 Hi everyone. Sorry for the delay there. Now we have Benjamin Mako Hill, who will be talking about anti-features That runs till half-eleven. I think now now I'm on. All right It's okay. The audio is good. All right, so All right. Well, it's wonderful to be back at DeppCamp. I was at DeppCamp 2 and most I think of the DeppCamp's intervening. So it's always good to be back here I'm not going to talk immediately about Debian, but I promise I will get there I'm going to be talking a little more generally about issues and sort of the free software and open source communities and In particular, I'm going to be talking about anti-features So as way of a sort of brief introduction to me because I think I've certainly I've changed a lot since I've been involved in Debian I'm by day as sociologists and a researcher into the dynamics of free software communities communities like Debian at MIT I'm in an interdepartmental program where I'm the creator and the only member between the Sloan School of Management I still wake up every day and wonder how I ended up in a business school And the some of the engineering programs as well So I study how to use how to design How to use technology designed to understand social dynamics and online collaborative communities Like free software communities and how to use that understanding of social dynamics to design technology better By night, I'm a sort of Part of a group that's been called a rebel with rather too many causes Certainly a longtime contributor to the Debian project Participated in a bunch of other free software projects and I'm on the board of the director Board of directors of the free software foundation. So as way of a disclaimer and sort of get my biases out there Um, here's a brief overview of what I'm going to try to do in this talk I'm going to first try to frame this sort of Exploration in terms of the whole free software versus open source debate. I understand that uh, that's Uh, both fraught and tired territory for a bunch of the people in this room So, uh, I hope to do it quickly and to bring something new and Dare I suggest more constructive and conciliatory than some of the way that that debate's been had in the past I'm going to try to argue that the principles versus sort of pragmatic something that's I think Uh, certainly an argument. I'm very familiar with from My time in the Debian project is Is basically valid, but that there are ways that the two camps come together that have often been ignored I'm going to uh, try to argue that there are important practical benefits of freedom And that they're not what we're used to thinking about when we usually talk about open source I'm going to introduce the term anti features. Um, I guess I've Little head start on that. Um, uh, which is my topic today and one of the important ways And I'm going to argue an important way of talking about the practical benefits of Software freedom and then I'm going to walk through a bunch of examples of anti features with the goal of providing three things first sort of a a tour Of the of the horrors possible in a world of proprietary software for those of us that are fortunate to have forgotten I suppose some of the people in this room And then a discussion by example of what anti features are and why they exist And then finally a demonstration of the fact that anti features are only possible because users are kept helpless And out of control in a word unfree And then, um, uh, I've given this I've given a version of this talk before as a A keynote so the risk of sounding a little Keynoty I'm going to try to use anti features to talk about three of what I think are the most important fronts in the broader Sort of movement for software freedom. So All right With that aside, we'll jump into The debate for those of us who those of you who have been lucky enough to miss it so far Um, uh, it quickly boils down to this on the first hand. There's the on on the one hand. There's there's basically This side. This is the gnu the gnu had the richard stallman the free software foundation who for the most part Spent the last 20 years talking about freedom About freedom in the devian free software guideline sense that is the freedom to use study modify share and collaborate on software I don't need to teach you if your dds. You've had this beaten into your head Repeatedly already But what I can say is that Is that rather than repeating either the devian free software guidelines or the or the the free software this free software definition I think I can tell you a little bit about how I like to think about it Which is in terms of autonomy and empowerment and I sort of use a an anecdote sometimes about a about a about a mobile phone so let's say I want to send a message to a friend back in boston about how About the great view that I had from the 12th floor of my dorm room, which was actually quite nice Now I could uh, if I have a phone that can send sms's and they you know, I can try to type it out there And I'm going to be constrained in my ability to describe the beautiful view by the 160 characters that I can type in on my phone Right, I could write a poem about it. I could be very evocative But I'm going to be constrained right now if I have one of these phones that can take pictures, which I do I have to figure out how it works Um, but if I can take a picture with my phone and that other person has a phone that can receive pictures Then I can maybe send a picture and my ability to send a message is going to be very different I could call them up on the phone and tell them somewhere We get the point the the the issue is that that the technological affordances of the of the technology That I'm choosing to communicate right here is determining very explicitly The nature of the message that I can say right my ability to communicate something to someone in in boston Is constrained by the technology that I choose to use it the technology determines very explicitly what I can say Who I can say it to they have to have a phone that can receive the kind of message that I'm trying to send um, how I can say it when I can say right that the the the The point the point is that there's a huge amount of political power for the people who control these Who are making these technological decisions who are designing these technologies and control over that technology Is it very important? It is in a very important sense Um, a type of political control that controls our experience My ability to experience the world is defined very explicitly by my ability to to control my technology That's why free software is important to me the concrete benefits of living Of this type of freedom I guess include the fuzzy feeling of living in freedom Which we all respect and which no one else seems to understand Um why we think is interesting and they're sort of left at that Now on the other on on the other hand we have open source, right? Which was invented as a term to explicitly distance itself from the work of the free software movement And from these freedoms that I've described by emphasizing pragmatic pragmatic benefits in the words in words taken directly from the open source Initiatives website. Um, it's it's quote better quality higher reliability More flexibility lower cost and an end to predatory vendor lock in right Now the normal response to that is that that's bad the free from the free software side the richard richard Salman i'll be richard salman for a second says that's bad because we're not talking about freedom And i'm biased here as my shirt shows. So that's my response to at least in some sense, right? I think that freedom really is important and that we should be talking about freedom But that's only part or at least and and I think that on one level the least interesting part of my response Because I also reject what I think is a false dichotomy between these two camps that this debate sets up, right? I believe that practical benefits really do matter For a whole number of reasons most most relevant here I think that that I think that freedom imparts inherent benefits that have nothing to do with the different methodology So I think that on the one hand the free software camp is right to be talking a bit to be to be worried about talking about quality Reliability flexibility and cost as an inherent benefit of free of the free software development model And I think it's understandable that they don't want to do it. Um, because I think that on one level It's just demonstrably wrong. I don't know. So who here was using free software in I don't know 95 1995 Okay, like so you so you so you remember it was really really bad, right? Like like, um Well, I mean it was it was good in some ways, but it wasn't like I Vividly remember get print printing a list of the three cd rom drives that were supported by the linux kernel going to the store Buying one having it be a new version of the of one of the three supported cd rom drives and not working, right? The the inherent benefits weren't there. It crashed more often. It was unstable I mean all of these things worked out with time in some ways, right? But but but it certainly wasn't inherently better before it was built or at least built completely and it's when it's and it'll be done It'll be done when it's done, right? um That I think that the that there was this That there was an idea very connected to the dot-com boom that we could just throw our code online and people would start fixing our bugs And uh, it's a nice idea. Um, but I think that the reality doesn't quite work people people remember linux care Linux care was a poster child of the dot of the dot-com boom, right linux care became a proprietary software company um, because they they were able to make more money that way they eventually went into business so they probably had other problems as well, but um, but The the point is that that this idea that this was inherently better didn't quite work out for everyone who did who did it it turns out that Open source is more difficult than just putting your code online slapping a gpl on it and just like letting the patches roll in um Although that's a nice idea So in putting my sort of sociologist hat on if you look at large numbers of free software projects, right source forage We'll go to source forage. We'll look median number of contributors to a source forage project And I guess median number of contributors one a single person right median number of cvs commits zero 95th percentile in terms of in terms of uh in in in terms of contributors five Right the average free software project is one person doing nothing or very little by themselves um And and even among the successful projects the project should have been downloaded thousands and thousands of times right Most of the time and you know this because you've put stuff online and had nobody fix your fix the bugs right? um The reality is is that it's is that it's a little bit more difficult The benefits are not inherent to a free to freedom and they're not automatic The benefits of mass collaboration are simply irrelevant for your average free software project Which is an average person working by themselves, right? We can all enjoy the collaborative potential, right? But freedom does lead to practical benefits even in those situations always And these benefits have nothing to do with pragmatic issues of low cost and flexibility and they have everything to do with freedom um And that's where an anti-features came in I got I got there eventually um because the world of proprietary software Is a world of firms Controlling users for their own benefit and very often for users disadvantage It's a world where rights and desires of users come after the technology producers desires for profit And for the desires of a third party friend. We call them a what is that strategic partner? I'm in business school now so I can um uh speak to that right a friend for a price, right? The result is the result is that non-free software is full of features that users hate Features users hate so much. They're willing to pay if they're lucky enough to be able to pay to have those features removed And I call those features anti features Um, so like a feature an anti feature must be built. It's not a bug. It's something that requires effort Um, it's not a missing feature. It's added functionality, but it's negative functionality At least in the sense that it makes the technology something do something that a user does not want that technology to do Which brings me back to free software because free software gives users control in a way that I in a way that I talked about a few minutes ago over what their technology does and anti features are a way of designing technology in ways that Exploit users quite explicitly Now when users have control as they do when they're using a system like that in they're given a choice in the matter And in my experience users given a choice on whether or not they want to be exploited tend to choose not to be exploited The result is quite simply that anti features cannot exist in the free world in the long term In a sense defense against anti features represents an inherent advantage advantage like actually inherent Of free software over competing proprietary technologies and it stems directly from the freedom not from the development methodology Not from the fact that you have lots of people showing up who probably aren't Um to to work on your software as such it represents a sort of compromise or middle ground in this debate in a sense So so so now hopefully some of you are thinking come on like well hopefully I don't know I mean maybe maybe maybe maybe you believe me already right features users hate What are you talking about how common could this be right? And I hope to show you that they are everywhere and that they're an inextricable part of proprietary software business practice And that they're a way that we can think about free software and proprietary software and think about um Advocating for for for Dabby and then for free software more broadly. So Um, I think the best way to explain anti features to show you what I'm talking about through examples And I've broken my examples down into four major types of anti features based roughly on why they exist um The the the first is um, let's see. So the first is sort of just the the simplest to explain So it's where I like to start um, and it's understandable to anybody who sort of understands roughly how the the mafia works. So Uh people people people from New York or from Italy will understand in here, right? Um, um So so selling protection. This is sort of selling protections from from yourself, right? That's very dangerous here. Maybe uh, you need some protection like it's dangerous because you're gonna break my window if you don't Pay me off, right? So so all right. So so so who here has I mean remember these things? Uh phone books, right? Um We used to use them to sit on them for children would sit on them Um, but uh, so so does anyone here ever paid the phone company to not list their phone number, right? Yeah, yeah, like I mean I have right Um, it usually happens in terms of offsetting costs for other people, right? The idea is the phone company is going to print your phone numbers without even calling you I mean it is more difficult for the phone company to print your number than to not print your number, right on one level Um, so so here's here's how it works, right? Fur may in this case the phone company has a product or service to sell the users they're gonna they're gonna um Sell the They're gonna they're gonna give you a phone book, right? Put your put your name in the public firm b is willing to pay So let's say this is the mark the telemarketer is willing to pay the phone companies is hey great We're willing to pay you you know a dollar for for or 10 cents for each phone number And this goes on an aggregate and pretty soon. They're willing to pay 50 dollars To to there are companies willing to pay 50 dollars for that person's phone number So the phone company says well, hey So the user says hey, I'd like to get my name out of the phone book But but of course your name in the phone book is worth 50 to the phone company if they sell it to other people So they so so they so they say great you pay us a hundred dollars And then we won't sell your name for these other people, right? It's the it's a it's a it's a it's a simple racket, right? It's like uh, uh, we're gonna get our 50 bucks one way or another We're either gonna get it from you or we're gonna get it from the people who you don't want us to get to get it from Which one do you want to do, right? now Let's get a little back to technology. Do people remember claria or gator? So so so this is a great gator was a piece of software installed on 35 million computers, none of which were running debut um All of which were running windows and what's kind of funny is is it? I mean it was one of the most widely installed piece of software on windows And what's funny is is that almost no one remembered installing it in fact, maybe no one remembered installing it Because claria was a piece of because claria was a piece of spyware Um, I mean it was like I mean this is great It's like it's like for those of us fortunate to have forgotten the provider software world It's like core wars you have you'd have one piece of spyware like looking, you know finding another piece of spyware Like like like, you know trying to uninstall it or block it or make it think that it was working But not I mean it's really really, uh Really quite ugly, right? But what's interesting is that claria and gator was never it was never directly downloaded and sold with anyone What it was was shipped with existing pieces of software. It was shipped with kazah It was shipped with um most famously and with sort of bit and with a series of peer-to-peer clients It was shipped with um div x the the sort of not quite dvd But the the the video decoding software and many other pieces of software on windows and it monitored users web browsing habits replaced Replaced ads so that you thought you were solving an ad from a website But you were seeing it out from somewhere else and was sort of generally nasty um And this phenomenon and what's interesting about this is that is that it was being is that that a number of these Companies including div x offered offered versions premium versions of their software and div x offered a version of A premium version of the div x software which was Which came Which was small the the file was actually smaller because the only difference between the premium and the non premium version Was the premium version didn't have the ads and didn't have the adware They would not install software on on your computer. Otherwise. It was exactly the same now this is this is this is a This is an example from Sonya. I understand you can't read this so i'll read it I'll read it for you this is sort of like this is basically the same sort of mafia behavior related to Craftware except on an even larger scale This is called this is an option that sony offered a year or two ago Called fresh start and there are two choices here. This is in the configurator. So you're buying your you're buying your Your vio online and you can choose between no fresh start subtract 49 dollars Which is kind of an interesting way of thinking about it or um, uh fresh start Which is removal of specific vio applications trial software and games and i'll read this it says Opt for a fresh start trademark on your vio pc will under and your vio pc will undergo a system optimization service Where specific vio applications trial software and games will be removed from your unit prior to shipment Fresh start safely scrubs your pc to free up valuable hard drive space and conserve memory and processing power While maximizing overall system performance right from the start, right? So so so basically they would just not install all the craftware that they were getting paid They were getting paid somewhere in the range of about 50 dollars for each pc shift, right? It's it's like Really explicit sony's getting 50 bucks to install a bunch of software that users don't like and want to install And they're willing to basically take 50 bucks from you in order to not install the software on your computer And apparently it was completely necessary the reviews of the computer that came out where they offered this Said that said that the screen blew the blue screen the first time the reviewer turned it on crashed and quote behaved as it was broken Before the unwanted software was removed and once they removed all the craftware. It was like great. It worked. It worked just fine Sony relented after getting a ton of negative publicity Although I guess that despite the fact that they've relented the negative as I am evidence the negative publicity has not quite stopped So things are continuing in that sense. Um, but I think that this is a a good example. I mean can Can can can we imagine the situation in devion? Of course, right? How long would it take for someone to fork it? How long would it take? No no no time at all Here's the second group of anti features and these are related to market segmentation market segmentation is sort of the polite Business school term or marketing term for what other people call price discrimination discrimination sounds bad. So we don't like to say that But but but the people who do it call price discrimination and and I think that the best way of talking about And the basic idea here is that is that people will get people are willing to pay or able to pay different amounts of money So if you've I mean, I forget who said this. I mean, I apologize to whoever I'm ripping off without without credit but but if if people they said that if people had uh Like the price that they paid for their airplane ticket like above their seat that there would be riots on the airplane, right? Because because because you know people people are paying an order of magnitude difference for seats that are immediately next to each other, right? The idea the idea and this is sort of famously that if you stay a weekend You get the cheaper ticket because you're because business travelers never stay weekends and they're willing to spend more The basic idea here is that different people are willing to pay different amounts And so market segmentation means can we sell people the same product or a very similar product? At whatever price they're willing to pay so we can sort of maximize profits overall, right? But moving back to technology I think that that that uh, I mean the history of microsoft windows can be read as a history of trying to Squeeze more money out of people by making their software worse and by forcing people into different segments where they can sort of pay it And this is my and this is my my favorite This is this is this is one of my favorite anti features and this is actually part of what got me thinking about the concept of anti features Fundamentally was the story of windows nt workstation and window the windows nt server What is nt workstation 4.0 and windows nt server 4.0? um And the story is that is that is that windows nt server was these are two different products offered by microsoft One of them and this is sort of in the early days of the of the internet and people were beginning to want to run servers basically on their systems So so so so microsoft released the new version released two versions of nt One of which was sort of capable of running on servers and one of which was was more ready for for workstations And they described them as two very different products and tended at two very different functions microsoft claims that that the server was suited and tailored for use as an internet server while nt workstation was quote grossly inadequate um and aiming to enforce or reflect this difference um the the uh workstation code and license agreement restricted users to To know more than 10 concurrent tcp ip internet connections Uh sort of nt server could have as many as you want so nt workstation could only make 10 concurrent tcp ip connections, right? Now now some people some journalists at oralea and a number of people noticed that other than this difference They really acted pretty similar in fact They were very very similar in fact someone Noticed that all of the files that were present in nt workstation were also present in nt server And that they were the same size and in fact if you md5 them they were actually had the same md5 sums In fact, they were exactly they were extremely similar. They were exactly the same software um Eventually someone realized that there was a single registry flag Set by the installer Um, which which which um would say i'm a workstation and if you were a workstation It would invoke code present on both workstation and servers Which would which would arbitrarily limit the number of connections to 10 tcp um connections That systems would um that there was software that would start up um I forget the the ias would start up as ias on windows nt Workstation but on on server, but would start up as a personal personal web server somewhere else. Um, the software was ident Was identical um someone at microsoft. I mean not just someone a team at microsoft Job was to build a set of features which would which would which would Restrict people which would and at an enormous expense right to microsoft to to limit people You know this is a great product and it's quite you know to limit people in ways that clearly nobody wanted Nobody said, you know, I really like Nt workstation server, but the problem is I just you know, it just allows me to make too many too many concurrent tcp connections I really want the uh, uh, you know, I really want one that's that's not the microsoft So this is a way of minimizing their costs while sending as many people into the more expensive products as well It was an 800 dollar difference between the two products um And when people were thrilled about this because all that once the soonest you realize was a single registry flag You could flip one bit on your computer and you and you could have an 800 dollar upgrade to your software Um, uh, but microsoft was less happy, but of course that's uh all different now, right? Um, I need to update this for windows I need to update this for windows 7 right? The the what's interesting is that the biggest difference between most of these pieces of software Um versions of windows are actually the amount of memory that you want to have access to on your computer There's um a group of people who basically build an arbitrary memory limit So if you have more than, you know, four or 16 or 32 megabytes of fit of Or gigabytes of physical memory in your machine your system will Your version of windows will just refuse to give you access It will only it will only allow programs to access the first, you know and and gigs of memory Um, uh, but there's a whole bunch of other applications as well This is the reason that I have this up there, uh instead of the Instead of the the windows 7 is because of windows beast of starter, which should have been called windows visa anti feature addition And it's I think um a really fabulous example Starter could only run could have a series of additional anti features. It could only run three Graphical applications at a given time So three user applications with it with a graphical interface It could only give you access to 250 gigabytes of disk space Um, it had an arbitrary limit of several gigabytes of memory. I think two gigabytes of memory And and and all of these things were written in enormous code Can you imagine being the engineer or the product manager whose job it is to Manage the team of people who is going to develop the code to keep people from running more than three graphical applications It's actually not trivial. I mean imagine doing it, right? Like you have to determine whether an application which is being launched is going to launch a graphical interface If it is or if it's just going to be in the taskbar or something like this If it is going to launch a graphical application, you need to be able to sort of intervene pop up a message for the user explain to them that That they've already run too many applications and it's quite clear that no user ever asked for this You know, this is a great piece of software. I just I need to be able to run less less applications So it gets very cluttered. You know, just just help me out, right? Um, um, the whole point of this was to counter Work by one laptop per child and by by basically free software more generally and sort of systems based on Linux kernels and systems In some cases using debbing Um, which which in addition to allowing users to run You know as many applications as they like um, we're you know, we're We're distributed at no cost So the idea was they wanted to make a version of windows that was cheap like 20 bucks Maybe even less and the idea was to make it so bad that anybody that could possibly afford a more expensive version of windows would upgrade Right. That's market segmentation um uh And this happens in all other sorts of places as well This is this is the the the canon g7 This is I guess an hour an increasingly older camera But what's what's cool about the g7 is that the g7 um is that the g1 through the g6 had the ability to shoot raw photos This is basically um Raw photography is for the photographers here You'll you'll know that being able to shoot raw on your camera means that you can Do some sort of more dark room effects. It's kind of a nice A nice little trick seen as sort of a more a more advanced feature But raw of course is just raw sensor data directly off the sensor in your camera, right? Which means that every time anyone takes a picture you have a raw you have a raw photograph, right? So so canon released the new version the g8 the new version in the series Which was faster had a bigger screen with everything about it was sort of better Except that it didn't do raw and the reason was because canon was sort of realigning their product line And they wanted to they decided that the g7 which was sort of previously seen as a more Prosumer camera. They wanted to push those people up to the digital SLRs You know the the rebel I mean they had some They had some thinking that they wanted to push people to more expensive cameras And that raw was a feature that they could take away from certain cameras that would push people They would they would they would push people to the to the more expensive products and And of course it is again more difficult to compress the jpeg than it is to not compress the jpeg, right? Clear to people in this room not as clear to many of the people that were buying these cameras, but clear enough to some people Because I'm sorry that's a little pixelated because Because a number of people quite annoyed by this eventually went out there and found a way to write a piece of free software Which would run in their cameras and which would allow them Including the g8 initially and which would allow them to take raw photography among other things, right? And and the point of this example and the point of mentioning chdk Which is the canon hackers dev kit which is this tool which among many many other things now allows you to To take raw photography It sort of started out with the ability to take raw photography on your camera and then built-in features to do things like I mean, uh zebra-severing real-time histograms, you know games of chess, you know all all of the all of the all of the things you You want to perhaps to show that is to show that that show the other side of anti features Which is not only are these tempting and irresistible perhaps in the world of proprietary software in a world of freedom They're not enough. They're not an option and they are entirely unsustainable The third class of anti features is is based around creating extending and anti and enforcing monopolies There's connections to all of these and the the I think the best way is to jump in with an example Which is another camera example Which is related to the I don't remember people remember this but but uh panasonic sent an upgrade to their Digital cameras out there the firmware upgrade and number of people installed them other cameras And when notices that when they installed it on some of their cameras the cameras just stopped working like all together The cameras wouldn't turn on because the firmware included the ability to lock out third-party batteries It turns out that they would notice if a battery was built by a third party And if the battery was built by a third party they just turned it they just wouldn't start the camera at all Now we can vilify panasonic here. In fact, I just did Um, um, uh, but this practice is extremely widespread and it's actually there's even a name for it And it's even an industry. It's called accessory control. This is here's a quote from ross anderson's Security engineering, which is a great book. Um, it says it's common for the makers of game consoles to build in challenge response protocols To prevent software cartridges or other accessories from being used with their product unless a license fee is paid This practice is spreading According to one vendor of authentication ships Some printer companies have begun to embed authentication in printers to ensure that genuine toner cartridges are used If a competitor's product is loaded instead the printer will quietly downgrade from 1200 dpi to 300 dpi In mobile phones much of the profit is made on batteries and authentication protocols can be used to spot competitors products So they can be drained more quickly The story here is that panasonic just screwed up. They turned that they turned the camera off Everyone else just turns the power saving features off Um and and and oh, yeah, these third party batteries made from commodity cells make produced in the same place, right? They never work as well Here's a press release from uh, this is a press release from from atmel So ti was very proud of their battery authentication ships Um, uh, which cost about 130 to the cost of the device That's 130 to the cost of each battery every time you buy a $10 battery one third This is in costs in thousands right goes into an authentication ship Which is designed to make other third party batteries work less well Um, um now now this is atmel's new one that they've half the price So it's now just under a dollar at in in quantity um at cost And this one is advertising the fact that they now have shot shot 256 on this on this Battery authentication ship because shot one wasn't strong enough Um, this is an arms race. It's an arms race being fought between between between the the third party battery manufacturers and the the the the the the main the vendors of our of our equipment and it's and and the and it's an And the users are the casualties. We are the collateral damage, right? It's an attempt by manufacturers to eliminate user choice and control over their technology It's trying to protect high margins that we all pay on the batteries themselves and the software only And this and this only works when when users are helpless divided and entirely dependent This basic idea of sort of secured secured monopolies are what make it possible for users For companies to use loss leaders and many subscription based services that users cannot leave right printer cartridges introduce a very complicated authentication system that's subject to you know, copyright cases in the us Over copyright things like there are copyright arguments over the code Which runs in the printer cartridges to keep other printer cartridges from working or working as well that that uh No us customer has been has has demanded being barred from refilling their own printer cartridges or using one from a third party And yet we pay for it every time we buy a printer cartridge or a printer We pay for the engineering effort for the for the hundreds of people that are involved in this, right? Game systems work the same way we sell a cheap cheap game system And we make up the loss on games when the xbox came out This is particularly evident right the original xbox after all was just a bunch of you know It was a bunch of pc components, right? It was it was it was it looked a lot more like my laptop than it did like like anything else really Um and microsoft invested an enormous amount of effort hundreds of engineers whose whose job it was to make the xx box Do less than its hardware could Their job was to make Was to make the xbox less of a computer than it actually was less of a general purpose computer than it actually was Um, namely it was only supposed to play games licensed by microsoft um, and in particular The xbox was not supposed to run devian or at least not supposed to run gnu linux more broadly Um, and and its inability to run gnu linux was highly engineered and expensive um Tevoization right this idea of locking down the the the the the device so that um, we can use Gpld software, but or or free software on the device But then have basically encryption which keeps users from being able to change the software on their device is it isn't free It's the cost of the subscriptions. Um, and we pay for it and we cannot turn it off right And it's a good example of how um a focus on licensing I think misses some of the most important issues of autonomy and control because access to the source code or the The code under a free license doesn't mean that we actually have any more control over our devices now um I've got one more class of anti features which is sort of based around protecting copyrights and I put that in scare quotes Because I think it is scary. Um, and it's also of course, uh, it's a subset Of course of a type of protecting it's protecting a particular type of Type of monopoly, but it's so Wide spread that I think it warrants being singled out and it's worth pointing out that copyright protection systems have been Demanded by essentially no users and forced on almost all Except the people sitting in this room Who remembers, uh, this? Oh a couple people, right? So it's a little hard to read and that's because it's designed to be hard to read That's the entire point. This is the this is part of the manual for sim city And this is uh, basically every time the game would start up it would ask you to What's the population or what are the next to the city or what are these little dots and you'd have to sort of Point them out here and the idea and when it was made with basically dark red on slightly less dark red paper Because it was designed to be impossible to photocopy. Um, it was basically just a copy protection thing, right? Um, if you remember this turn to page and in the manual and return the word x, you know There's a whole bunch of examples I've got some stuff on a on a website on uh on these right the idea here is I mean These things aren't cheap to make someone had to think about and someone had to go through and build these things And then someone had to build the functionality into each game, which would make the game not start unless Unless someone had implemented this. I don't know if anyone people here have must have had the misfortune of meeting a dongle right, yeah There's no dongle fan club. I like to say right These are physical Like physical things that you plug into your computer, which a piece of software will not start unless this Unless this physical object with some sort of crypto on it is present in the computer, right? Um And people are paying to engineer and build these things, right? They're often very significant portions of the cost of our technology, right? And here's and and and what they're doing is they're fighting an important reality that we and very few people outside of this room have Embraced which is the reality that we all have copying machines on our desks great Wonderful general purpose copying machines. I mean better than any produced ever before Um, and uh, we're on our labs, I suppose And it's depressing, but one of the greatest engineering problems of the 21st century has been making these perfect copying machines less good at copying things my, uh, uh, colleague at the electronic frontier foundation estimates that there are several tens of thousands of people who are employed in the sort of broader broader copy protection industry building systems that quite clearly no user has ever asked for Um, now I could I could give an entire talk about anti features and dvds And there's a sense in which I don't really know how to start. I could talk about region coding. I could talk about encryption I could talk about watermarking All anti features none of which have a fan club like dongles But there's one that I just want to single out right here because it annoys me so much Which is that unskippable track At the beginning of every dvd, right? How many thousands of days how many years hundreds of years of human life have been wasted by people watching that unskippable track The beginning of the dvd and pressing forward and having their dvd player not respond Um, I have not met a free software dvd player that honored that unskippable track Someone told me there is one, but I've not found it um But there is hope Uh after that depressing uh little talk and the hope is because and there is hope because in in free software because because um Because the freedom to modify software in any way A freedom enshrined in our dvd and free software guidelines and in our social contract is the freedom to remove Functionality that users don't want and the freedom to share software or collaborate is the freedom to work together to work Around predatory practices inflicted on us because we have freedom most anti features are impossible or at least They are the low hanging fruit for free software because as developers All we need to do is not build something For our users to get something to not get something they don't want That makes sense. Um Um, um, which version of debbie and do I want right? Well, let's see how much memory do I have in my computer, right? How many applications do I want to run? Right? If my answers to those questions matter How long do we think it would take before? Before debbie and was forked by someone who offered the ability to not choose and we all know the answer, right? No time at all Now, um, I wanted to end by talking a little bit about what I see is four important Areas for free software many of which debbie is involved involved in which and those three are mobile phones network services and drm And the way that anti features sort of are a way of thinking about and talking about each of these issues. So um This if people recognize this is a is a sim unlocker It's a little thing you can put in your putting your phone with a sim card and have the and have your phone run and unlock sim Um, mobile phones are the most widely distributed form of powerful computers And they are the least likely to act like a computer because they are almost universally locked down to a degree Which should seem extraordinary to people and unacceptable to you in this room and that we essentially even us essentially take for granted Um, this uh sim unlocker lets users defeat a anti feature Which is designed to keep their phone from working with arbitrary sim cards because a large number of phones are sold Worldwide locked to a particular character. This is basically a sort of an enforcing a monopoly anti feature but I don't need to Tell you about locked phones because despite the fact that everyone in this room hates it And most of us have probably had to deal with it. It's something that we've all come to expect Um, and we all just seem to take it, right? If this were a more general audience I'd ask how many of you have root on your phone. I'll ask how many of you have root on your phone Like uh, uh, some people but maybe less than half maybe a third, right? Um, and suffice it to say that if I did this in Most other rooms there would be less people who put their hand up, right cryptographic systems prevent the installation of unapproved or Unsigned images and is an expensive anti feature which is included in the prices of almost every phone sold worldwide in which we all just pay Um Let's see. Um, do I have a one here? Yeah, so so so this is this is the an old version here But even the best examples of free software friendly phones and two features are all clear Are quite clear, right? This is the this is these phones look simple. This is the g1 the first android phone This is the version that is the developer phone and this is the version that is not the developer phone And um, uh, basically they come in that these two two versions The version that is locked to a carrier is cheaper when it went on sale it cost, uh, about 200 dollars This version which is not locked to a carrier costs 425 dollars Um, and uh, lets you install arbitrary operating system images, right? That 222 dollars is the difference between those two prices those two phones and that 222 dollars is the freedom tax Um, and uh, I paid it. Um, I paid the freedom tax Um, I got what I got was a phone what I got was a phone without a key ring on That's it. I mean it was missing it was missing a couple of files Um, uh, and I got a statement that uh, and I guess and there was also an is statement in the boot loader that would check for it Um, uh, uh, so so so very little and I'm happy to pay it I'm happy to pay that 200 bucks because for me it's worth it It's the cost of removing an anti feature is what I'm willing to pay because I um because I think in those terms right But most people don't Anti features are what we um are what mean we're all carrying around computers with microphones with cameras With sensors and that we trust with our closest secrets and our most sensitive data And in almost all cases these computers remain controlled completely and ultimately by companies that very few of us trust at all Um, if we can communicate about anti features as anti features, right? We might be able to build a real support around a free phone alternative. Um, where those anti features become impossible. Um, you know Poor open mo co didn't do a lot of things But the fact that it didn't do some of those things was pretty great Uh, this is the uh This is the uh, uh, uh, moving on to network services. Um, this is sort of the secondary I wanted to talk about This is the github list of subscription prices and it's a combination of uh, Sort of subscription enforced monopoly model with a market segmentation model And it's like this is like a menu of anti features, right? The more the more you pay the less anti features you get is basically the idea here, right? Um, um, it doesn't cost github. I mean the difference between some of these is how many repositories you want I mean people in this room know exactly how much it costs to run an extra Git repository on a system, right? Not once you're once you're running one or two not very much Especially, um, if you're not having a space difference as well. What's the going price of a row on a mysql table? How much is it? How much does a row cost, you know to run? I don't know about a dollar a month according to this Um, and the reason I post this is to remind us that in network services access to code is no longer the central issue What matters is autonomy and control of the network services and the service provider has that even if In the case of git for example, although not in the case of the github infrastructure. We have, um, We have control of the code GitHub's entire systems, right? The legal and the technical systems was crafted in immense effort and expense. They're billing systems, right? They're the the the monitoring systems the thing that notices when you haven't paid your bills and disables your accounts, right? These are the sets of roles in the system to enforce it, right? The software that detects if you've created too many accounts and disables your access when your bill hasn't been paid All of these things are created enormous effort and they're actually a significant part of what bit of of the value That github is is bringing us and nobody wants it But of course there are options as well Gatorious is a free software replacement for github. I'm sure people here know about it. Um, I mean It doesn't have 100 of the features that github does But it is missing 100 of the anti features that github contains Um, and as a result it has an inherent advantage when it it had an inherent advantage over github when it did next to nothing incomplete sure But inherent and the reason I'm using these examples because I think these are generic problems of hosted or non-free network services Anti features give us a way to understand the harm that they do and a way to reflect on the fact that these services systematically disadvantage users and what we may do about them and in that this is a sort of designed free software developers This github is at least partially, you know, they make it easy for for us to use it It's something that I think is important to think about um This is my final example, um DRM you can order the shirt from the free software foundation um Despite victories in the area of music DRM continues to be a major threat to free software and video in software and in embedded systems Um, and I think that DRM in in one sense can be seen as like the mother of all anti features Um, nobody wants them. Um, there's this industry of as I said, you know Tens of thousands of people working on technologies that users hate and it's an anti feature that has already been the down The the downfall of DRM although not down enough yet Here is uh, uh, I picked this up at a um, this is a little advertisement I picked up at a a cafe across street from my house and despite the fact that I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's not like a geek cafe. It's like a normal cafe full of like normal non like normal non technical people um advertising Uh, this is this is a little this is a couple years ago when d it went before all music was essentially DRM music But this is but here's a company who's I mean Calabash music has printed DRM free almost bigger than the name of their own site Right like the fact that their music doesn't have DRM is one of them Is is seen for these people as one of the major selling points. They're advertising code that they have not written They're advertising features that they are not going to push on users um, and and and we don't have to uh look any further because because DRM was uh, you know To to see the sort of freedom tax, right? I mean to see the the degree of the anti features It used to be when when DRM and music was beginning to fail um Apple would offer in their music store a DRM version or the non DRM version the DRM version cost one dollar and the non DRM version costs a $1 50 that's the cost of freedom um That's the premium freedom. That's that's that's sony and the fresh start crapware removal system, right? so I can end uh I can end where where where I began which is to say that in a perfect software development world Even when things work perfectly what software developers want is simply not always what users want and that's just the reality um Anti features is the most extreme example of this and as I hope I've shown a nice way to talk about some of the key issues in Free softwares free software eliminates anti features ensures that we are closer in alignment between the interests of developers and users This is an inherent advantage and part of the reason that free software will win Thanks for listening and uh, thanks for putting on such a great conference Yeah, sure. Thank you questions. Yeah Sorry, uh I'm daniel tkg. I had a question about uh, the framing it as a the freedom tax or the extra price, um I wonder if that won't at some point become counterproductive in that If we make it clear to people. Hey, look, this is your choice. Either you've got an extra 225 dollars um Until you can buy your freedom or those of you who don't have 225 dollars to spend on such luxuries as freedom are gonna Well suck it up. You aren't free, right? Are we are we are we putting it all back into sort of? How you know how much freedom can you buy? Yeah, so I mean I think that I think that In the in the sense that as we build as we build systems, which are compelling and compelling compelling free alternatives They tend to be priced lower as well. So I think that that I mean we've already seen in lots and lots of places people making decisions to move to free systems because the free systems do everything that they want Maybe more Um, and and are all so cheaper In part because the the firms can't in in in the presence of a free alternative or a free competitor They can't charge the monopoly rents So I think that in the long term, I mean so maybe freedom tax is a better term because people don't like taxes Um, uh, and it sort of makes it clear that it is a it is a rent that's being charged Not, uh, uh, not not something that anyone is justified in doing because I think that they are Unjustified in doing it. I mean I mean you're right. The point the point here is to is to is to point out the the Injustice of this Um, and it's true that you can buy your way out of injustice in lots and lots of places. Um, that's a that's a Uh, a crappy reality of the world and it's one that I think we should be offended by in this space and in many other spaces um, and uh, uh, I'll I'll try to be more Explicit about my disgust when I frame this in the future. That's a great that's a great great feedback Hi, uh, Colin cjo arson Uh, one thing I've noticed is that users feel really good about removing anti features You know you people talk about hey, I reinstalled my windows system and you know suddenly it's much faster and they feel they feel kind of a sense of success in This easy improvement that can be made to the systems that they run And you know, obviously you can get the same kind of thing from free software systems and people do take Vast amounts of pride in the customizations that they've been able to make but it's harder. It's um, It's often a sort of geeky or kind of thing How can we make it just as easy? Do you have any thoughts on how we can make it just as easy for people to feel that same kind of success and pride But without having to suffer the pen of the anti feature in person That's a great. That's a great question. So I think that that So there's a degree of just like antagonism people There's a there's a there's a subset of people who just like love hacking the iphone because not because they particularly hate apple Or maybe they do but just because they like the they like, you know, for the same reason people like fighting, you know I mean you're seeing a little bit of my bias towards some of these communities But there's this like there's a bit of this sort of macho thing that we see in some geek communities And and and which and which is about you know, like sort of defeating other people systems or building systems that they can't defeat And I think people I think people enjoy that and So what's interesting is so so one answer is is that I think anti features are not I didn't mention this but one of the when I I gave this talk I gave this talk a couple times before and the first time someone or someone said what about anti features in free software like do you think that they could exist and Um, I've thought about it and I think the answer is yes. I can think of a couple Or at least complicated examples where some users want something but others others don't and they make it very hard to remove One would be anti anti cheating systems in games Um, um, which very often look a lot like DRM systems Um, there's a gpl. There's a piece of gpl software. I forget the name of the game But which they they want to basically authenticate clients to make sure that they're very particular There's one piece of software which is which is interacting with the network because they don't want people to run hack clients and Cheating people like to defeat those so I don't know if that's part of the answer, but uh um, that's that's that's one that's That's one suggestion. The other thing is is that sometimes people Some that there's a group of people who want to make it like very difficult people to run non-free software on their system Which is something that a lot of users don't Don't want to be like very proactive in terms of blocking people from running non-free software I think that those probably fall into the category of anti features at least for a large number of users Um, that's my that's my that's my intuition. Um, I mean in terms of the antagonism I'm not sure I think that that if you look there are a small subset of people who are interested in hacking the iPhone But I think that they're actually reasonably small compared to the number the 25 percent of people who actually did hack their iPhone We're just doing it because they they wanted to run some of the cool apps that people had built Or they wanted to run it with a carrier other than the one they would then the one that they had bought the phone from um, so I mean it's an interesting motivational question and I'm uh, I I'm I don't know how important it is Uh, but but uh, I think that that if we had the problem that we'd eliminated anti features and people were less motivated to Contribute to some of our projects where some people were I think I uh, that would be a great problem to have And I look forward to I look forward to struggling it when we get there Hi, I'm Ashish Paul Perdes So I'm not sure I'm gonna phrase this entirely the way I want to but I think that For a lot of users not having choice is a feature Simplicity means you don't spend your time deciding things So if microsoft for the xbox for example said, uh, we're gonna sell you a pc in the shape of uh an xbox and You can plug in whatever you want and here are some things that we think you can plug in I actually think it might have sold less than if they were really clear about this is a game console It will only ever run game Then we've done our best to make sure that no game can ruin the experience of a different game Sure, so so there's a difference between affordances Um in technologies and anti features, I guess every technology is going to be easier to do things. So so I mean Look at my, uh Whoops I mean we can go back to our our our list of versions of windows, right? There's this is not a lack of choice right, um There's plenty of choice right all of the choices are bad but uh, uh, but there's but there's certainly lack of choice and every technology is going to have Affordances my phone is going to have the ability to send is going to come out of the box and the ability to communicate in certain ways When I install deviant on my system, it comes, uh, you know has the ability to work in particular ways Many of them are are buggy. Um, uh, but but uh, uh, and many of them. I want to change and many of them I do change um, but but uh Most software I don't modify and most stuff I use basically with the affordances that it has So I think that that I think that that's setting up a little bit of a a false a false tension All software is going to have affordances and it's going to work in particular ways. Um, and there's a difference between saying, um, You know, uh, maybe people even want the DRM system to keep Software from from from attacking them. So you know from people's writing viruses and getting on your computer One nice thing about that sort of a very comprehensive DRM system is that viruses would presumably be less common Although whether or not that's true. I don't know but but let's say we believe the hype in that Why not install a button on the side of my computer which says or or even a jumper inside my computer that if I want to I can flip it. That's a feature. Um, uh, uh, and that and in some sense the ability to turn that off Um, renders that anti feature less Less important. Um, it's it's I mean, it's an it's an interesting model. So All right, well, thank you everyone. I think the time's up. So thank you very much