Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Internet's Immune System in Arms Race with Digital Rights Management A popular image of the internet it to think of it as a vast interconnected intelligent organism, like this gorgeous map of the internet. If the image is true then who is the heart, the brain, the liver, the nervous system, or the alimentary canal? I'm sure you have candidates for each role :-) The immune system though I think is us, we the citizens of the internet. And we as the internet's immune system react to DRM as an invading organism: destroy ! destroy! destroy! The parallels between the arms race between invaders and the immune system and DRM and netizens are uncanny. The job of an immune system is to detect foreign invaders and destroy! them. This is harder than it looks. Distinguishing between an unwanted visitor and your liver takes some careful work. But once your immune system figures out what's you and not you, it attacks. Some organisms have figured out a way to beat the system by waiting a while for the immune system to detect them as foreign and then rapidly evolving by changing their DNA. This causes the immune system has to start the whole process all over again. We were all brought up on microevolution. Evolution happens by small point/insertion/deletion changes. But the scientist Barbara McClintock discovered something radical, that genes could jump around chromosomes. This means genetic changes could be radical and immediate, not small and slow. Of course Ms. McClintock was ostracized by the scientific community for speaking a heresy. But modern science finally caught up to her, many decades later, and she won her Nobel prize. Why this matter is because invading organisms jump their genes around to cloak themselves from our immune systems. Then in effort to keep up the immune system does the same thing. It hits the big randomizer button in the hope that it can find a way to kill the invader. It's like chasing each other through mirrors. DRM, the internet, and netizens follow a very similar arms race. DRM systems are constantly changed and upgraded to evade we the immune system. But the massive distributed immune system that is the internet community starts simultaneously evolving and attacking the DRM until someone, somewhere finds a way to beat it. Then the process starts all over again. Shouldn't we be smart enough to think ourselves out of this arms race and stop acting like little Darwin machines? comment[] 1:46:01 PM       digg   reddit

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