Open, closed, and demon haunted: An Internet of Things that act like inkjet printers

Cory Doctorow discusses the stakes of an open source Internet of Things when faced with closed devices that the law prohibits reverse engineering; devices whose security vulnerabilities you may not disclose; demon-haunted devices that treat their owners as adversaries, that seek at every turn to thwart them, that are illegal to even peek at.

Closed and open—it used to be so simple. If something important was proprietary, you reverse engineered it and made a compatible, open alternative. If it was good and useful, it took over—it’s the story of Apache and Samba and GNU/Linux itself. Now there’s a new kind of closed: devices that the law prohibits reverse engineering, devices whose security vulnerabilities you may not disclose. Devices with DRM. What started as a stupid idea to extract extra dollars for the entertainment industry has metastasized into the dominant business model of the 21st century: demon-haunted devices that treat their owners as adversaries, that seek at every turn to thwart them, that are illegal to even peek at. It’s one thing when your DVD player is designed to say, “I can’t let you do that, Dave,” when you try to watch a movie from overseas; it’s another thing entirely when your car won’t accept third-party replacement parts or your insulin pump won’t accept third-party insulin. The phrase “Internet of Things” tells you that we don’t yet know what the Internet of Things is, but at least we know that it’s the integration of networked general purpose computers into everything from pacemakers to thermostats, computers in our bodies, and computers we put our bodies into. As the network penetrates our flesh, the question of open and closed takes on a new urgency. As “demon haunted” becomes an attractive option for vendors and product designers, that urgency becomes white-hot.