Chapter 63 12.3 Super spread

The water and electricity we use every day are charged according to the consumption.But metering itself is not an obvious and easy thing to do.Thomas Edison's amazing electrical appliances weren't useful until factories and homes were electrified.Thus, at the height of his career, Edison turned his attention from electronics design to electrical transmission networks.At the beginning, many questions were left unanswered, such as how to generate electricity (AC or DC?), how to transmit electricity, and how to charge, etc.In terms of fees, Edison tends to adopt a fixed fee method.This is also the method preferred by most information providers now.For example, readers pay the same price for a newspaper no matter how much they read.This is true for cable TV, books, or computer software.All for a flat fee for all the content you can use.

Therefore, Edison introduced a fixed fee for electricity use-as long as you have electricity, you have to pay a fixed fee, otherwise you don't have to pay a penny.In his view, the cost of counting different electricity consumption is higher than the cost of different electricity consumption.The biggest hurdle, though, is how to measure electricity usage.His General Electric Lighting Company in New York charged customers a flat fee for the first six months of operation.But, to Edison's chagrin, this approach was not economically viable.As a last resort, Edison came up with an expedient measure.His remedy is the electric meter.But his meter was neither stable nor practical.It will freeze in winter, and sometimes go back, users can't read the meter (and don't trust the meter reader sent by the company).It wasn't until a decade after the municipal grid came online that another inventor came up with a reliable electricity meter.Today, apart from this way, we hardly consider other ways to buy electricity.

A hundred years later, the information industry still lacks information meters.George Gilder, a high-tech choker, phrased the problem this way: "You don't want to have to pay for the entire reservoir every time you get thirsty, you want to pay for just the glass in front of you." Indeed, why pay for the entire ocean (all information) when all you want is a glass of water (partial information)?If you have an information meter, there is absolutely no reason to do this.Entrepreneur Peter Sprague thinks he's invented just that. "We can use encryption to enforce metering of information," he said.This "information tap" is actually a tiny chip that emits a small amount of information from a large pile of encrypted data.Sprague invented an encryption device that charged $1 per page for a CD-ROM containing 100,000 pages of legal documents instead of $2,000 for the entire copy.This way, the user only pays for what she uses, and can only use what she pays for.

Sprague's approach is to make each page of the document must be decrypted before it can be read.Users can select the scope of information to browse from the directory.She can read abstracts or reviews for a small fee.She then selects the full text she wants, which is decrypted by the "distributor".Charge a small fee (maybe 50 cents) per decryption.The fee is recorded by the metering chip in the dispenser and deducted from her prepayment (this prepayment is also stored in the metering chip), just like using a postage meter to distribute postage bills and automatically deduct money.When the credit is depleted, she can call the service center, which sends an encrypted message, transmitted via a modem, to the metering chip in her computer, which refills her account.There is now $300 on the distributor. When buying information, the $300 can be calculated by page, by paragraph, or by the stock price of each article. It depends on how finely the information seller divides the information. up.

Information is extremely easy to copy, and information owners want to be able to selectively disconnect information.What Sprague's encrypted metering device does is make the two not conflict.By metering information in chunks, the device allows information to flow freely and everywhere—like water in a city plumbing.Metering makes information a public supply like water and electricity. Cypherpunks point out that this doesn't stop hackers from intercepting information for free.The video encryption system used to pay for satellite TV programming was broken within weeks of being operational.Although the manufacturer claims that the encryption-metering chip is uncrackable, there is a cracking industry that has made a fortune exploiting the loopholes around the encryption code (these cracking industries are established on Indian reservations - that's a long story) .A pirate would first find a validly registered decoder box -- say, in a hotel room -- and clone the ID on that decoder to another chip.The customer can send his decoder to the reservation for "repair", and when the new decoder is sent back, the ID on the hotel decoder box is cloned.Television programs are broadcast in such a way that cloned viewers cannot be detected.In short, the way to hack this system is not decryption, but manipulation between the password and the device attached to it.

There are no unhackable systems.But cracking an encrypted system takes skill and effort.Although the information meter cannot stop thieves or hackers, it can eliminate the influence of free reaping and the natural human desire to share.Video-encrypted satellite TV systems eliminate the massive consumer piracy that plagued satellite TV before encryption and still plagues both the software and photocopying worlds.Encryption technology has turned piracy into a cumbersome task, unlike before, where a fool can do it with an empty disk.Satellite encryption generally works because encryption always wins.

Peter Sprague's password-meter allows Alice to copy as many encrypted discs as she wants, and she only pays for what she uses anyway.Fundamentally, crypto-meters separate the payment process from the copying process. Enforcing metering of information with encryption works because it does not limit the desire to copy information.Other things being equal, a small piece of information is replicated across the available network until it fills the entire network.Driven by vitality, every fact naturally diffuses as much as possible.The more "adaptable" a fact is - the more interesting or useful it is - the more widely it will be disseminated.Ideas or memes (i.e. memes) spread through a population in much the same way that genes spread through a population.Both genes and “memes” depend on a network of replicating machines—cells, brains, or computer terminals.Such a network consists of a bunch of nodes flexibly connected together, each of which can replicate (either identical or varied) information from another node.A population of butterflies has the same appeal as a batch of email messages: reproduce or die.Information wants to be copied.

Our digital society has built a super-copy network composed of countless personal fax machines, library photocopiers and computer hard drives; our information society is also like a huge aggregate form of copiers.But we don't allow this super machine to copy.To everyone's amazement, information generated in one corner can spread to other corners very quickly.Our previous economic system was based on the scarcity of items, so we have hitherto fought against the inherent diffusion of information by controlling every copying activity.We have a giant parallel replicator trying to kill the vast majority of replicators.As with other Puritan regimes, this doesn't work.Information wants to be copied.

"Let the information flow freely!" cried Tim May.However, this "freedom" is no longer the meaning of Stewart Brand's oft-quoted adage "information should be free", but has become a more subtle meaning: no chains and constraints.Information wants to flow and copy freely.In a networked world of decentralized nodes, success belongs to those who conform to the idea of ​​information replication and flow. Sprague's encrypted meter exploits the difference between paying and copying. "It's easy to count how many times a piece of software has been called, but it's hard to count how many times it's been copied." This is said by software architect Brad Cox.In a passage posted online, he wrote:

Software differs from physical objects in that its reproduction cannot be monitored fundamentally, but its use can be monitored.So why not build an information age market economy around the difference between an information age item and a manufacturing age item?If the charging mechanism is based on monitoring the use of the software in the computer, then the sellers can completely dispense with copyright protection. Cox is a software developer whose specialty is object-oriented programming.In addition to the advantage of reducing vulnerabilities mentioned above, object-oriented programming has two other major improvements compared with traditional software.First of all, object-oriented programming provides users with a more flexible application with more collaboration between different tasks, just like the furniture in the house is living instead of fixed.Second, object-oriented programming allows developers to reuse software modules, whether they are written by themselves or purchased from others.To build a database, an object-oriented designer like Cox takes sorting algorithms, field management, table generation, and icon handling, and puts them together rather than completely rewriting them.Cox wrote a really cool set of objects, sold it to Steve Jobs, and used it on the NeXT machine, but, as a regular business, it was too slow to sell code modules.It's like peddling doggerel on the street.If you want to recover the cost of writing code, you will not find many buyers if you sell the code directly, and it is too difficult to monitor if you sell copies.But if users can generate income every time a code is activated, the author of the code can make a living writing code.

While exploring the market possibility of "per use" sales of objects, Cox discovers the natural nature of networked information: make copies circulate and charge per use."The premise is that copy protection is a completely wrong idea for an intangible, easily copyable commodity like software," he said. Freely distribute, freely obtain. Encourage people to actively download software from the Internet, copy it to friends, or spam it to people they don't even know. Spread my software from satellites! Please!" Cox also added (in response to Peter Sprague, who was surprisingly unfamiliar with each other's work), that "the reason for this generosity is that such software is actually A 'metered piece' that seems to have a string attached to it, allowing sales rebates and software distribution to proceed independently." "This approach is called superdistribution," Cox said, using a term Japanese researchers use for a similar approach.They designed that method to track the flow of software across the network.He continued, "Like superconductors, hyperdistribution allows information to flow freely, unencumbered by copy protection or piracy." This model, devised by the music and broadcasting industries, successfully balances copyright and usage rights.Musicians can not only sell their works as "copy", but also sell them to radio stations and collect money for each "use".An unmonitored deluge of free music copies flowed from musicians' managers to radio stations.Radio stations choose from them and only pay royalties for the music they play, and the two organizations that represent musicians, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and the Broadcast Music Corporation (BMI), count the broadcasts. ). The Japan Electronics Industry Development Association (JEIDA), Japan's computer makers' federation, has developed a chip and protocols that allow every Apple computer on the Internet to freely and freely copy software while metering usage rights.According to Mori Ryoichi, the person in charge of the association, "Every computer can be regarded as a radio station. What broadcasts is not the software itself, but the use of the software. There is only one 'listener'." In thousands of freely available In software, each time an Apple computer 'runs' a piece of software or a piece of software, it triggers a royalty.Commercial radio and television stations provide the "proof of existence" for the hyperdistribution system.The system distributes copies freely, and radio and television stations pay only for those copies they use.Musicians are quite happy if stations make copies of their tapes and distribute them to other stations (“Let the bits flow freely!”), because it increases the chances that stations will use their music. The future envisioned by the Japan Electronics Industry Development Association is that software should penetrate unhindered in the network without various restrictions on software copyright or mobility.Like Cox, Sprague, and the cypherpunks, they expected public-key cryptography to keep metering information private and tamper-proof when it was transmitted to credit card centrals.Peter Sprague puts it unequivocally, “Cryptometry is the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers for intellectual property.” Cox has circulated a pamphlet on superdistribution around the Internet, which sums up the advantages aptly: At present, the easy copyability of software is a burden, but super distribution makes it an asset; currently, software vendors have to spend a lot of money to let users know their software, and super distribution throws the software into the world and gives it to themselves. advertising. The pay-per-view conundrum haunts the information economy.In the past, companies have tried unsuccessfully to sell movies, databases, or music by views or usage, costing them billions of dollars.This problem still exists.The problem is that people don't want to pay up front for information that they haven't seen, thinking that it might not be useful to them.Likewise, people are reluctant to pay for something after they've seen it, because that's when their intuition often "comes true": they can live without it.Can you imagine being asked for money after watching a movie?Medical knowledge is the only kind of information that receives money before it is seen, because the purchaser thinks he cannot live without it. Usually, this problem can be solved by trial.A haunting trailer can convince people to pay for a ticket before seeing it.Software can be borrowed from friends for trial use; books or magazines can be browsed in bookstores. Another way is to lower the entry price.Newspapers are cheap, so we buy them first and then read them.What is really creative about information metering is that it provides us with two solutions: one is to record the amount of data usage (traffic), and the other is to reduce the price of information flow.Encryption-metering works by breaking expensive large chunks of data into inexpensive smaller chunks.And people are ready to pay up front for such a small amount of low-priced information, especially when it is deducted from the account in an invisible way. The fine-grained nature of the crypto-metering approach excites Sprague.I asked him to give an example of how subtle this approach could be, and he immediately came up with one, obviously he'd been thinking about it for a while: "Let's say you're in your own home in Telluride, Colorado. , want to write nasty jokes. Assuming you can write one a day, we may find 10,000 people in the world who are willing to pay 10 cents a day to see your jokes. In this way, we can collect 365,000 a year U.S. dollars, of which 120,000 will be given to you, which is enough for you to spend in your lifetime.” No matter how obscene or cleverly written a worthless joke is, you won’t be able to find it on any market other than the Internet, and it’s not worth selling.Maybe the whole book is possible—that is, compiling the dirty jokes into a collection.A single article is impossible.But in the online marketplace, even a meme—with as much information as a stick of chewing gum—is worth making and selling. Sprague cites other examples of fine-grained transactions that can be done in markets.Some things he's willing to pay for right now: "I'll pay 25 cents a month for the weather in Prague; I'll buy my stock price updates for 50 cents a stock; I'll pay $12 a week." Buy stock reviews; since I'm constantly stuck in Chicago, I need constantly updated O'Hare airport congestion reports for $1 a month; plus, I'm willing to pay 5 cents a day for an update of the Scary Haga comic. "The current state of all these things is that they are either distributed randomly, or they are combined and sold at a high price.The network intermediary market proposed by Spreger can "categorize and price" these data, and then select a small section at a reasonable price and send it to desktop terminals or handheld mobile devices.Encryption measures information and prevents you from stealing small pieces of data that would otherwise not be worth protecting or selling.Essentially, an ocean of information flows by you, but you only pay for the scoop you drink. At the moment, this particular information isolation technology exists in the form of a $95 circuit board that plugs into a PC and connects to a phone line.To encourage a major computer maker like Hewlett-Packard to incorporate such hardware boards into its pipeline, Sprague's company, Wave Inc., gives the manufacturer 1 percent of the encryption system's revenue.The first market is lawyers, "because," he said, "lawyers typically spend $400 a month on information searches." Sprague's next move is to integrate encryption-metering Circuitry and modems are compressed onto a $20 microchip that can go into pagers, VCRs, phones, radios, and anything else that distributes information.Often, this lofty ideal might be seen as the pipe dream of an overly optimistic rookie inventor.But Peter Sprague is the chairman and founder of National Semiconductor, one of the world's major semiconductor manufacturers.He is to the silicon wafer industry what Henry Ford is to the automobile industry.He's no cypherpunk.If anyone knows how to launch a revolutionary economy on the tip of a needle, it's probably him.