WallPosting [unconditional consequences] Project/archive

• Prostheses of the No-Longer-Understood
• Paul Cézanne & The Cult of Ugliness
• Content Scrambling System (CSS) & De-Scrambling Code

February 5. 2003 - Prostheses of the No-Longer-Understood

These gadgets, these electronic toys of postmodernism are, in Hermann Sturm's precise words, prostheses of the no-longer-understood. They are giddy admissions of the defeat of objectivity. Thus, the notion of 'use' long ago ceased to be sovereign and self-evident. We all live in the voluntary slavery of the user. To put it less poetically, we subjugate ourselves to what we don't understand in order to use it. Much like in the worlds of economics and politics, in today's world of technological objectivity, we have to replace understanding with consent. Mercifully, the user surfaces hide our devices' logical depths from us. Design is no longer the conscience of things; it's become user-friendliness.

February 4. 2003 - Paul Cézanne & The Cult of Ugliness

A new temptation has now arisen, but is already waning to an end. Ugliness, deliberate ugliness, has momentarily occupied the throne of beauty. Eccentric accentuation of the hideous has been the device of recent art ; and in ways that we have never seen before, unless it be in some of the more degraded manifestations of savage output. To cut a definite section through history, to say here begins a certain development, there just beyond lies its cause, is idle. Cause and effect pass by indefinite gradations one into the other. A clear marking of commencement can be but an illusion. Nevertheless in this, as in other matters, approximation may serve a practical end. Though arguments may readily be produced in opposition to the statement, we shall not be far wrong in saying that the cult of ugliness dates from the work of Cézanne. But let us be very wary of attributing to him any such credo as those multiple beliefs professed by his pseudo-imitators. To certain, to many sides of the world's beauty Cézanne was profoundly alive ; and to him it was a source of unceasing sorrow that his lack of deftness, his insufficient knowledge, kept him from transcribing to the full such beauty in his work. Cézanne may almost be likened to some uncouth artistic seer to whom came passing visions of fair form rounded by unmeaning night. He would have been himself the first to condemn much, if not all, of the aesthetic chaos that has succeeded to his time. His self-styled followers have chosen the easier task of imitating his defects ; they have neglected, in almost every case, to reproduce his qualities.

Vernon Blake [1927]

January 24. 2003 - Content Scrambling System (CSS) & De-Scrambling Code

You may recently have heard about the Content Scrambling System (CSS) or CSS-compatible open-source software known as DeCSS. CSS, which includes both player-host mutual authentication and data encryption, is used to protect the content of DVDs from piracy and to enforce region-based viewing restrictions. It may also have other purposes and certainly has other side-effects. DeCSS, which is open source, allows Linux-based systems to access the content of DVDs by emulating a licensed player and performing the authentication and decryption.

A document signed by 1) a Norwegian minor, Jon Johansen, 2) an "anonymous German cracker" from the group MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering), who is designated the group's "top coder/disassembler", and 3) an individual referred to only as "[dEZZY/DoD]", suggests that the original CSS "crack" was performed by disassembling a software DVD player and rewriting the descrambling algorithm in C.

On January 20, 2000, United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction in Universal City Studios et al. v. Reimerdes et al., prohibiting the defendants from distributing computer code for reading encrypted DVDs. The defendants had been sued under 17 USC 1201(a)(2), also known as section 1201(a)(2) of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Judge Kaplan subsequently issued a memorandum order in which he indicated that executable source code was not subject to First Amendment protection against prior restraint of speech. This finding is contrary to that of the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, who ruled in the Bernstein cryptography case that source code is indeed protected speech. In their decision, The 9th Circuit even quoted some Scheme code from the declaration of MIT Professor Harold Abelson, explaining why source code is an effective and sometimes preferred means of human communication. Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University also filed a declaration explaining the importance for computer science of being able to publish source code. More recently, the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled in the Junger cryptography case that, independent of its functional significance, the expressive nature of source code affords it First Amendment protection.

If code that can be directly compiled and executed may be suppressed under the DMCA, as Judge Kaplan asserts in his preliminary ruling, but a textual description of the same algorithm may not be suppressed, then where exactly should the line be drawn? The Gallery of CSS Descramblers web site was created to explore this issue, and point out the absurdity of Judge Kaplan's position that source code can be legally differentiated from other forms of written expression. To learn more, check out this spot, or even read the essay Source vs. Object Code: A False Dichotomy by David S. Touretzky.

The image above is not the source code; it's a picture of the source code. These GIF files [ #1, #2, and #3] are not directly readable by a C compiler. However, a human looking at these images could certainly type the C code into a text file. Or the files could perhaps be converted automatically, by an OCR program. Are these page images considered an illegal "circumvention device" under the DMCA? Or, since they're not executable, are they protected speech?