Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Kevin, Paul Teeson, and Ali Sanjabi. Coming up on DTNS, U.S. passes chip subsidies, but what will that actually mean for chip making and for us, the consumers? Plus, we check in on the state of battery swapping for EVs, and Corey Doctorow brings us up to speed on DRM and why it still probably isn't good for anybody. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 29th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland and I'm Len Baralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, author, journalist, and activist, Corey Doctorow, welcome back. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you. It's been too long. I can't wait to talk about Dr. M, the digital rights management with you. Oh yeah, that's a good acronym. I like that. Thanks. I sometimes get mail for Dr. Corey O. Oh yeah. All right, well, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Judge Kathleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery set the trial date for Twitter's lawsuit against Elon Musk for October 17th through the 21st. Judge McCormick already determined the case would receive a five day trial in October. Now we have the exact dates. In other Twitter news, the company announced it increased the price of its Twitter blue subscription, $2 from $2.99 to $4.99 per month. Existing subscribers won't get the increase until October. Intel continued the week of dismal tech company earnings reports with a 22% drop in revenue on the year, partly due to slowing PC sales. Also because it couldn't get all the components it needed to finish enough data center chips to meet demand. Sony announced PS5 sales did rise 4% on the year, but it cut its annual profit outlook by 16% as the sales of games fell 26% and are expected to fall again next quarter. And there ends the bad earnings reports. Amazon beat expectations with a 7% rise in retail sales. And Apple reported record revenue again, though only a rise of 1.87% and profit fell 11%. Still, iPhone revenue was up 2.8% and analysts had expected to see the first fall in iPhone sales. Mac sales did fall 10% and service revenue slowed to 12% growth. Apple sounded pretty rosy about the next quarter though, saying it expected parts shortages to ease and continued demand for the iPhone. Good news, if you're one of the people still waiting on Valve's Steam Deck handheld game console. Steam wrote on Twitter, everyone who currently has a reservation can get their Steam Deck by the end of this year. We've cleared up supply chain issues, a bunch of folks got moved up to Q3 and all other reservations are now in Q4. So check your reservation window. You may have an earlier ship time now. Samsung has an announcement coming up on August 10th, right in the middle of Daily Tech News Show's annual experiment week, a little rude Samsung, but don't worry, Rob Dunwood and Rod Simmons have agreed to try out Instant Reaction, a new experimental show. So you're gonna get probably more Samsung coverage than you would have otherwise and a cool new show experiment. We should also thank Evan Blass who did his usual leaky job and got ahold of some advanced marketing photos of what appear to be upcoming Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 and the Z Fold 4. He posted them on 91mobiles.com. Pictures don't reveal much other than the design is not in for a big change and they look kind of like the current models. A less pronounced crease, an S Pen slot on the Fold 4, details like that you can't tell from the pictures so you're just gonna have to wait until the 10th to find out about those. On Qualcomm's latest earning call, CEO Cristiano Aiman said that the company reached a multi-year deal with Samsung that will see Qualcomm chips powering their devices globally. Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets are already used in 75% of shipped Galaxy S22 smartphones with Samsung X NEOS chips used on 25%. As part of the deal, Samsung will expand Snapdragon chip use across PC, tablet and extended reality products. All right, let's get to the House of Representatives. Oh, let's. So we mentioned somewhat in passing yesterday that the US House of Representatives passed the Chips and Science Act of 2022. This actually matters to a lot of people. It authorizes the spending of a $280 billion, some of which will go to companies to expand and build semiconductor manufacturing plants in the US. It was passed by the US Senate on Wednesday. Now heads to the president to sign it into law likely early next week. So Tom, for anybody who needs a little refresher, what is in this bill? I'm no Jennifer Briney, the congressional dish podcaster, but I did look at this bill a little bit. $39 billion is going right to semiconductor manufacturing subsidies, right to companies to build plants to make chips. 11 billion will go to research and workforce training at those plants. So a little bit to support R&D and get people trained up to work there. Two billion will go to older tech, the kind used by automakers and of course the military. So there's a military aspect to that as well. That makes up the 52 billion number that you're gonna hear a lot when you look in headlines as being allocated to chip making. Now you may have noticed that Sarah said a number that was quite a bit bigger than $52 billion. We'll get to that in a second. Intel, TSMC and Global Foundries all have plans to take some of that money and build plants. Those plans were supposedly contingent on this money being allocated. Samsung and MediaTek are expected to benefit as well. The US Department of Commerce is in charge of preparing for these subsidies and it has been doing that and will administer applications and allocations. $170 billion of this bill will be spent by several federal agencies over the next five years on research and development in fields like quantum computing, open architecture, software-based wireless technologies. I think that's probably around open ran but it didn't say so in the bill. Others for artificial intelligence development and precision agriculture. The bill directs the Commerce Department to set up 20 regional technology hubs to foster growth in tech, training, development, outreach, et cetera. National Science Foundation gets $20 billion to spur development of critical security technology. The Department of Energy's Office of Science gets its budget increased. It's gonna end up being $50 billion, although some of that already exists to fund development of clean energy, development of nuclear physics and high-intensity lasers. And there's a lot in here on NASA that's not funded but directs NASA to do things like aerospace regulation, cleaner burning fuels for planes, bringing people to Mars becomes a priority in the law, not just in the policy, as well as the Artemis mission to return to the moon. So, Sarah, how has it been received? Well, it got some bipartisan support. Of course, chip companies pleased by that. Criticisms of the bill include the fact that four chip makers, the amount of the subsidies, that's 52 billion split among multiple companies over five years, is very small when a single fabrication plant costs hundreds of billion dollars to operate. While the bill does allocate some funds for raw materials and equipment, most of that equipment, materials and components, will come from elsewhere. Protocol notes that certain tools needed for advanced chips come exclusively from the Netherlands. Japan is also a supplier of crucial components needed to make chips and chip packaging doesn't seem to be part of the strategy at all. So, chips will still need to be flown to packagers and testers in Asia in at least many of these cases. Also, the effect of this will not be felt until construction is complete, volume production begins, and things are kind of off and running. The first plans to reach that stage will be from TSMC in 2024 and Intel in 2025.  Well, you know that the long-term trend over the last 40 years has been to do more offshoring and to focus more on how production works rather than what happens when it fails. And I think the last two years have been a real crash course in the problem of only considering how well things go and not what happens when they go wrong. And the version of efficiency that says all you care about is that the prices are low and good times leaves out the possibility that in bad times, the prices will effectively be infinite, like you won't be able to get chips at all. And so re-onsuring some chip production and just more broadly pluralizing chip production. So it happens in lots of places in the world is clearly a good idea. And it's true in lots of key inputs. I just read that the reagent in our rapid tests for COVID is made in one factory and for all the world, there's a single Chinese factory that makes all the world's reagent. And that's just a bad idea, not because we don't trust the Chinese or because of trade war or whatever, but like, what if there's a fire? Single point of failure. Yeah, it's just bad news. And you know, I can save a lot of money on backup drives by not doing backups. That works great. But no, it doesn't, it fails really badly.  You know, it's just basically transferring money to more rich guys from the public purse. And you know, Bernie Sanders made a pretty good point which is like, yeah, there are lots of countries out there that subsidize their chip manufacturer. Most of those countries also have like universal healthcare and universal childcare. If we're gonna emulate other countries, why don't we emulate all the things that work for them? You know? Yeah, I think that hard drive backup metaphor is great. The usual advice we give is you should be backing up in a local place, an offsite place, you know, have multiple backups. And I think that's what needs to happen here is sure maybe this is a small part of a good strategy but it really doesn't seem like it's part of a strategy. A strategy would be to diversify supply so that like you say, things like reagents and minerals and materials are coming from multiple places. Packaging and testing is coming from multiple places so that if one fails, then you don't have the whole system fall apart. I think that's not what I'm seeing here. Yeah, I think that's right. And you know, Friday is backup day for me because I have these little USB two terabyte drives and I keep one in the mailbox down the street at a commercial mailbox provider where I get my mail so I don't have to give strangers my home address. And I keep one here on my desk and I swap them once a week. And so Friday, I literally just brought this back. I went and got my mail before speaking to you. Oh, that's great. That's a cool tip. I might have to steal that. I have a PO box myself so that's a good way to think about it. It really, and they were very sweet about it.  And I was like, yeah, I'm pretty sure my data is encrypted. That's why you don't have to lecture me on. What I do. Yeah.  And some of you have actually asked us about the idea of swapping batteries and an alternative to recharging an electric vehicle. It's sort of another analogy. It's like when I put fresh sheets on the bed, sometimes my sheets haven't been washed yet, but I got the extra pair. So the idea, if you're unfamiliar, instead of waiting for your car's battery to charge up, you take out the battery, you put in a fresh one. This could be potentially faster, obviously, then mean that you always have the latest battery tech, also improved range, since battery charging theoretically would be optimized by the provider of those batteries. Now, we talked about this on the January 28th episode of the show this year. That was some time ago. So Tom, let's recap. Yeah, one of the biggest success stories in this is Gogoro. They are very popular in Taiwan, and they're moving out to other markets. They swap batteries for electric scooters. We also talked about Tesla experimenting with swaps between 2013 and 2016, but then dropping that idea. China's NIO had 700 battery swap stations for cars as of last December. I think they have plenty more now. The downside to it is you need a lot more batteries than cars. You need more than one battery per car in the system. A good logistical plan needs to be there, so charged batteries are available at the right place when someone drives in and needs them. You need to program for safe testing, responsibly disposing of older batteries, and you probably need a universal battery standard if you want this to get to scale so that multiple car brands can use it. If you don't get to scale, it might end up being too expensive to catch on, at least for large vehicles. Then there's the question of whether customers would do it. Vehicle range is regularly in the 300s and going up as far as miles. Charging times are around 20 minutes and falling. And so the question is, is the extra 15 minutes compelling enough to get customers to pay for battery swap? When we came to the conclusion back in January that the best hope for battery swaps might be for fleets where scale and demand is kind of built in.  We mentioned a San Francisco company called Ample that had five swap stations in partnership with Uber and another company called Sally. However, protocols Lisa Martin Jenkins has revisited the topic in an article called What It Will Take for EV Battery Swapping to Go Mainstream in the US. Sarah, what'd you find? Well, so Jenkins mentions that Ample as well, mentions Ample as well and describes more about its process. Ample puts an adapter plate in place of the normal battery. Then it fits it with a smaller and lighter battery module, making them easier and cheaper to swap out than a standard battery in an EV. And that makes it easier to set up swapping stations. Ample CEO and co-founder Khalid Hasuna told Jenkins that if they get a couple of parking spots and a flat piece of land, they can set up a battery swap station within two weeks. Takes five minutes to swap out a battery. Sounds pretty convenient. Ample has about 100 cars modified in the Bay Area, mostly with Uber. Company has plans to reach 1,000 vehicles, though, and expand to Madrid and also Kyoto, Madrid, Spain, Kyoto, Japan before eventually marketing to individual owners. So knowing that, does it change anybody's mind? Well, it's not about changing minds so much as, does it change the conditions for success? And the answer is, maybe. Does it change your mind of the possibility for success? Yeah, maybe it does, but probably not. Smaller vehicles like Gogoro scooters are more likely to benefit. Two and three wheel vehicles right now make up 55% of battery swapping market. And India is close to a national battery swapping policy, but it's for two and three wheel vehicles, which are very common in India. As for full-size passenger EVs, car makers seem to be focused on expanding charging networks, not looking into battery swapping. So it seems for cars and trucks, there's just not a lot being done there. And battery swapping still right now, if you asked me, seems to be best for fleets or the smaller vehicles, the two or three wheel vehicles. Cory, I don't know if you have an EV or if you ever use an EV or think about this, do you? Yeah, I just typed into the chat, I have something to add on this. I do have an EV. I got a level two charger in my house. We've got solar panels, we drive sunshine. But the reason this sparked my interest is I'm actually playing hooky to speak to you from the project that I'm on for Electronic Frontier Foundation right now, which is writing comments for a federal docket on building a public charger infrastructure. There's about $8 billion in bipartisan infrastructure money to build chargers at about a 50 mile cadence. And not just across all interstates, but looking at specifically at underserved areas. And the NPRM, the Notice Proposed Rulemaking and the NOI that came before it, are both really interesting. And they're interesting in part for kind of how they progress. So I went and read all 500 comments in the notice of inquiry. And there were some pretty hilarious inputs into it. Like Tesla made these comments, they said, you want to make sure that your charger infrastructure is like suited to the vehicles on the road. And since 70% of the vehicles on the road are Teslas that are EVs, we should just make sure that 70% of the chargers only charge Teslas that are paid for with public money. That was hilarious. And then there was some job owning from the White House where various people who were involved in this at the White House made some noises about maybe saying that if you were a vehicle made by a manufacturer that had its own network but excluded rival cars from it, that you would not be eligible for public infrastructure. So only people who share get shared with. And then like 24 hours later, Tesla announced that they were going to start sharing their charger infrastructure. One of the weird and not great things about this otherwise very laudable initiative is that the underlying standards, there's about five of them. About three of them are super proprietary and you have to pay like $800 to look at them. And so we're on the verge of having a law, not the first one, but a new one that will say in order to comply with this law you will have to follow some conditions but those conditions are behind a paywall. And so that is really like a weird kind of law to have. A law that you have to pay to see but which you are still required to follow is not really a law. Like a bedrock since the law of the forest which is the document that came before the Magna Carta that the kind of the OG Magna Carta, it establishes this bedrock principle that was, also shows up in the Magna Carta and the Constitution and lots of other foundational documents that it's not the law unless you can read and speak the law. You have to be able to see the law, duplicate the law and so on. And there's a real problem with these societies of engineers and industrial societies writing what amount of public safety standards that governments adopt by reference. So they'll say, you know, the plumbing code of East Pigs Knuckle Arkansas shall be this document from the American Society of Plumbers, go buy a copy and you as someone who hires a plumber can't find out whether that plumber complied. You as a plumber have to go out and buy the document in order to follow the law. And that's just not good policy. And one of the things I've been really chewing on this week and the reason I'm glad to have a couple of hours break before I go back to work on this document is what we're gonna recommend. And I think we're gonna say something like, look, if you look at this 800 page $700, $800 standard, there's only like four pages that are relevant to this part. And it's pretty clearly fair use to reproduce those in the law. So you should just reproduce those four pages and six diagrams or whatever in the statute and the regulation and just say like, you must do this and source it to the underlying document. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Just shepherd it in that way if you can get to do it. That makes sense. It doesn't sound like there's anything in this bill that has to do with battery swapping that it is pretty much focused on recharging, right? Yeah, no, and I think that's right. Cause battery swapping is like jam tomorrow, right? Like it requires that we have a different fleet of vehicles to the one that we have. Cause not with sending all this business about putting in a charge plate and a smaller battery and so on. The vehicles aren't designed to do this. So you'll always be cutting against the manufacturing and prerogatives of the designers. And it's always gonna be a cleudge. I mean, there's a joke from Ireland that I often quote whose punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. And that's, I think that's where we are, right? Like we just have some like vehicle turnovers like a 10 and 15 year prospect, even EVs which do in fact need a battery swap somewhere in there. But if you've got 15 years worth of fleet on the road that won't be able to use battery swap, then you're kind of in this chicken and egg thing where you're building out battery swap infrastructure for cars that don't exist. And you have to run it in parallel with charger infrastructure for the cars that do exist. And obviously like the elephant in the room here is that geometry hates cars. And if you're gonna build a city and you're gonna try and solve its mobility issues with individual vehicles, you come up with this thing where you just like multiply the square footage of a car by the number of people in the city, by the miles they need to travel. And then you start realizing that all the places they need to go are getting further and further apart as you add roads. And you are locked in this Red Queen's race where you need more roads to bring people places that are further apart because you added roads. And then the places are further apart so you need more roads again. You know, I've been going to Disneyland since I was 18 years old and I worked as an Imagineer for a while in Glendale and would drive down to Anaheim on the five. And they've been widening the five since I was 18 years old. I'm 51 now. I remember driving that road when I was 18 in 1989 and going, God, this is terrible construction. It is now, I think like 79 lanes wide in places. And permanently under construction too, right? It's a parking lot. It is still like, there's a thing called induced demand, right? Like no matter how many lanes you add to the five the five will be a parking lot. What it needs is a single high speed train. And that would solve 95% of that traffic. Well, folks, if you've got thoughts on this or anything you want to hear about on the show, one way to let us know is in our subreddit you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. I have been following the story of digital locks, aka DRM since the early part of the 20th century. And Corey, your work on Boing Boing, Crap Hound and all over the place, the EFF has been very helpful over the years in helping me wrap my head around not only DRM but also the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and how that preserves digital locks and what effect it has on creative works in general. So I wasn't surprised and enjoyed reading your Twitter thread that you wrote earlier in July, explaining why you don't put your books on Audible and kind of going into the current state of digital rights management. What I really liked in the thread was your approach to the issue like a security problem. Can you talk a little bit about when you called a computer running a program with DRM meaning like an Audible app or something like that, an adversaries computer. You called our computer an adversary to that program. Sure, well, we have a lot of different kinds of information security and security as Bruce Schneier has been wanting to say it doesn't exist in the abstract, right? You cannot be secure. You can only be secure from something, right? All the fire suppression systems in the world won't help you against burglars. And so every time you talk about a security measure you have to talk about what you're trying to prevent. In the case of digital rights management what you're trying to prevent is the owner of the computer doing something that is in their interest but is against the interest of the shareholders of the company that have provided them with the software or the tool or the media or what have you. And that is a very odd kind of security model, right? It's actually not one we have a lot of experience with in the physical realm. It's, I mean, I guess you get things like if you stay at an Airbnb there might be like a locked closet with the owner's personal things in it or what have you. But generally speaking, like if you own a thing or even if you like are accustomed to using it you are considered to be on the same side as that thing. And that thing is on the same side as you. You are collaborators in doing stuff, right? We don't redesign our houses to make it easier for the cable company to make sure that we're not stealing cable or whatever. Yeah, we're the ones living there. Yeah, yeah, it's yours, right? DRM is weird because what it's saying is you own this computer and the computer's job is to stop you from doing what you want with it and leaving aside all questions about whether we think it's good for people to do it what the manufacturer is trying to stop or not. And we can talk about that too. I think that's a rich area to dig into. But there is just something foundationally cursed about designing a computer to police the actions of its owner, right? Because in order to do that, you really have to design the computer not just to police the owner but to hide how it works from the owner. Because if there's an icon on your desktop labeled like DRM.exe the first time you get a dialogue box on your screen with a glowing red eye that says, I can't let you do that, Dave, you're going to go find that DRM.exe file and drag it into the trash, right? So in order for the DRM to work, there have to be files on your hard drive you can't see. There have to be processes running that you can't see. And you have to not be able to terminate or alter those files or processes. Because if you can, because you are the adversary of your computer in this context, then you can defeat the security, right? It's like even really good bank safes are not kept in bank robbers' living rooms. Like we don't secure stuff by giving it to people we don't trust. It's just not how it works. And so you could imagine if for some reason banks decided that we all needed to have a bank vault in our living room that we couldn't open and then proceeded to insist that we also must now have cameras and microphones in our living rooms that are rolling 24 seven and that we can't cover or terminate so that they can make sure we're not robbing the vaults, we would all say, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That doesn't sound right. And that's basically what DRM has turned our computers into. It's turned it into systems that run processes that are adverse to us. And again, like we could talk about whether it's fair or unfair to do the things that the manufacturer wants to stop you from doing, you know, I don't know, ripping a Netflix stream and watching it later or Amazon is notorious for taking all the Christmas movies off prime starting in like late October and charging you $2.99 to rent them and then restoring them in like February. So maybe you save them to your hard drive in September. We could say whether that's cool or not, but I think a much more important point from a computer users perspective is that if there is a facility built into your computer to hide certain processes from you and someone else figures out how to use that process, right? If you've got a back door on your computer that lets programs run that you can't see or terminate and a bad guy figures out how to use them, well, you are really screwed, right? Because by design, your computer can't see what's going on or stop it. So this actually came up yesterday. Kaspersky just released data on a new UFE boot worm. They call it a boot kit that runs in the secure trusted computing module in your computer where the UFE is resident, the pre-boot software, security software that by design, your computer just has to listen to and do what it says, can't inspect and can't terminate. And this malware dates back to at least 2016, but Kaspersky only found it this year because by design, this is an opaque black box, right? And it's an opaque black box because it's supposed to protect you. If you can look inside it and change what's going on, then someone could socially engineer you into undermining your own security or they might just take over your computer, install a root kit somehow and then impersonating you to the computer, alter that boot locker. And so once that is compromised, right? Then you get into this situation where it's like, I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me, right? The bad guy is inside the house and you were locked in with him. And you point out in your thread that we're dealing with general purpose computers, right? These aren't appliances. These aren't single function items that they're meant to do lots of things. So it's a matter of who can get it to do what and you own it. And there's people, malicious actors, the publisher and you all fighting over what that software should do. Oh yeah, and I wanna make a clear distinction here between like you deciding to remove some capabilities from your computers to protect yourself. Like I'm not saying that you should be able to play Doom on your dishwasher, right? But I'm saying that when someone else gets to make that call and when they make it specifically to stop you from doing things that you want because it's better for them if you don't get your way, that's a really different circumstance. Like I'm in my office right now and the way that my door opens, it could hit a framed picture that's on the wall behind the door and one of those little like door jams, right? That stops like those little pegs at the baseboard. That's fine, right? Like my general purpose hinge remains general purpose. It can still yawn open to the full 270 degrees hypothetically, but I've chosen to restrict the field of motion of that hinge. And that's fine, right? Cause it's consensual, it's under my control. And from a security perspective, you don't need to somehow lock that peg in place to stop me from release removing it, right?  And there are circumstances in which you are gonna wanna do things that the manufacturer doesn't want you to do for reasons that are totally orthogonal to their financial interests and that are really about the exigencies of the moment. There's a company called Medtronic. They're the largest Medtech company in the world. It's thanks to a bunch of acquisitions followed by the world's largest tax inversion where they essentially had a tiny Irish company buy them. It was really the other way around so that they could hide their money and not pay tax. And they bought all the companies that make ventilators. And so they're now the one company, the biggest sort of 800 pound gorilla ventilators. And they use these things called VinLocks on their ventilators that stop you from swapping a part in and then turning the ventilator back on. It needs an unlock code delivered by a technician. And so this is just like a side revenue thing for them where if a hospital like harvests a donor screen from a dead ventilator and puts it in a ventilator with a cracked screen, they then have to pay a technician $200 to fly out and type an unlock code in. And that's kind of odious and gross. Like again, like we can talk about whether the restriction is fair. But what was really bad about it is what happened during the pandemic. When we needed all the ventilators we could get and none of their technicians could get on an airplane. And that became like this very critical moment where hospitals were losing access to their ventilators because the manufacturer put a component or a design choice in place in the early days of the design process that did not anticipate a once in a century pandemic. And there was no way to sort of travel back in time and undo that. And section 12, one of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which you mentioned earlier, this law that Clinton signed in 1998 makes it a felony to produce and share a tool to remove that DRM, to remove that Vinlock. It's actually punishable by a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence. My goodness. This is why you don't get them, right? This is why like, yeah, you can download a code from the internet to unlock your appliance or whatever, but like you can't, you can go into a mall kiosk and they'll swap the battery in and screen on your phone. But you can't go into a mall kiosk and jailbreak your phone because not because it's harder, but because they don't wanna go to prison for five years and no one wants to sell them a tool to do it that might send them to prison for five years. And so what this does, sorry, go ahead. No, no, no. I was just, one last point before we wrap up. Sure. Go ahead. Oh, I was gonna say, so what this does, I thought you had one last point. So what this does is it encourages manufacturers to add like a kind of one millimeter thick layer of DRM to their product, because if removing the DRM is illegal, then anything that you wanna do, that requires that you first remove the DRM becomes illegal. So Jay Freeman, the guy who started the SIDIA project, which was like the alternate app store for iOS, he calls this felony contempt of business model. And we see this kind of DRM being used to lock people into consumables, into repairs, into certain usage of media and so on. John Deere does it, a lot of. John Deere does it, but you know, coffee makers and toaster ovens and just like all kinds of stuff you're seeing it pop up. And it's like, it's not a copyright violation to use your own coffee in your coffee maker, but because you have to bypass a digital lock to do it, it becomes an area of copyright. And to return to where we started here, my little article about why you can't buy my books on Audible, Audible, which sells 90% of the science fiction audio books in the world, requires DRM, they won't let you choose not to have DRM. And that means that every customer of mine who buys one of my books on Audible, whatever they spent, 24.95 is now 24.95, they have to forfeit if they quit Audible because I can't give them a tool to unlock the DRM and go somewhere else. And so I don't wanna lock my customers to Amazon's platform, because we know that like even companies that aren't as rapacious as Amazon, they're not charities. And if they can find a way to squeeze a supplier, they will. And if they know that I'm dependent on them because my customers have sunk thousands of dollars into Audible audio books, and they're not gonna leave, even if I leave the platform, then they will use that as leverage to squeeze me. And so long-term DRM is handing Amazon a stick to beat me with. And so I won't let my books be sold on Amazon, but of course, are on Audible rather, but of course, Audible, the way that they figure out whether someone who proposes to upload an audio book to them for sale has the rights is whether there's already an Audible edition. And so I get all these pirates like actual pirates, not fans trading audio books, but people who have tricked narrators into recording audio editions of books that there are audio editions for and putting them on Amazon on Audible. And the only addition you can find when you search on Audible is this pirate edition. And so the full title of the article is like, why my books aren't available on Audible and why Amazon owes me $3,200. Because I got an email from one of these narrators saying, a scammer tricked me into recording your book by claiming they had the rights. I didn't know any better. And do you want the book because it's not on Amazon anymore? And I was like, wait, wait, wait, what happened? And he was like, yeah, we sold 129 copies. And that's $3,200 and something dollars, which frankly, Amazon owes me though. Didn't come to you. Yeah. Well, we could talk for a lot longer about this and we will talk more about it on the extended show, folks. But that's gonna do it for DTNS. Big thanks to Len Peralta, who's been illustrating today's show. Well, check in real quick, Len, what have you drawn today? Well, you know, you should actually read the article that Corey wrote. And one of the things I pulled out of it was Dr. O's first law, which of course is anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, it won't give you the key, that lock is not there for your benefit. So yeah, this is available right now on my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len or at my online store. Oh, look at the little hand, look at the key. It's over at LenPeraltaStore.com, so check it out. Excellent, good to have you back, Len. Corey Doctor, also such a pleasure to have you. Let folks know, besides Audible, where they can find you on the next. Yeah, so I do a daily kind of blog thing at pluralistic.net, it's mirrored as a Twitter thread and also it's mastered on thread and it's on Medium and it's on Tumblr, I simultaneously publish it everywhere.  And all of that is surveillance free, ad free, tracker free.  So it's just me shouting into the void and the only thing I, the only feedback I get is when people send me email or notes or whatever. And then my books are available everywhere, books are sold. I have a new one coming out in September called Showpoint Capitalism that I wrote with my friend Rebecca Giblin. She's an Australian copyright professor and it's about how creative labor markets are rigged by both big tech and big content and how we can unrig them. Well, things that you can do as an artist or a member of an artist group or fan or someone in local government or a technologist to really take concrete steps to unrig those labor markets and divert more of the revenue from creative work to the creators who make it. That's great. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for being with us today, Corey. Also, special thanks to Bill Russell. Bill Russell is one of our top lap time supporters for DTNS. Bill, if you're listening, we would like to thank you for all the years of support. Thank you, Bill. And deeds. Also patrons, stick around for the extended show. As Tom mentioned, Good Day Internet rolls right in in just a sec, but just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live, join us live if you can. We hope you all have a great weekend. We'll be back on Monday with Nick Amont for joining us. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottis 1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Gadget Virtuoso, Steve Guadirama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and JD Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei. Music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A., A-Cast and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta. A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show include Terence Gaines, Ayaz Akhtar, Scott Johnson, Lamar Wilson and Chris Christensen. Guests on this week's show included Dimitris Jenakis and Corey Doctorow. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick's International Roundup where we are joined by Prabir Pukhayasta. In today's episode we first go to Brazil where ex-president Lula has been released. Next we revisit the Pegasus hacking issue and finally we go to Syria for an update. So Prabir firstly going to Brazil. Ex-president Lula de Silva has been released from prison up to 580 days. Of course the case isn't over yet, it's still going on. But can you tell us about the developments in this case and what this release means? Really narrowly this didn't come up as a direct consequence of the Lula case. This came up because there is a Supreme Court judgment in Brazil that those who are still appealing their convictions, they should not be put in jail but they should be free till the final appeal is decided. By this Lula's entire incarceration, his entire jail period is actually legally wrong. So that's been the larger issue which doesn't only relate to Lula but to probably something like 5,000 prisoners in Brazilian jails who have been denied this right to appeal pending which they have been put in jail. So this is one part of it. The second part of it, I don't think this is to be seen in isolation from what happened earlier, about 3-6 months back. We have had a series of leaks which talked about, which actually disclosed that Judge Moro, who was supposedly the hero of the Car Wash campaign or the Lava Jyoth campaign, that he was involved in a judicial impropriety, that he was actually conniving with the prosecutors. While being a judge, he should not have been playing that role. And those conversations have been made public. And after this conversation and messages became public, it also showed that the Brazilian judiciary was not participating in this Car Wash campaign. Mainly because it is corruption, they had a definite agenda or parts of the Brazilian judiciary specifically Judge Moro had an agenda which was to fix Lula so that he would not be able to contest against whoever would be the right-wing candidate and therefore make it possible for a right-wing victory in the elections. So this is really targeting Lula. That was clear from all the conversations which had been leaked. I suspect the Brazilian judiciary also reacted to this. So instead of directly pronouncing on Lula's case, they have pronounced the general verdict because they also want to show, at least for themselves, that the judiciary is above reproach. And Judge Moro's, all these conversations being leaked coming in public domain has actually meant a huge blow to the credibility of the Brazilian judiciary itself. So I think a part of it was to recoup from that, recover from that. But the consequence is a big victory for the left, the working class politics which Lula represented in Brazil and a definite defeat for Bolsonaro and company who have come in only because Lula was disqualified. If there was an election which Lula had been able to contest and this judgment now makes clear that's what should have been the legal position. You cannot condemn somebody without the final appeal being heard, which means that he was technically innocent till the final appeal was heard. Then he should have been able to contest for presidency. And if you take all that into account, I think it's a huge victory for the Brazilian democracy today. And it definitely a defeat for all those forces who tried to keep Lula out of the electoral fray and handed over Brazil to the right wing. And I think in that sense is constitutional coups which is what the United States has been pioneering in Latin America. I think this certainly has seen a defeat. And our next issue today is the Pegasus hackings. So it has been over a week since the news broke that WhatsApp was used to hack into phones through NSO groups Pegasus. And one aspect of this which has not been talked about as much as that government officials were also hacked in over 20 countries. So can you tell us about this aspect? Let's look at what NSO is and what Pegasus software or Pegasus tools do. NSO comes out of the Israeli military intelligence. In fact, the people involved in it, the kind of access it has seems to show it was very close to the Israeli military. We have seen this in the United States as well. There are specific companies which seem to work very closely with the security established in the United States. Israeli military intelligence has a special role. It also aids the United States by passing its own legal restraint which exists what it can or cannot do against you as citizens. GCHQ and Israeli military intelligence are the two bodies which work very closely as we know from the Iranian case where the virus which was used to hack into the centrifuges in Iran. So it was shown later that this appeared to be a joint project of the US and the Israeli military. So this comes out of Israeli military, the NSO. And it's a shadowy company. We don't know who really the owners are. It seems to have interlocking directors that one company owns another company which is again owned by the original company. So we don't know what this shell company's who real owners of these are. It's quite conceivable Israeli government is actually involved in the ownership as well. So this is really a part of a particular hacker for a higher company as it is known that they give this hacking tools to others for money. They have claimed they give it only to governments. So we don't know how true or not that claim is. What the borders apparently of this company was to give the suit of tools. But it was licensed and it was also using the servers which they had to deploy. They could deploy it on behalf of their clients or the clients could have also used the servers that NSO had set up for them. So this operates by hacking into our smartphones or any other computing device which is on the internet using different mechanisms. In this particular case, what we talked about is the Pegasus tools or the hacking tool hacked into the smartphones by using WhatsApp. So if you had a call from WhatsApp, even if you didn't answer it, it had discovered what is called the zero defect in the system, WhatsApp software. Which allowed it to then plant its malware code into the smartphone itself. And once it is planted in the phone, that means end to end encryption that WhatsApp and Facebook claim is no longer applicable because you actually have access to the phone. And once you have access to the phone, then it was possible for the malware to what is called exfiltrate. It means send the files, whatever is there, contacts, messages, images, everything of the phone out to a Pegasus server. Which as I said would be set up by NSO with the client or directly by the NSO and supplied the information supplied to the client. This is the modus operandi of what this hack was. But this is not the only tool that they had, this is not the only hack they had. They apparently hacked iPhone, they hacked other systems also. So there's a whole bunch of hacks which are available with Pegasus, within the Pegasus toolkit. And this is only one of them because this has now come to light. Let's not think that this is something which is the only thing that happened. There are other suits also that could be still active today. The second part of it is that once it is hacked, it is actually your phone which has been hacked. It is not WhatsApp which has been hacked, it's your phone which has been hacked. That was the security hole which was used to hack your phones. Once our phones have been hacked, can they be ever made free of the infection? We don't know because actually it can go deep down into the operating system. It's quite possible that unless we change the phone that we will not be free of the infection. So 1400 known cases means at least 1400 phones today are actually possibly useless for their owners or compromised for their owners. So they might have to replace all these phones. So this is a huge damage to the people that have been done. And also we don't know how many more have been infected. There's only once that Citizen's Lab in Canada has told us. But there could be many more which are there and you can see from the colour of the Citizen's Lab case that they have published that you can see there are multiple players who are clients of NSO because there are different regions in which the colours are there. The 45 countries are grouped in different regions. Of course, a large number of reds belong to the countries that Saudi Arabia was interested in and it's clear for instance Qatar, Syria, all these countries are Saudi targets. Of course, Iran is not a target because Iran doesn't have WhatsApp and Facebook. China is not a target because it doesn't have WhatsApp and Facebook. So those were protected by the fact that these were not there. But if you look at all of this, you see US for instance, you see South Africa, you see Brazil, they are obviously more players than just Saudi Arabia in the picture. So this has been sold to a number of countries and the fact that 20 countries' governments you talked about, this is really governments actually hacking each other's officials. That's what it really is that WhatsApp officials were hacked. So 20 countries' government officials hacked each other's phones with the support of the Pegasus tools or essentially NSO. The last point I would like to make what people are forgetting that these 20 governments are buying Pegasus software. They may think they are the recipients of the information but that information goes back to NSO. NSO is very close to the Israel military intelligence if not a part of it and this also goes to the sharing agreement it has with the United States. So what we are doing, for instance, if we take India, which is 140 such cases and the suspicion is it is one of the government agencies which have bought the software, it's either NTRO, it's either CIB, CBI, or it is RO, which doesn't operate under the Home Ministry. Though they have one of these agencies could have bought the software, certainly in all other countries we are talking about it is probably the, not certainly, but probably the government agencies who have bought the software. So what they are doing is while spying on their citizens, which is what they have been interested, they have been doing or spying on other countries' officials, what they are doing is also helping all this information to go to Israel and the United States. So that is the flip side of it. Countries like India who think that this is only helping their agencies, the security agencies to get certain kinds of information. They are not realizing, they are also supplying this information straight off to also other countries and whether any security agencies should be procuring such software from third countries is I think a huge security issue. Let's, I would also say, let's be very clear, these are not hacking tools. These are essentially weaponized software. They essentially are cyber weapons. And finally in Syria, we now know that Russian and Turkish troops have begun joint patrol in the northern border areas of Syria and the US has now agreed to deploy, approved deployment of troops in the oil fields in their resort where the oil fields are located and Trump has also openly declared that the US is staying there for the oil. So can you tell us about these developments? Let's look at the northern border, which I think is the more critical strategic issue. Which side will Turkey be? Which side will the Kurds be? And how will Russia and Syria negotiate between the Kurds and the Turkish forces which are poised to fight each other? And of course Turkey has a military advantage as we know. Looking at the Kobane and the Haqsa area that this have been taken over really by the Syrian Arab army, the Syrian government forces. And there they along with the Russians are patrolling the border with Turkey. So they have protected Kobane. They have protected the eastern part of the northern border. So that is where a bulk of the Kurdish population is. And this always had some presence in the eastern side. The government always had some presence over there. But this is now expanded so that that part of it hasn't gone to Turkey. There is a middle portion which is really from Rasul Al Ain to near Kobane. That whole border which is there, Manbij and all these areas. That seems to be at the moment still fluid. The Turkish aided forces, we will not call them Turkish forces. They are what used to be called the Syrian National Army. This is the part which was close to the Turkish government. The Free Syrian Army was aided big time by the Americans as we know. And we also find that the US support that was given out of I think 24 groups. 21 were very close to the Al Qaeda or to Tahir el-Sham or to various other jihadi what is called the jihadi forces. What we have been calling the Islamist extremist forces. So these groups are the one Turkey has banded together to find the Kurds. They are trying to enter into this area. And there still seems to be some element of question mark. How that area which is at the moment being shown in a different color on our map. You can see that that area is still not clear where it will go. But it does seem that Turkish troops are supporting this but they really not doing the fighting. So it is something that still we need to see how it develops. But it is appearing that the US does not have too much of a role on this. The Kurds and the Syrian government seem to have had some real approach mark. It also appears that Russia has been able to contain the Turkish forces not to intervene militarily directly in Syria. So that's a northern border which I think strategically is what is important. Rest is when you come to the eastern side east of Euphrates. That whole area it's a sparsely populated area but yes it has some river basin. So it has some grain production and further down it has an oil producing area where the oil wells are. Now those oil wells if the United States wants to grab them the amount of money they'll have to spend to position their troops there will be more than what they will get out of the oil. So I don't think strategically it makes much sense. This is all I would say Twitter campaign that Trump is doing to say that he's still getting something out of it. I don't think in the long run the Kurds see any way of trying to retain this area. These are really Arab areas. They're not Kurdish populated areas. So they're Arab areas. I don't think the Kurdish forces would like to be there after having the US handing them over virtually to Turkey and they're being saved right now by the Syrian government and the Russians. So I don't think that's going to be a long term solution for them and gifting Syria's oil to the Kurds. I don't think the Kurds have any stake in that either. So I do feel that this is a transient issue. Once the northern border, northern border gets settled, Idlib gets settled, I think this will be negotiated and settled. This is just Trump's bit of grandstanding to save face after his what has been regarded widely as his abandonment of the Kurds and the betrayal of the United States of the Kurds. As we know, the Kurds have repeatedly been betrayed by the United States and other forces.  And I do believe that the Kurds have kept their lines of communication open via the Russians to the Syrian government. So that is why this transition of this nature was possible. So I do think that this is the eastern side of it that we are talking about is also going to change, but it's going to take a lot of little time. And for the Syrian government, the more important is the northern border and of course Idlib where there is still a sizable section of extremist forces which are there, which they need to address. And we still have an open question, what role Turkey is playing because Baghdadi seems to have been very close to the Turkish border. And some of his family members seem to have journeyed through Turkey in order to reach him. So there is still an open question. What was Turkey doing? Was there protecting Baghdadi? Was it, there was a tacit still understanding between the extremist in Idlib and Turkey? Those are open questions. So I think Idlib poses at the moment the bigger issue for the Syrian government. And what happens to Turkey and Syria will depend much more on Idlib than it is going to depend on now, on the northern side or the eastern side. So thank you for joining us today. And that is all the time we have in today's episode. Keep watching NewsClick.


Lead halide perovskites have been identified as a promising material for x-ray detection due to their high sensitivity and efficiency. However, these materials are prone to degradation over time, which limits their use in applications such as medical imaging. A new approach has been developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge to address this issue. They use starch as a polymeric template to create a stable thin film perovskite x-ray detector. This approach resulted in a fully passive device with a top sensitivity of 5.5 μCGY-1S-1, which was found to be highly stable after being exposed to air for 630 days. This study represents a significant step forward in the development of lead halide perovskite x-ray detectors, as it provides a solution to the long-term stability issues associated with these materials. This article was authored by Matteo Verdi, Antonella Jury, Andrea Saivatti and others.


Welcome, you're joining me here in the heart of the British Library, the home of words and people who love them.  Well, neither does the British Library. This next session invites you inside a digital Blue Stockings Salon as part of the upcoming exhibition, Unfinished Business. I'm going to hand you over now to my chair, Joanna Barker. Thank you, babe. I would like to start by introducing our panel for this evening. First of all, we have Dr. Yutika Sharma from Edinburgh University, who works on the art and intellectual history of South Asia in the early modern and colonial period. In fact, she used to work in the Asian Department of the British Museum and has been involved in the East India Company at Home Project. Our second participant is Professor Emma Cleary, who is Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University. And she has written extensively on the Blue Stockings and also is the author of a very interesting book called Jane Austen, The Banker's Sister. And our final panel member is Dr. Elizabeth Eger, who is a writer and cultural historian and reader emeritus at King's College London. She is currently completing a biography of Elizabeth Montague. And some years ago, she co-curated the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition called Brilliant Women, wonderful title, which was about the 18th century Blue Stockings. Now, Elizabeth and I are here today. One reason we're here today is that we are both co-founders of an organization called MCO. And MCO stands for Elizabeth Montague Correspondence Online. And this organization is about to launch the digital edition of the Letters of Elizabeth Montague. And the launch will actually be in three weeks time on the 15th of October. Now, this correspondence is one of the most important collections of the 18th century. There are an amazing 9,000 letters known to have survived, including 4,000 that are written in Montague's own hands. And the aim of MCO is to produce a free, online, digital edition of all her letters together with transcriptions and notes. And including in this will be 46 letters that are held by the British Library. So, who was Elizabeth Montague? Well, I'd like to show you a picture which was painted by Richard Samuel in 1779 and is called The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain. Now, in this group of nine ladies, we see a singer, a painter, a poet, a playwright, several writers, and Elizabeth Montague, who's the one seated in the middle holding a scroll. Now, unfortunately, it doesn't look like her at all. These were idealized muses, not real people. So, who was the real Elizabeth Montague? She was an author, a businesswoman, a philanthropist, and a patient of the arts. She was a leading woman of letters of her day. And for 50 years, she hosted one of the most celebrated salons in London. So, today, we are going to use the spirit of the sound to illustrate the role that Montague and women like her in London in the second half of the 18th century played at a time when London was already regarded as a global city. But I'd like to talk, first of all, about what this meant in practice. Emma, can you help us? Yes. Well, I can try. One of the blue stocking writers, Anna Letitia-Babel, described London as a global city in her poem, 1811. She presented as, to quote her, a mighty city, which by every road in floods of people poured itself abroad. The main feature is this sense of openness, of what she calls spontaneous plenty. The sense of commerce as a powerful force which pushes people outwards around the globe, but also draws them into the British metropolis from all corners of the world. She talks about and celebrates ethnic diversity in London's public spaces, streets where the turbaned Muslim bearded Jew and woolly afric met the brown Hindu, to quote the poem. I'm going to show you the first of our images or rather the second, but the first that I'd like to bring forward, which is a painting called Commerce or the Triumph of the Thames by the Irish artist James Barry. It was one of the series he created to show the progress of human knowledge and culture for a society that was founded in London in the mid 18th century to encourage artistic and commercial enterprise. The headquarters were located right on the river at Adelphi, not far from the present day Trafalgar Square, and this image strongly conveys the imperialist mindset. It's a kind of fever dream of a vampire. On the left, you've got giant figures representing the different continents presenting their goods to father Thames, who's being propelled by a collection of great explorers, Drake, Raleigh, Cabot and Captain Cook, and surrounded by a ring of sea nymphs, some of them holding up goods manufactured in Manchester and Birmingham ready to be shipped out to the colonies. On the one hand, there's pride in London as the world's exchange. It's openness. And on the other, there's a rather overheated and exclusive patriotism. In the same series of paintings, there's another image. This was the annual prize giving for young creatives. It's really striking, I think, how prominent women and girls are at this event and in this image. James Barry, the artist, himself thought that talented women and girls were an important national resource. And the Society of Arts who awarded the prizes shared this view. Now, right at the centre of this image, it's rather, I don't know if people can locate it, but if you see a girl holding a basket just beyond her is Elizabeth Montague, the Queen of the Blue Stockings herself, right in the centre of the picture, you can see her in profile presenting this girl who has won a prize for needlework and she's presenting the girl to some aristocratic patrons. Montague was one of the main supporters of this society. This is very much a London image. You have the tip of a sail on the far right and the dome of St. Paul's in the distance. It's about the concentration of capital in the capital, wealthy aristocrats mingling with talented and ingenious professionals in the applied arts. The picture is saying this is the dynamic mixture which makes London the ideal launch pad for a rising international superpower, Britain. That's very interesting, Emma, but I wonder if Elizabeth can tell us a bit more about how women were able to participate in this because you showed the explorers there, but women were not able to be explorers or ambassadors and they didn't join the army or the navy and go abroad. So really, how could they be involved? That's a very good question. As Emma has emphasised, Montague lived in an era of empire building and while she couldn't travel abroad, she was very concerned with building Britain as a nation. As you saw in the paintings of the 9 Muses, she represents Britain's cultural talents as being superior, particularly to that of France. At the end, and it's important to remember this was an era of global warfare at the end of the Seven Years War after the British had signed a pact of peace with the Cherokee Indians having been fighting over land in the colonies. Elizabeth Montague decided to visit the Cherokee Indians who are an embassy to London and I'd like our next image up, please. This portrait is fascinating. It documents the visitation of the Cherokee chief and his fellows to London where they became something of celebrities appearing at Vauxhall pleasure gardens, randly and even visiting the court. What is interesting is that Montague is determined to see them for herself and she describes them in wonderful detail in her letter to Lord Bath. She notices the bright copper colour of their face and their makeup which she later compares to the rouge of Saloniers in Paris and she writes the general cast of his physiognomy is not a miss nor is he different in features from an English man as our new neighbour the French. She feels a real empathy with the chief of the Cherokees and there's something of a sense of emerging relative cultural relativism in her conclusion. I wish that interpreter was arrived he had sadly perished on the journey some thought he had been poisoned. I should be glad to hear their observations on what they see here all civilised people have prejudices in favour of their national customs and therefore do not judge people with candour those of other countries. So she's aware that they're in the process of judging her and she articulates that very clearly. I think the other way in which she brings the global to London is through the power of her salon. Now this was a fascinating space because it was in competition with the court but it was far more open and diverse to different influences and parties so it soon became known for the support of female education but also as a place to seek patronage. She wrote to her fellow Blue Stocking Elizabeth Faisy at the beginning of her Hill Street Salon about the fact that she is living as a time of great cultural achievement the most famous men of the day and the most famous and talented women of any day. Later when she more ambitiously built her Portman Square mansion on the profits of her coal mines which we'll come to later she described a little assembly she planned at her house that evening it will be composed of persons of so many different nations that if each should speak his mother tongue it would resemble the company at the building of the Tower of Babel. Now Elizabeth you mentioned the two houses that Montague built at Hill Street and in Portman Square and I wanted to turn to Utica to talk a bit about how its globalization affected the material culture of the time. At her Hill Street house where her salon was held Montague had a Chinese room. Was this typical? Have a minute as well please. That's a really interesting question. It was quite typical of the time there was a real interest in acquiring furnishings and decorating houses in the styles and designs inspired by Asia and a lot of this was fueled by the growing maritime trade with the eastern seaports and merchants and traders often bought back goods that they had commissioned privately through private trade channels as supercargos and this is a great example in that Montague's brother Robert Robinson who was a naval captain worked for the East India Company and brought back presents for her very often and she is known to have said you know my house looks like an Indian warehouse I've got so many figures jars etc you would laugh at my collection the gown that I bought out of the ship is very pretty and the work extremely neat so she was using these these furnishings and these presents to adorn her dressing room which was which was the main the main space in the house itself where where she met her intimate friends and also the the style that became really popular in the 1750s was Shinoiserie which was basically inspired design designs inspired by China and that these were incorporated within you know wallpaper furnishings curtain designs etc and she brought in a young architect by the name of Robert Adam who I encountered in my other work at Osterly when I was working for the East India Company at home project so Adam was brought in to refurbish or her existing Shinoiserie inspired dressing room and he sort of adapted it to a sort of more neoclassical taste but with Chinese inspiration with the Shinoiserie sort of inspiration and in fact one of the really striking pieces of designs that we have in this in the Johnstone Museum is the carpet that was used in the Hill Street dressing room of which we do have a slide today and one can see from that particular slide it was a really interesting mix that Adam came up with of a sort of very neoclassical aesthetic but then you know he interspersed these roundels that you see on the corners with again scenes inspired from China and also the central roundel itself is something that has been talked about in terms of having this inspiration from from the East so she really really fancied her dressing room in its earlier phase when it was very Shinoiserie oriented and this later phase which was more pared down as well and she often called it the she's quoted as saying that it was the dressing my dressing is the female of the great room this is what she called it so it's quite interesting that the material culture of the time had this real inspiration you know from the growing trade links well that's great but of course we must remember it wasn't just pretty pictures was it Montague herself complained about the the Nabobs coming back from from India and buying up country houses in her area of Baksa and their immense wealth came as we must recognise from exploiting and indeed later on from plundering the resources of the East so what did she think of that? Not pretty patterns at all there was an entire sort of sensibility in a way around the use of Shinoiserie and other such inspirations from Asia the sensibility of taste making and self-positioning that also went along with the connoisseurs connoisseurly interest in these designs and you're right I mean these objects were in some cases acquired through private trade but a lot of what Montague was observing in in her vicinity was a sort of arrival of these Nabobs and the Nabob is really a term which was a corruption of the word Nawab which actually refers to provincial governors and men of influence in in the subcontinent who were very wealthy and it is known it is very well known that these East India Company merchants and officers who served in the subcontinent became very wealthy very soon especially before 1813 before they were they were regulated so to speak by the government so in this sort of phase you know between the 1750s and 1813 of deregulated sort of corporate governance of the subcontinent there was a real worry about these company servants coming back extremely rich it said for example that they were seen to be dripping in diamonds or stuffing their menageries with beasts and it's it's true as as their control of the colonies grew their wealth grew and when they came back they they exercised their they used this wealth to exercise influence over things like buying parliamentary seats or funding investments in new properties or business ventures and some of these business ventures would have been also in the Caribbean so unlike the the West Indian company servants you know people serving in West India in the West Indies they were known they were looked down upon quite a bit and one great example is Samuel 4th 1788 play entitled the Nabob which made fun of the Nabobs but they they were a very divisive figure in society well I think we might we might pursue that theme a bit but I'm just going to take the opportunity here to say to the audience that if anyone would like to send in any questions you can do so online and I think it's in the chat box or the Q&A box and we'll be able to put some of your questions to our panel members later on but I want to come back to this this theme and I'm wondering whether women in Elizabeth Montague's circle were they cheerleaders or critics of imperialism I mean what was their attitude to to to his important issues like slavery Emma can you tell us something more about that thanks um Joanna yeah I think the answer has to be they were both cheerleaders and critics the women of the blue stocking circle supported the idea of a moral British empire some it's an idealized view of empire which would spread the benefits of trade internationally but they also condemned slavery as a blot on Britain's reputation um Elizabeth Montague was born in 1718 so she was 70 years old by the time the campaign to abolish the slave trade really got going but she took a keen interest one of the younger blue stockings Hannah Moore became a leader of the abolitionist movement and introduced Montague to William Wilberforce who was its main representative in parliament but earlier in her life there are really interesting connections between Montague and African intellectuals in London these links might have influenced her and spurred her interest in abolition I feel sure she knew about the visit of the African-American poet Phyllis Wheatley from Boston in 1773 Phyllis Wheatley travelled from America to London to see her book poems on various subjects through the press she was something of a sensation treated as a celebrity by the London Literati while Wheatley was in London we know that she met one of Montague's closest friends George Littleton Baron Littleton and it was reported in the newspaper an advertisement for Wheatley's poems that Littleton and other cultured aristocrats were in awe of her genius Montague would certainly have come across another leading light of the African diaspora Ignatius Sancho shown in in the next picture a really beautiful portrait by Thomas Gainsborough from 1768 now in the National Gallery of Canada Sancho was the protégé of members of the extended Montague family first as a valet and later when he set up independently as a shop owner in a fashionable part of Westminster Sancho achieved success as a musician as a composer and as a writer and he socialized with well-known actors artists and authors white and black he famously corresponded with Lawrence Stern the author of Tristram Shandy who also happened to be a relation of Elizabeth Montague by marriage you can't get get away from Montague's at this time in cultural circles now Sancho first wrote to Stern in 1776 asking him to quote him to give one half hour's attention to slavery as it is at this day practiced in the West Indies his letters were published in 1780 two years after his death and became a best-selling book circulating his strong views on slavery the young Christian and most diabolical usage of my brother Negroes he wrote about the illegality it's his word the illegality of the slave trade the horrid wickedness of the traffic for more on Sancho and other black Londoners you should go to an essential study by the historian Gretchen Gozina Black London life before an emancipation Gozina describes very vividly the significant black presence in the capital there are around five to ten thousand people of color and she's able to show the way they experienced urban life in England in the period drawing on documents like Sancho's letters which by the way is available in a modern paperback edition like Wheatley's poems one of Sancho's sons incidentally became a publisher now within the blue stocking circle um Sarah Scott Montague's sister was one of the first novelists to represent and condemn plantation slavery in the West Indies in a work called The History of Sir George Sir George Ellison published anonymously in 1766 she was a reformer rather than a radical but in their correspondence Montague and Scott showed their enthusiasm for abolition as he shared one of the letters with me from 1788 right at the start of 1788 as the campaign for abolition of the slave trade gets going Ignatius Sancho praised Scott's novel and in fact he described her to Stern along with Stern as one of his favorite authors so perhaps um Elizabeth can carry on that theme um but you're making it sound as if the women were in some way becoming intellectual leaders can we really justify thinking in that way absolutely Montague was known for her leadership not only of the salon but also of the business in Newcastle where she increased the coal trade to fund her cultural projects so she's an extraordinarily powerful woman a leader in many different spheres but as an intellectual that was her her intellectual leadership was her definitely her most prized identity and it was as a defender of Shakespeare that she very cleverly became most famous as a writer her essay on Shakespeare published in the same year as Garrix Jubilee um defended Shakespeare as a poet of the vernacular who hadn't who didn't have the classical languages similarly to women who were not generally educated in the classical texts she also defended him against Voltaire's criticisms in a very witty way showing his mistranslations of English by re-translating them back into English from his French which is rather a dynamic witty way of showing up his lack of sensitivity to the British to the English language so through this very close celebration of Shakespeare's language she becomes known as an intellectual who's prepared to defend a different kind of drama the drama the more natural drama of the people and in fact she gets invited to France in the end of the 1770s to defend her position in the academy in the French Academy of Literature which by the way has only honored a woman Asya Jeba in the last decade so women I think it's very important to remember that in this age very few institutions allowed women to participate and Montagu created something of an institution for women who were barred from universities a space from which they could develop their intellectual conversation and she banked upon the philosophy she's very pragmatic in promoting the philosophy of the time women's civilizing force or something practical leaders in conversation her salon was famous for its quality of conversation which was so strictly maintained that alcohol was forbidden lemonade and hot chocolate were the favorite drinks delicacies which can be stimulants to good conversation I'm sure but what's very interesting I think in broader terms when we consider Montagu's impact historically is that despite her relative conservatism she's an Anglican and she's definitely pro-amoral empire as Emma suggested she becomes taken up by much more radical figures in the French and American revolutions Helen Marie Williams a radical contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft who opened a salon in post-revolutionary Paris dedicated her poem Peru to Montagu and described her salon in Portman Square as a shrine of intellect further afield at the beginning of the 19th century mercy Otis Warren the American writer published her poems in Boston and this was the first of her literary works to bear her name and she dedicates it to Montagu in a very moving passage she celebrates Montagu's achievements and says will she across the Atlantic stretch her eye look over the main and view the western sky and their Columbia's infant drama see reflects that Britain taught us to be free and it's that sense of freedom what Anna Barbold terms freedom of the mind which is so important to Montagu and I think makes her a very valuable figure to to have as a resource in any kind of study of the 18th century because she was also a supreme networker um Elizabeth I'm going to ask you to go back I think to the material culture we looked at some pictures that Utica showed us earlier on of Hill Street and in in the late 70s I think about 1780 she built this huge mansion in Portman Square and this this was known for how I think even the queen visited didn't she yes um there she came with the princesses for breakfast and it was reported in the national papers Montagu wrote rather grandly to Elizabeth Carter that um she could read about the success of the great room in the in the papers she didn't have any energy left to describe it herself and we have a drawing of the great room as envisioned by Joseph Bonamy her architect here you can see it's on a different scale from her previous salon it's not really a domestic room and I think that's what's so interesting about Montagu in creating a space that is neither private or public it has a certain sense of intimacy and cache and it's somewhere that everyone desires to be seen sociability was a very performative thing by this time and Montagu was well known for her controlling ways creating a semicircle where people were ordered by rank and intellect as to who was nearest to her and it's believed that she even asked her carpet to be designed with um circles on the floor to guide people into groups that would promote ease of conversation um so in some ways she's an exponent of a kind of social control but I think she's unfortunately this building was bombed in the Second World War so it's no longer possible to visit it but we do have some extraordinary descriptions of it in her correspondence and one of my favorite accounts of it is William Cooper's poem on Mrs Montagu's feathered hangings which describes this extraordinary tapestry of feathers taken from all over the world and in many ways they represent the fact that she collects people because several of these feathers were donated to her by correspondence from around the world over the period of her lifetime so for example her her cousin Thomas Robinson who had been a governor in Barbados her brother Robert Robinson who's who sadly died in the middle of his life at the center extraordinary examples of feathers and she used them in this remarkable interior decoration taking featherwork which was considered to be a feminine accomplishment for fire screens or fans and built it on a scale quite extraordinary it covered the end wall of the salon and it was larger than life size so I think that's another way which she subtly subtly uses stereotypical accomplishments to perform ambitious spectacle and to draw people further into her power that's um that's an arresting image um in the spirit of the salon we want to involve other people in this so we've got quite a number of questions coming in that I'm going to put to you all uh in a minute um but I I don't want to miss the opportunity to remind you that um the emco digital edition will launch on the 15th of October and after that I can't give you the the URL the the web address today because um we're at the digital version of you know painting the walls and hanging the curtains we're not quite ready to launch it upon the world but it will be there in in three weeks time and I'm sure that by then you will just be able to put Elizabeth Montague letters into your search engine and you will find it um but I want to turn to some questions um there's a very interesting one coming um from Lisa Nicholson um who asks us whether aside from conversation did the members of Montague Salon engage in other activities did they read out works together or exchange books or or listen to lectures um Emma did did you want to say a bit about this yes most certainly yeah they they were great encourages of each other's um writing activities and um I I love the example of um uh Elizabeth Montague Elizabeth Carter Catherine Talbot the first generation of blue stockings who um provided tremendous moral support to each other and suggestions for where they might place their writings quite often they they wrote privately circulated um works in manuscript form among friends and it took a quite a lot of um courage actually to take that final step into print and so um they they were they were a terrific support network as far as um women's entry into print culture was concerned and there's another question here from Sarah Green which I think it actually steps back a bit and says well what do we know much about Elizabeth Montague's own education and the people who would have influenced her before she was this grand dame of international London um Elizabeth do you want to tell us about that yes well she was very lucky in that um when she was a child she was born into the gentry um quite a humble background relatively and when she was a child she went to stay with her step grandfather who lived in Cambridge Conyers Middleton who was a scholar and librarian of the university and he was also librarian to to to uh uh of Oxford who's living at at Winpole uh safely home close to came to Cambridge and he took his young granddaughter to visit and Edward Harley had a daughter himself Margaret Cavendish Harley later Duchess of Portland who of course was of a great aristocratic collector and being so child of her father inherited his incredible collection of natural history and books the books that form the tower in the British Library in fact the Harley collection um found their way to the British Museum at the great sale of her collection at the after her death so she became connected with this aristocratic learning circles at a very young age but she was also very she also had great initiative during that time she read the whole of the spectator and copied it out at the age of eight and she was required by her grandfather to sit and listen to his conversations with academics in Cambridge um and visitors including Voltaire when she was a young young girl and that I think that habit encouraged a very formal ability to to converse in a way that was intellectually rigorous um from the start thank you um I've got a different question here and I'd like to see if Utica could um answer this one it's a question about interracial marriage to what extent was this common in London at the time and what would social attitudes have been to them you're on mute still Utica that's a difficult one for me because I haven't really worked on that but I do understand that um the their interracial marriages mostly um happened in the colonies and in some cases um the wives came back um the BBs so to speak did come back with um some of the officers um or certainly that their children did um in many cases for example I can speak to what happened in the Indian subcontinent for example there were cases for example where um men maintained sort of two families at a time one family that they had left behind um in Britain and the other family that they started in India and um once their tenure in India was finished the children would then travel back and and reside with the with the parent with the original family and grow up there and go to boarding schools or you know be well educated and then come up in the world like that but um this this um and if you're interested to find out more there's a really interesting um book by the Arvaghosh on this um on the colonial family which you should definitely look at which which really talks about um the structure of the domesticity and and and the and interracial marriages as well um so I would definitely point you towards that thank you that's very interesting now I've got a question here I don't know who to put this to um it's um it's asking us whether the Blue Stockings discussed um the discoveries of Caroline Herschel um who was of course an astronomer at the time from a completely different background and not part of their circle um but apparently she was mentioned by Fanny Burney and that does give us a link for the Blue Stockings because she was one of the younger members of the Blue Stockings circle so um Emma you're nodding can you can you help us with this I'm just pleased that Burney is getting a mention um yeah I mean I I can't I really not sure about um Caroline Herschel herself but I I am certain that they were very interested in previous generations of learned women I'm sure that that uh Elizabeth could say more about this but um there were many um interestingly many publications at this time um cataloging almost brilliant women um from usually from about this the renaissance onwards um and I think that this was seen at the time as symbolic of a country's advancement the fact that women could share in learning um that uh women were permitted an education um and could achieve and be celebrated you know the very act of celebrating learned women became something of a ritual in Enlightenment Europe um but maybe Elizabeth could say a bit more about the specific case of Caroline Herschel and whether Elizabeth Montague knew about her I don't remember that there being a specific letter between them but I'm sure that it's very possible that they knew of each other um we'll have to look look in the letters when they're on the on the database but I think um they definitely appear together in several of the catalogs of famous women such as um Emma has mentioned one of my favorites is by a very young 13-year-old poet called Elizabeth Ogilvy-Benger who writes the female geniad and she talks about knowledge being on the stretch in a way that's very dynamic and includes the natural sciences I think um a figure that we could mention here is Mary Delaney of course um who who's a great botanist as well as a an embroiderer and is famous now for her collages paper collages that she made of plants specimens in the collection of her great friend the Duchess of Portland who I've mentioned already as being responsible for educating Elizabeth Montague when Cook's Cook's went to the Pacific and when Joseph Banks came back he came just he came straight to Balls Road the Duchess's country estate to ask Mary Delaney to make specimens of the plants he brought back from the from the from the South Seas so she was not only celebrated by fellow women but explorers and scientists of the day who we hear so much about in the history books um were actually relying on women's knowledge to record some of their discoveries um he could have chosen many other illustrators but he went straight to Mary Delaney now I'm getting lots and lots of questions here um and one of them is is highly topical because it's asked whether um Elizabeth Montague in her correspondence is anything about vaccinations now I guess vaccinations would be a bit later because it wasn't discovered by Edward Jenner until I think the 19th century but of course they did have inoculations which were introduced to um to to Britain by another Montague Lady Mary Workley Montague who I think Elizabeth I'm right in saying her husband was Elizabeth Montague's cousin but that's an aside tell us can we say anything about Elizabeth Montague and inoculations? Yes well she inoc- she decided to inoculate herself against the smallpox um which her sister caught um and that was a very tragic difference between them in terms of their success in society um and there's a very moving letter in which she describes having to visit her sister after a period of 14 days and remain at six feet distant from her which I think would ring lots of bells for people today um it it was very important for William to not to have their face scarred by by the pox and it ruined their capital in the marriage market just to put it bluntly so it is a fascinating question a topic that I think would reward a whole salon. All right well we'll probably move on then um I've had a question here that we really should have addressed earlier on which is why were they called the Blue Stockings? Who would like to answer that? Emma, I'll pick you. I feel like uh that Elizabeth has an absolute right to this having having worked so extensively on the blue stockings but yes wasn't it something about the informality? Not if I if I'm getting this right the informality of the original gatherings it was actually the men who wore the blue stockings is that right? Yes the men in this a specific man yes Benjamin Stilling Fleet was the first blue stocking and it was if there was something homely about it compared to silk stockings is that right they were worsted stockings stockings? Yes I think the connotation is that he was working in his study and he forgot to change into his white silk silk so I always liken it to the to the fact of someone today going to a gentleman's club in jeans and instead of being turned away he was welcomed by the blues who said come in your blue stockings because we are promoters of a new informality and sociability so and what's fascinating to me is that while the blue stockings were a heterosocial body men and women mixing freely it was a very fashionable term and people longed to be blue stockings but as soon as it became more solidly associated with the female sex and it it did that gradually over time because of Montague's focus on female education it then very quickly became derogatory so it's um a mark of the misogynist misogynist labelling of history that the term has become to represent something far more ambivalent than it did initially. Yes because of course it would have been very rude in those days to speculate about color related stockings. Yes those were not on view. Um now I've got some a series of very serious questions um perhaps perhaps more serious than the than the stockings um and it's really what perhaps we can link them and what was the influence of the sales did the did the opinions um that Elizabeth Montague and her other salon saloniers have did they did they influence policy did they were they taken seriously did they helped to change the laws um and did they all have a similar view or would you imagine that you'd have a whole variety of views in the salons from you know radical to to conservative so it's quite quite a serious one that isn't it I can't think myself that there were any laws that were actually changed of course a lot of the um these women there were related to members of parliament. Yes and also I think it's worth pointing out that one of the crates the first flourishings in blue stocking history came about at the time of the argument for suffrage um at the end of the 19th century so that there are collectors and writers who seek out the example of the blue stockings at that point because women are always in search of models from the past. I think what's more disturbing is the achievements of the blues are so so had such a great impact at the time and yet were quickly forgotten at the big for a large part of the 19th century and it shows that the progress of feminism is never something simply positive and I think that's something that the British Library is brilliant in addressing in its forthcoming exhibition about the history of the progress of women's rights because there have been always been periods at which people have argued strongly for women's right to be included but it's it has also been been periods where she's been where women have been utterly restricted from having a public voice. That's a good point and I'm glad you made that because this whole panel really was inspired by the exhibition that the British Library is putting on which should have been launched this spring but of course other things took over but it will be launched in in October about the same time as the the MPO site and this is called unfinished business the fight for women's rights and I think the exhibition itself is taking a slightly different a slightly later historic time period from the one we've been talking about really from the the middle of the 19th century up until today and we could tell from the title unfinished business that they're they're saying that there are still things to be done today so we've we've sneaked in the blue stockings here really as precursors of those 19th and 20th century women who took up different different causes and so actually I think I might finish by asking each of you in turn to speculate because I've had a very interesting question here which is what if the Montague Salonistas were around today what would they be looking to reform what would they want to change or to influence do we think in today's society or culture Utica? I mean I think the fact that the salon you know operated in the way that it did and it was so in a way it was exclusive but also inviting it was intimate but it had a global outlook and so I suppose one can compare it in a way to the sort of new digital culture in a way that's that's that's starting where you know very much like our digital salon at the moment right and you might find you might you might find more sort of these small focus groups or small discussion groups you know that are coming up and and taking up a cause and I think very much the environment would be one very primary thing on their mind and I'm sure they would be very very vocal about that as well. I'm sure that's right Emma. Yes I mean they were women with great of great capacity and there's no doubt that Elizabeth Montague herself would have made a brilliant prime minister but I think that they were incredibly good at forging alliances with men who did have actual social and political power and so I think indirectly they did have quite a big impact on policy sometimes in government probably but also the tone of public life and I think that one cause they would have embraced very wholeheartedly is the everyday sexism movement begun by Laura Bates. I think they would have they're very concerned about equality gender equality in language and and I think that's what comes across very much in the correspondence I think it will it will demonstrate you know this wonderful sort of innovative um equal discourse between male and female intellectuals that really they established in a central way in British culture. Elizabeth? Yes I think I'd follow on from Emma there and agree that um they were primarily concerned with promoting judgment and critical this critical intelligence through education and writing. I think for women they really highlighted the connection between writing and rights that importance of having a voice depends upon a critical judgment. What's fascinating about Montague is that she managed to combine this with quite a material brilliance and splendor. I'm not sure what they would think of the inequality of today's society and the fact that two-thirds of the world don't have access to education. I think that's a very important question for feminists today and global feminism is about recognizing those inequalities which haven't been addressed but at her historical moment I think Montague was a great figure for pointing out the importance of language in in law Mary Wilson Cross' vindication of the rights of women was one of many texts she wrote including an autobiographical novel in which she tells the story of her life as an individual. I think that the the great emphasis on enlightenment, selfhood that Montague is also fascinated by is something that these women could can teach us today when we're thinking about modern feminism. That seems to me like a very good place to stop. I'm sorry for all of those who have put in questions that we haven't had time to answer but I really appreciate all the contributions that everybody has made that enabled us to hold this discussion and I am very grateful to our panelists Utica, Emma and Elizabeth for joining us today and thank you for all of those of you in the audience as well. Goodbye. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Thank you to the brilliant speakers in our digital salon to Lizzie, Joanna, Utica and Emma and thank you to you for joining us. Please make a donation to the British Library if you can and be sure to check out the rest of our event program.