Internet of Things Profiles Series

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so I'm Tim O'Reilly I'm the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media and we're gonna be on this morning with Cory Doctorow who's famous both as a science fiction writer

probably the science fiction writer of the technology community the guy who has his finger on the pulse of many many futures but also yeah a noted activist for issues of security privacy user

rights how do you think about these things in the context of technology in the future and Cory and I met recently in London and we were talking about the issues that are raised by the Internet

of Things this is Cory's and next frontier as you know he has been you know noted an early proponent of DRM free publishing his own books have been DRM free his publisher

tor books as published DRM three for years as has a reilly media we find that it's really an obstacle to user satisfaction and Corey pointed out that this issue of DRM is raising its ugly

head in the Internet of Things and you know you go what do you mean and there's a couple of examples that will be familiar to anyone who has a printer for example you can't refill the printer ink

cartridges in your HP printer because the the business model is a razor and blades model and so they basically have said no no no no you know we're gonna put a sensor in a printer that will

basically not allow you to use refill the cartridge only the official cartridges well then Along Came Keurig the coffee maker and they said well guess what we

actually have that same plan and although it was interesting we saw in just the news just the other day that they now who recognized that that may have

been a serious mistake and wait looks like we're getting Cory now and since this is really his his issue I'd love to see if Cory can talk to us about his thinking on this point

sure thing thank you for that Tim I'm sorry about the tech problems at this end I'm sure it was the agents DRN sneakily messing up my computer yeah I think you can hear and see me okay now

is that is that all right all right so it'sit's a little a little funky but I think let's just move forward okay well we roll with it then so for a long time when we worried about

digital rights management we worried about that consumer side of things we worried that there were a bunch of things that all allowed you to do and things that you would get more value out

of their devices that because of it rights management within the way and because it was against the law to break the digital rights management you weren't able to do so a good example of

this would be something like DVDs and CDs if you if you can remember you know if you when you had CDs kicking around the house and there came a day where if you stuck it it stuck it in your

computer your computer would say you know I detect a CD would you like to rip mix and burn it and stick it on your mobile devices um if you took a DVD and you stuck it into that very same drive

for no good technical reason but for a legal reason all it would let you do is play it and indeed if you want to watch those movies again you have to buy them again you have to buy them on the iTunes

Store on the Amazon store and I think a lot of people justifiably feel ripped off after all Congress wrote a copyright law that says you can time shift and format shift your movies but because the

digital rights management is there you can't you can't get past it but that was only for starters because the longer this stuff went on the more we realized that the real issue was with security

and not with consumer rights and as bad as it was to not be able to unlock all the value and the stuff that you own the much worse issue is that in order to preserve you

or your wolde bart and in order to make sure that you didn't somehow sneakily figure out how to trick your advice to do doing stuff that it was designed not to do Congress made it illegal to tell

people about vulnerabilities in those devices because if you know about an error that Apple made when they programmed your iPhone or if you know about an error that your cable operator

made when they designed your cable box then you could use that error to bootstrap a jailbreak and of course these aren't just devices that we use to entertain us an error in an iPhone or an

error in a cable box or an error in an Xbox 360 has some pretty potentially grave consequences increasingly these things have got cameras they've got microphones you'll remember there was

this huge uproar from Samsung when they updated their privacy policy and they said bhaag way our Smart TV that does speech-to-text it listens to you and if you talk about stuff in front of our TV

there's a pretty good chance that whatever it is you say in your living room will get sent around to the rest of the world and I think a lot of people who were technically savvy that said

well how do you suppose your speech-to-text television was accomplishing the speech-to-text if not by listening to you but what I think even those of us who have the technical

sophistication to understand that didn't quite think through is that in order to lock your Samsung TVs so that you can't take video out of the HDCP output and then save it in the clear to a harddrive

Congress made it illegal to tell you about mistakes that Samsung made with your television and TVs like every other computer ha mistakes and we really only have one experimental methodology for

filing those mistakes and that's to wait for people to point them out to us you know it the only anyone can design a security system that works on people who are stupider than them but unless you're

the smartest person in the world and totally perfect and error-free that's not going to help you you you need to have other people review your work that's why we have peer review in the

sciences and so the last thing you want isn't just a TV that sends the audio to other places on purpose but a TV that's like this long live reservoir of digital pathogens

that have been put there by script kiddies and people running Monte Carlo attacks on all of ipv4 to find every TV that's vulnerable to it and then tuning in and using their own speech-to-text to

do things like find sensitive conversations and automatically lock in on them and you know as our Internet of Things becomes more and more bound up with this ecosystem walled garden mall

the number of devices in our house that you can't know about vulnerabilities and keeps expanding I mean for one thing last year the World Wide Web Consortium decided to standardize digital rights

management in all of our browsers meaning that your browser which is probably the Nexus of control for your Internet of Things house remember we're supposed to be phasing out native apps

in favor of html5 the Nexus of control for your Internet of Things house and all of its cameras and all of its microphones and all the other sensors and actuators is going to also be

covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and also be illegal to discover bugs in well so there's really two issues you're talking about your quarry the first one is simply the fact

that we used to think of these issues of you know privacy security digital rights management as something that had to do with our computers and then we started realizing that maybe had to do with our

phones too and now we're realizing that it has to do with it you know all kinds of other devices our cars our televisions are your home heating system are you know eventually you know our you

know electronic door lock you know we're gonna have more and more of these kinds of devices industrial systems and so there's the the fundamental issue that the attack vectors really change

everything from you know the possibilities of of severe programming errors which then can be exploited by people who wish to you know rip us off or do us harm so there's that whole

universe of issues but there's also the universe of issues that are wrapped up in the DMCA which is because of the legal regime that was a written that was originally designed by

you know big copyright holding companies to protect their business interests actually have this side effect that it's harder to find these vulnerabilities unless you're a bad guy it's harder to

spread information about them and of course just as importantly and perhaps even more importantly it's harder for us to come up with unintended uses you know if you look at the history of DRM and

media you know entire industries were born because people violated what the original intent was if you go back to the history of VCRs for example you know the entire notion of the VCR was for

time shifting that you could you could record a show off of television and watch it later and they had no notion that people would want to actually rent movies that actually came out of the

hacker movement there were people you know these are big machines back in the early days and you know people would get together they link up hundreds of them in sequence to copy movies for each

other and it was this sort of whole sharing and then people oh I guess people really want to rent movies and the whole video rental market started you know out of people you know

performing unintended uses and that of course became the salvation and the next you know big revenue stream for Hollywood now it's just I find it's so perplexing that you know companies fight

the very future that is likely to be the opportunity so I think you put your finger on something here that there's two questions that or two issues one is this this expansion of Internet enabled

objects and the other one is the business model that started with App Store's really I think it started with video game consoles where companies sold hardware at a loss sometimes they're

sometimes sold it at a profit but then ensured an ongoing revenue stream by using cryptography and other tools to make sure that the consumables and the things that

were attached to them would would have to come from them so being jet printers and whatnot and the success of that business model in the in this century starting with mobile devices has really

led the Internet of Things to to have that business model as its kind of default everybody wants an ecosystem everyone wants an ongoing relationship with their customers everyone wants

software now I think that that that tells you why is that firms when confronted with the possibility of having an ecosystem that lots of people can play in and having an ecosystem that

only they can play in why they choose that that you know an app store model doesn't have doesn't lack independent software vendors but those independent software vendors all pay rent to whoever

owns the App Store so well these companies want is them to have there needed to they want to make sure that if you're good you give you cut moon for a piece that they don't just benefit

because their platform got bigger they benefit because you actually give them a fraction a royalty on all the variants they also want to make sure that if you want to disrupt them that you don't that

you're not able to that you can only make apps that don't disrupt their existing just relationships so if you're an Internet of Things company that has deals with power companies to make sure

that the thermostat and it receives the turn down the heat message we don't have to bring the coal plants online that um people can't walk over to those smart thermostats and turn them back up again

so you've made that promise to the power company you don't want to have a wide-open platform because someone might make an app that lets people adjust their thermostats and even when you've

you've adjusted the amount of dust them back up again and so you want to be able to make these promises because you can get more money from the power company for your thermostat if you can promise

them this sure but it's always short-term thinking I mean there's certainly that there is a huge advantage in a winner-takes-all system if you're the winner first off and and you know

these these sort of approaches and business models tend to you know lead towards winner-takes-all takes all systems but Eve the winner in a winner-takes-all system

ends up losing in my experience over time because they cut off innovation they cut off opportunity for other people and you know so you know I just have watched this you know over the

years you look at for example what at Microsoft they used to call the strategy tax you know which was okay we're gonna we're gonna do these things to lock customers in we're going to do things to

lock out the competition and all of those choices bit by bit added up to a system that was less usable that was less attractive there was less innovation there was no

opportunities for developers outside Microsoft and eventually all those developers went somewhere else namely the web and they built the competing ecosystem that eventually you know not

Microsoft off you know it its top position and then you know you watch this repeat you know and now you know Google and Apple are sort of fighting over how are we going to walk people

into are in a vertical stack you know I would just found this recently I got back from from Peru where I was on my honeymoon and I was trying to share photos and we had some photos from the

camera and we managed to suck those into iTunes and the other ones off of my phone and they were in Google+ and getting them into one place was super hard because there were all these little

obstacles that were put in place by both companies you know to keep you from sharing you know with the other platform and and you look at that and I go I'm going somewhere else you know and and

this this question of how do you focus on creating value for users and value for a developer ecosystem who are going to invent new things that are going to delight those users are fairly central

it seems to me for every you know technology company but also really you know really brought home by this new revolution with the Internet of Things we have a lot of silos emerging and the

question is where are we going to find that system that allows everybody to you know work together to create that whatever this new paradigm is going to be is too early yet to lock this

thing down yeah and you know I think that one of the UM one of the new things on this earth is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that although it dates back to 1998 when when firms tried to

use it to lock up their verticals like when Lexmark invoked it for its printer cartridges there was a company called Skylink that invoked it for its garage door openers we were able to

successfully argue in court that that's not what the DMCA was for so the Federal Circuit when they looked at those two examples they said look you know the copyrighted work that your DRM is

protecting is the DRM right the only copyrighted work in your printer cartridge is the stuff that stops you from loading a different printer cartridge that's not what the DMC is for

it's way too circular but these days you have to RM that sits in front of really substantial copyrighted works that it'd be really hard to argue we're not copyrighted works entire

operating systems for example you know no courts gonna say I don't know a copyright the operating system doesn't attract a copyright so now what you've got is this really weird thing whereas

before there was this funny dynamic where like if HP sold at a loss of bazillion printers and then really outed on the printer ink the fact that they were doubting kind of a feature if you

are an entrepreneur going into the market you could say look HP has created this this landscape of millions of people who want cheaper ink than they're willing to sell and you know Jeff Bezos

said it he said your margin is my opportunity the fact that HP is charging a 10x mark up means that there's plenty of room at the bottom here with my 1x markup to go into that market and the

more printers HP sold into that business model the more opportunity there was for the little guy to get in and try and take a piece out yeah in let me actually take a slightly contrary and point of

view here and it's one that I'm not sure I I could I can really defend but I want to you know we do have these trade-offs that we make in business models and I find it a somewhat problematic when

people want it both ways you know so for what we say yeah we want all this free content on the web a swerve by advertising but let's put up an ad blocker you know so you know other

people will suffer the ads and pay for my free content but I don't have to and in a similar way you know you know HP has made a choice they said okay we're gonna sell you a really cheap printer

and I remember when getting a home printer was thousands of dollars and now it's hundreds of dollars and we're gonna make our money by selling the ink cartridges and so you know I do I do

think that you know while I object to the DRM and the ink cartridges I do think that one of the consequences of letting go of that model might well be that HP says well actually we got to

charge a lot more for the printers and people need to understand the trade-offs and and not be kind of on this entirely on this moral high horse it's like you know same thing with with phone walking

it's like oh the phone companies lock us in yeah they do but they also subsidize your phone and and then you can be more discriminating about what's the right balance because all these issues are

issues of balance you know the phone companies you know okay to your contract because I've got to recover the cost of that subsidized phone but then of course they keep you under contract and they

have various games to keep you under contract and you try to get out and they they you know they try to lock you in longer and you go that's when you start to hate you know they made a deal and

then it wasn't quite good enough for them and and and so I think with all of this I think we have to actually be smart and nuanced and not just knee-jerk that all this stuff is automatically bad

so I hear what you're saying and what I think is that um there are two ways that we can decide how much HP's products cost the first one is that we can have a market or HPE and introduces a bit of

inconvenience and depending on which inconvenience there is you made it ium on there on that for their device you may go out and figure out how to jailbreak your device you may buy a

third party thing that you plug into your HP device the that deep that jailbreaks it so that you can plug a thing I'm and then yeah market would decide right HP could

introduce just enough inconvenience and just enough extra cost you know that you decided to go and buy something the other one we could do is we can have a law and you know I'm not someone who

thinks that all laws are bad so we might say okay HP gets to charge a premium on this to recoup you know will protect it in contract or somewhere else but I don't

think that we would say with that laws HP can charge anything they want for the ink cartridges and we will use an unlimited number of tax dollars to punish anybody who gives you the power

absolutely and I do think that the idea that companies trying to protect their business model you know by law you know is a mistake you know the point really is if a business model really is a good

business model it should not leave need a law to prop it up and so you end up with these distortions in the marketplace when companies go to the government to try to effectively protect

their particular approach to the market and I think that those kind of distortions happen all the time you know the thing that I'm most interested in is is helping companies to understand how

some of these business models are ultimately self-limiting you know when you look at you know so many of the opportunities I mentioned earlier you know how the whole video rental market

which became really the major revenue stream was something they originally fought against you know the famous jack valenti you know you know the Boston Strangler

you know quote it's just you know crazy and you look at this like with the app store you know Apple this is there are actually some great examples from more recent technology where companies really

saw people you know hacking their system and went oh you know I mean Apple didn't introduce the iPhone with an app store people started jailbreaking the iPhone in order to add apps and Apple went oh

good idea and they then they formalized it they built a system to make it to encourage that behavior and of course created a whole new more

same thing happened when you know Google Maps was first hacked and instead of fighting it they basically said oh this is awesome and and traded an API for more people to be able to do it and I

think you look at some of those business examples of people saying oh there are people who want to innovate on our platform let's help them and let's build a business model that creates this

cornucopia of value creation universe's these stingy business models that say okay we figured it all out we're gonna lock it down and nothing is gonna happen from here and III somehow I think I'd

love to get this out of the you know let's you know let's protect our business model by law or you know and to know let's actually figure out the business models that really really work

because those are much more powerful yeah you know I think that you need a carrot and a stick right like so you need to anis they look there is a big opportunity out there for you in an

ecosystem that's open as opposed to a walled garden or a closed ecosystem but you also need to say there is something wrong or a sleazy about locking this up and it is legitimate to take something

that has been locked and unlock it because once you transfer ownership of something to someone they really have the right to decide how they're gonna use it and if you know if your business

model relies on that you're just you know in addition to the fact that you could make more money conceivably by by having these open markets you also don't get to complain or you at least don't

get any sympathy when you complain when other people start to treat their property as though it were their own and you know this this brings us back to the security question that I started with

the consumer rights story only takes us so far at a certain point you also have to say whether or not and it's it's very parallel to your ads example there are not ads are good or bad ads that

compromise huge amounts privacy and whether or not it's often after good or bad softer locks that compromise the ability to work devices that work on our our have no

arguable place to be there and so if you want to keep ads intact don't make ads that are as invasive of privacy yeah if you want to keep your ecosystem intact don't punish people who

report bugs in it and me you know you can covet it like one of the ways you can we can we can divide the baby here is if you have an ecosystem like if your ZigBee and you've got a consortium you

could say if you join our consortium you have to covenant that you will never sue people for reporting the vulnerability yeah you know that would go a long way to it yeah hey I was think we should go

to some questions that have come in from Twitter as well as some that they sourced earlier from analysts so John Gray who's a great perspective at gray spective on Twitter wrote given the

skill and sophistication of Seminole criminal cyber hackers both government and non-government is there a minimal bar or threshold of security and privacy that the everyday connected suspect oh

like like if I guess the my understanding of that question if I've got it right is ever there there's some really there's some really like badass hackers out there so you probably don't

have any privacy privacy is probably dead something something on those lines yeah I think he's also asking you know how well are we being taken care of by our vendors you know I look at the you

know what we really learned from Sony is that companies just don't do even do the most basic practices well and even I you know the there was this tour yesterday on slash thought about the medical

implanted medication pump that as an open telnet listener on the standard telnet port and when you log into it it gives you route on it and this thing sends drugs directly into people's blood

streams and is always connected to the internet with the public IP address so yeah I mean there's some pretty bad stuff out there so I guess what fully designed yeah so on the one hand I

would say you absolutely should be should be able to be protected from attacks of opportunity that crypto works well enough and peer review works well enough and insurance liability is enough

of a disciplining factor on firms that all other things being equal the script Kitty thing where they just they find a zero-day and they feed it into a scanner that looks at every IP address in the

world until it finds your machine that happens to be vulnerable to it and attacks you but that's a thing we should aim for being able to fix that also incidentally gets us out of spies

because the whole point of spies and mass surveillance is that it only works if it doesn't cost anything to add a new person to the surveillance net you know once Gmail is under

surveillance each gmail user comes for free so if the Gmail doubles in user base you still have the same you know cost to spawn all Gmail users so if we didn't make cost something to spy on us

right people have to target us and do and do attacks that are that are based on knowing who we are and what we're running that makes us much safer than we are now you still want to be resistant

to targeted attacks but we can certainly make ourselves largely and you into Unterman attacks mm-hmm okay cool so what about you know I mean I guess the real question that I think John Gray is

asking because he has a second question how can we increase digital literacy to help citizens better secure themselves and ensure privacy is simply a fallacy you know whose whose job is it to get

this right you know you know do we have to does everybody have to become very sophisticated now or should we really have a higher expectation of vendors and infrastructure providers to take care of

these issues so I think that you you know there's less takes for factors right Lurie says that the world is controlled markets code law and norms and I think he's

right so you could imagine that we can solve the privacy the problem of making privacy literate with all four things right like we can um make proactive to businesses to to want to make privacy

oriented products and and we'll see them in the market the fact that the Pew study showed that 87% of Americans had done something to protect their privacy since the Snowden leaks most of what

they died useless tells you that eighty seven percent of Americans want something that no one's selling so I think that that that we're likely to get markets involved code of course is a is

a very important piece of it we've had code to protect your privacy for nerds for a long time and it was really an open question whether the reason that crypto was so hard to use was because it

was intrinsically difficult or because the only people who cared about crypto were nerds and it seems as we get more and more usable crypto being introduced that it was it was really more the the

latter that because only nerds knew enough about the Internet to understand the privacy risks tools to protect your privacy assume that you're already a nerd the same way before desktop

publishing all the software that lets you lay out a page assumed you were a typographer and as soon as we took on board the project of making typesetting accessible to normal people we could get

a long way not all the way to where typographers gap when when they sit down and use these tools but we could make them usable by normal people to produce things that were far beyond the capacity

that they had before so we can use code to do this we could use law to do this we could for example change the liability picture for companies for breaches and we could immunize them from

liability in the event that they had taken best practices so you know there's a California privacy law that limits your liability for breaches if you do good crypto with your user records so

you know if you if you lose a bunch of users but they're well encrypted that is nowhere near as serious as losing user records when they're in the clear and

you know insurers basically solve that problem for you right once you say to people you're immunized from liability if you take us one simple step the insurers dependents they all right well

before we're going to insure your business we won't mention your taking that step that means you can sue us for our deep pockets so I think there's lots of four ways that we can get there lots

of different kinds of steps that we can take to get there yeah I think you know the thing that's sort of interesting here you're recommending a law in one case and and the real interesting

question is how do you distinguish between a law that is helpful and one that isn't and it seems to me that at least one axis that is a pretty clear and obvious test is is this law designed

to protect a you know it's a single company or a small group of companies or is it something that really applies for everybody I remember John Gilmore always used it was John Gilmore Michael Tiemann

but back in the early days said you know his his his question for lawyers was always you know like okay you know can we just turn this around and like if we have these rules for me would you apply

them to yourself you know this is in the context of open source but sort of like okay you know lawyers copy from each other contracts all the time you know yet they were saying oh no you know you

know code is is is you know protected by copyright you can't do these things things like okay well you know which is it you know and why is it and I think in a similar way you know you just look at

the law like that where you go okay yeah it applies to everybody it's designed to protect the public yeah bursa you know their copyright extension which is designed to protect a few big companies

and I think that kind of general test of law is it you know laws can be trying to protect the public and still be wrong but at least is a fundamental premise that the goal is you know

to protect everybody and not to protect the interests of a particular company yeah I mean I think it's important to think to say that there that there shouldn't be no rules that we should

just be arguing about which rules people who who talk about copyright reform are often accused of being anti copyright and you know I'm someone who releases his books under Creative Commons I use

copyright I don't think copyright is wrong I just want that per se I just want to have sensible copyright rules different copyright rules you know the same way I don't think anyone would

ever say that no company should ever be liable for anything right so as soon as we say some company should sometimes be liable for some stuff then the discussion devolves to like what and and

you know liable for not encrypting records that leak that feels like a good one to know especially here in which the best crypto tools are free yeah hey let's move back to the internet of

things I'm looking at a question here from at Leah the Hunter she says which companies and new technologies are most profoundly impacting how the Internet of Things evolves and also I guess how will

the you know things evolve in the next five years beyond just more sensors hmm that's I mean that feels like more of a question for you your you've got your finger more on the pulse of this yeah

well well let me let me oh yeah sure I can take a little bit of that I mean I think the biggest mistake people make with the Internet of Things is in thinking that it's about devices you

know I'm sure there are sexy devices you know your your your nest thermostat your you know your internet connected drone or whatever people got awesome and yes and there's things like Smart TVs but

the biggest impact to me seems to be when you start thinking about how sensors and devices can change the way you actually do things and when I first started talking about uber as an

Internet of Things company everybody looked at me like I had two heads but wait no come on is made possible by mobile internet connected sensors you know the fact that they're in a smart

phone doesn't change anything we did a thought experiment and you oh yeah there's a special device that lets you call you know a car we would go oh yeah internet of things you know or

if the car was a self-driving car you say Internet of Things but the fact is is made possible by you know mobile you know sensitives and so there's gonna be a lot of opportunities just using phones

and all the sensors in them and we see that with something like apple's healthkit you know and some of it we will be adding new sensors but what really seems interesting to me is if you

take uber as a model Internet of Things company use that as your kind of icon rather than say nest you say oh wait a minute what's really happening here is we're saying once you have connectivity

and sensors out in the world you can actually completely rethink an industry you know and of course that's why you know ooh BRR is so disruptive and you look at for example well what would the

analogy be in healthcare you think about a home health care worker wearing an augmented reality headset who could be you know sort of beaming back images to a doctor you know if they needed

additional consultation there's summoned by sensors on an elderly patient who's who's failed to you know do their normal movement pattern yeah you could say well we can

completely reinvent healthcare in fact there's a company called I think it's called Chen med and I remember it's Chen med or Chen health in Florida which I heard about from Todd Park where because

of the way they've now changed Medicare reimbursements they've actually you know you can actually keep part of the savings if you save money these guys have actually doing concierge medicine

for the sickest patients because they go these are people who were showing up at the emergency room multiple times a month and and they're kind of going we can actually it's cheaper to send

somebody to their house to make sure they take their medications you know and we actually get to pass on you know we get to keep part of the savings and you go

that's actually an internet of things play you know it's like we're having people use sensors will use data we'll use you know in this case you know they it may not actually be all the way to

Internet of Things but it's sort of that check let's change the business model and and you know and just some of things you know it's like you think about the internet connect to the

washing machine you think naively about it you say well I would like why do I care about my washing machine being connecting you go well not if you're at home you know you know Amazon –

notwithstanding but if you're in an apartment building or you're a college student or the college dorm oh my god the internet washing machine totally changes the way you think about doing

laundry as you go I can see if you know I don't tread down there with all my will and we find that all the machines are full I don't judge down there find it's got ten minutes more to go you know

all these things suddenly make sense in the right context and so for me the biggest opportunities in the Internet of Things are not new devices and new sensors but rethinking what people do in

a way that we can do them more powerfully you know create great user value and user experience because we now have connected sensors I'm really interested in the idea of treating

beings as things that are good at sensing and not things that are there to be sensed that's a nice I like that yeah a lot of our Internet of Things models proceed from the idea that a human emits

a beacon and you gather as much information as you can often in a very adversarial way about that human and then you make predictions about what that human wants and then you alert them

and what if instead you had advice or a device ecosystem that was local to you that didn't share your information with anyone else that gathered information that you gave voluntarily because it was

just for your own benefit was my wear or not spyware and then as you move through the world other things emitted information about themselves your device took them in looked at your very

intimate not for sharing preferences and presented you with options so rather than rather than treating you was like you know a kind of ambulatory wallet to try and game into into and remitting

dollars you know the rest of the world if you think about FB offer that every business that you passed today might make to you it adds up to a gig or two right like we can

handle that in our sleep why are we well why are we sending all at what like why are we trying to to tailor with information comes to you why don't they all previously broadcast and you receive

if you filter them at your end using your device that can that can keep your secrets for you mmhmm yeah yeah hey I lied sorry girl distracted they're tweeting that great line about you know

yeah I think that the whole notion of you know I Iceland I said that the purpose of the Internet of Things is to give you my superpowers and you know you think about it you know the I I think if

GPS is a new sense you know it's an augmentation of human beings you know I mean yeah it's certainly true that the you know the Australian Aborigines you know had the song lines and they knew

how to get around but for a long time you know modern humans have not really had that that superpower and now we do and III think yeah we're gonna see more and more of that you know I think a lot

what's happening you know I look at you know projects like hololens and other augmented reality platforms these are you know we're heading in the direction of you know the matrix you know i want

to download some new you know skill and i'm gonna actually have this this you know on the spot augmentation yeah well you know the original superpower like the one that defines our species the

thing that made the first superhuman thing we ever did was work with other people in cooperative ways right like what two people can do Princeton's one person can do it's literally superhuman

yeah animus like ronald coase have have written at length about how the major project of our species has been to figure out more efficient ways of working together we have corporations we

have mobile phones we have churches yeah we have terrorist organizations we have governments always to make us superhuman more cheaply for certain purposes and where the internet-of-things were

actuators and and and becomes really it is when you start to think about really low-cost collaboration in the physical world enabled by centers so in Bruce Kulick novel distractin which which is a

very prescient book he has this scene where people collaboratively build a hotel and they start with its huge pile of bricks like like when you shake out the lego book and you get the cute pile

about everything that goes into your building they get into your project they get everything that goes into the in the hotel and they walk over to the cinder block and they slap a a little kind of

sticky to it and it immediate starts talking that says I am a cornerstone walk me three feet to the left walk me one foot to the right set me down find the trowel right and you can

find this cement and it senses and kind of helps you and you collaboratively work on the hotel for as long as you want then you walk away from it and the next person who wants to make a hotel in

this in this building walks over and picks up any Beast slacks a little little you know grain of rice size to actuate her sensor onto it and then it tells you where to put that piece now

well I mean we're already seeing something like that which you know augmented reality in certain kinds of situations daiquiri is a company that you know it has an augmented reality

headset for aerospace workers you know it's of complex mechanical work and they're kind of looking at oh this oh this is how the part of the lines you know they're kind of looking with a

heads-up display what they're working on they're looking you know you can also have a worker with less skill go out and look at something because it's automatically providing background and

context information so pretty interesting so you know I have another question here that on Twitter this is from Niklas taller they were taller very and tall he says given slow government

bureaucracy how do you affect change to introduce Internet of Things innovation in the public sector well so you know this is this is getting back to Lessig's model

of markets code law norms so we in America not only is Congress very slow it actually has a typically stop making laws that aren't just partisan gamesmanship like it the amazing thing

about about like this often unlocking law was not that they taxed of cell phone a lot law but that they passed any law at all you know we have this long this PDF of using courses as a

legislator second reason recourse and that's that's a that's something that I'm this the liberties and and litigation world is done for a long time not not just because Congress is and and

Liddy and lawmakers are sometimes dysfunctional but also because you sometimes see legislative bodies passing laws that are politically attractive but that you know obviously don't pass

constitutional muster and then ideas we get to make this law that says you know everybody who disagrees with us is against the law and then someone like us goes to court and get that law

overturned and then they turn to their base and they shrug and they say you know we tried but the activist judges made our crazy law that said you know everybody has to have the Ten

Commandments tattooed on their forehead they they you know that they made our law go away and even though we all knew that it would be a good idea so you know why did you change law is by going to

court and asking for a constitutional review of laws and and yet certainly is thinking out of the context of clearing the way for the Internet of Things and changing the way the DMCA works but also

the wave markets right when when one of the these things all work together like it you talked about the VCR before and one of the untold pieces of the VCR story is that over the eight years of

the VCR was litigated people kept making ecr's even though the legal status of them was uncertain and by the time the Supreme Court finally ruled on PCR there were

six million VCRs in American living rooms all of those judges drove past video rental stores to get to court and courts are consequentialist right they pay attention to the law but they also

pay attention to what their decisions will do to the world and you know for a judge to sit and bang the gavel and say I ran six million American household now I'll have to get a piece of a major

entertainment technology your living rooms because after eight years I've decided that it's finally illegal that's hard for them to do so you know what the things that will help litigation about

how this Russian work is technologies that the right thing technologies that go ahead and securely halt at the internet of things even though you have to jailbreak it to do it or that offer

third-party patches or privacy enhancements I mean you know my favorite third-party tool friend run is this CyanogenMod module that lets me lie to my location sensor naankhatai only load

an app that doesn't in my location but requires it in order to run I can tell my operating system to lie okay I am so the app still runs but it doesn't know where I am right so if

companies still go on doing the right thing when we get to court when we get to that highest court and we're being heard we'll be able to use the fact that the markets marched on to do better yeah

now that's a really good point and and it really does illustrate a really important point that doing can sometimes be more important than activism you know you know making something that actually

works differently in the world and succeeds can be a very powerful force for change and so you know that's that's really an appeal to the entrepreneurs out there if you have an idea that

people are doing it wrong do it right and try to win in the marketplace because you've actually you know persuaded people that you know I look at that in you know in what we've done at

O'Reilly and others have done around DRM for publishing you know so like we were a lonely voice at first and now more and more publishers have ended up joining the DRM free you know bandwagon because

there's enough evidence that it works that you know it's no longer an issue and I I know that for my discussions with tech publishers that were free the fact that you went to your home free was

a huge piece of their calculus it was really a force for good in the – yeah and as we as we became a distribution you know you know company for other publishers and we just said we

will only distribute your content if it's drm-free there was actually an economic incentive for them to to join so yeah I guess the point is we can make social change for

the good by actually our business practices and that's something I think you know this is going well beyond the Internet of Things I think there really is an obligation for every company to

think about how it creates value for society and not just for itself and we've kind of lost that sense and there's so many issues you know that where we're talking is a new event I'm

working on which we haven't announced yet around you know jobs the future of the economy in the face of technology you know that it's not inevitable that you know companies must maximize their

profits and screw their customers and screw the public that's a choice and it's a moral choice and not only that it's not the most effective choice it's sort of short time short term profit

optimization that you know long-term destruction of you know the ecosystem and the world we live in you know and you see that choice all through our society and I think we as entrepreneurs

you know can make other choices and must make other choices I think that's really well said Tim I really agree with you I think that you know we we have all this weird anxiety about AI and movies like

The Matrix resonate with us even though you know our a eyes are just nowhere near smart enough to worry about at this point and don't seem to be mapping up as quickly as we'd hope but I think the

reason we look at a movie like matrix and its whole to us is that we do have these trans gamin in human immortal creations of our minds that view us as kind of a vector for reproducing

themselves and otherwise as a form of a convenient gut flora and that's limited liability corporations exactly mr. Tom you know it's a it's a transformational thing yeah that's a

really great perspective you know that the non-human entities we built that are actually you know hostile inimical to us or not a eyes they're corporations that's actually a pretty interesting

perspective but again they don't have to be and they can and should be directed by humans and we need to take our responsibility there very seriously yeah yeah I think that's probably a great

quickest to wrap yeah well let's my anniversary tonight and I'm gonna go run and meet Alice all right thank you very much all right great thanks a lot Gauri later Tim thank you

you