Cory Doctorow is one of those people who's career crosses several fields. He's a Hugo Award-winning science fiction author, co-founder of Boing Boing, former Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and advocate of liberalizing copyright laws. His latest book is Checkpoint Capitalism. Nancy and I remember him behind the counter at Bakka, Toronto's science fiction bookstore.
He's now well enough known that the New Yorker has favoured him with an interview. As you'd expect from the New Yorker, it's long, wide ranging, and deep.
If there were one thing that you wish more people would think about when it comes to where tech is going, what would that be?
When we design a computer that treats its user or owner as its adversary, we lay the groundwork for unimaginable acts of oppression and terror. Here’s an example: in 2005, it was revealed that Sony BMG had shipped millions of audio CDs that had a rootkit on them that, when you put it in the CD drive on your computer, silently patched your computer’s kernel so that it could no longer see programs that began with “$sys$”—that little string of characters. And then they installed a program that started with that string which broke CD-ripping, so you could never rip a CD again. They didn’t want you to uninstall that program, which is why they modified your kernel for that. This was radioactively illegal. They infected between two and three hundred thousand computers. They settled with the F.T.C. for a giant amount of money. Every virus writer in the world immediately pre-penned their virus to “$sys$” and made it invisible to your computer and its antivirus software.
Wow.
This is 2005. So we are now fifteen years into this and we still have car companies, phone companies, med-tech companies all building devices that are designed so that the owner cannot override the manufacturer’s choices. You have HP shipping updates to printers that update them so they can detect the latest third-party ink cartridges. And everyone has followed them because, of course, we have market concentration, so there’s only four printer companies. They all do this now. They all have zero-touch, no-user-intervention firmware updates that could be used by malicious parties to do incredibly terrible things to your network, to you, to your data.
There’s a guy named Ang Cui. He runs a thing called Red Balloon Security. But, in 2011, he was a grad student at N.Y.U., and he gave a security presentation at the Chaos Communication Congress called “Print Me if You Dare,” where he showed that he could update the firmware of an HP printer by sending it a poison document. You just give, like, the H.R. department a document called resume.doc. And when they print it the printer’s firmware is updated silently and undetectably: it scans all future documents for Social Security numbers, and credit-card numbers, and sends them to him. It opens a reverse shell to his computer, through the corporate firewall, and then it scans all the computers on your lan for known vulnerabilities and takes them over. It was just a little proof of concept; he never released it.
