Web DRM Enables Innovative Business Model

Earlier this year I wrote at length about the looming disaster that was Web DRM, or the W3C's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). Ten days ago, after unprecedented controversy, a narrow majority of W3C members made EME official.

So now I'm here to tell you the good news about how the combination of EME and the blockchain, today's sexiest technology, solves the most pressing issue for the Web, a sustainable business model. Innovators like the Pirate Bay and Showtime are already experimenting with it. They have yet to combine it with EME and gain the full benefit. Below the fold, I explain the details of this amazing new business opportunity. Be one of the first to effortlessly profit from the latest technology!

Sustaining Open Resources

Cambridge University Office of Scholarly Communication's Unlocking Research blog has an interesting trilogy of posts looking at the issue of how open access research resources can be sustained for the long term:

• Dr. Lauren Cadwallader's Open Resources, who should pay
• David Carr's  Sustaining open research resources – a funder perspective
• Dave Gerrard's Sustaining long-term access to open research resources – a university library perspective

Below the fold I summarize each of their arguments and make some overall observations.

Attacking (Users Of) The Wayback Machine

Right from the start, nearly two decades ago, the LOCKSS system assumed that:

Alas, even libraries have enemies. Governments and corporations have tried to rewrite history. Ideological zealots have tried to suppress research of which they disapprove.

The LOCKSS polling and repair protocol was designed to make it as difficult as possible for even a powerful attacker to change content preserved in a decentralized LOCKSS network, by exploiting excess replication and the lack of a central locus of control.

Just like libraries, Web archives have enemies. Jack Cushman and Ilya Kreymer's (CK) talk at the 2017 Web Archiving Conference identified seven potential vulnerabilities of centralized Web archives that an attacker could exploit to change or destroy content in the archive, or mislead an eventual reader as to the archived content.

Now, Rewriting History: Changing the Archived Web from the Present by Ada Lerner et al (L) identifies four attacks that, without compromising the archive itself, caused browsers using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to view pages that look different to the originally archived content. It is important to observe that the title is misleading, and that these attacks are less serious than those that compromise the archive. Problems with replaying archived content are fixable, loss or damage to archived content is not fixable.

Below the fold I examine L's four attacks and relate them to CK's seven vulnerabilities.

The Internet of Things is Haunted by Demons

This is just a quick note to get you to read Cory Doctorow's Demon-Haunted World. We all know that the Internet of Things is infested with bugs that cannot be exterminated. That's not what Doctorow is writing about. He is focused on the non-bug software in the Things that makes them do what their manufacturer wants, not what the customer who believes they own the Thing wants.

Long-Lived Scientific Observations

By BabelStone, CC BY-SA 3.0
Source

Keeping scientific data, especially observations that are not repeatable, for the long term is important. In our 2006 Eurosys paper we used an example from China. During the Shang dynasty:

astronomers inscribed eclipse observations on animal bones. About 3200 years later, researchers used these records to estimate that the accumulated clock error was about 7 hours. From this they derived a value for the viscosity of the Earth's mantle as it rebounds from the weight of the glaciers.

Last week we had another, if only one-fifth as old, example of the value of long-ago scientific observations. Korean astronomers' records of a nova in 1437 provide strong evidence that:

1473 nova remains

"cataclysmic binaries"—novae, novae-like variables, and dwarf novae—are one and the same, not separate entities as has been previously suggested. After an eruption, a nova becomes "nova-like," then a dwarf nova, and then, after a possible hibernation, comes back to being nova-like, and then a nova, and does it over and over again, up to 100,000 times over billions of years.

How were these 580-year-old records preserved? Follow me below the fold.

Josh Marshall on Google

Just a quick note to direct you to Josh Marshall's must-read A Serf on Google's Farm. It is a deep dive into the details of the relationship between Talking Points Memo, a fairly successful independent news publisher, and Google. It is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the business of publishing on the Web. Below the fold, pointers to a couple of other important works in this area.