A tale of two cities: CES and 22C3
As media companies continue to chisel away at the brittle consumer rights remaining in the Fair Use doctrine and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and government pushes low-cost surveillance technology to the very street corner, a quiet revolution fueled by an emotional backlash to these digital shackles has begun. This revolution uses similar technology to push back, yin to yang. Encryption on DVDs are fought with decryption. Surveillance is fought with sabotage, which was interestingly enough, the same strategy of the original Luddites who destroyed milling machines in nascent industrial age England.
Wired reports that many discussions being held at the European Hacker Conference going on in Berlin right now (also known as the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress or 23C3) deals with this obfuscation of surveillance concern.
Hackers have figured out ways to jam cameras with lasers and modify face recognition software to insert black bands over the images of human faces.
The fundamental truth of technology is that for every action there is a reaction. As CES is going on in Vegas, its doppelganger is meeting in Berlin. Hollywood studios discuss digital film watermarking to stop piracy as the buccaneers themselves meet quietly in Europe and figure out how to board the steadily sinking ship of intellectual protectionism while firing back at the privacy privateers.
Posted on January 03, 2006
