![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Musings on information...
May. 14th, 2009 02:02 pmThere's a buzz on the 'net today, expressing a modicum of surprise that Amazon's Kindle implements so-called "remote kill" flags, one of which has been shown to disable the hardware's text-to-speech function on a book-by-book basis. (The text-to-speech feature has had the Author's Guild - among others - crying "Foul!" on copyright grounds, and Random House has apparently pulled the TTS plug on a number of its offerings, post sale.)
This has led people to wonder what other goodies are hidden under the hood of the Kindle. Is there, ask some, a "read only once" flag? Perhaps a "cannot page backward" flag?
Moi, I entertain thoughts along different lines. I recall something I read a long time ago - I think it was something of Solzhenitsyn's - to the effect that after Lavrenti Beria (one of the most powerful of Stalin's lieutenants and the man in charge of the Gulag) was executed after Stalin's death, the editors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia meticulously sent every encyclopedia subscriber three pages of information - about the Bering Strait, among other subjects - to replace the three-page article that had been published about Beria, with said superseded article to be sent back after literally being physically removed from the respective volume (preferably with a sharp razor).
Then I think of poor Winston Smith, in Orwell's 1984, the worker bee at the Ministry of Truth, whose job it was to, um, revise historical documents to bring the past into conformance with what The Party says is true today.
And I wonder: Wouldn't a Kindle, with its joined-at-the-hip link to the ubiquitous data network, make it ever so easy to remotely and quietly implement such revisions? I would think this is a more credible threat to the commonweal than publishers suddenly deciding to "expire" one's access to books downloaded onto one's Kindle. (Something like that would be a boneheaded business move, but... given the government's recent interest in bailing out industries whose strong suit has been the boneheaded business move, perhaps I am mistaken in thinking it unlikely.)
Another reason not to have bought the Kindle.
Cheers...
This has led people to wonder what other goodies are hidden under the hood of the Kindle. Is there, ask some, a "read only once" flag? Perhaps a "cannot page backward" flag?
Moi, I entertain thoughts along different lines. I recall something I read a long time ago - I think it was something of Solzhenitsyn's - to the effect that after Lavrenti Beria (one of the most powerful of Stalin's lieutenants and the man in charge of the Gulag) was executed after Stalin's death, the editors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia meticulously sent every encyclopedia subscriber three pages of information - about the Bering Strait, among other subjects - to replace the three-page article that had been published about Beria, with said superseded article to be sent back after literally being physically removed from the respective volume (preferably with a sharp razor).
Then I think of poor Winston Smith, in Orwell's 1984, the worker bee at the Ministry of Truth, whose job it was to, um, revise historical documents to bring the past into conformance with what The Party says is true today.
And I wonder: Wouldn't a Kindle, with its joined-at-the-hip link to the ubiquitous data network, make it ever so easy to remotely and quietly implement such revisions? I would think this is a more credible threat to the commonweal than publishers suddenly deciding to "expire" one's access to books downloaded onto one's Kindle. (Something like that would be a boneheaded business move, but... given the government's recent interest in bailing out industries whose strong suit has been the boneheaded business move, perhaps I am mistaken in thinking it unlikely.)
Another reason not to have bought the Kindle.
Cheers...
