#(and the only way you can force the algorithm to stop feeding you songs you hate is to BLOCK THE ARTIST ENTIRELY)

[skyriderwednesday]

Spotify, please, I enjoy one (1) The Human League song, and it's Don't You Want Me Baby.

Practically every single other song they've ever produced is crap.

[cutepresea]

XD0-5 Gjallarhorn Prologue: A Chance Meeting

Sorry again for the spam. This will be the last of these before Valkyries’ Summer in late June.

If you want to blacklist these, you can use either the tag #gjallarhorn prologue or #xdu scripts

Reminder that these are copied straight from XD Unlimited itself, so any grammatical weirdness, mistranslations, and/or mischaracterizations are not my doing.

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "Watch out!"

Kirika Akatsuki: "It's coming this way!"

Miku Kohinata: (I promised Hibiki. I promised that I was going to protect her!)

Chris Yukine: "I can't believe how big this thing is..."

Maria: "It really is massive. I have no idea where to start."

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "You could broil it up and feed an army."

Kirika Akatsuki: "Sh-Shirabe? You aren't planning on eating it, surely?!"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Baked or broiled, nobody is eating anything until we bring it down."

Maria: "Yeah. Let's take it down before it makes more Karma Noise!"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Yes. The early bird gets the worm, after all!"

Chris Yukine: "I'm gonna skewer this thing with bullets!"

Kirika Akatsuki: "Wh-What?! Her bullets went right through it?!"

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "Can it possibly be ephemeral?"

Maria: "That's not it. When her bullets passed through it, it wavered slightly."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Meaning that it isn't completely immune to the laws of physics."

Kirika Akatsuki: "So it's like the first Karma Noise that appeared in this world?"

Maria: "Possibly. If we can just get our attacks to land somehow..."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "All we can do is trust in our songs, and keep fighting!”

Tsubasa Kazanari & Maria: "Yaah!"

Kirika Akatsuki: "We're right behind you!"

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "Let's go, Kiri-chan!"

Chris Yukine: "We'll cover you from afar!"

Miku Kohinata: "......"

Chris Yukine: "Hey! Are you listening?!"

Miku Kohinata: "Y-Yes, I hear you!"

Miku Kohinata: (I have to help Hibiki, and everyone else. I won't fail this time!)

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Our attacks are landing, but...." [1]

Kirika Akatsuki: "I can't see any sort of damage being done."

Chris Yukine: "Yeah... Its body just shakes and seems to fade for a second."

Maria: "I'm not sure if our attacks are dealing with the miasma, but it seems we've kept it from making more Noise."

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "But we need to find a way to damage this creature."

Kirika Akatsuki: "We'll just wear ourselves out at this rate."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "HQ, any  leads on a strategy to deal with this?"

Elfnein: "We're analyzing the data now!"

Elfnein: "I will try to temporarily recode the tuning algorithm for the Phase Contrast Barrier."

Maria: "Also, what's the status on the evacuation of the local population?"

Aoi Tomosato: "The effected area is very large. Not even half have evacuated yet." [2]

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Please work on both tasks as quick as you can! We don't know how much longer we can contain it!"

Chris Yukine: (And that's not our only problem, either...)

Miku Kohinata: "Haah... Haah... Haah..."

Chris Yukine: (She's exhausted.)

Chris Yukine: (Even in a normal battle, she'd be dead tired by now wielding a Gear she isn't used to yet.)

Miku Kohinata: (My body... won't do what I tell it to anymore.)

Miku Kohinata: (I have to fight on Hibiki's behalf!)

Miku Kohinata: (I promised I would protect her. But now, she's going to--)

Chris Yukine: "Snap out of it, moron!"

Miku Kohinata: "Huh?!"

Miku Kohinata: "Aaaah?!"

Chris Yukine: "Guh?!"

Miku Kohinata: "Ch-Chris!"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Yukine!"

Kirika Akatsuki: "Chris-senpai!"

Chris Yukine: "Oww... You okay?"

Miku Kohinata: "Forget about me! What about you?!"

Chris Yukine: "Don't sweat it. It takes a lot more than that to take me down."

Chris Yukine: "Now get your head back in the game! Got it?"

Miku Kohinata: "Y-Yeah..."

Miku Kohinata: (I'm holding everyone back again...)

Tsubasa Kazanari: (Guh! We're losing our formation!)

Maria: (It's taking advantage of the lapse in our assault.)

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: (Damn, we lost our grip on it!) [3]

Kirika Akatsuki: "It's coming this way!"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Get back into formation! Prepare to engage!"

Chris Yukine: "Watch out, I feel like the next one is going to be big!"

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "What can we even do?!"

Kirika Akatsuki: "There's nowhere to run or hide, you know!"

Maria: "Everyone, get behind me!"

Maria: "Ngh!"

Maria: (Please, I just need a little longer...)

Maria: (Crap! I can't hold it back!)

Wielders: "Aaaaaaaaaah?!"

Maria: "I-Is everyone all right?"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Barely, but thanks to your shield..."

Kirika Akatsuki: "We're alive..."

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "For the moment, that is..."

Chris Yukine: "Tch. This is so not fair..."

Miku Kohinata: "What can we do?"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "I can't think of any way to stop it..."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Even if we used our Superb Songs, would they even get through to that thing?"

Maria: "I agree. This isn't something we can solve with brute force."

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "But if we don't do something..."

Kirika Akatsuki: "I don't want to see us all die here."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "What?!"

Maria: "Oh, no... It's got even more energy than it had before!"

Sakuya Fujitaka: "An even larger energy source is converging on the enemy."

Aoi Tomosato: "There's... so much energy!"

Genjuro Kazanari: "What's wrong?!"

Aoi Tomosato: "If this much energy is released at once, the city and the surrounding area will be reduced to ashes!"

Genjuro Kazanari: "What?!"

Genjuro Kazanari: (We haven't even evacuated all of the civilians yet, but we can't just leavea all of our wielders in there--)

Aoi Tomosato: "Everyone, retreat immediately! Get out of there!"

Maria: "Retreat? Have the civilians been evacuated yet?!"

Aoi Tomosato: "They..."

Maria: "Then there's no way we can leave yet!"

Kirika Akatsuki: "If we run now, it's going to blow up the whole city, right?!"

Chris Yukine: "How the hell could we just run away?!"

Genjuro Kazanari: "Girls..."

Tsubasa Kazanari: " guardian is both a sword and shield for the innocent. Abandoning those I am tasked with is unacceptable."

Genjuro Kazanari: "Tsubasa!"

Kirika Akatsuki: "It's coming!"

Maria: (Don't fail me now, Airget-lamh...)

Maria: "Everyone, get behind me again!"

Elfnein: "That will never work! The energy of this attack is far beyond the previous one!"

Maria: "If I can dampen the attack's power even a little, the others will have a better chance of survival!"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Yeah, as long as we have the strength for a single attack, there's still hope."

Chris Yukine: "I'd give my life to slit that thing's throat!"

Miku Kohinata: "......"

Miku Kohinata: "Before it's too late, I want to try something."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Try what?"

Miku Kohinata: "My Superb Song. I don't know if it'll work, but I at least want to try!"

Chris Yukine: "What the hell are you saying?!"

Miku Kohinata: "If doing nothing means we're all going to die, then I..."

Miku Kohinata: (Instead of being a burden, I can sacrifice myself, if it gives them at least a chance to survive--)

Chris Yukine: "No! Do you think that idiot would ever forgive us if we let you die?!"

Miku Kohinata: "But what about--"

Maria: "Oh, no! It's--"

Aoi Tomosato: "Get out of there!"

Genjuro Kazanari: "How could this happen..."

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "Aaaah!"

Kirika Akatsuki: "Wh-What was that light?!"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "It was like blue lightning!"

Chris YUkine: "Forget about that. Are we still alive?"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Yeah, somehow..."

Maria: "Did it cancel out the monster's energy blast?"

Miku Kohinata: "Huh... What happened?"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "What was that light?"

Maria: "Wait, there's someone behind us!"

???: "Wow, that was a close one." [4]

???: "Can't cut it much closer than that."

Maria: "I'm guessing she isn't a civilian straggler?"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Who are you?!"

???: "Stand aside, girls."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "What?"

Tsubasa Kazanari: (She raised her hand to signal to someone.)

Tsubasa Kazanari: (Does she have reinforcements hiding somewhere?)

Kirika Akatsuki: "It's that light again!"

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "It's heading right for the monster!"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "It's working?!"

Maria: "Look... The monster is disappearing!"

Chris Yukine: "What the hell was that?!"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "She beat that thing? Or did it just disappear?"

Elfnein: "All signs of the monster's presence have vanished. The Gjallarhorn alert has stopped, but what was it?"

???: "What you saw in this world was only its projected reflection. The real one is in another dimension."

Maria: "Its reflection?"

Chris Yukine: "You're shady as hell. Just who are you?"

???: "I don't have time to tell you my life story, but let's just say that I'm not your enemy."

???: "So, do you happen to have Gjallarhorn by any chance?"

Wielders: "What?!"

???: "Yep, that reaction speaks volumes. You do have it, don't you?"

???: "By the way, is the girl on the ground back there all right?"

Miku Kohinata: "Hibiki?!"

Miku Kohinata: "Hibiki!"

Miku Kohinata: "Oh, good, she's okay."

???: "But wow, I can't believe there are seven of you."

???: "Yes, I understand."

???: "Well, I've got a monster to chase. I'll be going now."

Chris Yukine: "Chase? But how?"

Tsubasa Kazanari: "Wait! We still have questions--"

???: "You have Gjallarhorn, so you'll likely see me again very soon. I'll tell you the rest then."

Maria: "Because we have Gjallarhorn? What do you know?"

???: "The World Serpent is gathering strength, and parallel worlds are being destroyed."

???: "There will come a time when this world will also fall prey to its onslaught."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "When you say the World Serpent..."

Tsubasa Kazanari: (Was that the monster we just fought?)

???: "It's a magical beast that travels across the many parallel worlds, siphoning life from the stars."

???: "I'm sure you've been hearing it. The footsteps of ruin, I mean."

???: "Could you wielders be the sword that slays the beast?"

???: "Wielders of Gjallarhorn's choosing, we will meet again soon."

Maria: "She's gone..."

Chris Yukine: "What in the hell just happened?"

Kirika Akatsuki: "This is just crazy! I can't believe someone else knows about Gjallarhorn!"

Shirabe Tsukuyomi: "She knew all about the parallel worlds, too."

Tsubasa Kazanari: "So that monster was the World Serpent... A magical beast siphoning life from the stars."

Sakuya Fujitaka: "Well, we've somehow managed to avert a crisis."

Aoi Tomosato: "Yeah, the city was saved, and our wielders made it back alive, but..."

Elfnein: "......"

Genjuro Kazanari: "Where in the world did that woman come from?"

Aoi Tomosato: "When she disappeared, several life forms in the area vanished from our readings at the same time."

Aoi Tomosato: "It's likely she didn't come alone."

Genjuro Kazanari: "Could she have come from a group with a technology to easily drive off that monster?"

Genjuro Kazanari: "I can only hope that they are on our side."

Aoi Tomosato: "Commander, there's more. When they disappeared, we had energy readings like those of Gjallarhorn's transport."

Genjuro Kazanari: "What?! Then that much mean..."

Elfnein: "They can travel between parallel worlds, too."

Genjuro Kazanari: "But how do they do it without the Gjallarhorn?"

Elfnein: "I cannot say for sure..."

Elfnein: "But they seemed to know even more than we do about Gjallarhorn and parallel worlds."

Genjuro Kazanari: "Hmm..."

Elfnein: (That aside, what could this World Serpent that is destroying parallel worlds be?)

Elfnein: (If something like that really exists, it is going to affect more than just our world.)

Elfnein: (The World Serpent, the destruction of parallel worlds, and Gjallarhorn...)

Elfnein: (The wielders have traversed many parallel worlds, rooting out abnormalities along the way...)

Elfnein: (But it appears the real battle has yet to begin.)

Notes:

[1] a rare four dot ellipsis

[2] "effected" should be "affected"

[3] Just like with Serena a couple parts ago, this was originally "dame" and probably would've been better translated as "No!" to stay a bit more in character

[4] Her name is Mina. Or Miina. Or Mena. Depending on how you wanna spell it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

DRM's Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next

PLEASE REBLOG THIS

EFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM:

Everybody on the inside secretly knows that DRM technology is irrelevant, but DRM law is everything; and

The reason companies want DRM has nothing to do with copyright.

These two points have just been demonstrated in a messy, drawn-out fight over the standardization of DRM in browsers, and since we threw a lot of blood and treasure at that fight, one thing we hope to salvage is an object lesson that will drive these two points home and provide a roadmap for the future of DRM fighting.

DRM IS TECHNOLOGICALLY BANKRUPT; DRM LAW IS DEADLY

Here's how DRM works, at a high level: a company wants to provide a customer (you) with digital asset (like a movie, a book, a song, a video game or an app), but they want to control what you do with that file after you get it.

So they encrypt the file. We love encryption. Encryption works. With relatively little effort, anyone can scramble a file so well that no one will ever be able to decrypt it unless they're provided with the key.

Let's say this is Netflix. They send you a movie that's been scrambled and they want to be sure you can't save it and watch it later from your hard-drive. But they also need to give you a way to view the movie, too. At some point, that means unscrambling the movie. And there's only one way to unscramble a file that's been competently encrypted: you have to use the key.

So Netflix also gives you the unscrambling key.

But if you have the key, you can just unscramble the Netflix movies and save them to your hard drive. How can Netflix give you the key but control how you use it?

Netflix has to hide the key, somewhere on your computer, like in a browser extension or an app. This is where the technological bankruptcy comes in. Hiding something well is hard. Hiding something well in a piece of equipment that you give to your adversary to take away with them and do anything they want with is impossible.

Maybe you can't find the keys that Netflix hid in your browser. But someone can: a bored grad student with a free weekend, a self-taught genius decapping a chip in their basement, a competitor with a full-service lab. One tiny flaw in any part of the fragile wrapping around these keys, and they're free.

And once that flaw is exposed, anyone can write an app or a browser plugin that does have a save button. It's game over for the DRM technology. (The keys escape pretty regularly, just as fast as they can be revoked by the DRM companies.)

DRM gets made over the course of years, by skilled engineers, at a cost of millions of dollars. It gets broken in days, by teenagers, with hobbyist equipment. That's not because the DRM-makers are stupid, it's because they're doing something stupid.

Which is where the law comes in. DRM law gives rightsholders more forceful, far-ranging legal powers than laws governing any other kind of technology. In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 provides for felony liability for anyone commercially engaged in bypassing a DRM system: 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first offense. Even noncommercial bypass of DRM is subject to liability. It also makes it legally risky to even talk about how to bypass a DRM system.

So the law shores up DRM systems with a broad range of threats. If Netflix designs a video player that won't save a video unless you break some DRM, they now have the right to sue -- or sic the police -- on any rival that rolls out an improved alternative streaming client, or a video-recorder that works with Netflix. Such tools wouldn't violate copyright law any more than a VCR or a Tivo does, but because that recorder would have to break Netflix DRM, they could use DRM law to crush it.

DRM law goes beyond mere bans on tampering with DRM. Companies also use Section 1201 of the DMCA to threaten security researchers who discover flaws in their products. The law becomes a weapon they can aim at anyone who wants to warn their customers (still you) that the products you're relying on aren't fit for use. That includes warning people about flaws in DRM that expose them to being hacked.

It's not just the USA and not just the DMCA, either. The US Trade Representative has "convinced" countries around the world to adopt a version of this rule.

DRM HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH COPYRIGHT

DRM law has the power to do untold harm. Because it affords corporations the power to control the use of their products after sale, the power to decide who can compete with them and under what circumstances, and even who gets to warn people about defective products, DRM laws represent a powerful temptation.

Some things that aren't copyright infringement: buying a DVD while you're on holiday and playing it when you get home. It is obviously not a copyright infringement to go into a store in (say) New Delhi and buy a DVD and bring it home to (say) Topeka. The rightsholder made their movie, sold it to the retailer, and you paid the retailer the asking price. This is the opposite of copyright infringement. That's paying for works on the terms set by the rightsholder. But because DRM stops you from playing out-of-region discs on your home player, the studios can invoke copyright law to decide where you can consume the copyrighted works you've bought, fair and square.

Other not-infringements: fixing your car (GM uses DRM to control who can diagnose an engine, and to force mechanics to spend tens of thousands of dollars for diagnostic information they could otherwise determine themselves or obtain from third parties); refilling an ink cartridge (HP pushed out a fake security update that added DRM to millions of inkjet printers so that they'd refuse remanufactured or third-party cartridges), or toasting home-made bread (though this hasn't happened yet, there's no reason that a company couldn't put DRM in its toasters to control whose bread you can use).

It's also not a copyright infringement to watch Netflix in a browser that Netflix hasn't approved. It's not a copyright infringement to record a Netflix movie to watch later. It's not a copyright infringement to feed a Netflix video to an algorithm that can warn you about upcoming strobe effects that can trigger life-threatening seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy.

WHICH BRINGS US TO THE W3C

The W3C is the world's foremost open web standards body, a consortium whose members (companies, universities, government agencies, civil society groups and others) engage in protracted wrangles over the best way for everyone to deliver web content. They produce "recommendations" (W3C-speak for "standards") that form the invisible struts that hold up the web. These agreements, produced through patient negotiation and compromise, represent an agreement by major stakeholders about the best (or least-worst) way to solve thorny technological problems.

In 2013, Netflix and a few other media companies convinced the W3C to start work on a DRM system for the web. This DRM system, Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), represented a sharp departure from the W3C's normal business. First, EME would not be a complete standard: the organization would specify an API through which publishers and browser vendors would make DRM work, but the actual "content decryption module" (CDM) wouldn't be defined by the standard. That means that EME was a standard in name only: if you started a browser company and followed all the W3C's recommendations, you still wouldn't be able to play back a Netflix video. For that, you'd need Netflix's permission.

It's hard to overstate how weird this is. Web standards are about "permissionless interoperability." The standards for formatting text mean that anyone can make a tool that can show you pages from the New York Times' website; images from Getty; or interactive charts on Bloomberg. The companies can still decide who can see which pages on their websites (by deciding who gets a password and which parts of the website each password unlocks), but they don't get to decide who can make the web browsing program you type the password into in order to access the website.

A web in which every publisher gets to pick and choose which browsers you can use to visit their sites is a very different one from the historical web. Historically, anyone could make a new browser by making sure it adhered to W3C recommendations, and then start to compete. And while the web has always been dominated by a few browsers, which browsers dominate have changed every decade or so, as new companies and even nonprofits like Mozilla (who make Firefox) overthrew the old order. Technologies that have stood in the way of this permissionless interoperabilty -- for instance, patent-encumbered video -- have been seen as impediments to the idea of the open web, not standardization opportunities.

When the W3C starts making technologies that only work when they're blessed by a handful of entertainment companies, they're putting their thumbs -- their fists -- on the scales in favor of ensuring that the current browser giants get to enjoy a permanent reign.

But that's the least of it. Until EME, W3C standards were designed to give the users of the web (e.g. you) more control over what your computer did while you were accessing other peoples' websites. With EME -- and for the first time ever -- the W3C is designing technology that takes away your control. EME is designed to allow Netflix -- and other big companies -- to decide what your browser does, even (especially) when you disagree about what that should be.

Since the earliest days of computing, there's been a simmering debate about whether computers exist to control their users, or vice versa (as the visionary computer scientist and education specialist Seymour Papert put it, "children should be programming the computer rather than being programmed by it" -- that applies equally well to adults. Every W3C standard until 2017 was on the side of people controlling computers. EME breaks with that. It is a subtle, but profound shift.

WHY WOULD THE W3C DO THIS?

Ay yi yi. That is the three billion user question.

The W3C version of the story goes something like this. The rise of apps has weakened the web. In the pre-app days, the web was the only game in town, so companies had to play by web rules: open standards, open web. But now that apps exist and nearly everyone uses them, big companies can boycott the web, forcing their users into apps instead. That just accelerates the rise of apps, and weakens the web even more. Apps are used to implement DRM, so DRM-using companies are moving to apps. To keep entertainment companies from killing the web outright, the Web must have DRM too.

Even if those companies don't abandon the web altogether, continues this argument, getting them to make their DRM at the W3C is better than letting them make it on an ad-hoc basis. Left to their own devices, they could make DRM that made no accommodations for people with disabilities, and without the W3C's moderating influence, these companies would make DRM that would be hugely invasive of web users' privacy.

The argument ends with a broad justification for DRM: companies have the right to protect their copyrights. We can't expect an organization to spend fortunes creating or licensing movies and then distribute them in a way that lets anyone copy and share them.

We think that these arguments don't hold much water. The web does indeed lack some of its earlier only-game-in-town muscle, but the reality is that companies make money by going where their customers are, and every potential customer has a browser, while only existing customers have a company's apps. The more hoops a person has to jump through in order to become your customer, the fewer customers you'll have. Netflix is in a hyper-competitive market with tons of new entrants (e.g. Disney), and being "that streaming service you can't use on the web" is a serious deficit.

We also think that the media companies and tech companies would struggle to arrive at a standard for DRM outside of the W3C, even a really terrible one. We've spent a lot of time in the smoke-filled rooms of DRM standardization and the core dynamic there is the media companies demanding full-on lockdown for every frame of video, and tech companies insisting that the best anyone can hope for is an ineffectual "speed-bump" that they hope will mollify the media companies. Often as not, these negotiations collapse under their own weight.

Then there's the matter of patents: companies that think DRM is a good idea also lovesoftware patents, and the result is an impenetrable thicket of patents that make getting anything done next to impossible. The W3C's patent-pooling mechanism (which is uniquely comprehensive in the standards world and stands as an example of the best way to do this sort of thing) was essential to making DRM standardization possible. What's more, there are key players in the DRM world, like Adobe, who hold significant patent portfolios but are playing an ever-dwindling role in the world of DRM (the avowed goal of EME was to "kill Flash"). If the companies involved had to all sit down and negotiate a new patent deal without the W3C's framework, any of these companies could "turn troll" and insist that all the rest would have to shell out big dollars to license their patents -- they have nothing to lose by threatening the entire enterprise, and everything to gain from even a minuscule per-user royalty for something that will be rolled out into three billionbrowsers.

Finally, there's no indication that EME had anything to do with protecting legitimate business interests. Streaming video services like Netflix rely on customers to subscribe to a whole library with constantly added new materials and a recommendation engine to help them navigate the catalog.

DRM for streaming video is all about preventing competition, not protecting copyrights. The purpose of DRM is to give companies the legal tools to prevent activities that would otherwise be allowed. The DRM part doesn't have to "work" (in the sense of preventing copyright infringement) so long as it allows for the invocation of the DMCA.

To see how true this is, just look at Widevine, Google's version of EME. Google bought the company that made Widevine in 2010, but it wasn't until 2016 that an independent researcher actually took a close look at how well it prevented videos from leaking. That researcher, David Livshits found that Widevine was trivial to circumvent, and it had been since its inception, and that the errors that made Widevine so ineffective were obvious to even a cursory examination. If the millions of dollars and the high-power personnel committed to EME were allocated to create a technology that would effectively prevent copyright infringement, then you'd think that Netflix or one of the other media companies in the negotiations would have diverted some of those resources to a quick audit to make sure that the stuff actually worked as advertised.

(Funny story: Livshits is an Israeli at Ben Gurion University, and Israel happens to be the rare country that doesn't ban breaking DRM, meaning that Israelis are among the only people who can do this kind of research without fear of legal retaliation)

But the biggest proof that EME was just a means to shut down legitimate competitors -- and not an effort to protect copyright -- is what happened next.

A CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT

When EFF joined the W3C, our opening bid was "Don't make DRM."

We put the case to the organization, describing the way that DRM interferes with the important copyright exceptions (like those that allow people to record and remix copyrighted works for critical or transformative purposes) and the myriad problems presented by the DMCA and laws like it around the world.

The executive team of the W3C basically dismissed all arguments about fair use and user rights in copyright as a kind of unfortunate casualty of the need to keep Netflix from ditching the web in favor of apps, and as for the DMCA, they said that they couldn't do anything about this crazy law, but they were sure that the W3C's members were not interested in abusing the DMCA, they just wanted to keep their high-value movies from being shared on the internet.

So we changed tack, and proposed a kind of "controlled experiment" to find out what the DRM fans at the W3C were trying to accomplish.

The W3C is a consensus body: it makes standards by getting everyone in a room to compromise, moving toward a position that everyone can live with. Our ideal world was "No DRM at the W3C," and DRM is a bad enough idea that it was hard to imagine much of a compromise from there.

But after listening closely to the DRM side's disavowals of DMCA abuse, we thought we could find something that would represent an improvement on the current status quo and that should fit with their stated views.

We proposed a kind of DRM non-aggression pact, through which W3C members would promise that they'd only sue people under laws like DMCA 1201 if there was some other law that had been broken. So if someone violates your copyright, or incites someone to violate your copyright, or interferes with your contracts with your users, or misappropriates your trade secrets, or counterfeits your trademarks, or does anything else that violates your legal rights, you can throw the book at them.

But if someone goes around your DRM and doesn't violate any other laws, the non-aggression pact means that you couldn't use the W3C standardised DRM as a route to legally shut them down. That would protect security researchers, it would protect people analyzing video to add subtitles and other assistive features, it would protect archivists who had the legal right to make copies, and it would protect people making new browsers.

If all you care about is making an effective technology that prevents lawbreaking, this agreement should be a no-brainer. For starters, if you think DRM is an effective technology, it shouldn't matter if it's illegal to criticize it.

And since the nonaggression pact kept all other legal rights intact, there was no risk that agreeing to it would allow someone to break the law with impunity. Anyone who violated copyrights (or any other rights) would be square in the DMCA's crosshairs, and companies would have their finger on the trigger.

NOT SURPRISED BUT STILL DISAPPOINTED

Of course, they hated this idea.

The studios, the DRM vendors and the large corporate members of the W3C participated in a desultory, brief "negotiation" before voting to terminate further discussion and press on. The W3C executive helped them dodge discussions, chartering further work on EME without any parallel work on protecting the open web, even as opposition within the W3C mounted.

By the time the dust settled, EME was published after the most divided votes the W3C had ever seen, with the W3C executive unilaterally declaring that issues for security research, accessibility, archiving and innovation had been dealt with as much as they could be (despite the fact that literally nothing binding was done about any of these things). The "consensus" process of the W3C has so thoroughly hijacked that EME's publication was only supported by 58% of the members who voted in the final poll, and many of those members expressed regret that they were cornered into voting for something they objected to.

When the W3C executive declared that any protections for the open web were incompatible with the desires of the DRM-boosters, it was a kind of ironic vindication. After all, this is where we'd started, with EFF insisting that DRM wasn't compatible with security disclosures, with accessibility, with archiving or innovation. Now, it seemed, everyone agreed.

What's more, they all implicitly agreed that DRM wasn't about protecting copyright. It was about using copyright to seize other rights, like the right to decide who could criticize your product -- or compete with it.

DRM's sham cryptography means that it only works if you're not allowed to know about its defects. This proposition was conclusively proved when a W3C member proposed that the Consortium should protect disclosures that affected EME's "privacy sandbox" and opened users to invasive spying, and within minutes, Netflix's representative said that even this was not worth considering.

In a twisted way, Netflix was right. DRM is so fragile, so incoherent, that it is simply incompatible with the norms of the marketplace and science, in which anyone is free to describe their truthful discoveries, even if they frustrate a giant company's commercial aspirations.

The W3C tacitly admitted this when they tried to convene a discussion group to come up with some nonbinding guidelines for when EME-using companies should use the power of DRM law to punish their critics and when they should permit the criticism.

"RESPONSIBLE DISCLOSURE" ON OUR TERMS, OR JAIL

They called this "responsible disclosure," but it was far from the kinds of "responsible disclosure" we see today. In current practice, companies offer security researchers enticements to disclose their discoveries to vendors before going public. These enticements range from bug-bounty programs that pay out cash, to leaderboards that provide glory to the best researchers, to binding promises to act on disclosures in a timely way, rather than crossing their fingers, sitting on the newly discovered defects, and hoping no one else re-discovers them and exploits them.

The tension between independent security researchers and corporations is as old as computing itself. Computers are hard to secure, thanks to their complexity. Perfection is elusive. Keeping the users of networked computers safe requires constant evaluation and disclosure, so that vendors can fix their bugs and users can make informed decisions about which systems are safe enough to use.

But companies aren't always the best stewards of bad news about their own products. As researchers have discovered -- the hard way -- telling a company about its mistakes may be the polite thing to do, but it's very risky behavior, apt to get you threatened with legal reprisals if you go public. Many's the researcher who told a company about a bug, only to have the company sit on that news for an intolerably long time, putting its users at risk. Often, these bugs only come to light when they are independently discovered by bad actors, who figure out how to exploit them, turning them into attacks that compromise millions of users, so many that the bug's existence can no longer be swept under the rug.

As the research world grew more gunshy about talking to companies, companies were forced to make real, binding assurances that they would honor the researchers' discoveries by taking swift action in a defined period, by promising not to threaten researchers over presenting their findings, and even by bidding for researchers' trust with cash bounties. Over the years, the situation has improved, with most big companies offering some kind of disclosure program.

But the reason companies offer those bounties and assurances is that they have no choice. Telling the truth about defective products is not illegal, so researchers who discover those truths are under no obligation to play by companies' rules. That forces companies to demonstrate their goodwill with good conduct, binding promises and pot-sweeteners.

Companies definitely want to be able to decide who can tell the truth about their products and when. We know that because when they get the chance to flex that muscle, they flex it. We know it because they said so at the W3C. We know it because they demanded that they get that right as part of the DRM package in EME.

Of all the lows in the W3C DRM process, the most shocking was when the historic defenders of the open web tried to turn an effort to protect the rights of researchers to warn billions of people about harmful defects in their browsers into an effort to advise companies on when they should hold off on exercising that right -- a right they wouldn’t have without the W3C making DRM for the web.

DRM IS THE OPPOSITE OF SECURITY

From the first days of the DRM fight at the W3C, we understood that the DRM vendors and the media companies they supplied weren't there to protect copyright, they were there to grab legally enforceable non-copyright privileges. We also knew that DRM was incompatible with security research: because DRM relies on obfuscation, anyone who documents how DRM works also makes it stop working.

This is especially clear in terms of what wasn't said at the W3C: when we proposed that people should be able to break DRM to generate subtitles or conduct security audits, the arguments were always about whether that was acceptable, but it was never about whether it was possible.

Recall that EME is supposed to be a system that helps companies ensure that their movies aren't saved to their users' hard-drives and shared around the internet. For this to work, it should be, you know, hard to do that.

But in every discussion of when people should be allowed to break EME, it was always a given that anyone who wanted to could do so. After all, when you hide secrets in software you give to people who you want to keep them secret from, you are probably going to be disappointed.

From day one, we understood that we would arrive at a point in which the DRM advocates at the W3C would be obliged to admit that the survival of their plan relied on being able to silence people who examined their products.

However, we did hold out hope that when this became clear to everyone, that they would understand that DRM couldn't peacefully co-exist with the open web.

We were wrong.

THE W3C IS THE CANARY IN THE COALMINE

The success of DRM at the W3C is a parable about market concentration and the precarity of the open web. Hundreds of security researchers lobbied the W3C to protect their work, UNESCO publicly condemned the extension of DRM to the web, and the many crypto-currency members of the W3C warned that using browsers for secure, high-stakes applications like moving around peoples' life-savings could only happen if browsers were subjected to the same security investigations as every other technology in our life (except DRM technologies).

There is no shortage of businesses that want to be able to control what their customers and competitors do with their products. When the US Copyright Office held hearings on DRM in 2015, they heard about DRM in medical implants and cars, farm equipment and voting machines. Companies have discovered that adding DRM to their products is the most robust way to control the marketplace, a cheap and reliable way to convert commercial preferences about who can repair, improve, and supply their products into legally enforceable rights.

The marketplace harms from this anti-competitive behavior are easy to see. For example, the aggressive use of DRM to prevent independent repair shops ends up diverting tons of e-waste to landfill or recycling, at the cost of local economies and the ability of people to get full use out of your property. A phone that you recycle instead of repairing is a phone you have to pay to replace -- and repair creates many more jobs than recycling (recycling a ton of e-waste creates 15 jobs; repairing it creates 150 jobs). Repair jobs are local, entrepreneurial jobs, because you don't need a lot of capital to start a repair shop, and your customers want to bring their gadgets to someone local for service (no one wants to send a phone to China for repairs -- let alone a car!).

But those economic harms are only the tip of the iceberg. Laws like DMCA 1201 incentivize DRM by promising the power to control competition, but DRM's worst harms are in the realm of security. When the W3C published EME, it bequeathed to the web an unauditable attack-surface in browsers used by billions of people for their most sensitive and risky applications. These browsers are also the control panels for the Internet of Things: the sensor-studded, actuating gadgets that can see us, hear us, and act on the physical world, with the power to boil, freeze, shock, concuss, or betray us in a thousand ways.

The gadgets themselves have DRM, intended to lock our repairs and third-party consumables, meaning that everything from your toaster to your car is becoming off-limits to scrutiny by independent researchers who can give you unvarnished, unbiased assessments of the security and reliability of these devices.

In a competitive market, you'd expect non-DRM options to proliferate in answer to this bad behavior. After all, no customer wants DRM: no car-dealer ever sold a new GM by boasting that it was a felony for your favorite mechanic to fix it.

But we don't live in an a competitive market. Laws like DMCA 1201 undermine the competition that might counter their worst effects.

The companies that fought DRM at the W3C -- browser vendors, Netflix, tech giants, the cable industry -- all trace their success to business strategies that shocked and outraged established industry when they first emerged. Cable started as unlicensed businesses that retransmitted broadcasts and charged for it. Apple's dominance started with ripping CDs and ignoring the howls of the music industry (just as Firefox got where it is by blocking obnoxious ads and ignoring the web-publishers who lost millions as a result). Of course, Netflix's revolutionary red envelopes were treated as a form of theft.

These businesses started as pirates and became admirals, and treat their origin stories as legends of plucky, disruptive entrepreneurs taking on a dinosauric and ossified establishment. But they treat any disruption aimed at them as an affront to the natural order of things. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, any technology invented in your adolescence is amazing and world-changing; anything invented after you turn 30 is immoral and needs to be destroyed.

LESSONS FROM THE W3C

Most people don't understand the risks of DRM. The topic is weird, technical, esoteric and take too long to explain. The pro-DRM side wants to make the debate about piracy and counterfeiting, and those are easy stories to tell.

But people who want DRM don't really care about that stuff, and we can prove it: just ask them if they'd be willing to promise not to use the DMCA unless someone is violating copyright, and watch them squirm and weasel about why policing copyright involves shutting down competitive activities that don't violate copyright. Point out that they didn't even question whether someone could break their DRM, because, of course, DRM is so technologically incoherent that it only works if it's against the law to understand how it works, and it can be defeated just by looking closely at it.

Ask them to promise not to invoke the DMCA against people who have discovered defects in their products and listen to them defend the idea that companies should get a veto over publication of true facts about their mistakes and demerits.

These inconvenient framings at least establish what we're fighting about, dispensing with the disingenuous arguments about copyright and moving on to the real issues: competition, accessibility, security.

This won't win the fight on its own. These are still wonky and nuanced ideas.

One thing we've learned from 15-plus years fighting DRM: it's easier to get people to take notice of procedural issues than substantive ones. We labored in vain to get people to take notice of the Broadcasting Treaty, a bafflingly complex and horribly overreaching treaty from WIPO, a UN specialized agency. No one cared until someone started stealing piles of our handouts and hiding them in the toilets so no one could read them. That was global news: it's hard to figure out what something like the Broadcast Treaty is about, but it's easy to call shenanigans when someone tries to hide your literature in the toilet so delegates don’t see the opposing view.

So it was that four years of beating the drum about DRM at the W3C barely broke the surface, but when we resigned from the W3C over the final vote, everyone sat up and took notice, asking how they could help fix things. The short answer is, "It's too late: we resigned because we had run out of options.

But the long answer is a little more hopeful. EFF is suing the US government to overturn Section 1201 of the DMCA. As we proved at the W3C, there is no appetite for making DRM unless there's a law like DMCA 1201 in the mix. DRM on its own does nothing except provide an opportunity for competitors to kick butt with innovative offerings that cost less and do more.

The Copyright Office is about to hold fresh hearings about DMCA 1201.

The W3C fight proved that we could shift the debate to the real issues. The incentives that led to the W3C being colonized by DRM are still in play and other organizations will face this threat in the years to come. We'll continue to refine this tactic there and keep fighting, and we'll keep reporting on how it goes so that you can help us fight. All we ask is that you keep paying attention. As we learned at the W3C, we can't do it without you.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/drms-dead-canary-how-we-just-lost-web-what-we-learned-it-and-what-we-need-do-next

[casualarsonist]

How To Write The Sequel To A Successful TV Series, by The Duffer Bros.(Creators of the fledgling success, ‘Stranger Things’, and the vastly superior ‘Stranger Things 2′)

Remember the gross old days when the plot of an eight-episode series would unfold over eight whole episodes? Remember how the characters occupied themselves during that time by doing stupid things like uncovering the mystery at the centre of the narrative, and revealing parts of themselves that enabled the viewer to connect with them? 

Well we’re the Duffer Bros. and we say FUCK THAT. Fuck that behind the local Walmart on a sweaty Tuesday afternoon. 

Pacing and audience engagement is lame and outdated, friendo, and frankly, neither me, Doug Duffer, nor my brother Nug Duffer, would wipe our asses with a script that was tightly written, thrilling, and/or consistent. So with that in mind, here are our tips for how to become big famous TV boys in 2018. 

1: When starting your story, make sure that you open with a scene depicting something seemingly integral to an interesting plot - perhaps include characters the audience doesn’t know yet and link them to a central established character. Then, when that’s done, wait at least two-thirds of the series before you even mention that thing again. Treat your script like you treat the women you date - don’t call back for five weeks, because if you do your audience won’t have time to forget that the thing you set up ever existed and stop caring about it. You don’t actually have to bring it back ever again, but if you do, devote one episode and one episode only to it - don’t let it feed back into the plot at a later time, because establishing things that then become important later on is complicated, and it only appeals to annoying people like intellectuals and pedants. Instead, take all the moments that would otherwise end up on the cutting room floor, like multiple scenes of a character arguing with his sister in a car and then screeching off down the street with heavy metal music playing, or dozens of moments in which a person wakes up with a gasp, and sprinkle them liberally all over the place. This will ensure that you keep a steady flow of tweets coming from your core audience of people with low standards and short attention spans, such as babies, the mentally inhibited, and the millions of people that spend money on the Transformers films.

2: Plot balance is important. VERY important. Which is why you want to make sure that you even out the good pacing and tight narrative of your first season by scripting a second season that has neither of these things. Generally speaking, you want to aim for MORE episodes, and LESS story. If your first series was eight episodes long, make your second series NINE episodes long. I know this might sound like you’ll be doing more work, but don’t worry, because you’re not actually going to script nine episodes worth of story. Instead, make three episodes worth of story, and fill the other six episodes with padding that doesn’t impact the central narrative. Then, put the story episodes right at the end of the season to ensure that your audience spends the entire time hanging on to the hope that the thing they’re investing their precious time in will eventually be worth the life they wasted watching it. It will also leave them in a good enough mood not to immediately cancel their Netflix subscription when you drop some kind of killer ‘to be continued…’ moment at the end, like showing that the monster of the story isn’t dead, or having a hand pop up out of a grave, or something similarly awesome and not at all shit.

3: Be unpredictable. Specifically when it comes to your characters. The worst thing in the world for a screenwriter is when the audience can predict your characters’ decisions before they make them - it takes tension away from the scene, and makes your audience feel like they can relate to the person they’re watching, which is why you need to make sure that your characters are as distant from actual human beings as possible. Have you spent an entire season ensuring that the town’s sheriff was the foundation of reason and moral responsiblity? Throw that out the window and make him have a violent, screaming argument for no real reason with a 13-year-old kid - fuck it, TWO 13-year-old kids. Have you made a concerted effort to establish the personality of the leader and ethical compass of a group of plucky young teenagers? Then force him to be aggressively mean to a girl for eight episodes just because she wants to be his friend. Hell, why not take the smartest kid on screen and make him befriend and protect a demonic creature that looks an awful lot like the one that nearly killed his friends the year before. The sky’s the limit, really, just so long as you make sure that you’re not allowing your audience to ever feel like they understand what is happening to the people they’re watching.

4: ‘Nostalgia’ is a fancy word for ‘feeling the sex feelings for a thing that happened in the before-time’, and it’s a great way to get a whole bunch of people who are terribly depressed about their adult lives to come and watch your show. But if you’re anything like us and dealing with 80s nostalgia, then that means that your target audience are Gen X, Gen Y, and Millenials, and everyone knows that they have the attention spans of a bunch of church mice on ketamine. Which is why you have to be careful that you don’t ever let them forget what year it is that your show is set in. There are a number of ways you can do this: 

- Mullets. Prominently feature a goofy mullet. If your modern-day actors won’t grow one, don’t fret, a terrible wig will do exactly the same job, and no-one will even notice. 

- Television. Feature lots of old televisions with visible resolution lines. In the olden days people didn’t have 1080p, so everyone used to watch a light-up box that only had four pixels on it. These pixels would alternate in colour, from brown, to beige, to red, to black, to brown again. They found this very amusing because their brains were roughly a third the size of a modern human’s brain, and the only other things to do of an evening were to eat frozen corn around the dinner table or with friends, or put on pants and go and watch the executions in the town square. 

- Music. It’s a scientifically established fact that music is the only good thing that the 80s produced. Therefore you must drown your show in licensed music. Start every scene with an instantly recognisable song, and end every scene with an instantly recognisable song. If you don’t have dialogue for a scene, don’t worry, because you can just mix an instantly recognisable song over the other audio - people won’t care that they can’t hear what the characters are saying, because they will be too busy recognising the song you’re playing for them and wishing they weren’t being screwed over by the economy. 

- Eggos. Put. Eggos. EVERYWHERE.

5: Lastly, the most important lesson of them all - the lesson of fear. Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear a person can feel, which is why the number one rule of scary films is that you don’t want to erode the fear factor by revealing too much of the monster and where he comes from. Which is why you should do the exact opposite and reveal NOTHING about the monster or where he comes from (apart from maybe the fact that the monster has a gender, and that gender is male). Tell the audience nothing new at all - don’t give them ANYTHING (apart from the fact that it’s a ‘he’). Don’t even show the monster that was in the previous season at all. It’s a good thing to leave the audience wondering why there are three hundred new monsters when there was only one old monster - unanswered questions like this are called ‘mystery’, and idiots people love it. And speaking of which, when you reach the last episode, tie everything up without having made any progress at all, because not knowing the point of the series you just watched is the scariest unknown of all.

See? It’s simple! Even a dingus can write and direct an unnecessary follow-up series to a successful TV show. To be honest, we didn’t even write the first one - a computer algorithm did it for us, and we just sat back smoking rolled-up strips of newspaper that we pretended were cigarettes and watched the money flow in. And after the first season became weirdly popular, we finally had the capital to buy all the licensed music we wanted, and fully realise our TRUE vision of what Stranger Things should be - the cassette tape from Guardians of the Galaxy. 

Sweet.

TO BE CONTINUED…

[wingedashley]

Falling for you

(Notes: This fic is 4K words long. Shoutout to @myrastuff for helping with editing, and for creating this superhero AU in the first place.)

Alice Song woke to the soft beeping of her watch’s alarm.

She took a deep, shuddering breath and blinked the sleep out of her eyes. She’d fallen asleep resting her head against the window by her seat, and on any other day the view would’ve taken her breath away. Cruising 85 kilometers above the ground, the shuttle just barely skimmed the edges of outer space. So close to the Kármán line, the upper half of the sky was black as night despite the harsh glare of the sun. She could see the curvature of the Earth dipping into every horizon.

But today wasn’t about sightseeing. She had a job to do.

She shifted in her seat, straightening her back as she stretched her arms and legs. The shuttle’s interior was dark and quiet, sparse but still surprisingly cosy. Her mid-flight nap hadn’t left her cramped and sore like on a regular airplane, where the upholstered seats weren’t designer-made for style and comfort. The soft hum of the shuttle’s engines reverberated through the small space, its automated lights still calibrated for broad daylight. She smiled. That’s what you got for flying without a human pilot, she supposed.

As she stretched, a holographic window opened up a few feet from her face, projected from the shuttle’s ceiling. The plane’s soft spoken AI chimed through the speakers.

“Incoming call from-”

“Put her through.”

It would take a few seconds for the call to connect, enough time to freshen up. After all, it wouldn’t help to give Juliet the wrong impression. With practiced ease, she detached her brain’s chronology from the rest of her body and compressed it, accelerating her mind’s eye in tandem to gloss over the span. She blinked, and blinked again.

By the time Juliet’s office sprang into view before her, she’d been awake for hours.

By the time Dr. Juliet Godsmith extricated herself from the ongoing soiree, the sun had started to set on the horizon. She breathed a sigh of relief as she stalked through the labyrinthine halls of the company office towards her private lab, the click-clack of her cane slowly drowning out the sounds of laughter and music from somewhere behind her.

Of all the times for a crisis like this to happen, it had to happen now. She should have been handling this herself; her mistake, her neck on the line to fix it. But that would put the whole company on the line in the process, and probably end up getting her killed as the icing on that cake. It had to be Song, fighting her battles and saving the day. A proper superhero, for all she seemed set on denying it. Her plan was ludicrous, but it was the best one that either of them had.

By the time she made it to her office she was already breathing heavily, exhaling sharply as the door slid closed with deceptive softness. “Security level to maximum, Aurora,” she spoke to the AI as she settled herself in, resting her cane against the desk as a dozen holographic displays opened in a panoramic array before her. “Run this operation on the burner rig, I want all records wiped as clean as we can get them.”

“Yes, doctor Godsmith.” The AI affirmed it had completed the action with a short, mechanical chirp.

The overhead lights came on gradually, replacing the dimming daylight from the floor-to-ceiling one-way windows with her own perfectly replicated blend of artificial sun. The tender reds and oranges of twilight mixed with the artificial afternoon to cast her office in a riot of warm colours. All of which stood in remarkable contrast to the shadowy shuttle camera feed projected onto the central display before her.

Song was brooding in the passenger seat. Piercing blue eyes glared out at the sky below, her pitch black hair blending into the darkness behind her. Gone was her cocksure grin, the happy spark behind a perennial smile. For all her too-young-to-die posturing, she looked very… mortal. Juliet sighed.

“Aurora, add reminder for tomorrow, 9 am. Review personal privacy filters on camera AI, update recognition algorithm.”

“Yes, doctor Godsmith.”

She closed the feed with a wave of her hand, leaning back into the oversized office chair. Song did this every few weeks, there was no need to feel this nervous.

If she had any more time… well, it didn’t matter. There wasn’t any time left at all.

She opened a call to the shuttle, clasping her hands before her and leaning forward on her elbows. She smiled, and it didn’t feel all that fake at all.

Juliet’s face popped onto the stream, all prim and cunning and perfect. She was wearing a full-length sequined gown, and a smug little half-smile that told Alice she’d invented something that would disrupt another million-dollar industry… or impressed another supermodel.

Let’s not think about that.

“Party went well, I take it?” said Alice.

“Is going well, I hope. We’d better make this fast, or they’ll be fresh out of hors d’oeuvres before I get back.” Juliet’s smile widened into a grin as she leaned back in her throne-like chair, tapping on a keyboard off screen. “Are you ready?”

“Born ready.” Alice grinned. She stood from her seat, stepping closer to the open space by the bay doors to begin her warm up routine. The holographic window followed her… not that she minded. It wasn’t every day that she got to do calisthenics in a skin-tight plugsuit, let alone in front of little miss Stark herself.

Juliet, for her part, seemed far more interested in some readouts floating in her side screens. Poo. “On an unrelated note, I took your request for swim goggles and whipped up something a bit more… fashionable.”

Alice could hear the clack of manicured nails on a keyboard as a hidden compartment opened in the wall with a pneumatic hiss. It was a visor, a single ear-to-ear screen designed to fit across the bridge of her nose, between two large over-the-ear headphone pieces held together by a strap. Same colour and size as the one Juliet wore, except for the ear covers. Fashionable, indeed. She lifted it from the compartment, pulling it over her head to adjust it in place on her face. She smiled, it still had that heady newly-replicated smell.

Whipped up indeed.

Juliet piped up, directly in her ears this time. “If you do find a way to break this one, could you try to bring it back in one piece? I could use the test data. It’s hard enough building a sensor suite that can survive the G forces you put out, let alone one that can wirelessly communicate through all your… temporal folding.”

Alice had to laugh. Juliet always made it sound so frightfully gauche. The visor’s insides lit up after a quick boot sequence, mapping an augmented reality display into the shuttle around her. Her eyes flicked across the visual keyboard as she filled in her login details.

“And what about my… other request?”

With the clack of a keyboard through the visor comm, a second compartment (how many did this damn shuttle have?) opened behind her. Alice turned to look at it, and stopped. She stepped up to it with more than a little trepidation, before pulling out a device she’d only seen on TV. Modelled in museums.

“Really, I should be making you something custom-fitted, but it’s been years since I played with this sort of tech and I was having difficulty with the…” Juliet cut herself off ahead of the technical explanation, conscious of the time. “Anyways, it was easier to convince a few world governments and one admiral that they owed me a favour. I hope you don’t mind something secondhand.”

It was a smooth disc of chrome, with a series of glowing blue rings embedded inside. Like a comic-book arc reactor. Leather straps hung from its sides, a surprisingly oldschool harness for such an incredible piece of technology. Courtesy of its last user, she supposed.

The visor mistook her hesitance for confusion, and layered diagnostic data over the machine:

97% MATCH CERTAINTY: Prototype Soltech egomorphic field reservoir. Last seen…

She dismissed the window. Impulse’s field projector, custom built by Dr. Godsmith herself. She squelched the automatic pang of jealousy.

The device was synonymous with the late superhero, and ever since she’d inherited his powers she’d always wondered when she’d get her hands on something like it. Even now, held at arm’s length, she could feel her field slipping and sinking into the device. Filling and feeling it out like it was meeting an old friend.

She shivered.

“It’s… thank you, Juliet,” she muttered, before slipping it onto her back and tightening the straps around her chest. Impulse always wore the damn thing on his chest, and it certainly made for a pretty striking heroic silhouette. But for the next 30 minutes, the less blinking lights she had pointing forward, the better.

Besides, it clearly wasn’t designed to fit across breasts.

It normally took a bit of effort to stretch her field to something new and foreign on her person. It was still licking at her visor, assimilating the device over long minutes. But the ring pulled at her, drawing her aura into it like a black hole, twisting and coiling it around its core. She stepped up to the starboard bay doors, stretching her face in a mock yawn as she tested the airtight seal around the visor’s screen.

“Song…” The inventor’s voice wavered for a moment, until she restarted with more conviction. “Alice. You know you don’t have to do this alone. It’s the best plan we have now, but that doesn’t mean it’s the optimal solution. We can figure something else out, I’ll handle any fallout. I’ve dealt with worse.”

Alice looked down at her feet, and saw the Earth projected below the shuttle’s floor on her aug display. Drexler’s lab was marked on the ground below, to her left, along with the curving ballistic trajectory of her projected route onto the site.

“Me going in alone gives you the highest plausible deniability, and I can improvise a high speed exit strategy without worrying about anyone else slowing me down. Going now means we can solve this before it becomes an international crisis.”

Alice looked forward, staring through the doors at the void beyond. She grimaced.

“And of course you’ve dealt with worse. We wouldn’t have powers if we hadn’t dealt with worse…” Her voice faltered. “… It doesn’t change a damn thing.”

I couldn’t be there for you then. But I sure as hell can be there for you now.

She could practically hear Juliet smile.

“Fine.” said Juliet. “Though I have to ask, when did you become an expert in breaking into secure military facilities?”

“Since when did you start building tech that could end the world if it fell into the wrong hands?”

“Mmm, touché.”

They faded into a companionable silence, the visor’s clock ticking down the final few seconds before the shuttle arrived at the drop window. She briefly considered leaving her now-obsolete watch behind, but decided against it. As much as she’d fought to not do the jump in a bloody space suit to keep her weight down, a few grams wouldn’t kill her.

And, well… she ran a thumb over its screen nervously. The thought of being without a working timepiece was too difficult to bear. Never again.

“Alright,” Juliet’s voice through the visor broke the silence, “it’s showtime.”

The bay doors flashed green as they waited for Alice’s signal. She checked her harness, flexed her fingers in her suit. Her visor was comfortably saturated in her field at this point, and it had completed the software handshake with the projector on her back. Which, in turn, had finished absorbing as much of her field as it was able. Ideally, optimally, she’d want to hyperventilate before this next bit… but it really wasn’t all that necessary.

Besides, in the off chance that she actually died, she really didn’t want that to be Juliet’s final memories of her. She smirked.

Taking a few deep breaths, she hit the bay door controls. She made sure to exhale sharply as the shuttle’s interior explosively decompressed. As much as she’d have loved to hold her breath, the vacuum would’ve ripped it right out of her chest anyway. She felt her saliva bubble away as the insides of her mouth froze.

To her pleasant surprise, her ears didn’t so much as pop. Thank you, Juliet.

She stepped forward, to the lip of the void. She felt her lungs and heart slow, her power deftly scaling back the speed of her metabolic processes in tandem with her mammalian diving reflex. Her eyes drooped, arms spread wide by her side, as she fell forward into the cold sky beyond.

Juliet tapped her fingers against the desk in nervous anticipation. Now began the wait.

At Song’s altitude, she’d take almost 10 minutes to reach the lab. Her desk’s holographics were dominated by a volumetric display of the atmosphere between the shuttle and the landing zone, Song just a blip on a parabolic track. A side screen showed a camera feed of her receding further and further away from the shuttle.

Juliet clenched her teeth. Any lower, and the spaceplane would drop out of the ionosphere and risk detection. Song was plummeting into this absurd, half-formed plan at terminal velocity, completely alone.

She glanced at another side screen, the internal feed from Song’s visor. It depicted a sharp cross section of the girl’s face: her unfocused blue eyes. Her fingers tapped harder, she bit her lip.

Sod it.

“Aurora, hook me into the company satellite mainframe.” It barely took her a minute to coordinate every Solnet satellite in the hemisphere to train their sensors on the girl. Her windows shifted as a new volumetric display took center stage, a perfectly triangulated 3D reconstruction of Song in free fall. She’d have to scrub a lot of mainframes after this whole mess was over.

She looked… angelic.

Without an atmosphere in the way, the sun burned bright on her skin. Her hair floated in a soft wave behind her, utterly ethereal. And oh god, her in that suit… Juliet tore her eyes away, flushed. Form fitting, ideal for speed, of course Song would insist on it. Impulse always had, and Juliet was starting to realize what his legions of fans had seen in the damned thing. Thank you, aerodynamics.

Wait.

She snapped her focus back to the visor’s screen. Song’s eyes weren’t unfocused anymore. They were tracking something on the ground below with the focus of a hawk.

“What do you see?”

Juliet’s voice felt tinny and distant in Alice’s ears. She scanned the ground again, straining her eyes through her torpor.

Shit.

In lieu of trying to type out a text message with her eyes, she fragmented a new timestream for her visor and carefully decelerated it. Show, don’t tell: the slower anything moved in relation to normal time, the faster the subjective frequency of any waves. All she had to do was pull the visor’s cameras down the EM spectrum juust far enough to-

“Oh,” said the voice in her ear.

Song’s eyes were incredible, even by metahuman standards. They were one of the many adaptations her body had been pushed through to adopt Impulse’s powers. She could see radiation ranging from gamma rays all the way down to, say, radio waves.

There were three radar installations below her, ringing Drexler’s lab. Scratch that, four. She could maybe risk falling past one. But with that many triangulating together, probably on high alert, she didn’t stand a chance. And that wasn’t even the worst part.

“They’re SAM sites. Surface to air missiles. You could probably take one direct hit with that projector online, but you can’t take four.” A pause, an intake of breath, “I’m pulling the plug. We’re aborting the mission.”

Juliet sounded panicked. Which made sense, there wasn’t really an exit strategy for this leg of the mission. If Alice had to guess, Juliet would force the shuttle out of its thermosphere cover and probably risk the world’s most one-sided dogfight to buy her a few minutes.

Alice grimaced. Not if she had something to say about it.

She splayed her arms and legs out in a spread eagle, before reaching out to the field enveloping her body to clock it down.

Time slowed. Every nerve, every atom throttling to a crawl. The world around her exploded into blinding blues and purples as high frequency light overloaded her sluggish retinas. She felt warm, the air spiking in subjective heat and pressure to her slowed skin. She felt her stomach sink as her drop to Earth suddenly accelerated. A kinematic illusion, her brain playing catch up with her subjectively faster trajectory.

But for all the things that sped up around her, gravity did not.

The earth spun beneath her, far faster than it ever should. But she still fell with the force, and speed, of a single G, relative to her own pocket of time. Her visor struggled for a long second to recalculate her new trajectory… one that plateaued over the lab to land in the ocean well beyond it. Her face broke into a smug grin with the sharp intake of breath from the other end of the com.

“Well then. That’s a neat trick. Didn’t realize you could slow your fall like that.” Alice listened in a happy daze; Juliet’s voice was wonderfully, gloriously, legible. No speed up at all. Somehow, the inventor had built a machine that could package her voice perfectly across compressed time. She always hated having to keep her auditory nerves running at a different rate than the rest of her, it was such a debilitating experience.

With the boosted atmospheric pressure, she decided to finally open her mouth and inhale a few, deep breaths. Some of that daze was feeling a bit too literal.

Juliet was speaking again. Blinking the fog away from her mind, she tried to pick up the thread of the conversation she’d lost. Audio compensation or not, there was no fixing the fact that Juliet was literally in a faster timestream than her. Her messages came thick and fast. Something about the view being spectacular?

“- will bring the shuttle around and pick you up from your new landing zone. I trust that you can swim.”

She almost rolled her eyes, until Juliet paused, left her hanging on her words like she hung in the air. Even with her mind running a bit faster than the rest of her body, a second of silence was a worryingly long gap in realtime.

“…Don’t worry about Drexler, or the transponder. Don’t worry about diplomatic incidents. Just come back safe, Song.”

Practically a whisper, it almost felt like an admission. To what, she didn’t dare guess. She had to focus on what came next. Slowing down was always the easy part.

She’d been tracking the sweeps of the radar beams, putting together a map of how they intersected, the transient gaps and windows. But everything moved so dizzyingly fast, her crawling nerves struggling to keep up with the shifting sensor net.

She felt her mind fragment, executive functions slowing further and further as her planning functions endlessly accelerated. Her vision narrowed. Blood rushed to her head. Tinnitus keened in her ears. A dull pain settled between her eyes-

There.

Like a bolt of lightning down her cortical stack, she felt the raw certainty of a route found, a plan committed. Her mind telescoped back in on itself as she heard her lungs draw a deep, shuddering breath. She was drifting right above the installation, the SAM sites forming a perfect ring of interlocking death.

What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?

“… Song?” Juliet was talking to her. “Song? The visor doesn’t have much of a biometric suite, but your-”

Tyger Tyger, Juliet.

For a single dizzying moment, everything clicked into place. Alice reached the laboratory’s zenith. The radar beams finished sweeping directly over the installation, to return to scanning their surroundings.

She let go of her power.

Her body snapped back to real time, the world dropping back to chilly normality as every particle in her body sprung back into action. And then she kept on pushing, driving her temporal momentum forward as she clocked her entire self up.

The world was dark, redshifting into a red and black hellscape. The world was cold, chilling to near absolute zero.

The world was still.

She couldn’t breath, the air frozen in time around her. She couldn’t see the SAMs, her eyes shifting frantically to adapt to the grim red sun. She hung in the sky, frozen for a gut wrenching moment, her momentum reduced to negligibility.

And then she fell.

She pulled her arms and legs tight against her sides as she picked up speed, dropping like a javelin through the frozen sky. Her power was red lightning in her veins. The world was a shrinking cage of radio waves, flanked on all sides by the invisible eyes of an angry god. She felt herself break the sound barrier, stabbing out of the stratosphere like an orbital strike.

A dozen seconds into her breakneck descent, she heard Juliet’s delayed gasp in her ears. She laughed with aching lungs.

Welcome to my wonderland.

The laboratory grew in her vision as she felt the shockwave of compressed air stretching against her finally ignite. Fire scorched her sight, seared the caked frost from her visor. Countless warning windows exploded across the edges of her vision, which she ignored for the only readout that mattered: altitude.

500 meters from the ground and dropping, she decided to prime the projector, slid her eyes across the ring’s controls, and-

ERROR: RADIO BLACKOUT. Potential causes: active jamming, spacecraft re-entry, ionospheric anomalies…

No. No no no.

The emergency release. She’d seen it in the museum, briefly noted it when she picked the thing up on the shuttle. Teeth clenched, she whipped her left arm behind her back to grab for the switch.

Her arm had only extended from her profile for a microsecond, but a microsecond was all that the angry sky needed. The sudden asymmetry to her profile whipped her into a tailspin. The burning, freezing night spun her end-on-end as she flailed for the release.

So that’s why Impulse always wore this thing on his chest.

The altimeter kept draining.

In a handful of terrifying moments, she found the latch, grabbing and holding on to it for dear life. With a silent scream, she clocked up as hard as she could with every iota of power she had left, and clocked her mind further still.

5 meters

The world collapsed into darkness, her eyes failing her completely, her breakneck fall suddenly slowing to a lethargic sink. She couldn’t tell up from down. It felt familiar… like diving.

Like drowning.

3 meters

She screwed her eyes shut and pulsed her senses through her field. It caressed the edges of her temporal bubble, tracing a thousand soft fingers against walls of frozen sky.

With a slow spin she righted herself, orienting against her wake. She extended her feet to help cushion the landing. She splayed her right hand before her, fingers outstretched.

(1 meter)

Her fingers and feet touched the roof of the laboratory. They sank into the concrete like it was dust in the wind.

Two knuckles deep, she flicked the switch.

The field stored in the projector blasted through her body like a shockwave, pumping down her legs and arms to dig deep into the concrete. She felt her power stretch across the rooftop, licking down at the load bearing supports. The effect was immediate, the concrete hardening and absorbing the shock of her descent. Dust became rubber as her momentum scattered into her field.

And like a wire snapping, she whipped back to realtime.

The world gasped back into light and warmth as she slammed into the flexing rooftop. Her fragmented mind was still a step ahead of her body, watching with dispassionate curiosity as the shockwave rippled away through the ground beneath her.

It rippled up her body too, her bones and limbs twisting and warping far beyond their breaking points, held together by the aftershocks of her field. The wave rippled through her skull and she struggled to hold onto consciousness, shivering as it passed up through her hair.

And then, finally, it was over.

Her brain crashed back into realtime all at once, following the rest of her. For the first time in far too long, she was all in one piece; even the minor instinctive temporal eddies that wormed their way through her metabolism had all collapsed in sheer exhaustion.

It was a surprisingly nice day out. The sun was high in the sky, and all she could hear was birdsong from the nearby forest. No surface to air missiles, no foxy geniuses, nothing. Only the soft chime of her visor rebooting broke her from her reverie. She laughed, gasping for breath, and rose from her three-point landing.

Cheeks flushed, flakes of cement scattering from the grooves she’d dug into the ground, Alice stood tall, turning back to look up at the sky and straight into the eyes of her audience.

She winked.

[softghor]

10 Easy Ways to Expand Your Facebook Reach

Reach is a key metric marketers use on Facebook to measure brand awareness, after all, if you don’t know how to reach your followers, you will fail no matter how many followers you have. In this blog post, I’ve set out to share my best recommendations on how you can widen the reach of your audience on Facebook and boost your success on the social network. Enjoy! 1. Be Personal Nobody wants to engage with a boring brand. Think of your presence on Facebook like a show performance: your content should be there to educate, enlighten and entertain. To generate engagement and increase Facebook audience reach, showcase your staff, behind the scenes clips and shine the light on your customers and how your products or service is solving their problem. Here’s a great post from Starbucks. They gathered 45 of their Starbucks baristas across six different cities in Asia to share joy around the world with a Christmas song. Funny, entertaining and personal. Perfect! 2. Use Hashtags Hashtags today are everywhere and you need to learn how to incorporate them into your social media strategy to increase your Facebook reach. Start by searching for hashtags that would be relevant to your business (including your business name) and see if people are already using them. You’ll also want to search for currently trending (or viral) hashtags to see if you might be able to create a connection with your brand and piggyback on existing engagement. You can use a social media analytics tool to provide. you with such insight. 3. Comment on blogs with Facebook comments The Internet is one big content repository, and a lot of it can be of interest to your company and your followers. Curation is the new creation, and content marketing has now been democratized, so all you have to do is look around to associate relevant content to your own interests and brand. I bet that you already are following some blogs relevant to your company (and if not, you should), and I bet that some of these blogs use Facebook comments. Why not add some thoughts on relevant posts—but instead of linking them to your personal page, add them as your business. Just click the Change link in the comment section, select your business page, and write your (interesting, thought-provoking) comment. Your comment will be seen by everyone who is reading the comments thus increasing your business page Facebook reach. 4. Use Call to Actions “Like this post if you love pizza!” “Did you find this post insightful? Share it with your friends!” “What do you think? Add your comment in the section below.” CTAs are a direct marketing tactic, and they’re a great way to get audiences to engage with your Facebook posts and share them with their friends, which will in turn, boost your entire Facebook reach. Using calls to action can be a slippery road, though. You don’t want to overdo it, and it should be natural. Here’s a nice example from Chevrolet. They let their followers choose what kind of car they like the best by either liking the post or sharing it with their friends. Nicely done, Chevrolet!  (I’m European, so my vote is old school.) Make sure you consider the wider business objective when thinking of what call to actions to use in your Facebook social media strategy. 5. Ask Questions Asking someone a question is a great way to engage that person and stop them from continuing to scroll through their newsfeed. Asking questions to your followers activates them, leading to greater reach for your Facebook Page. At the same time, it gives you the answers to questions that may be crucial for your company’s sales and marketing strategy. Keep in mind though that the goal of asking questions should be to start a discussion - and you need to be a part of that discussion! Reply to your followers’ comments and make sure that the discussion not only increases your Facebook reach, but that they also provide value to your followers. 6. Connect with other pages Liking and connecting with other companies on Facebook you will improve your Facebook reach too. When you comment on other relevant pages, your brand will appear in the newsfeed of their followers therefore helping to extend your reach to new audiences and boost brand awareness as a result. 7. Use Images Using images in your Facebook posts is a simple way to boost engagement as Facebook's algorithm prioritises posts with pics. But what sort of images should you post? My recommendations are that you use high-quality images, quirky images, images of your staff and/or clients, images of how one can use your products, and images that show the joy that your company brings. 8. Take advantage of Facebook promotion Contests are a great way to improve your reach on Facebook! Businesses are able to collect entries by having users comment or like a post and—more importantly—we can finally use likes as a voting mechanism. You could, for example, post something like: “Win a free dinner for two! Like this post and let us know in the comments below why you should win. The comment with the most likes wins! Let your friends know and share this post.” You can’t force users to share your posts as an entry mechanism any more than you can force a purchaser to enter a contest, but the “like” is powerful on its own. The more users who like and comment on your post, the more users you’ll reach via their activity feeds. 9. Built-In Social Media Monitoring: Use Facebook Insights Facebook Insights is a great social media monitoring tool to learn more about your Page, your posts, your followers, and your Facebook reach. Visit your Facebook Insights, click on Posts, and order all your posts by Facebook reach. By doing this, it’s quite easy to find out which posts reached the most users. This data will give you the insights to post more of whatever works for you. I’ll give up my own business intelligence (hope you can read Swedish)! If you want to read more about Facebook Insights and how you can use all this data to improve your Facebook Reach I suggest that you read the blogpost 4 Facebook Metrics Every Company Should be Measuring. 10. Learn from the Best There are millions of companies that have spent the past few years improving their reach on Facebook. So, it’s pretty safe to say that a lot of “tricks” have already been tried out by other companies. But who are the companies that reach more and more users every day? Who are the companies that are great at engaging their followers? Well, it’s not that hard to find out—and that business intelligence is actually free! How to Boost Facebook Reach For some time now, Facebook’s organic post reach has been in decline. You may have 1,000 likes to your business page, but how many of the people who have liked your page are actually seeing your message? Well, it depends on how often people engage with your content, but the figures are alarming: estimates are around 10%, but some writers put the number as low as 1%. So your 1,000 likes may result in 10 people seeing your post. With this in mind, how can you boost your Facebook post reach without breaking the bank? Create Great Content OK, this is a tough one. But there is nothing more effective in maximising your Facebook reach than excellent content. If you produce content that is fantastic, then people will engage with it: and if people engage with your content, they are more likely to see your posts, thus boosting your reach. Ask Questions You would be surprised with the effect that asking questions has on your engagement levels. People enjoy being asked their opinion and are often happy to share it. So use content such as asking open questions, caption competitions and fill in the blank competitions: a good way to drive your reach not only to your existing audience, but to new people too. Know Your Analytics There is no excuse for not knowing your numbers on Facebook. The insights section has improved dramatically over the years and you can now easily find out what time is best to post your message, what type of content works best and what your audience looks like (gender, age, location, etc.). You can also send messages to targeted areas of your page – for example, you can send a post to an audience segmented by location, gender, age or language. The more specific the message, the better the engagement. Stop Selling A lot of businesses go wrong with Facebook right at the start: they see it as a good way of selling more. But Facebook is not about that, it is about engaging an audience. If you were catching up with your friends and someone who you didn’t know interrupted and started selling something to you, how would you feel? Advertise I know that I said there were ways of boosting your Facebook post without breaking the bank, so why mention advertising? Well, Facebook advertising doesn’t need to be expensive. You can run a full campaign where you can select your audience and budget, or you can choose to ‘boost’ a post. This is where you can choose to spend a small amount of money to reach an audience that you select with one of your posts. You can see the number of people you are reaching as well as how that changes if you amend your budget.

[thelmasirby32]

Managing Algorithimc Volatility

Upon the recently announced Google update I've seen some people Tweet things like

if you are afraid of algorithm updates, you must be a crappy SEO

if you are technically perfect in your SEO, updates will only help you

I read those sorts of lines and cringe.

Here's why...

Fragility

Different businesses, business models, and business structures have varying degrees of fragility.

If your business is almost entirely based on serving clients then no matter what you do there is going to be a diverse range of outcomes for clients on any major update.

Let's say 40% of your clients are utterly unaffected by an update & of those who saw any noticeable impact there was a 2:1 ratio in your favor, with twice as many clients improving as falling.

Is that a good update? Does that work well for you?

If you do nothing other than client services as your entire business model, then that update will likely suck for you even though the net client impact was positive.

Why?

Many businesses are hurting after the Covid-19 crisis. Entire categories have been gutted & many people are looking for any reason possible to pull back on budget. Some of the clients who won big on the update might end up cutting their SEO budget figuring they had already won big and that problem was already sorted.

Some of the clients that fell hard are also likely to either cut their budget or call endlessly asking for updates and stressing the hell out of your team.

Capacity Utilization Impacts Profit Margins

Your capacity utilization depends on how high you can keep your steady state load relative to what your load looks like at peaks. When there are big updates management or founders can decide to work double shifts and do other things to temporarily deal with increased loads at the peak, but that can still be stressful as hell & eat away at your mental and physical health as sleep and exercise are curtailed while diet gets worse. The stress can be immense if clients want results almost immediately & the next big algorithm update which reflects your current work may not happen for another quarter year.

How many clients want to be told that their investments went sour but the problem was they needed to double their investment while cashflow is tight and wait a season or two while holding on to hope?

Category-based Fragility

Businesses which appear to be diversified often are not.

Everything in hospitality was clipped by Covid-19.

40% of small businesses across the United States have stopped making rent payments.

When restaurants massively close that's going to hit Yelp's business hard.

Auto sales are off sharply.

Likewise there can be other commonalities in sites which get hit during an update. Not only could it include business category, but it could also be business size, promotional strategies, etc.

Sustained profits either come from brand strength, creative differentiation, or systemization. Many prospective clients do not have the budget to build a strong brand nor the willingness to create something that is truly differentiated. That leaves systemization. Systemization can leave footprints which act as statistical outliers that can be easily neutralized.

Sharp changes can happen at any point in time.

For years Google was funding absolute garbage like Mahalo autogenerated spam and eHow with each month being a new record. It is very hard to say "we are doing it wrong" or "we need to change everything" when it works month after month after month.

Then an update happens and poof.

Was eHow decent back in the first Internet bubble? Sure. But it lost money.

Was it decent after it got bought out for a song and had the paywall dropped in favor of using the new Google AdSense program? Sure.

Was it decent the day Demand Media acquired it? Sure.

Was it decent on the day of the Demand Media IPO? Almost certainly not. But there was a lag between that day and getting penalized.

Panda Trivia

The first Panda update missed eHow because journalists were so outraged by the narrative associated with the pump-n-dump IPO. They feared their jobs going away and being displaced by that low level garbage, particularly as the market cap of Demand Media eclipsed the New York Times.

Journalist coverage of the pump-n-dump IPO added credence to it from an algorithmic perspective. By constantly writing hate about eHow they made eHow look like a popular brand, generating algorithmic signals that carried the site until Google created an extension which allowed journalists and other webmasters to vote against the site they had been voting for through all their outrage coverage.

Algorithms & the Very Visible Hand

And all algorithmic channels like organic search, the Facebook news feed, or Amazon's product pages go through large shifts across time. If they don't, they get gamed, repetitive, and lose relevance as consumer tastes change and upstarts like Tiktok emerge.

Consolidation by the Attention Merchants

Frequent product updates, cloning of upstarts, or outright acquisitions are required to maintain control of distribution:

"The startups of the Rebellion benefited tremendously from 2009 to 2012. But from 2013 on, the spoils of smartphone growth went to an entirely different group: the Empire. ... A network effect to engage your users, AND preferred distribution channels to grow, AND the best resources to build products? Oh my! It’s no wonder why the Empire has captured so much smartphone value and created a dark time for the Rebellion. ... Now startups are fighting for only 5% of the top spots as the Top Free Apps list is dominated by incumbents. Facebook (4 apps), Google (6 apps), and Amazon (4 apps) EACH have as many apps in the Top 100 list as all the new startups combined."

Apple & Amazon

Emojis are popular, so those features got copied, those apps got blocked & then apps using the official emojis also got blocked from distribution. The same thing happens with products on Amazon.com in terms of getting undercut by a house brand which was funded by using the vendor's sales data. Re-buy your brand or else.

Facebook

Before the Facebook IPO some thought buying Zynga shares was a backdoor way to invest into Facebook because gaming was such a large part of the ecosystem. That turned out to be a dumb thesis and horrible trade. At times other things trended including quizzes, videos, live videos, news, self hosted Instant Articles, etc.

Over time the general trend was edge rank of professional publishers fell as a greater share of inventory went to content from friends & advertisers. The metrics associated with the ads often overstated their contribution to sales due to bogus math and selection bias.

Internet-first publishers like CollegeHumor struggled to keep up with the changes & influencers waiting for a Facebook deal had to monetize using third parties:

“I did 1.8 billion views last year,” [Ryan Hamilton] said. “I made no money from Facebook. Not even a dollar.” ... "While waiting for Facebook to invite them into a revenue-sharing program, some influencers struck deals with viral publishers such as Diply and LittleThings, which paid the creators to share links on their pages. Those publishers paid top influencers around $500 per link, often with multiple links being posted per day, according to a person who reached such deals."

YouTube

YouTube had a Panda-like update back in 2012 to favor watch time over raw view counts. They also adjust the ranking algorithms on breaking news topics to favor large & trusted channels over conspiracy theorist content, alternative health advice, hate speech & ridiculous memes like the Tide pod challenge.

All unproven channels need to start somewhat open to gain usage, feedback & marketshare. Once they become real businesses they clamp down. Some of the clamp down can be editorial, forced by regulators, or simply anticompetitive monpolistic abuse.

Kid videos were a huge area on YouTube (perhaps still are) but that area got cleaned up after autogenerated junk videos were covered & the FTC clipped YouTube for delivering targeted ads on channels which primarily catered to children.

Dominant channels can enforce tying & bundling to wipe out competitors:

"Google’s response to the threat from AppNexus was that of a classic monopolist. They announced that YouTube would no longer allow third-party advertising technology. This was a devastating move for AppNexus and other independent ad technology companies. YouTube was (and is) the largest ad-supported video publisher, with more than 50% market share in most major markets. ... Over the next few months, Google’s ad technology team went to each of our clients and told them that, regardless of how much they liked working with AppNexus, they would have to also use Google’s ad technology products to continue buying YouTube. This is the definition of bundling, and we had no recourse. Even WPP, our largest customer and largest investors, had no choice but to start using Google’s technology. AppNexus growth slowed, and we were forced to lay off 100 employees in 2016."

Everyone Else

Every moderately large platform like eBay, Etsy, Zillow, TripAdvisor or the above sorts of companies runs into these sorts of issues with changing distribution & how they charge for distribution.

Building Anti-fragility Into Your Business Model

Growing as fast as you can until the economy craters or an algorithm clips you almost guarantees a hard fall along with an inability to deal with it.

Markets ebb and flow. And that would be true even if the above algorithmic platforms did not make large, sudden shifts.

Build Optionality Into Your Business Model

If your business primarily relies on publishing your own websites or you have a mix of a few clients and your own sites then you have a bit more optionality to your approach in dealing with updates.

Even if you only have one site and your business goes to crap maybe you at least temporarily take on a few more consulting clients or do other gig work to make ends meet.

Focus on What is Working

If you have a number of websites you can pour more resources into whatever sites reacted positively to the update while (at least temporarily) ignoring any site that was burned to a crisp.

Ignore the Dead Projects

The holding cost of many websites is close to zero unless they use proprietary and complex content management systems. Waiting out a penalty until you run out of obvious improvements on your winning sites is not a bad strategy. Plus, if you think the burned site is going to be perpetually burned to a crisp (alternative health anyone?) then you could sell links off it or generate other alternative revenue streams not directly reliant on search rankings.

Build a Cushion

If you have cash savings maybe you guy out and buy some websites or domain names from other people who are scared of the volatility or got clipped for issues you think you could easily fix.

When the tide goes out debt leverage limits your optionality. Savings gives you optionality. Having slack in your schedule also gives you optionality.

The person with a lot of experience & savings would love to see highly volatile search markets because those will wash out some of the competition, curtail investments from existing players, and make other potential competitors more hesitant to enter the market.

Categories: 

internet

from Digital Marketing News http://www.seobook.com/managing-volatility

[techbotic]

All Social Networks Should Let Us Take Back Control From the Algorithm

Twitter recently introduced a button that lets users sort Tweets in a way that makes sense (read: chronologically), then quickly switch back to the default “popularity” sorting. The thing is, why can’t all networks do this?

Victoria Song, writing for Gizmodo, made the case today that Instagram should “steal Twitter’s sparkle button” and I couldn’t agree more.

While Instagram may not buck parent company Facebook’s love of algorithmic feeds, it should do exactly that (and Facebook should do it too!)—calm down the masses and give us a goddamn sparkle button. Stop trying to force side-scrolling feeds and other junk features. Just lovingly gank Twitter’s sparkle button. After all, it worked with ripping off Snapchat’s stories.

Currently, Instagram pushes stuff from accounts you interact with most to the top of your feed. While that’s cool because it’s probably content you’ll dig, what about all the cool stuff you’re missing out on because it’s buried at the “bottom” if your feed? You don’t get to interact with that stuff because you never see it, which in my mind puts your account in some sort of perpetual cycle of seeing the same crap all the time and missing out on new stuff. Naturally, the solution there is to offer a quick-sorting button to switch between the two types of feeds. There’s so much value in that.

But really, why stop with just Instagram? Facebook should do it. And any other network that decides I should see what’s “popular” instead of looking at things in the order they’re presented. I mean, you can append “?sk=h_chr” to the end of the URL in the browser (like this) to get Facebook in chronological order, but that’s only helpful on the web. A little button to toggle between the two types of feeds in the mobile apps would be where it’s at.

RELATED: Why The Chronological Facebook Feed is Never Coming Back

Truthfully, that’s where the biggest issue lies now that Twitter is giving users what they want—with Instagram and Facebook. But all networks should do this, even niche ones. Like Strava! I’d like to see when my friends are active in order; why show me rides from three days ago instead of the ones from this morning? It’s stupid.

Anyway, the point is that Twitter’s “sparkle” button is a great idea, offering users a fast and efficient way to sort content the way they want to see it. Seems like something that would make a lot of sense on all networks—not just Twitter.

All Social Networks Should Let Us Take Back Control From the Algorithm published first on https://medium.com/@CPUCHamp

[blakcmambaa]

Twitter recently introduced a button that lets users sort Tweets in a way that makes sense (read: chronologically), then quickly switch back to the default “popularity” sorting. The thing is, why can’t all networks do this?

Victoria Song, writing for Gizmodo, made the case today that Instagram should “steal Twitter’s sparkle button” and I couldn’t agree more.

While Instagram may not buck parent company Facebook’s love of algorithmic feeds, it should do exactly that (and Facebook should do it too!)—calm down the masses and give us a goddamn sparkle button. Stop trying to force side-scrolling feeds and other junk features. Just lovingly gank Twitter’s sparkle button. After all, it worked with ripping off Snapchat’s stories.

Currently, Instagram pushes stuff from accounts you interact with most to the top of your feed. While that’s cool because it’s probably content you’ll dig, what about all the cool stuff you’re missing out on because it’s buried at the “bottom” if your feed? You don’t get to interact with that stuff because you never see it, which in my mind puts your account in some sort of perpetual cycle of seeing the same crap all the time and missing out on new stuff. Naturally, the solution there is to offer a quick-sorting button to switch between the two types of feeds. There’s so much value in that.

But really, why stop with just Instagram? Facebook should do it. And any other network that decides I should see what’s “popular” instead of looking at things in the order they’re presented. I mean, you can append “?sk=h_chr” to the end of the URL in the browser (like this) to get Facebook in chronological order, but that’s only helpful on the web. A little button to toggle between the two types of feeds in the mobile apps would be where it’s at.

RELATED: Why The Chronological Facebook Feed is Never Coming Back

Truthfully, that’s where the biggest issue lies now that Twitter is giving users what they want—with Instagram and Facebook. But all networks should do this, even niche ones. Like Strava! I’d like to see when my friends are active in order; why show me rides from three days ago instead of the ones from this morning? It’s stupid.

Anyway, the point is that Twitter’s “sparkle” button is a great idea, offering users a fast and efficient way to sort content the way they want to see it. Seems like something that would make a lot of sense on all networks—not just Twitter.

via How-To Geek

[technteacher]

All Social Networks Should Let Us Take Back Control From the Algorithm

Twitter recently introduced a button that lets users sort Tweets in a way that makes sense (read: chronologically), then quickly switch back to the default “popularity” sorting. The thing is, why can’t all networks do this?

Victoria Song, writing for Gizmodo, made the case today that Instagram should “steal Twitter’s sparkle button” and I couldn’t agree more.

While Instagram may not buck parent company Facebook’s love of algorithmic feeds, it should do exactly that (and Facebook should do it too!)—calm down the masses and give us a goddamn sparkle button. Stop trying to force side-scrolling feeds and other junk features. Just lovingly gank Twitter’s sparkle button. After all, it worked with ripping off Snapchat’s stories.

Currently, Instagram pushes stuff from accounts you interact with most to the top of your feed. While that’s cool because it’s probably content you’ll dig, what about all the cool stuff you’re missing out on because it’s buried at the “bottom” if your feed? You don’t get to interact with that stuff because you never see it, which in my mind puts your account in some sort of perpetual cycle of seeing the same crap all the time and missing out on new stuff. Naturally, the solution there is to offer a quick-sorting button to switch between the two types of feeds. There’s so much value in that.

But really, why stop with just Instagram? Facebook should do it. And any other network that decides I should see what’s “popular” instead of looking at things in the order they’re presented. I mean, you can append “?sk=h_chr” to the end of the URL in the browser (like this) to get Facebook in chronological order, but that’s only helpful on the web. A little button to toggle between the two types of feeds in the mobile apps would be where it’s at.

RELATED: Why The Chronological Facebook Feed is Never Coming Back

Truthfully, that’s where the biggest issue lies now that Twitter is giving users what they want—with Instagram and Facebook. But all networks should do this, even niche ones. Like Strava! I’d like to see when my friends are active in order; why show me rides from three days ago instead of the ones from this morning? It’s stupid.

Anyway, the point is that Twitter’s “sparkle” button is a great idea, offering users a fast and efficient way to sort content the way they want to see it. Seems like something that would make a lot of sense on all networks—not just Twitter.

from How-To Geek http://bit.ly/2Hqm4CL from Blogger http://bit.ly/2FGOaIB

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Spotify seriously needs to add a blocking feature

Algorithms don't understand when you break up with a band.

Calling it quits on an musician you once loved, or just ridding your life of a song or artist you've come to completely loathe should be easy, right? Not on Spotify.

Listening passively to terrestrial radio is rare these days. Our feeds and playlists are constantly being curated by algorithms that theoretically know exactly what we'll like. We should have the ultimate control over what we want to listen to, but there is sadly no way to block an artist on Spotify from ever playing one of their songs again.

SEE ALSO: How to organize your Spotify account

This lack of a blocking feature has always annoyed hardcore Spotify Premium users, but it has become increasingly problematic in the #MeToo era, where we have more reasons than ever to want to quickly expunge an artist from our view. 

Recently, Spotify announced a new public hate content and hateful conduct policy, noting that it no longer promotes music from R&B artist R. Kelly on its platform. Kelly has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault and is allegedly running a sex cult. 

"We don’t censor content because of an artist’s or creator’s behavior, but we want our editorial decisions — what we choose to program — to reflect our values. When an artist or creator does something that is especially harmful or hateful (for example, violence against children and sexual violence), it may affect the ways we work with or support that artist or creator," the policy reads.

What about Chris Brown, who was arrested for beating Rihanna? Does he get banned?

Is there any way to block Chris Brown on Spotify, any time I’m listening to playlists and he comes on I vom a little

— Annie (@_annieconnolly) May 13, 2018

For me, the issue really became apparent in November when a Facebook post about Brand New's frontman Jesse Lacey prompted two women to step forward and allege that he solicited explicit photos of them when they were minors. The accusations caused a reckoning among fans, who now looked back at the band they once loved with disgust.

Every time Brand New comes up on a Spotify playlist, I feel sick. I can't listen to the band any more, and every time a song of theirs comes up on a playlist or mix, I immediately hit the skip button. But it doesn't stop the band from continuing to pop up on mixes and playlists.

It's easy enough to remove a band from a playlist you've created by clicking on the three dots, and you can block a band from showing up on your Daily Mixes. But one of the best features of Spotify Premium is finding new music through Discover Weekly and its curated lists. Removing a band from those lists doesn't appear to be an option.

Spotify did not return my request for comment or information on a blocking feature, and despite many requests from the community, it doesn't appear the feature will be added anytime soon.

"After serious consideration, we’ve decided not to offer blocking/ hiding/ or blacklisting artists or tracks on Spotify at this time," the company stated in its community section in October 2017. 

can i block an artist on spotify premium? no? huh pic.twitter.com/5EqoxJ0DSe

— M'Bakukang (@janicag_r) May 15, 2018

Ah, yes. Just hit dislike and eventually, the algorithm will learn. Sorry, but that's not good enough.

An algorithm analyzing bands I don't want to hear isn't going to help in this case. It's not that I don't like music similar to Brand New. I just don't want to listen to them anymore.

I am definitely not the only person that wants this feature from Spotify. People want to block artists for all sorts of reasons. 

Hey there! Thanks for the feedback. This isn't possible right now, but we have more info about this on our Community. Check it out: https://t.co/3NtA9t3qV1. Give us a shout if you need anything else /HZ

— SpotifyCares (@SpotifyCares) May 14, 2018

how can i get spotify to block modern baseball and sorority noise from playing i never want to hear them again lol

— 68° // mostly cloudy (@civilexistence_) May 14, 2018

I feel @Spotify needs a blacklist feature for all those songs/artists you really dislike so they don’t sneak up on you in the middle of a great playlist jam

— Gretel Downey (@GretelDowney) May 14, 2018

Some users are also claiming the "dislike" function just isn't working.

No matter how many times I block @bobatl on Spotify he keeps popping up on my daily mix

— Nicky (@nickyneighbors) May 14, 2018

It's unclear why the major streaming services are  resisting the community's need for a blacklisting feature. Apple Music and Pandora don't have an easy way to block artists from ever showing up in your ear holes either. 

Playlists and mixes are a great way to discover new music, but if you know you don't want to hear something what's the point of forcing users to listen. 

Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

WATCH: Unleash your inner Jedi (or Sith) with this AR Star Wars lightsaber app

[neptunecreek]

DRM's dead canary: how we just lost the web, what we learned from it, and what we need to do next

EFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM:

Everybody on the inside secretly knows that DRM technology is irrelevant, but DRM law is everything; and

The reason companies want DRM has nothing to do with copyright.

These two points have just been demonstrated in a messy, drawn-out fight over the standardization of DRM in browsers, and since we threw a lot of blood and treasure at that fight, one thing we hope to salvage is an object lesson that will drive these two points home and provide a roadmap for the future of DRM fighting.

DRM IS TECHNOLOGICALLY BANKRUPT; DRM LAW IS DEADLY

Here's how DRM works, at a high level: a company wants to provide a customer (you) with digital asset (like a movie, a book, a song, a video game or an app), but they want to control what you do with that file after you get it.

So they encrypt the file. We love encryption. Encryption works. With relatively little effort, anyone can scramble a file so well that no one will ever be able to decrypt it unless they're provided with the key.

Let's say this is Netflix. They send you a movie that's been scrambled and they want to be sure you can't save it and watch it later from your hard-drive. But they also need to give you a way to view the movie, too. At some point, that means unscrambling the movie. And there's only one way to unscramble a file that's been competently encrypted: you have to use the key.

So Netflix also gives you the unscrambling key.

But if you have the key, you can just unscramble the Netflix movies and save them to your hard drive. How can Netflix give you the key but control how you use it?

Netflix has to hide the key, somewhere on your computer, like in a browser extension or an app. This is where the technological bankruptcy comes in. Hiding something well is hard. Hiding something well in a piece of equipment that you give to your adversary to take away with them and do anything they want with is impossible.

Maybe you can't find the keys that Netflix hid in your browser. But someone can: a bored grad student with a free weekend, a self-taught genius decapping a chip in their basement, a competitor with a full-service lab. One tiny flaw in any part of the fragile wrapping around these keys, and they're free.

And once that flaw is exposed, anyone can write an app or a browser plugin that does have a save button. It's game over for the DRM technology. (The keys escape pretty regularly, just as fast as they can be revoked by the DRM companies.)

DRM gets made over the course of years, by skilled engineers, at a cost of millions of dollars. It gets broken in days, by teenagers, with hobbyist equipment. That's not because the DRM-makers are stupid, it's because they're doing something stupid.

Which is where the law comes in. DRM law gives rightsholders more forceful, far-ranging legal powers than laws governing any other kind of technology. In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 provides for felony liability for anyone commercially engaged in bypassing a DRM system: 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first offense. Even noncommercial bypass of DRM is subject to liability. It also makes it legally risky to even talk about how to bypass a DRM system.

So the law shores up DRM systems with a broad range of threats. If Netflix designs a video player that won't save a video unless you break some DRM, they now have the right to sue -- or sic the police -- on any rival that rolls out an improved alternative streaming client, or a video-recorder that works with Netflix. Such tools wouldn't violate copyright law any more than a VCR or a Tivo does, but because that recorder would have to break Netflix DRM, they could use DRM law to crush it.

DRM law goes beyond mere bans on tampering with DRM. Companies also use Section 1201 of the DMCA to threaten security researchers who discover flaws in their products. The law becomes a weapon they can aim at anyone who wants to warn their customers (still you) that the products you're relying on aren't fit for use. That includes warning people about flaws in DRM that expose them to being hacked.

It's not just the USA and not just the DMCA, either. The US Trade Representative has "convinced" countries around the world to adopt a version of this rule.

DRM HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH COPYRIGHT

DRM law has the power to do untold harm. Because it affords corporations the power to control the use of their products after sale, the power to decide who can compete with them and under what circumstances, and even who gets to warn people about defective products, DRM laws represent a powerful temptation.

Some things that aren't copyright infringement: buying a DVD while you're on holiday and playing it when you get home. It is obviously not a copyright infringement to go into a store in (say) New Delhi and buy a DVD and bring it home to (say) Topeka. The rightsholder made their movie, sold it to the retailer, and you paid the retailer the asking price. This is the opposite of copyright infringement. That's paying for works on the terms set by the rightsholder. But because DRM stops you from playing out-of-region discs on your home player, the studios can invoke copyright law to decide where you can consume the copyrighted works you've bought, fair and square.

Other not-infringements: fixing your car (GM uses DRM to control who can diagnose an engine, and to force mechanics to spend tens of thousands of dollars for diagnostic information they could otherwise determine themselves or obtain from third parties); refilling an ink cartridge (HP pushed out a fake security update that added DRM to millions of inkjet printers so that they'd refuse remanufactured or third-party cartridges), or toasting home-made bread (though this hasn't happened yet, there's no reason that a company couldn't put DRM in its toasters to control whose bread you can use).

It's also not a copyright infringement to watch Netflix in a browser that Netflix hasn't approved. It's not a copyright infringement to record a Netflix movie to watch later. It's not a copyright infringement to feed a Netflix video to an algorithm that can warn you about upcoming strobe effects that can trigger life-threatening seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy.

WHICH BRINGS US TO THE W3C

The W3C is the world's foremost open web standards body, a consortium whose members (companies, universities, government agencies, civil society groups and others) engage in protracted wrangles over the best way for everyone to deliver web content. They produce "recommendations" (W3C-speak for "standards") that form the invisible struts that hold up the web. These agreements, produced through patient negotiation and compromise, represent an agreement by major stakeholders about the best (or least-worst) way to solve thorny technological problems.

In 2013, Netflix and a few other media companies convinced the W3C to start work on a DRM system for the web. This DRM system, Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), represented a sharp departure from the W3C's normal business. First, EME would not be a complete standard: the organization would specify an API through which publishers and browser vendors would make DRM work, but the actual "content decryption module" (CDM) wouldn't be defined by the standard. That means that EME was a standard in name only: if you started a browser company and followed all the W3C's recommendations, you still wouldn't be able to play back a Netflix video. For that, you'd need Netflix's permission.

It's hard to overstate how weird this is. Web standards are about "permissionless interoperability." The standards for formatting text mean that anyone can make a tool that can show you pages from the New York Times' website; images from Getty; or interactive charts on Bloomberg. The companies can still decide who can see which pages on their websites (by deciding who gets a password and which parts of the website each password unlocks), but they don't get to decide who can make the web browsing program you type the password into in order to access the website.

A web in which every publisher gets to pick and choose which browsers you can use to visit their sites is a very different one from the historical web. Historically, anyone could make a new browser by making sure it adhered to W3C recommendations, and then start to compete. And while the web has always been dominated by a few browsers, which browsers dominate have changed every decade or so, as new companies and even nonprofits like Mozilla (who make Firefox) overthrew the old order. Technologies that have stood in the way of this permissionless interoperabilty -- for instance, patent-encumbered video -- have been seen as impediments to the idea of the open web, not standardization opportunities.

When the W3C starts making technologies that only work when they're blessed by a handful of entertainment companies, they're putting their thumbs -- their fists -- on the scales in favor of ensuring that the current browser giants get to enjoy a permanent reign.

But that's the least of it. Until EME, W3C standards were designed to give the users of the web (e.g. you) more control over what your computer did while you were accessing other peoples' websites. With EME -- and for the first time ever -- the W3C is designing technology that takes away your control. EME is designed to allow Netflix -- and other big companies -- to decide what your browser does, even (especially) when you disagree about what that should be.

Since the earliest days of computing, there's been a simmering debate about whether computers exist to control their users, or vice versa (as the visionary computer scientist and education specialist Seymour Papert put it, "children should be programming the computer rather than being programmed by it" -- that applies equally well to adults. Every W3C standard until 2017 was on the side of people controlling computers. EME breaks with that. It is a subtle, but profound shift.

WHY WOULD THE W3C DO THIS?

Ay yi yi. That is the three billion user question.

The W3C version of the story goes something like this. The rise of apps has weakened the web. In the pre-app days, the web was the only game in town, so companies had to play by web rules: open standards, open web. But now that apps exist and nearly everyone uses them, big companies can boycott the web, forcing their users into apps instead. That just accelerates the rise of apps, and weakens the web even more. Apps are used to implement DRM, so DRM-using companies are moving to apps. To keep entertainment companies from killing the web outright, the Web must have DRM too.

Even if those companies don't abandon the web altogether, continues this argument, getting them to make their DRM at the W3C is better than letting them make it on an ad-hoc basis. Left to their own devices, they could make DRM that made no accommodations for people with disabilities, and without the W3C's moderating influence, these companies would make DRM that would be hugely invasive of web users' privacy.

The argument ends with a broad justification for DRM: companies have the right to protect their copyrights. We can't expect an organization to spend fortunes creating or licensing movies and then distribute them in a way that lets anyone copy and share them.

We think that these arguments don't hold much water. The web does indeed lack some of its earlier only-game-in-town muscle, but the reality is that companies make money by going where their customers are, and every potential customer has a browser, while only existing customers have a company's apps. The more hoops a person has to jump through in order to become your customer, the fewer customers you'll have. Netflix is in a hyper-competitive market with tons of new entrants (e.g. Disney), and being "that streaming service you can't use on the web" is a serious deficit.

We also think that the media companies and tech companies would struggle to arrive at a standard for DRM outside of the W3C, even a really terrible one. We've spent a lot of time in the smoke-filled rooms of DRM standardization and the core dynamic there is the media companies demanding full-on lockdown for every frame of video, and tech companies insisting that the best anyone can hope for is an ineffectual "speed-bump" that they hope will mollify the media companies. Often as not, these negotiations collapse under their own weight.

Then there's the matter of patents: companies that think DRM is a good idea also love software patents, and the result is an impenetrable thicket of patents that make getting anything done next to impossible. The W3C's patent-pooling mechanism (which is uniquely comprehensive in the standards world and stands as an example of the best way to do this sort of thing) was essential to making DRM standardization possible. What's more, there are key players in the DRM world, like Adobe, who hold significant patent portfolios but are playing an ever-dwindling role in the world of DRM (the avowed goal of EME was to "kill Flash"). If the companies involved had to all sit down and negotiate a new patent deal without the W3C's framework, any of these companies could "turn troll" and insist that all the rest would have to shell out big dollars to license their patents -- they have nothing to lose by threatening the entire enterprise, and everything to gain from even a minuscule per-user royalty for something that will be rolled out into three billion browsers.

Finally, there's no indication that EME had anything to do with protecting legitimate business interests. Streaming video services like Netflix rely on customers to subscribe to a whole library with constantly added new materials and a recommendation engine to help them navigate the catalog.

DRM for streaming video is all about preventing competition, not protecting copyrights. The purpose of DRM is to give companies the legal tools to prevent activities that would otherwise be allowed. The DRM part doesn't have to "work" (in the sense of preventing copyright infringement) so long as it allows for the invocation of the DMCA.

To see how true this is, just look at Widevine, Google's version of EME. Google bought the company that made Widevine in 2010, but it wasn't until 2016 that an independent researcher actually took a close look at how well it prevented videos from leaking. That researcher, David Livshits found that Widevine was trivial to circumvent, and it had been since its inception, and that the errors that made Widevine so ineffective were obvious to even a cursory examination. If the millions of dollars and the high-power personnel committed to EME were allocated to create a technology that would effectively prevent copyright infringement, then you'd think that Netflix or one of the other media companies in the negotiations would have diverted some of those resources to a quick audit to make sure that the stuff actually worked as advertised.

(Funny story: Livshits is an Israeli at Ben Gurion University, and Israel happens to be the rare country that doesn't ban breaking DRM, meaning that Israelis are among the only people who can do this kind of research without fear of legal retaliation)

But the biggest proof that EME was just a means to shut down legitimate competitors -- and not an effort to protect copyright -- is what happened next.

A CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT

When EFF joined the W3C, our opening bid was "Don't make DRM."

We put the case to the organization, describing the way that DRM interferes with the important copyright exceptions (like those that allow people to record and remix copyrighted works for critical or transformative purposes) and the myriad problems presented by the DMCA and laws like it around the world.

The executive team of the W3C basically dismissed all arguments about fair use and user rights in copyright as a kind of unfortunate casualty of the need to keep Netflix from ditching the web in favor of apps, and as for the DMCA, they said that they couldn't do anything about this crazy law, but they were sure that the W3C's members were not interested in abusing the DMCA, they just wanted to keep their high-value movies from being shared on the internet.

So we changed tack, and proposed a kind of "controlled experiment" to find out what the DRM fans at the W3C were trying to accomplish.

The W3C is a consensus body: it makes standards by getting everyone in a room to compromise, moving toward a position that everyone can live with. Our ideal world was "No DRM at the W3C," and DRM is a bad enough idea that it was hard to imagine much of a compromise from there.

But after listening closely to the DRM side's disavowals of DMCA abuse, we thought we could find something that would represent an improvement on the current status quo and that should fit with their stated views.

We proposed a kind of DRM non-aggression pact, through which W3C members would promise that they'd only sue people under laws like DMCA 1201 if there was some other law that had been broken. So if someone violates your copyright, or incites someone to violate your copyright, or interferes with your contracts with your users, or misappropriates your trade secrets, or counterfeits your trademarks, or does anything else that violates your legal rights, you can throw the book at them.

But if someone goes around your DRM and doesn't violate any other laws, the non-aggression pact means that you couldn't use the W3C standardised DRM as a route to legally shut them down. That would protect security researchers, it would protect people analyzing video to add subtitles and other assistive features, it would protect archivists who had the legal right to make copies, and it would protect people making new browsers.

If all you care about is making an effective technology that prevents lawbreaking, this agreement should be a no-brainer. For starters, if you think DRM is an effective technology, it shouldn't matter if it's illegal to criticize it.

And since the nonaggression pact kept all other legal rights intact, there was no risk that agreeing to it would allow someone to break the law with impunity. Anyone who violated copyrights (or any other rights) would be square in the DMCA's crosshairs, and companies would have their finger on the trigger.

NOT SURPRISED BUT STILL DISAPPOINTED

Of course, they hated this idea.

The studios, the DRM vendors and the large corporate members of the W3C participated in a desultory, brief "negotiation" before voting to terminate further discussion and press on. The W3C executive helped them dodge discussions, chartering further work on EME without any parallel work on protecting the open web, even as opposition within the W3C mounted.

By the time the dust settled, EME was published after the most divided votes the W3C had ever seen, with the W3C executive unilaterally declaring that issues for security research, accessibility, archiving and innovation had been dealt with as much as they could be (despite the fact that literally nothing binding was done about any of these things). The "consensus" process of the W3C has so thoroughly hijacked that EME's publication was only supported by 58% of the members who voted in the final poll, and many of those members expressed regret that they were cornered into voting for something they objected to.

When the W3C executive declared that any protections for the open web were incompatible with the desires of the DRM-boosters, it was a kind of ironic vindication. After all, this is where we'd started, with EFF insisting that DRM wasn't compatible with security disclosures, with accessibility, with archiving or innovation. Now, it seemed, everyone agreed.

What's more, they all implicitly agreed that DRM wasn't about protecting copyright. It was about using copyright to seize other rights, like the right to decide who could criticize your product -- or compete with it.

DRM's sham cryptography means that it only works if you're not allowed to know about its defects. This proposition was conclusively proved when a W3C member proposed that the Consortium should protect disclosures that affected EME's "privacy sandbox" and opened users to invasive spying, and within minutes, Netflix's representative said that even this was not worth considering.

In a twisted way, Netflix was right. DRM is so fragile, so incoherent, that it is simply incompatible with the norms of the marketplace and science, in which anyone is free to describe their truthful discoveries, even if they frustrate a giant company's commercial aspirations.

The W3C tacitly admitted this when they tried to convene a discussion group to come up with some nonbinding guidelines for when EME-using companies should use the power of DRM law to punish their critics and when they should permit the criticism.

"RESPONSIBLE DISCLOSURE" ON OUR TERMS, OR JAIL

They called this "responsible disclosure," but it was far from the kinds of "responsible disclosure" we see today. In current practice, companies offer security researchers enticements to disclose their discoveries to vendors before going public. These enticements range from bug-bounty programs that pay out cash, to leaderboards that provide glory to the best researchers, to binding promises to act on disclosures in a timely way, rather than crossing their fingers, sitting on the newly discovered defects, and hoping no one else re-discovers them and exploits them.

The tension between independent security researchers and corporations is as old as computing itself. Computers are hard to secure, thanks to their complexity. Perfection is elusive. Keeping the users of networked computers safe requires constant evaluation and disclosure, so that vendors can fix their bugs and users can make informed decisions about which systems are safe enough to use.

But companies aren't always the best stewards of bad news about their own products. As researchers have discovered -- the hard way -- telling a company about its mistakes may be the polite thing to do, but it's very risky behavior, apt to get you threatened with legal reprisals if you go public. Many's the researcher who told a company about a bug, only to have the company sit on that news for an intolerably long time, putting its users at risk. Often, these bugs only come to light when they are independently discovered by bad actors, who figure out how to exploit them, turning them into attacks that compromise millions of users, so many that the bug's existence can no longer be swept under the rug.

As the research world grew more gunshy about talking to companies, companies were forced to make real, binding assurances that they would honor the researchers' discoveries by taking swift action in a defined period, by promising not to threaten researchers over presenting their findings, and even by bidding for researchers' trust with cash bounties. Over the years, the situation has improved, with most big companies offering some kind of disclosure program.

But the reason companies offer those bounties and assurances is that they have no choice. Telling the truth about defective products is not illegal, so researchers who discover those truths are under no obligation to play by companies' rules. That forces companies to demonstrate their goodwill with good conduct, binding promises and pot-sweeteners.

Companies definitely want to be able to decide who can tell the truth about their products and when. We know that because when they get the chance to flex that muscle, they flex it. We know it because they said so at the W3C. We know it because they demanded that they get that right as part of the DRM package in EME.

Of all the lows in the W3C DRM process, the most shocking was when the historic defenders of the open web tried to turn an effort to protect the rights of researchers to warn billions of people about harmful defects in their browsers into an effort to advise companies on when they should hold off on exercising that right -- a right they wouldn’t have without the W3C making DRM for the web.

DRM IS THE OPPOSITE OF SECURITY

From the first days of the DRM fight at the W3C, we understood that the DRM vendors and the media companies they supplied weren't there to protect copyright, they were there to grab legally enforceable non-copyright privileges. We also knew that DRM was incompatible with security research: because DRM relies on obfuscation, anyone who documents how DRM works also makes it stop working.

This is especially clear in terms of what wasn't said at the W3C: when we proposed that people should be able to break DRM to generate subtitles or conduct security audits, the arguments were always about whether that was acceptable, but it was never about whether it was possible.

Recall that EME is supposed to be a system that helps companies ensure that their movies aren't saved to their users' hard-drives and shared around the internet. For this to work, it should be, you know, hard to do that.

But in every discussion of when people should be allowed to break EME, it was always a given that anyone who wanted to could do so. After all, when you hide secrets in software you give to people who you want to keep them secret from, you are probably going to be disappointed.

From day one, we understood that we would arrive at a point in which the DRM advocates at the W3C would be obliged to admit that the survival of their plan relied on being able to silence people who examined their products.

However, we did hold out hope that when this became clear to everyone, that they would understand that DRM couldn't peacefully co-exist with the open web.

We were wrong.

THE W3C IS THE CANARY IN THE COALMINE

The success of DRM at the W3C is a parable about market concentration and the precarity of the open web. Hundreds of security researchers lobbied the W3C to protect their work, UNESCO publicly condemned the extension of DRM to the web, and the many crypto-currency members of the W3C warned that using browsers for secure, high-stakes applications like moving around peoples' life-savings could only happen if browsers were subjected to the same security investigations as every other technology in our life (except DRM technologies).

There is no shortage of businesses that want to be able to control what their customers and competitors do with their products. When the US Copyright Office held hearings on DRM in 2015, they heard about DRM in medical implants and cars, farm equipment and voting machines. Companies have discovered that adding DRM to their products is the most robust way to control the marketplace, a cheap and reliable way to convert commercial preferences about who can repair, improve, and supply their products into legally enforceable rights.

The marketplace harms from this anti-competitive behavior are easy to see. For example, the aggressive use of DRM to prevent independent repair shops ends up diverting tons of e-waste to landfill or recycling, at the cost of local economies and the ability of people to get full use out of your property. A phone that you recycle instead of repairing is a phone you have to pay to replace -- and repair creates many more jobs than recycling (recycling a ton of e-waste creates 15 jobs; repairing it creates 150 jobs). Repair jobs are local, entrepreneurial jobs, because you don't need a lot of capital to start a repair shop, and your customers want to bring their gadgets to someone local for service (no one wants to send a phone to China for repairs -- let alone a car!).

But those economic harms are only the tip of the iceberg. Laws like DMCA 1201 incentivize DRM by promising the power to control competition, but DRM's worst harms are in the realm of security. When the W3C published EME, it bequeathed to the web an unauditable attack-surface in browsers used by billions of people for their most sensitive and risky applications. These browsers are also the control panels for the Internet of Things: the sensor-studded, actuating gadgets that can see us, hear us, and act on the physical world, with the power to boil, freeze, shock, concuss, or betray us in a thousand ways.

The gadgets themselves have DRM, intended to lock our repairs and third-party consumables, meaning that everything from your toaster to your car is becoming off-limits to scrutiny by independent researchers who can give you unvarnished, unbiased assessments of the security and reliability of these devices.

In a competitive market, you'd expect non-DRM options to proliferate in answer to this bad behavior. After all, no customer wants DRM: no car-dealer ever sold a new GM by boasting that it was a felony for your favorite mechanic to fix it.

But we don't live in an a competitive market. Laws like DMCA 1201 undermine the competition that might counter their worst effects.

The companies that fought DRM at the W3C -- browser vendors, Netflix, tech giants, the cable industry -- all trace their success to business strategies that shocked and outraged established industry when they first emerged. Cable started as unlicensed businesses that retransmitted broadcasts and charged for it. Apple's dominance started with ripping CDs and ignoring the howls of the music industry (just as Firefox got where it is by blocking obnoxious ads and ignoring the web-publishers who lost millions as a result). Of course, Netflix's revolutionary red envelopes were treated as a form of theft.

These businesses started as pirates and became admirals, and treat their origin stories as legends of plucky, disruptive entrepreneurs taking on a dinosauric and ossified establishment. But they treat any disruption aimed at them as an affront to the natural order of things. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, any technology invented in your adolescence is amazing and world-changing; anything invented after you turn 30 is immoral and needs to be destroyed.

LESSONS FROM THE W3C

Most people don't understand the risks of DRM. The topic is weird, technical, esoteric and take too long to explain. The pro-DRM side wants to make the debate about piracy and counterfeiting, and those are easy stories to tell.

But people who want DRM don't really care about that stuff, and we can prove it: just ask them if they'd be willing to promise not to use the DMCA unless someone is violating copyright, and watch them squirm and weasel about why policing copyright involves shutting down competitive activities that don't violate copyright. Point out that they didn't even question whether someone could break their DRM, because, of course, DRM is so technologically incoherent that it only works if it's against the law to understand how it works, and it can be defeated just by looking closely at it.

Ask them to promise not to invoke the DMCA against people who have discovered defects in their products and listen to them defend the idea that companies should get a veto over publication of true facts about their mistakes and demerits.

These inconvenient framings at least establish what we're fighting about, dispensing with the disingenuous arguments about copyright and moving on to the real issues: competition, accessibility, security.

This won't win the fight on its own. These are still wonky and nuanced ideas.

One thing we've learned from 15-plus years fighting DRM: it's easier to get people to take notice of procedural issues than substantive ones. We labored in vain to get people to take notice of the Broadcasting Treaty, a bafflingly complex and horribly overreaching treaty from WIPO, a UN specialized agency. No one cared until someone started stealing piles of our handouts and hiding them in the toilets so no one could read them. That was global news: it's hard to figure out what something like the Broadcast Treaty is about, but it's easy to call shenanigans when someone tries to hide your literature in the toilet so delegates don’t see the opposing view.

So it was that four years of beating the drum about DRM at the W3C barely broke the surface, but when we resigned from the W3C over the final vote, everyone sat up and took notice, asking how they could help fix things. The short answer is, "It's too late: we resigned because we had run out of options.

But the long answer is a little more hopeful. EFF is suing the US government to overturn Section 1201 of the DMCA. As we proved at the W3C, there is no appetite for making DRM unless there's a law like DMCA 1201 in the mix. DRM on its own does nothing except provide an opportunity for competitors to kick butt with innovative offerings that cost less and do more.

The Copyright Office is about to hold fresh hearings about DMCA 1201.

The W3C fight proved that we could shift the debate to the real issues. The incentives that led to the W3C being colonized by DRM are still in play and other organizations will face this threat in the years to come. We'll continue to refine this tactic there and keep fighting, and we'll keep reporting on how it goes so that you can help us fight. All we ask is that you keep paying attention. As we learned at the W3C, we can't do it without you.

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