|
Information Superhighway vs One Big Mall
What the real hackers do and how they've contributed to society in working to make computer software free
By: Michelle Zurbrigg
Enter Professor Steven Mann - a long-haired hacker dressed in what seems to be a fishing vest. Instead of fishing line, hooks and sinkers, a multitude of wires hang from his pockets. He stumbles down the steps of a lecture hall at the University of Toronto because he can't clearly see through his dark glasses. His glasses record everything into the computer hanging from his torso.
If Mann wished he could broadcast the view from his glasses throughout the world, the slow deliberate steps his feet try to take beamed up to the Internet in real-time. As it stands, his audience gets recorded into his computer's visual memory, forever.
Mann's hand holds a twiddler, a palm-sized keyboard, with which he types various GNU/Linux commands on a screen connected to a digital overhead. He sees this screen on his glasses and the view through his glasses simultaneously.
Mann thinks that soon we will all be wearing this sort of gear. Our computers will become physical extensions of ourselves, prostheses.
"Just as: wheel is extension of leg, and radio is extension of voice, so is: the camera an extension of the eye, the computer an extension of the brain, and wiring, circuits, and the Internet an extension of the nervous system."
 |
|
If we don't clue into open source, the Internet will be a big shopping mall |
With machines like the eyetap computer Mann invented and wears at his lecture, we will be able to record every moment of our day and night, forever on file, to create a "true visual memory prosthetic".
James Fung is a grad student of Mann's in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UofT. He's working on a Reality Window Manager, a way to organize computer windows refracted off the eye glasses an eyetap user sees with. The window manager will let an eyetap wearer have full vision while simultaneously viewing and using various computer programs.
**********
As computers inevitably become more manifest in our lives - compare your dependency now to just ten years ago, for example - Mann and his apostles stress the growing necessity for people to get tuned in to the computer programming movement known as open source.
If we don't clue into open source, "the Internet will be a big shopping mall", says Fung.
The way to manage increasing amounts of information that we're bombarded with is through open source, he says. Open-source Web browsers can be easily configured to filter out the advertising banners which so incessantly creep up on each Web site. (Large software companies, like Microsoft, have traditionally prevented such filtering by selling "closed", encrypted software.)
Open-source software can also be employed to improve its users' privacy. Currently, our Web site selections are tracked by commercial Web browsers. This information is then sold to on-line retailers or advertisers, such as Amazon, an Internet bookseller. Amazon and others then tailor their advertising banners to the preferences they've observed in our Web surfing patterns.
|
|
We're in the middle of the battle between money and freedom |
Open-source browsers, such as Apache or Netscape (which became open-source in 1998), on the other hand, do not track their users habits. If they did, this function would quickly be removed from their program code by a hacker.
With open source, if the user feels bombarded, he can configure these browsers to make his screen an advertising-free zone.
Jon Katz contributes articles to Slashdot, on-line "News for Nerds". He says that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like America On-Line (AOL), or Sympatico in Canada, "can record which chat room you enter, what news pages you read, what pages you've bookmarked." Search engines also track and characterize computer users.
Fung says we're in the middle of the battle between money and freedom.
Mann contends its fundamentally about the right to think.
**********
Computers are made functional for us by software, which itself is dependent upon the installation of an operating system into the computer's hard drive. Currently, many PCs are sold with a pre- bundled "closed-source" operating system, most often Microsoft Windows.
"Closed-source" means that the underlying code of operating systems or software is encrypted so that only the developer can access it. Contrast this concept with "open-source", a term used to describe the programs which run a gamut of operating systems, as well as software, from word processing, spreadsheets, databases, desktop publishing and image processing, in addition to other applications.
The open-source movement has existed ever since corporations began copyrighting software in the 1970s. It seems to be poorly known outside of techie/hacker communities.
Richard Stallman is a computer scientist, who sees his work as contributing to a non-proprietary knowledge base which exists for the common good. He was at MIT when software copyrighting began. Up until then most software was free. Stallman is credited with founding the "free software" movement, initiating the GNU Project, a computer system to provide a "free" complete operating system as a substitute for UNIX, a system widely used in computing and science. Stallman also is credited with the development of an anti-property or "copyleft" system, through the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).
(GNU stands for GNUs Not UNIX, a self-referential acronym.)
**********
One of open source's core attributes is that anyone can use and change it. The only proviso is that any changes are made available to everybody in return. This is essentially the requirement of the GNU GPL, one of several types of open-source licences.1
The GNU/Linux operating system is one of the best known open-source systems. (Lately the name Linux alone, which honours a single component of the GNU/Linux operating system initiated by Linus Torvalds of Finland has come to be used for the entire GNU/Linux system.2) Like Microsoft Windows, UNIX or DOS, GNU/Linux is the basic interface between the software and the hardware of the computer. Over GNU/Linux, any number of different types of software can be run. The thing that's revolutionary, in the ultra- capitalist 21st century, is that no one owns open-source software. The software itself cannot be sold. It's underlying code is available to users to see and alter, if they wish.
Unlike Microsoft Windows, UNIX or DOS, the code of GNU/Linux is unencrypted and can therefore be adapted to better suit the needs of an individual user or organization, which then must register their changes or additions under a new GPL for public use.
Jesse Hirsh, an activist with TAO, The Anarchist Organization in Toronto, says there are approximately 100 different versions of GNU/Linux in use at the moment.
In 1998, the Mexican government cut a deal with Red Hat Linux to run 140,000 elementary and middle school computer labs on GNU/Linux. The Mexican government paid $50 for a single pair of Red Hat CDs, as this pair can be replicated an infinite number of times under their GPL. Red Hat's CEO Bob Young says Mexico would have paid $124 million (US) for the equivalent closed-source systems, such as Microsoft Windows.
Young boasts that under the UNDPs Sustainable Development Networking Programme, Red Hat provides software and support to 40 developing countries. Red Hat sees China as a prime market for open-source software.
About one-third of Web servers, worldwide, run on GNU/Linux.
Although open-source and closed-source systems and software are virtually indistinguishable in looks and function, they do differ immensely.
Open-source systems and software require more technical ability to install. But manuals, local user groups (LUGs) and the Linux Internet Support Cooperative (LISC) can be accessed for free on the Internet.
Open-source software is infinitely customizable. So if someone in Tamil Nadu, India, has a computer and a reliable phone hook up, she could conceivably install Linux and various open- source software programs and configure them to take Tamil commands instead of English. No commercial software developer would likely have gone to the trouble.3
Along with a person's language of choice, her personality can go into her machine and the programs she works with daily.
When you're finished in a Microsoft program, you select "close" and then "exit". We're accustomed to not having a choice. Open-source software can be configured to use whatever words you like, based on whatever philosophy or politics you have. So your "close" could become "shut", "slam", "conclude", "finish", "dismiss", "terminate", "adjourn" or "recess", depending on how you feel about it. Exit could have similar alternatives: "depart", "leave", "retire", "withdraw", "say goodnight"...
In a more practical vein, open-source systems and software crash far less than their commercial counterparts. Kristofer Coward, a mathematics student at UofT, says: "One of the major advantages of Free Software is that much of it has been written by people whose livelihoods do not depend on finishing their project before a given time. They also lose far more face for prematurely announcing a program to be stable than they lose for announcing it later than expected, so social pressures tend more towards Doing It Right than Doing It Now."
"Because Free Software tends more to be written to Do The Right Thing than to 'ship by this date', or to 'use this secret protocol so more people have to use our software', it is often more reliable and interoperable than proprietary software."
**********
To get started in open-source means jumping in, usually alone, unless you happen to have a hacker for a friend. It's not as easy as buying a neatly packaged closed system and software, whose complicated programming is hidden from the user. Mann argues that the experience shouldn't be easy. The "user friendly" version of computers for popular consumption is a controlling marketing construct. It creates "a computing environment where the user doesn't need to think". The corporation takes over that department -- it's more profitable.
"There's something seriously wrong with this vision. It's a bit like having only a few elite individuals with the ability to read and write, and keeping everyone else illiterate."
Fung suggests that non-techies interested in open source consider the commercial versions of GNU/Linux, although they are bundled with, and therefore "diseased" by, closed-source software. For instance, Corel Linux comes with closed WordPerfect software. The remedy is to simply trash the closed software, and keep the rest. The only truly open-source version is Debian Linux, but he recommends Red Hat for novices.
Open source does not hold your hand. PJ Lilley, an open source convert and self-taught hacker, encourages interested folks to acquire a do-it-yourself attitude - DIY in punk-rock circles.
**********
Corporate use of open source has really taken off in the last couple of years: there's now Corel Linux, VA Linux, IBM Linux, Red Hat Linux and others. They've realized the superiority of open- source software in terms of reliability, speed and security. The corporations bundle closed-source software with an open-source operating system, and sell this as a "distribution". They make their money from the closed software and providing technical support for the entire distribution.
Mann refers to such distributions as "diseased". He lives by the motto that "I should only pay for that which I deprive others of." Knowledge should not be proprietary, because there is no loss associated with sharing it. It's not like taking someone's shirt off their back.
If software is sold says Mann, it should be done "without limitations on redistribution, like Red Hat [which] you can buy and copy freely".
Colleague Richard Stallman encourages the sale of "free software". (Free here is the free as in freedom, not free as in no cost.) For Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open-source code is "open" only to the person who purchases a copy; copying of Raymond's software is discouraged by the signing of a non-disclosure agreement.
Mann doesn't argue with these other figures in the movement over the issue of charging money for open-source software. In fact he considers them compatriots, fighting the same fight. Whether some, like Eric Raymond, get rich off of selling copies of his stuff, is seen as a minor issue in the scheme of things. The essential point is that the code itself is never concealed.
Mann's concern about the use of concealed computer code is earnest. As a computer engineer, his vision embraces a future where computers play an increasingly integral role in human life. Mann's personal vision is that of the computer as a literal human prosthesis. This begs his question.
"When 'technology as extensions of mind and body' is no longer a metaphor, will we have already sold our heart and soul for software of a particular corporation, or will our thoughts be free?"
Michelle Zurbrigg is a non-technical type who is finishing a degree in broadcast journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her interests include freedom and access to information.
[ Front Page ]
|
