March 2, 2017

#90 Matt Lieber Goes to Dinner

by Reply All


Further Reading

W3C's proposed standard 
Mozilla's blog post "DRM and the Challenge of Serving Users"




PJ VOGT: And I’m PJ Vogt.



ALEX: And, um.

PJ: What’ve you got for us?

ALEX: Yeah, lay it on us.


ALEX: I don't remember that. Um--

PJ: Matt Lieber goes to a lot of dinners and has like--

PHIA: (laughs)

PJ: He'll be, like, he’ll jus- you'll be like, "What are you up to Matt?” and he'll be like, “I was at this dinner and I talked to a - a very--a very unique man from a very far away place--”

PHIA: Mhm.

PJ: “---and he told me a very troubling thing." Like, the details change, but like--

PHIA: Right.

PJ: --the man goes to, like, dinners with thought leaders.

PHIA: He goes to dinners with Chicken Little every night.

PJ: Yeah.

PHIA: Just like, “The sky is falling!”

PJ: (laughing)


ALEX: I know him.

PJ: We know this guy.

ALL: Yeah.

PHIA: Um--

PJ: He’s a … (sighs) he’s a weird combination of things. Like, he writes novels--

PHIA: Mhm.

PJ: He writes--he does--

PHIA: Science fiction novels.


PHIA: Basically, like, if - if the internet were a bar, Cory would be like a regular at the internet.



PJ: Because…

PHIA: Because…

ALEX: He’s drunk?

PHIA AND PJ: (laugh)

PHIA: Um, because he keeps trying to tell people about this thing, like, the thing he told Matt Lieber about, but it’s just like--people keep finding it, like, so complicated and technical.


PHIA: (laughs)






PJ: Who are the bad guys?



PJ: Uh huh.






PHIA: I’d never heard of it either.



PJ: Uh huh.



PHIA: So part of what the WC3 does is you guys are like the Webster's Dictionary saying like, “We spell color with a ‘u’ or without a ‘u,’” and then--


PHIA: --you're also doing, like the, “This is sentence structure, this is grammar, this is like--here's how we define the building blocks and here's what they are?”



PHIA: Are the calls fun, like, the whole thing--




ADRIAN ROSELLI: Some calls are great, and some calls, it's just a slog, it’s just … I don't want to be here. I’ve- I--I could be driving a- a screwdriver into my knee, but instead I'm on this call.

PHIA: Wow, that sounds like you should hang up, if it feels like that. That sounds--


PHIA: --really bad.


So, you know how ... like, in the past, when you've wanted to watch a video on--line, if you wanted to watch a movie on Netflix, sometimes it would be like, grey screen, “You need to update your Silverlight.”

PJ: Yes! This is the bane of my existence.

PHIA: Yes!

PJ: It's not actually Netflix, it's Amazon. Amazon is constantly like, "Microsoft Silverlight needs to update.”

PHIA: Mhm.

PJ: Which is crazy because I don't know what it does--

PHIA: (laughs)

PJ: --I assume it's like an annoying privacy, like, a thing for them, not for me.

PHIA: Mhm.

PJ: And it is constant.

PHIA: Yes.

PJ: Like constant. Can I tell you that, like, multiple times--not only in my life, but this year--I've bought a movie or a television show online--

PHIA: Mhm.

PJ: --run into something like a Silverlight update and then pirated it. Because I felt like I don't want to go through whatever crap you want to put on my computer, I don't want.

PHIA: Uh-huh.

PJ: I'm happy to have paid for it--

PHIA: Yeah.

PJ: --but, like, I'm not gonna--I don't want your weird invasive ... crap. Which is reasonable and normal.

PHIA: (laughs) Which, I mean the funny thing about Silverlight is it's a way for you to watch videos online but the actual intention is to, like, wrap up the movies in a way where, like, they are protected and secure and people can’t steal them. It’s this thing called DRM.


PHIA: Mhmm.



PJ: Which is not working.

PHIA: Certainly isn’t really working for you.




PJ: (laughing)

PHIA: And s9--

PJ: Like you’re just not allowed to?






CORY: And he came to America to give a p- a presentation at a tech conference about Adobe's ebook reader. And Adobe had made this ebook reader that promised that you wouldn't be able to copy the text.


PHIA: He went on a stage at this conference and he told people, like, “Here's this flaw.” And … the FBI arrested him.

PJ: What?!

PHIA: Yeah.

ALEX: Th- the FBI arrested him for copyright infringement?


ALEX: That’s--

PHIA: And--

ALEX: --so ridiculous.

PHIA: He struck a deal with the feds and went back to Russia. Um--

PJ: “What are you in for?”

PHIA: (laughs)


PHIA: Yeah.

PJ: “What about you?”


PHIA: What was he like?

CORY: He was, um, he was a - a - a quiet Russian guy. He was a nerd. He was a programmer like all the programmers I knew. He didn’t--h- he wasn’t Neo. Uh, he was just this guy who (laughing) had been to jail in America, and wanted to get the hell out and go back to Russia.


CORY: There are lots of people around the world who discover bugs and sell them to governments, right? They weaponize them and they sell them to governments instead of reporting them to the, um--to the, uh, company or pu- publishing them to the public.

So if it’s a really bad defect, you know, you might be able to seize control of the whole computer or maybe you can just take over the browser, in which case you can do things like log credit card numbers and turn on the camera maybe, depending on how the browser and the camera are interacting with each other. If the browser has location access, you can get that, if the----uh, you can get passwords--you can do all kinds of things.


PHIA: Mhm.

ALEX: --that, uh, no one is allowed to look at, and I can’t understand why this is better than the current system.


PJ: Huh.

PHIA: But Cory has a theory about why the W3C is considering this, and it has to do with some new members that joined in the last few years--members like Netflix and YouTube and Viacom.

CORY: Giant media companies, who forever have not liked the- the wide openness of the web and have been calling--since the web’s inception--for, um- uh, controls on how the web works to make their business models more viable, see an opportunity. and etc





PHIA: Right.



PJ: Huh.


PJ: Yeah.


ALEX: They gotta get along with everybody.



PJ: Uh-huh.


DENELLE DIXON: The content owners--the ones that produce this content that is--it’s their content. It’s copyrighted content. It’s content that they’ve spent creative energy putting together. And they should be able to monetize this content and to protect that content from being--in their mind--being distributed in ways that they don’t authorize. Um. We actually--as Mozilla--think that that’s true. Like, they’re content owners and they should be able to protect it. But there are other ways to go about to protecting the content.

PHIA: Mozilla would like any other option besides this one--because on top of everything else what their company stands for is openness and transparency. For example, Firefox is- is like famously the open source browser.

ALEX: Right.

PHIA: But at some point they realized they can either go along with this or... die.



PHIA: Does that mean there’s code in Firefox that Mozilla can’t look at? Like that--that you can’t look at?

DENELLE: Right. So this is--yeah, so we can’t get into the black box of the DRM, of the-- of the locking system either.

PHIA: Does that feel kind of weird?

DENELLE: (laughs) Yeah, I mean this part of the challenge that we had. It’s that- here’s the--I’m gonna give you the really simple perspective on this: if we didn’t--if we chose not to--put this locking system, black box or not, into our code, uh, then we obviously, our users would go to other browsers because … they need to be able to--they want to be able to watch this content.



PHIA: Yeah, I mean she said it felt really bad. She said, like, a lot - like, it was sad. It made her sad.

ALEX: It’s--that is, like, the thing that, to me, helps me understand the bigness of this.

PHIA: Mhm.




PHIA: Mhm.

ALEX: --if it--if that is no longer visible it just seems like it’s like a fundamental shift to me.




PJ: But what’s the like-- is there like a showdown point? You know what I mean?


PJ: Uh-huh.



PJ: Huh.


PJ: (laughs)

PHIA: (laughs) And he hasn’t heard back.

PJ: Wow.

PHIA: So that’s where it stands right now.


ALEX: That’s... intense.


PJ: Cool.

ALEX: Thank you.

PHIA: Yeah.

PJ: Thanks for explaining!

PHIA: You’re welcome.



PJ: Welcome back to the show. Alright, Alex.

ALEX: Yes?



PJ: I’ve been thinking about Donald Trump's cellphone.

ALEX: What about it?


ALEX: Right.


ALEX: Mhm.

PJ:, So- so he bought this software off the internet, which allowed him to hack his own phone--which he said took like a minute--and then he gave one of his friends access to it. Like, basically he wanted to find out what could he learn by intentionally hacking himself.



ALEX: (cackling) Yes!

PJ: Can I really?

ALEX: Yeah--absolutely.  


ALEX: I have nothing to hide from you.


ALEX: Yeah, totally (laughs).

PJ: Do you have any … do--I’m curious, like … do you have any anxieties about it at all?



ALEX: (laughs) Sure. But like, I really ... for better or worse, you know - you know a lot of - of - of the dark recesses of my soul.

PJ: Not only that, like, you’re somebody who … I’ll be like, “Hey, can I log into, like, wh- how do I get into such a--” y- you’ve given more your e-mail password--I don’t even remember it--but you’ve given it to me I think like six times. And I get the sense that’s just, like, your password for everything.

ALEX: (pauses, opens mouth to speak)

PJ: You don’t have to answer that question.


PJ: Whereas,like, for me, I feel … it’s not like I’m like, “Oh, if someone were to get into my information they would find ‘blah,’” but I just have, like, a … I don’t know if it means that I’m, like, a more deceitful person than you--probably--but I just have, like, a basic medium anxiety. Like, if somebody just, like, grabs my computer, I have a heart attack. Because in my mind, I’m like, “That is my open brain,” and, like, “I don’t know what you're going to see and what type of context you’re gonna put it in.” You don’t-- do you have that?

ALEX: Uhhhh, generally no.

PJ: I feel like you just say everything.


PJ: Yeah it’s true.



PJ: We were talking about--at the podcast where I work--we were talking about trying to do a version of the experiment you did, umm--


PJ: --the only difference being I talked to my co-host and convinced him to allow me to spy on him.


PJ: And he--I- I’m not sure he completely understands the capabilities of the technology?



JOSEPH: (laughing) I mean, are you really going to do it for 24 hours? 48 hours? ’Cause I-  I mean, I’m dedicated to my job, but I--honestly couldn’t do that.

PJ: One week. Seven days.

JOSEPH: (laughs)

PJ: (laughs)

JOSEPH: Oh my god … I--sorry, my mind has just has gone into genuine cyber security mode. Yeah, umm--he’s going to get a shock, definitely.



PJ: And umm … god, that is so strange (laughing) sorry--

JOSEPH: It’s fucked up. It’s really fucked up.

PJ: (whispers) God.







