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SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects

Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.

In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. That's a tall order.

Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance.

The first skirmishes of the PC wars were fought with incompatible file formats and even data-storage formats: Apple users couldn't open files made by Microsoft users, and vice-versa. Even when file formats were (more or less) harmonized, there was still the problems of storage media: the SCSI drive you plugged into your Mac needed a special add-on and flaky driver software to work on your Windows machine; the ZIP cartridge you formatted for your PC wouldn't play nice with Macs.

But as office networking spread, the battle moved to a new front: networking compatibility. AppleTalk, Apple's proprietary protocol for connecting up Macs and networked devices like printers, pretty much Just Worked, providing you were using a Mac. If you were using a Windows PC, you had to install special, buggy, unreliable software.

And for Apple users hoping to fit in at Windows shops, the problems were even worse: Windows machines used the SMB protocol for file-sharing and printers, and Microsoft's support for MacOS was patchy at best, nonexistent at worst, and costly besides. Businesses sorted themselves into Mac-only and PC-only silos, and if a Mac shop needed a PC (for the accounting software, say), it was often cheaper and easier just to get the accountant their own printer and backup tape-drive, rather than try to get that PC to talk to the network. Likewise, all PC-shops with a single graphic designer on a Mac—that person would often live offline, disconnected from the office network, tethered to their own printer, with their own stack of Mac-formatted ZIP cartridges or CD-ROMs.

All that started to change in 1993: that was the year that an Australian PhD candidate named Andrew Tridgell licensed his SAMBA package as free/open source software and exposed it to the wide community of developers looking to connect their non-Microsoft computers—Unix and GNU/Linux servers, MacOS workstations—to the dominant Microsoft LANs.

SAMBA was created by using a "packet sniffer" to ingest raw SMB packets as they traversed a local network; these intercepted packets gave Tridgell the insight he needed to reverse-engineer Microsoft's proprietary networking protocol. Tridgell prioritized compatibility with LAN Manager, a proprietary Network Operating System that enterprise networks made heavy use of. If SAMBA could be made to work in LAN Manager networks, then you could connect a Mac to a PC network—or vice-versa—and add some Unix servers and use a mix of SAMBA and SMB to get them all to play nice with one another.

The timing of Tridgell's invention was crucial: in 1993, Microsoft had just weathered the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation of its monopoly tactics, squeaking through thanks to a 2-2 deadlock among the commissioners, and was facing down a monopoly investigation by the Department of Justice.

The growth of local-area networks greatly accelerated Microsoft's dominance. It's one thing to dominate the desktop, another entirely to leverage that dominance so that no one else can make an operating system that connects to networks that include computers running that dominant system. Network administrators of the day were ready to throw in the towel and go all-Microsoft for everything from design workstations to servers.

SAMBA changed all that. What's more, as Microsoft updated SMB, SAMBA matched them, relying on a growing cadre of software authors who relied on SAMBA to keep their own networks running.

The emergence of SAMBA in the period when Microsoft's dominance was at its peak, the same year that the US government tried and failed to address that dominance, was one of the most salutary bits of timing in computing history, carving out a new niche for Microsoft's operating system rivals that gave them space to breathe and grow. It's certainly possible that without SAMBA, Microsoft could have leveraged its operating system, LAN and application dominance to crush all rivals.

So What Happened?

We don't see a lot of SAMBA-style stories anymore, despite increased concentration of various sectors of the tech market and a world crying out for adversarial interoperability judo throws.

Indeed, investors seem to have lost their appetite for funding companies that might disrupt the spectacularly profitable Internet monopolists of 2019, ceding them those margins and deeming their territory to be a "kill zone."

VCs have not lost their appetite for making money, and toolsmiths have not lost the urge to puncture the supposedly airtight bubbles around the Big Tech incumbents, so why is it so hard to find a modern David with the stomach to face off against 2019's Goliaths?

To find the answer, look to the law. As monopolists have conquered more and more of the digital realm, they have invested some of those supernormal profits in law and policy that lets them fend off adversarial interoperators.

One legal weapon is "Terms of Service": both Facebook and Blizzard have secured judgments giving their fine print the force of law, and now tech giants use clickthrough agreements that amount to, "By clicking here, you promise that you won't try to adversarially interoperate with us."

A modern SAMBA project would have to contend with this liability, and Microsoft would argue that anyone who took the step of installing SMB had already agreed that they wouldn't try to reverse-engineer it to make a compatible product.

Then there's "anti-circumvention," a feature of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, bypassing a "copyright access control" can put you in both criminal and civil jeopardy, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. DMCA 1201 was originally used to stop companies from making region-free DVD players or modding game consoles to play unofficial games (neither of which is a copyright violation!).

But today, DMCA 1201 is used to control competitors, critics, and customers. Any device with software in it contains a "copyrighted work," so manufacturers need only set up an "access control" and they can exert legal control over all kinds of uses of the product.

Their customers can only use the product in ways that don't involve bypassing the "access control," and that can be used to force you to buy only one brand of ink or use apps from only one app store.

Their critics—security researchers auditing their cybersecurity—can't publish proof-of-concept to back up their claims about vulnerabilities in the systems.

And competitors can't bypass access controls to make compatible products: third party app stores, compatible inks, or a feature-for-feature duplicate of a dominant company's networking protocol.

Someone attempting to replicate the SAMBA creation feat in 2019 would likely come up against an access control that needed to be bypassed in order to peer inside the protocol's encrypted outer layer in order to create a feature-compatible tool to use in competing products.

Another thing that's changed (for the worse) since 1993 is the proliferation of software patents. Software patenting went into high gear around 1994 and consistently gained speed until 2014, when Alice v. CLS Bank put the brakes on (today, Alice is under threat). After decades of low-quality patents issuing from the US Patent and Trademark Office, there are so many trivial, obvious and overlapping software patents in play that anyone trying to make a SAMBA-like product would run a real risk of being threatened with expensive litigation for patent infringement.

This thicket of legal anti-adversarial-interoperability dangers has been a driver of market concentration, and the beneficiaries of market concentration have also spent lavishly to expand and strengthen the thicket. It's gotten so bad that even some "open standards organizations" have standardized easy-to-use ways of legally prohibiting adversarial interoperability, locking in the dominance of the largest browser vendors.

The idea that wildly profitable businesses would be viewed as unassailable threats by investors and entrepreneurs (rather than as irresistible targets) tells you everything you need to know about the state of competition today. As we look to cut the Big Tech giants down to size, let's not forget that tech once thronged with Davids eager to do battle with Goliaths, and that this throng would be ours to command again, if only we would re-arm it.

A Bad Copyright Bill Moves Forward With No Serious Understanding of Its Dangers

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted on the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act, aka the CASE Act. This was without any hearings for experts to explain the huge flaws in the bill as it’s currently written. And flaws there are.

We’ve seen some version of the CASE Act pop up foryearsnow, and the problems with the bill have never been addressed satisfactorily. This is still a bill that puts people in danger of huge, unappealable money judgments from a quasi-judicial system—not an actual court—for the kind of Internet behavior that most people engage in without thinking.

During the vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was once again stressed that the CASE Act—which would turn the Copyright Office into a copyright traffic court—created a “voluntary” system.

“Voluntary” does not accurately describe the regime of the CASE Act. The CASE Act does allow people who receive notices from the Copyright Office to “opt-out” of the system. The average person is not really going to understand what is going on, other than that they’ve received what looks like a legal summons.

Take Action

Tell the Senate Not to Enable Copyright Trolls

Furthermore, the CASE Act gives people just 60 days from receiving the notice to opt-out, so long as they do so in writing “in accordance with regulations established by the Register of Copyrights,” which in no way promises that opting out will be a simple process, understandable to everyone. But because the system is opt-out, and the goal of the system Is presumably to move as many cases through it as possible, the Copyright Office has little incentive to make opting out fair to respondents and easy to do.

That leaves opting out as something most easily taken advantage of by companies and people who have lawyers who can advise them of the law and leaves the average Internet user at risk of having a huge judgment handed down by the Copyright Office. At first, those judgments can be up to $30,000, enough to bankrupt many people in the U.S., and that cap can grow even higher without any more action by Congress. And the “Copyright Claims Board” created by the CASE Act can issue those judgments to those who don’t show up. A system that can award default judgments like this is not “voluntary.”

We know how this will go because we’ve seen this kind of confusion and fear with the DMCA. People receive DMCA notices and, unaware of their rights or intimidated by the requirements of a counter-notice, let their content disappear even if it’s fair use. The CASE Act makes it extremely easy to collect against people using the Internet the way everyone does: sharing memes, photos, and video.

If the CASE Act was not opt-out, but instead required respondents to give affirmative consent, or “opt-in,” at least the Copyright Office would have greater incentive to design proceedings that safeguard the respondents’ interests and have clear standards that everyone can understand. With both sides choosing to litigate in the Copyright Office, it’s that much harder for copyright trolls to use the system to get huge awards in a place that is friendly to copyright holders.

We said this the last time the CASE Act was proposed and we’ll say it again: Creating a quasi-court focused exclusively on copyright with the power to pass judgment on parties in private disputes invites abuse. It encourages copyright trolling by inviting filing as many copyright claims as one can against whoever is least likely to opt-out—ordinary Internet users who can be coerced into paying thousands of dollars to escape the process, whether they infringed copyright or not.

Copyright law fundamentally impacts freedom of expression. People shouldn’t be funneled to a system that hands out huge damage awards with less care than a traffic ticket gets.

Take Action

Tell the Senate Not to Enable Copyright Trolls

New #Linux #malware has been discovered that masquerades as a #GNOME shell extension and spies on users.

https://www.intezer.com/blog-evilgnome-rare-malware-spying-on-linux-desktop-users/ …

We fund #opensource projects like @Nitrokey, @delta, @cryptpad, @manyver_se, @fediversespace, @mailpipe, @sartura, @Searx_engine, @r2refresh, @IRMA_privacy and many more to help build the #NextGenerationInternet. Want to know more? Meet us at #NGIForum and contribute! @NGI4eu

We would love to feature your photos and videos of apps running on Librem 5 (devkit). Tag your creations with #runsonlibrem5 and we'll share it with the community #librem5 #purism

Google and Facebook Are Quietly Tracking You on Sex Websites #privacy
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/opinion/google-facebook-sex-websites.html

A California Bill Could Transform the Lives of Gig Workers. Silicon Valley Wants Labor’s Help To Stop It.

Gig economy workers who support the legislation view it as a necessary step toward their ability to collectively organize. Uber and Lyft want a workaround.

The post A California Bill Could Transform the Lives of Gig Workers. Silicon Valley Wants Labor’s Help To Stop It. appeared first on The Intercept.

Why Don’t They Just Go Back To Where They Came From?

Trump administration officials take their own advice.

House Votes to Hold Top Trump Officials in Criminal Contempt for Withholding Census Documents

The House of Representatives voted 230 to 198 Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over key documents about the Trump administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. It’s the first time the full House has voted to […]

Spawn of the triffid? Tiny organisms give us glimpse into complex evolutionary tale

Two newly discovered organisms point to the existence of an ancient organism that resembled a tiny version of the lumbering, human-eating science fiction plants known as 'triffids.'

House Judiciary Committee Continues Its Antitrust Inquiry Into the Internet Marketplace

The House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust held its second hearing on whether our antitrust laws and their enforcement are keeping up with the Internet marketplace. Notably, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple were present as witnesses along with a range of experts to follow, giving Congress a lot to assess. EFF supports this inquiry by Congress and shares the concern that the lifecycle of competition has been on the decline, bringing serious risk of a small handful of gatekeepers having disproportionate power over user expression and privacy online.

Congress Asks the Wrong Question: “How Can We Make Big Tech Behave Better?”

A persistent theme from some in Congress is applying pressure to Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon to modify their practices to appease some constituency. This misses the point of an antitrust inquiry, which is to figure out if these companies are exerting market power in ways that foreclose competition, harm consumers, and suppress innovation, and then remedy the harm with thoughtful interventions. But not all industries share this objective—some would rather have the dominant Internet companies become regulated monopolies in order to further their own policy goals.

For example, major entertainment companies submitted a letter to the House Judiciary Committee claiming that Google and Facebook are not doing enough to stop copyright infringement, and attempted to shoehorn the copyright issue into an antitrust discussion. Echoing this theme, Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon asked the tech companies to explain their copyright enforcement practices. Google’s witness responded by discussing Content ID, their wildly expensive and poorly functioning system of copyright filters for YouTube.

The question struck a discordant note in this hearing on monopoly power. YouTube has the lion’s share of user-uploaded video on the Internet, and while Content ID causes endless difficulties for video creators and their viewers, YouTube’s vast scale makes its filtering system hard to avoid. What’s more, Content ID has cost at least $40 million to build. An aspiring competitor would find it next to impossible to build an equivalent system of filters. Making systems like Content ID the norm (or worse still, a legal requirement) cements Google’s dominance, reinforcing the exact problem the Antitrust Subcommittee has set out to fix.

Changing the subject to copyright may further the entertainment industry’s agenda, but it doesn’t address the monopoly problem. Major content companies consistently seek to narrow distribution channels for their content and then maximize control. It has no place in an antitrust inquiry, as the ultimate objective for Congress should be to open the door to more channels of distribution that can compete with YouTube. In fact, content creators would benefit from competition in distribution channels as alternatives to Google products. This would give content creators choices, and those distributors could compete for new video creations with better terms than what YouTube offers.

Congress’ Effort to Understand the Internet Marketplace Is Vital to the Internet’s Future

Chairman David Cicilline laid out the facts as to why his Subcommittee is engaging in this antitrust inquiry: a small handful of companies wield enormous influence over Internet activity and investors that are important in funding startups noted the “kill-zone” that exists when challenging the dominant tech companies. Rather than try to launch startups that were meant to displace the Internet giants, the market seems to have trended towards building companies that the tech giants will seek to acquire through vertical mergers. Professor Fiona Scott Morton testified that what may be needed is a rethinking of mergers and acquisitions. EFF agrees that this area of antitrust law is sorely in need of a reboot. Other witnesses noted that small businesses now see companies like Amazon as potentially hostile to their ability to use the Internet to grow, Stacey Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This represents a dramatic shift in how Internet industries have worked historically, where the garage startup became the next billion-dollar corporation only to be replaced by the next garage startup, and no company could gatekeep others.

It’s a powerful indication that the Internet markets have changed when the giant corporations under scrutiny could only list each other as competitors, in response to requests from Congressman Hank Johnson. In a follow-up inquiry, Congressman Joe Neguse noted  4 of the 6 largest global social media companies are all owned by Facebook, which highlights how its series of mergers appeared to have gotten ahead of users who switched away from Facebook but were brought back into the fold in the end.

Lastly, an unfortunate outcome from this congressional inquiry was dismissiveness by some Members of Congress about the idea of structural separation. This is effectively saying these serious problems facing the Internet ecosystem should be approached with one hand tied behind our backs. It is quite possible that industry is opposing discussions of structural separation policies, which have a long history in antitrust law, because they might be the most effective solution. If the endgame is to avoid a regulated monopoly approach to Internet commerce, then all options have to be on the table with the purpose of empowering users to be the ultimate decision makers for the Internet’s future. It is critical that Congress get this right.  An extraordinarily valuable benefit of the Internet is how it has lowered the barriers to participation in commerce, politics, and other social activities that historically were often reserved to the powerful few.

Pokémon-like card game can help teach ecology

Playing a Pokémon-like card game about ecology and biodiversity can result in broader knowledge of species and a better understanding of ecosystems than traditional teaching methods, like slideshows, according to new research.

Endangered Bornean orangutans survive in managed forest, decline near oil palm plantations

Recent surveys of the population of endangered Bornean orangutans in Sabah, the Malaysian state in the north-east of Borneo, show mixed results. Populations have remained stable within well-managed forests, where there is little hunting, but declined in landscapes comprising extensive oil palm plantations, according to a new study.

Radiation in parts of Marshall Islands is higher than Chernobyl

Radiation levels in parts of the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean, where the United States conducted nearly 70 nuclear tests during the Cold War, are still alarmingly high. Researchers tested soil samples on four uninhabited isles and discovered that they contained concentrations of nuclear isotopes that are significantly higher than those found near Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The Warden Tried to Cover Up a Crisis at His Freezing Brooklyn Jail — Then He Got Promoted

The Bureau of Prisons hasn’t released its investigation into what went wrong at the New York jail, but the man in charge just got promoted anyway.

The post The Warden Tried to Cover Up a Crisis at His Freezing Brooklyn Jail — Then He Got Promoted appeared first on The Intercept.

How kissing as a risk factor may explain the high global incidence of gonorrhea

In 2016, there were 87 million people diagnosed with gonorrhea, the most antibiotic resistant of all the STIs. There is a global rise in gonorrhea rates and, until now, no one has understood why.

Study bolsters case that climate change is driving many California wildfires

A new study combs through the many factors that can promote wildfire in California, and concludes that in many, though not all, cases, warming climate is the decisive driver.

The DNC Debate Rules Are Turning Small Donors Into a Racket

You can hear the muffled strains of the first 2020 presidential primary debate play in the background of the office as we put the finishing touches on this issue. Technically it’s the second night of the first debate, as the sprawling field of participants—20 in all—necessitated a two-night affair. 

The decision of who gets to participate falls to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which was battered from all sides (including In These Times) with accusations of bias during the 2016 primary. This time around things would be different, the DNC promised. Among other changes, candidates were able to qualify for the first debates by one of two routes: performance in polls (the traditional measure) or how many donors they have—even (and especially) those who give as little as $1. 

A campaign’s tally of small donors is now viewed as a proxy for broad, grassroots political support—and a hallmark of any good insurgency. It began with Howard Dean in 2004. Barack Obama used the approach to power past Hillary Clinton in 2008. Bernie Sanders nearly did the same in 2016. (Another candidate also mastered this approach last time around: Donald Trump.)

I saw firsthand the power small-donor fundraising can have, working as part of the teams that helped Obama raise record amounts of money in 2008 and again in 2012. But as more candidates adopt this approach, we’ve also seen the rise of an industry custom-built to deliver small donors, for anyone who can afford it. Candidates with a large, established base of support like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden will likely meet any donor threshold the DNC sets. For everyone else, the new rules are an invitation—and maybe even a requirement—to buy your way onto the stage. 

Advertising firms have reportedly been quoting a cost of $40 and up for campaigns to acquire a single $1 donor. In practice, this amounts to a massive transfer of campaign funds directly to online ad platforms—2020 candidates are collectively paying more than $1 million a week to Facebook alone. Not only have fundraising appeals become more numerous, they’ve become increasingly desperate. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) plays beer pong to earn donations. Julián Castro’s mom pleads, “I’m humbly asking for $1 to help my incredible son, Julián, qualify for the Democratic Presidential debates.” As a recent Vice News headline summarized: “2020 Democrats Are Literally Begging for $1 on Facebook.” Even Bernie is offering up copies of his latest book (cover price $27.99) for a buck.

In the end, all 20 candidates in the first debate qualified by polling (with 14 meeting the donor threshold as well). For the third round of debate in September, the threshold will double (to 2% polling and 130,000 donors), and candidates have to meet both criteria. Because each new donor is harder to bring in than the one before it, expect the desperation (and spending) to ramp up exponentially.

There’s a lesson or two in all of this about unintended consequences. There’s also a larger question the Left will need to continue to grapple with moving forward: Do we really want money to be the measure of a good candidate? 

If we want a politics focused on building mass movements, then the price of entry should ultimately be participation and solidarity. What we don’t need is to encourage politicians to become better hucksters, offering a brighter future for the low, low price of just $1.

'Intensive' beekeeping not to blame for common bee diseases

More 'intensive' beekeeping does not raise the risk of diseases that harm or kill the insects, new research suggests.

You Can Bury It for 40,000 Years, but Don’t Mess With Arctic Life

Welcome to Recharge, a weekly newsletter full of stories that will energize your inner hellraiser. See more editions and sign up here. Buried under ice for centuries, plants in the warming Arctic have hit air and are awakening, to the surprise of scientists. The resilience of these species suggests newly known plants may emerge as […]