Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2001
The story about Saddam Hussein and the Sony PlayStation 2s was too good not to report, whether or not it was true. Iraq is one of four nations in the world to which the export of certain classes of technology is prohibited. Computers that meet very specific standards regarding their power and features are among the prohibited technologies, and, as Sony would like us all to remember, the Sony PlayStation 2 is a very powerful game machine — er, computer. So...We all saw the headlines when retailers reported that some Sony PlayStation 2s were covertly being routed to Iraq.
As it turned out, no laws were being broken. The export restrictions set price limits as well as clock speed limits, and the PlayStation 2 sells for too few Yen to show up on the export ban's radar, so to speak. Then there seemed to be some question as to whether the story was even true. And finally, the obvious point: Despite the PlayStation 2's great graphics and processing power, how likely is it that anybody would buy a bunch of game machines to use for military purposes?
Isn't all the world domination and international terrorism software written for Windows?
I came away from the story feeling entertained but somehow not alarmed by The PlayStations of Saddam Hussein. No, I thought, there's enough to be alarmed about right here in the good ol' US of A.
Like CPRM for ATA.
CPRM is a copy protection mechanism (it stands for "Content Protection for Recordable Media"). CPRM for ATA is copy protection gone mad. The idea is this: Digital content is tagged with whatever copying restrictions its creators wish to attach. Then when it is downloaded to and stored on a CPRM-compatible storage device, the device will enforce whatever copying restrictions are coded into the content. If the content is not to be copied to any other device, the device won't allow the copying.
Discussions are far along toward implementing CPRM in the ATA spec for fixed-media hard drives. If this happens, it will (according to my reading of the alarmed reactions of knowledgeable observers including the editors at The Register, Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Gilmore, Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman, and others): Break all backup software; break all disk defragmenters; break all RAID systems; make the lives of system administrators a living hell; fragment or destroy the open-source software movement; take control of the content of a hard disk away from its owner; and open the door for corporate — and governmental — control of that content.
This seems to me like a bad idea, and I support Gilmore's call (check at EFF's site, http://www.eff.org/) for a boycott of any hardware that implements this technology. It seems to me that stopping people who want to break your hard drive and interfere with your use of its content qualifies as Content Protection for Recordable Media.
This is all very 20th Century, I know. I'm growing more and more certain that I won't even know the words to use to discuss the issues of the world of the 21st Century unless I get up to date on the history of Gundam Wing and anime generally, buy an iMode, and start chatting with 14-year-old Japanese girls. Well, and learn Japanese, of course. But let's pretend that the lives and values of those of us left back here in the technological and cultural backwater of Greater Silicon Valley actually matter, a little, still. If that's true, then it's not pointless to be angry at this conspiracy to cripple hardware for the benefit of corporate greed. I'm angry — so angry, in fact, that I'm tempted to take up arms.
Well, not arms, exactly. Not arms at all. I'm not an arms kind of person. I understand the viewpoint of the National Rifle Association, I really do, and I actually agree with them that the Founders of the American republic didn't have the National Guard in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. Those extraordinary individuals had a very personal and not in any way abstract relationship with the idea of overthrowing a government by armed insurrection, and when they wrote about the right of the people to keep and bear arms, they knew exactly what they were saying. They weren't thinking about hunting turkeys, anyway not the feathered kind.
But Charlton Heston is still a moron and the idea that citizens can defend themselves from a repressive government by buying a AK-47s is moronic. The Second Amendment just isn't about guns any more. Times change, technology changes, and the Feds are not so dumb in classifying encryption as armament. So...
Call me a radical, but I'm thinking of going out and buying a Sony PlayStation.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com