Cory Doctorow suggested recently that Digital Rights Management and its shoring-up exercises may be only the start of a “War on General Computing” to come — in which various interests, probably more powerful than the entertainments industry, will attempt to control people’s use of computers by requiring that they only operate with built-in spyware to monitor and control our activities — no matter how impossible that is to actually achieve in any comprehensive sense. (And I might add, no matter the problems prohibition and wars always create.)

This sets me thinking: As others have observed, one area this might happen is 3D printing. Right now, we’re in much the same place microcomputing was in the mid-to-late 1970s, with build-it-yourself kits (like the original Apple) being about the most popular way of obtaining them. We have yet to see the 3D printer equivalent of the Vic-20, ZX81, or BBC Micro. That’s not to say that there will inevitably be such a thing. (If history really did repeat itself it would be easier to learn from.) It’s questionable whether there will ever be the kind of demand for 3D printing at home that there has been for computing and 2D printing. But it can be expected that something like the IBM PC will emerge and dominate the market anyway, because that’s what mass-production markets do. And going by present trends, it will have DRM; instead of USB it will connect with something like HDMI, a cable (or at least an interface) which restricts the actions of a computer, owned by anyone, to those permitted by a Luddite industry association. There is no particular reason to think that industry associations in this case will be any less inane than the entertainments outfits, so there will probably be something like DVD region encoding too. Which is one reason why I plan to get in early and get the equivalent of an Apple I (in memory of the days when Apple did not seem like part of the problem).

But that’s not what I came here to blog about.

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Ammpol recently made a comment about unemployment and the “Protestant Work Ethic”, which set me thinking . . . I probably have only a vague grasp of the concept — but I assume it has to do with (or descends from) a salvation-by-something-or-other angle on religion as distinct from a supposed earlier (Roman) Catholic salvation-by-something-else. It’s always puzzled me as I had the impression that Catholicism allowed for salvation-by-good-works whereas most varieties of Protestantism seem to be more about salvation-by-grace. But that’s a whole other boring topic, and not one I’m qualified to speculate about. I doubt it’s really germane to economics, or more to the point, it’s not the actual “work ethic” we appear to have in contemporary society.

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Whatever else will happen in the Chelsea Manning trial, it is apparent that the prosecution will be careful to present anything that could possibly be seen as out of order when it comes to her use of equipment — at least, based on this report in The Guardian:

Military computer experts told the hearing that they had found a computer programme called Wget that is used to speed up the transfer of files, and another called Roxio for burning CDs.

So, this may not be news, but possession of standard operating system utilities or the most commonly distributed applications may be regarded as incriminating evidence. And be reported as such. I commented on this recently in another place, to which the entirely valid response was made that use of Roxio may have been illicit on a military computer. Even that may be too broad — it could be that Chelsea Manning’s unit were not allowed to use Roxio or wget on specific computers, or perhaps she was personally banned from using them at all. But none of these seem likely — or at least, not very sensible.

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