In my new novel, Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, I
explore what happens to people when their computers don’t listen
to them anymore. Imagine a world where you tell your computer to
copy a file, or to play it, or display it, and it says no, where
it looks at you out of the webcam’s unblinking eye and says, “I
can’t let you do that, Dave.”  Broadly speaking, that’s the
whole point of DRM. Embracing DRM means embracing a world in
which your computer and other devices must be designed to
disobey you—you, the owner, are the adversary. What’s more, in
order to design computers and other devices to effectively
disobey you, it means designing them so that they must hide
things from you. After all, if there was an unfamiliar icon on
your desktop labeled “HAL9000.EXE,” you would just drag it into
the trash, right?  And that’s the deeper problem: once we demand
that our computers be designed to hide things from us, we invite
a world where machines stop listening to our orders, and start
issuing them.  Design Fla