Since my post on non-fungible tokens last month, I've come to the radical and totally shocking conclusion that I personally don't care if corporations start using NFTs as a Digital Restrictions Management scheme to further lock down their products. Actually, I take that back: I hope they do, and quickly, because the more restricted their products are, whether software or music or games, the less appealing said products will be for the end consumer and thus the less money said companies will make.

I follow a great deal of Tumblr accounts without having an account myself due to this funny little thing called RSS. Over the past month, one of them, which I followed for the occult memes, has been throwing a shitfit over the public backlash from their planned NFT collection. It turns out that almost nobody actually wants to pony up large chunks of money for the privilege of... accessing a full-quality GIF in a digital locker.

And why should they? It's not as if the art, from what the preview GIFs show me, is of high artistic merit. Why would someone go through the hassle of setting up a crypto wallet, paying the money, and figuring out what convoluted authentication scheme the digital locker uses to access the art just to... claim ownership over a chunk of ones and zeros? Thanks to the analog hole, either the value would tank when the buyer tried to show off the GIF they'd bought as it would be the full-quality one and now available to everyone to see and steal, or whatever site they uploaded it to would compress it, in which case there would be no point to having bought it as they could have just used the preview one to get the same end quality.

This person losing a large chunk of their followers from what they perceived to be as "selling out" is, to me, a microcosm of what is to come if corporations start trying to use NFTs as a DRM mechanism. Any PC gamer knows what a hassle existing DRM methods like Denuvo are, especially when trying to get games working on any operating system that isn't Microshaft Wangblows. There comes a point where the software's attempts to ensure it isn't an "unauthorized" copy are so intrusive- remember the Sony rootkit?- that it becomes more of a hassle to tolerate it than to learn how to use a less-restrictive alternative. Even the most dedicated "bugman" has a limit. (That is, when one is aware an alternative exists...) I originally learned how to use Linux because my Windows install had found a way to break itself, and fixing it every day would have been more effort than just learning how to run Ubuntu, even though I was terrified of breaking my computer at the time due to my then-incompetence. The more opaque and DRM-ridden a product is, the closer to "path of least resistance" a pirated version of said product with the DRM removed or an alternative that never had the DRM becomes.

Rejecting intrusive DRM need not mean a loss of revenue for artists. Before my parents finally allowed me access to my bank account in 2019 (which had existed before then, but they hadn't allowed me to withdraw any money...?) and I got my first real job later that year, my consumptive habits were limited to whatever I could squeeze past my parents' censors or what I could acquire on my own for free. Any music that I could not torrent, any video games that I could not find an emulator (or, later, a hacked console) for, any books I could not find on eBook Bike (which later went to shit when they required registration to download) or Z-Library, I had to go without. This restriction led me to places like Bandcamp, which had a plethora of music free to download from every genre I could possibly think of. There was (and still is) no DRM to be had, just an optional prompt to donate whatever money one thought the album was worth.

And, as it turned out, many of those albums which were free to me ended up becoming some of my favorites:

• this is dead art, this is dead time, but we may still live yet by Cassus
• Things Are Getting Better But I am Still Dead Inside by I Don't Want To Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
• Always Already by la luna
• the Piri Reis / They Sleep We Live split (which may sound familiar...)
• Invitation To The Voyage by Setsuko Suwa
• i'd rather forget by Treehouses

As soon as I had access to my money, I made sure to give some to these artists in appreciation for the many hundreds upon hundreds of hours I'd spent listening to them over the years. And although many of them have fallen into hiatus, I am still finding new music, new books, new games for free to this day. And as for the games and books I had pirated? The ones I ended up liking, I bought physical copies of, money they would have never received if I hadn't had the opportunity to experience them for free first.

There is a world of art that exists outside DRM, outside the purview of corporations. There is a Second Realm waiting to destroy the First by making it obsolete and irrelevant. And it exists now. And if corporations, and the occasional indie artist, want to shoot themselves in both feet with NFTs thinking them an impenetrable form of DRM, I say: let them. Let them lock down their works so tightly that they become utterly inaccessible. Let them miss out on the money they would have earned from now-disgruntled customers. Let the corporations destroy themselves in building a dam to maximize every dollar flowing to them only to find their river is drying up. Let that money flow instead to those who respect computing freedom, to those not hamstrung by corporate interests. I would rather live in a creative culture with millions upon millions of indie artists who make a few things out of love than a single corporate powerhouse with a monopoly, a monoculture.

This tutorial assumes you already have a functioning Node.js and Caddy installation.

1. Install Oasis.

Test the installation by running node . (yes, including the period).

• If the output stops after a few lines and isn't an obvious Node error, hit Control and C at the same time to exit; you're ready for the systemd file.
• If you get an error about port 3000 already being in use, use the command node . --port PORTNUMBER instead, where PORTNUMBER is any open port you want.

If your instance immediately throws an error about ssb.friends.get:

2. Prepare the systemd daemon file.

Edit /lib/systemd/system/oasis.service as root with your favorite text editor. Paste the following:

					[Unit]
					Description=Oasis client for Secure Scuttlebutt
					After=network.target
					
					[Service]
					User=YourUsername
					Group=YourUsername
					ExecStart=/path/to/your/node/binary . --port 8787
					WorkingDirectory=/path/to/where/you/cloned/oasis/
					TimeoutStopSec=5s
					LimitNOFILE=1048576
					PrivateTmp=true
					ProtectSystem=full
					
					[Install]
					WantedBy=multi-user.target
				

Replace /path/to/your/node/binary with whatever comes up when you run which node. You may need to change this if you update Node.

3. Edit your Caddyfile. (This will probably also require root.)

yourdomain.tld {
	reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:PORTNUMBER {
		header_up Host 127.0.0.1
		header_up Referer http://localhost
	}
	basicauth * {
		AnyUsernameYouWant EXTREMELYLONGCADDYHASHHERE
	}
}
				

EXTREMELYLONGCADDYHASHHERE is used instead of an actual password so you don't have cleartext credentials hanging around. Generate this with caddy hash-password. Make sure you save your actual password in a password manager, as you can't reverse a hash!

The header_up lines are there to trick Oasis into thinking it is running on a local machine, as it (very aggressively) wants to be. Normally this would be true, as Secure Scuttlebutt is peer-to-peer and intended to be run on a personal device that may see intermittent internet connectivity. However, if you're looking at this tutorial, you probably want to host a public peer as an actually functioning alternative to a pub or room.

4. Get everything running.

The "analog hole" is the last inevitable loophole in DRM. We humans (or those stuck in human bodies) are analog creatures whose brains cannot run DRM, and so anything digital must be somehow converted into analog signals- music to soundwaves, pictures to an array of pixels on a screen- before it can be experienced. And as long as we remain analog without computer chips in our brains, this hole will never be patched, meaning any (noninterative) piece of media can be copied in some form. Maybe it means plugging a phone playing Spotify or some other streaming service into an aux cord and that into a computer's microphone port. Maybe it means pulling out a cheap old point-and-shoot camera and taking a picture or video of one's screen. There may be some loss of fidelity or quality along the way, but something can always be extracted beyond the reach of DRM.

This is the main problem with NFTs as they stand today. Because an NFT is essentially a line in a blockchain somewhere that says that a particular wallet holds a particular integer. And someone, somewhere, one day decided to make this integer represent the hash of a file, because blockchains usually don't have the capacity to hold the raw image data in a single entry. This means the file has to be hosted elsewhere in order for anyone to see or care about it. And, to be seen, the file has to be converted into an... analog format. Meaning, if I don't give a shit about the "ownership" of an NFT, I can just right-click the image or video or whatever, or take a screenshot or recording of it, and have a copy of it on my hard drive without having to spend any money.

The value of an NFT isn't in the JPEG or whatever in and of itself because of the analog hole. They're just JPEGs on a screen. And no sane person is going to buy an image that they can right-click and reproduce to infinity. The "value" comes from what the NFT represents: a tradeable asset. However, almost all of the NFTs I've ever seen don't actually seem to have any... function beyond being a reference to an image that one can waste Ethereum gas money moving around to other people. And I, and I suspect most of the people reading this, don't put any monetary value on a JPEG in and of itself. But what about a JPEG that was a token, a proof of ownership, of... an account slot in an online game? A tradeable item in an MMORPG? Because games are interactive, they are immune to the analog hole, and thus an online game would be a perfect medium for using NFTs to supplant its in-game economy. Due to the append-only nature of every blockchain I've ever seen, the NFTs would be nigh-immune to hacks to duplicate items or save editing or other methods of cheating.

The uses of NFTs could extend well beyond the gaming sphere. What about proof of holding a ticket to a conference or concert? An alternative to traditional notaries for real-world contracts between people? Land deeds or other proof of purchases that would benefit from being publicly auditable? Anything that needs artificial scarcity or cryptographic proof of having happened or being owned by a person in a transferrable format could theoretically be made into an NFT. Only once more applications of NFT technology like this are made as accessible to the average layperson as "JPEG trading platforms" like OpenSea are will NFTs grow beyond their reputation of blatant ape-themed Picrew knockoffs.

The phrase "considered harmful" in regards to computer science originated in a 1968 essay by Edsger W. Dijkstra, in which he argued that the "go to" statement was harmful because it too easily invited programmers to make an absolute mess of their code. That means, for more than fifty years, computer nerds have been arbitrarily deeming software they don't like, whether they can articulate a proper argument (like the above) or not, "harmful".

But what does it mean to be "harmful", anyway? Let's open a dictionary (or just dictionary.com) and see:

harmful: adj. causing or capable of causing harm; injurious: a harmful idea; a harmful habit.

So a piece of "harmful" software would be one that caused the user harm or is capable of doing so. I specify the user because software meant to facilitate piracy might "harm" a corporation's profits, or a tool to break through firewalls might "harm" a control freak's attempt to filter the outside world, but I do not think a reasonable person would consider any of those programs harmful. The user in this sense must also be extended to the computer the user, well, uses, as impairing a person's tools would also impair their ability to complete whatever tasks they were using the tools for, thus harming the user albeit indirectly.

Right and away, we can consider all malware and viruses to be "harmful" under this definition, for hopefully obvious reasons. If a program is so poorly written that it results in catastrophic data loss or leaks information to parties said information was not intended for, it is harmful because it has done tangible harm to the user. But much like trying to determine what's bloat and what's not, the waters turn murky from here. What makes a program harmful, if not for its actual capacity to do harm to the user? According to the types of people who unironically still use "considered harmful" in Current Year, some of the reasons include:

• complexity of the code
• number of lines of code
• using a programming language the person doesn't like
• having not enough features
• having too many features
• making installation easy for the end user

systemd is widely considered harmful by much of the Linux community, and yet I find it worlds easier to write a service file to daemonize something for systemd than a startup script for any other init system. Much ado has been made about systemd's supposed myriad bugs, and yet I have never personally encountered any of them. systemd has never caused me any harm, so how could I honestly consider it "harmful"?

JavaScript is also similarly maligned. It is responsible for much of the corporatization of the internet, facilitating "rich user experiences" like being able to buy things without going into a physical store or at the expense of also making possible targeted advertisements, legion browser exploits, cryptocurrency miners, bloated "news" sites that refuse to show any text to, well, text-based browsers or those without JavaScript support... JavaScript demonstrably does the end user much harm when opening only a few tabs can slow their entire machine down to a crawl, but it also means I can run college-mandated software like Microsoft Office without having to actually install it on my computer. (Which, since Office is perennially allergic to WINE, would mean having to install Windows 10 as well.) If I can enable JavaScript when I need to do the aforementioned college tasks and keep it disabled the rest of the time, am I really harmed by it? Has my computing freedom really been damaged?

However, I would consider Discord harmful because it demonstrably causes harm to the end user:

• it collects logs of all the system processes running, a MAJOR privacy concern
• it is proprietary software, meaning it is nigh-impossible to verify it doesn't cause the end user harm
• it often requires phone verification, which harms people who don't have phones or use cellular providers blacklisted or not supported by Discord
• "servers" (a false term invented by Discord to mean a collection of related chatrooms) are often shut down without notice, meaning, since both Discord and Reddit have long supplanted the traditional internet forum, information is often lost to time

Both of my brothers and my one "real-life" friend use Discord. I have tried time and time again to explain why Discord is spyware meant to suck advertising data from them and that they should use software that respects them, but their response is only ever "but all my friends are on it".

Discord is harming them, but they don't consider it harm because their values are different. A "starvingdev" (the opposite of a "soydev"; one who seeks minimalism at all costs) considers Python harmful because it's "slow" and "bloated", but I do not consider Python a harm to me as it enables me to write software I otherwise would not have as I don't have the attention span to learn a "real" programming language.

I'd rather spend that time writing poetry, or watering my garden, or riding my bike...

A Windows user is consistently harmed by Microsoft due to the constant telemetry that cannot be disabled and the updates that take forever to install and, well, Windows just being a pile of shit that crashes a lot. They might concede that having to sit through blue screen after blue screen or update after update is a harm as it prevents them from using their computer for what they bought it for, but I would argue that a Windows user happily making music or Photoshopping to their heart's content is doing them a lot less harm than forcing them to use Linux and forgo the programs they need for their hobbies due to no Linux support for them. In the same vein, I am much happier when my computer setup is Debian set to boot straight to a TTY (as opposed to a graphical session) and I can write in a Byobu session with no tray icons or notifications or other distractions (caused by the computer, anyway) and can startx into i3 for playing games than when I am forced to use a Windows computer for a program with no Linux equivalent, constantly nagged every five minutes with update popups and Cortana begging me to sign in. We have different values and different needs and are harmed when our computers prevent us from fulfilling these.

The purpose of a computer is to assist the user in completing the tasks they need to do in their life. For a computer program to obstruct the user in this pursuit, or to exploit them in the process, is to do the user harm. That is, I believe, what "considered harmful" should mean, not anything that falls outside of the cult of ultra-minimalism.