1984 in the Making, or Getting to Know Big Brother in Six Pictures
By HUNG Chao-Kuei on Monday, October 22 2007, 20:39 - Permalink
I wrote an article "1984 in the Making: Stealthy Invasion of Consumer Rights and Privacy by ICT Corporations" and submitted it to a conference in Taiwan to be held Nov 11, 2007. (A suitable translation of the conference name could be "Information Science and Society".) The paper talks about the well-known analogy of comparing the current state of computing to George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 and explains the interplay of Digital Rights Management, Trusted Computing, and the anticircumvention provision of Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I don't get a chance to talk but will have a poster space to display my article, or some picture related to it.
I spent an entire day to draw this picture using inkscape. I think it would be a pity if I show it only to the conference attendees. So here it is. I am grateful to have found nice drawings from wikimedia, such as Butters, squirrel, and kiwi, to include in my drawing. I never got good grades in drawing in the elementary school, and I had seldom drawn between then and 1996, when I started advocating FLOSS and the danger of proprietary file formats. By that time I was too old to learn good drawing. So please excuse the crude quality. I hope you enjoy the ideas in the drawing, especially the text in the underwear of the Lord of Authors. You need to save the svg file and zoom in in inkscape in order to read it. But then you would give him a very good reason to shoot you using the DMCA gun. You have been warned. BTW, I feel a strong urge to draw a handcuff on the male genital instead of on the hand. because it really rings very well with Big Brother's command: "Thou Shalt not Reproduce without permission". But I don't have the guts to do so. :-)
This picture is distributed under the creative-commons attribution share-alike license. You are invited to improve on it. I would appreciate if you let me know. Please also show it to the poor souls who don't know that their computers report back to the Big Brother once every two weeks. Your voice (and her voice, and his; our voices together) is the key to unlock the handcuffs that the Big Brother has placed on the consumers' and programmers' hands.