This is time out,
This is* permission…
— Kings (2009), The Sabbath Queen (Episode 8)
…to hack bad devices.
*not actual legal permission
Obviously the "4"bleed situation (I just made that name up, a silly name for eMudhra signing keys with 1-byte passwords such as 4) is ridiculously bad. Someone done just left the house key to the internet under a front door mat, and it's incredible risk and danger that means traffic could be anyone. Until we all update.
There is one upside. 4bleed is also, for some locked away devices, a way out. Devices that would have protected, jealously guarded their connection to their masters, never to let the user in: some of these devices are open now. We users have a first way in, to perhaps see what they are up to, to pretend to be what we would, to pretend to be what they expect. To sit in the middle and watch what exactly they are saying, to who they regard as home. And to pretend to be that party.
I would not have asked for 4bleed. This is wildly insecure. But, it's also a way in, is a chance to see something that, in my view, is illegitimately denied: understanding of our own devices, of what they do, what conversations they hold when they, residing in our home, dial back to their home. When they open that portal to the cloud keep on the other end.
Those are conversations we owners of devices have been denied. That we are forbidden from. It's illegal, a criminal DMCA violation, to understand, to learn, to have tools or ways of seeing what they are doing (with some modest exceptions carved out by the Library of Congress).
This is a spiritual religious travesty against mankind's will. Against our nature. And it inverts property and ownership again humanity, is a legal farce. And it's a technocratic ruin: servitude to devices we bought but that conspire against us, deny us the stories of what they are really up to, deny us techno-understanding. That is a stance against science, a stance against the upright tool-making human world where we learn and adapt. Something deep and artificially created: that suppresses our best natures.
We all have easy access to some of the internet's best skeleton keys today. Most of the locks are being changed. Very fast. But for a good number of devices? They'll never change. They can't. The commercial world: it doesn't really care about what it makes, too often. Commitment to the product is only to satisfy the demands of the market, and once three years of updates or whatever are done? The device will just rot.
There's such ossification, such stuckness to technology in the capitalist world: how it refuses to budge for mankind, how the very few dictate terms down. And at the same time wish to disentangle themselves, stop development as quickly as permissible, to not be responsible. It's been such a bad stance against the world, so widely. But finding this key under the mat? It's going to give us some interesting tools to see this invisible world all around us. It's going to alter the deal we never had any say on, in some of our favors, for some of the less cared for devices. This isn't a lot. But, well, it's time out. Something other than the same old nothing. From a horrible regime of technology that has secured itself against us seeing or learning anything about it. And that? That has excitement. Good excitement. For us. The humans. And what we can learn and see of the world. I hope.
(Title is a reference to Kings (2009), Sabbath Queen (Episode 08), a day when a power outage leaves the teenagers a freedom from the typical constraints, and able to explore for a spell.)