Don't buy black boxes at Christmas

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

It was far away Christmas 2005 and Cassandra delighted us with this (unheeded) premonition.

This article was written on December 16, 2005 from Cassandra

Cassandra Crossing 15/ Don't buy black boxes at Christmas

Beautiful little objects from the wonderful world of consumer electronics, those that are selling like hotcakes these days. So beautiful and complicated that they can slip in pitfalls without the user realizing it.

For many, the laptop and the mobile phone have now become real "technological prostheses" that allow them to experience an "augmented reality" that is inaccessible without them; they are now indispensable objects. The natural tendency is to consider these objects like other everyday objects, which we use freely, and which we identify with their primary function. For example, the laptop is used for writing and sending emails, the mobile phone for making calls and sending SMS, and so on. There are many other everyday objects that are truly identifiable with their main function; can openers and cutlery are simple objects, cars and cameras are complex objects, but they all possess this property. They do only one thing, they do nothing else, they really coincide with their function, in short they are "transparent" objects.

Most consumer electronics, however, do not; the internal complexity of these objects, often used by the owner only for one function, is not only not perceived by the owner but allows the manufacturer to insert, even in very cheap objects, functions that are hidden or not evident to the average user. They are real "black boxes" that do not reveal their internal structure.

Let's be clear, these are not James Bond-style features from secret services, but features that are known and more or less well documented in the technical literature, standards and data sheets. However, this also means that they are not hypotheses of (however virtuous) paranoids but pure, simple, real description of what we already see (but do not perceive) on shop shelves today. Privacy violations, geographical tracking of mobile radio users, collection of profiles of navigators, listening habits of music lovers, all these things are possible here and now thanks to these objects, perceived as "deceptively" simple and harmless, and therefore insidious. While not lumping everything together, this allows some categories of uses, DRM (Digital Rights Management systems) and tools for mass techno-control first, to be realized in practice. These are uses that need to be "hidden" or in any case barely perceptible to the average user, otherwise they cannot function. The commercial and police techno-control tools, which track the actions and behaviors of users of cellular networks and connections to the Internet, are elementary and fairly well-known examples. DRM systems, on the other hand, are much less so, even if some sensational cases, such as the recent one which saw Sony/BMG in the spotlight, have brought the issue to the attention of even those who had never heard of it talk first. However, it is not digital media, such as CDs with anti-copying/anti-listening systems, that are the greatest concern in terms of hidden functionality, but rather active and/or connected objects. Already this Christmas, buyers of branded and high-end laptops may unknowingly take home one that integrates, passing it off as "new performance", the chip that makes them "Palladium-ready" or, to use the new less flashy term, " TC-ready”. These are laptops that are also designed to be able to communicate with third parties without the knowledge of their owner and to refuse, if third parties deem it right, to carry out his commands. And what this Christmas represents an exception , next Christmas will probably be a frequent thing, if not the rule. We are now in an era in which the user of consumer electronics will have to look with justified suspicion at any object on sale that contains a microprocessor and can communicate in some way via a network; therefore mobile phones and PCs, but also decoders, RFID, PDAs and soon video recorders, passports and banknotes. These are times in which responsible consumption will be the only thing capable of mitigating the problem and perhaps, in the medium term, avoiding the proliferation of objects that no longer obey, like Frankeinstein's Monster, their masters or rather that obey, like Indiana Jones' little monkey, "other" masters. However, the responsible consumption of consumer electronics (forgive the pun) will be much more difficult and tiring than that of vegetables, chocolate or cane sugar; in fact, few have the desire or the possibility to read up on technical topics much more complex than the economic cycle of cocoa, and often masked to the tune of millions by advertising spots and pseudo-independent scientific broadcasts. However, consumers have always had the levers of command, even if they very rarely use them. So ask for information in shops, but also from your computer-loving friend, read something on the subject using Google, and finally DO NOT buy what is not above all suspicion, even if it means not listening to your favorite singer, not playing the latest video games or giving up the latest mobile phone model or the latest technological gadget.

Only this message will reach where it can be heard. Perhaps Intel will backtrack as it has already done on the Pentium III serial number, or perhaps Chinese manufacturers will seize the opportunity and produce guaranteed TC-free PCs (on the topic see the dedicated website no1984.org).

Maybe? It might work. And for now there are no other possibilities.

Marco Calamari

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