OpenVizsla – Open Source Hardware

USB Protocol Analyzer.

Which is pretty cool, because if there’s one thing I hate with a fiery bloody passion, it’s anything proprietary.

I need to control my video camera from a little laptop – so I buy a little laptop, and the proprietary software says it can’t install because the screen is too small – so I need to temporarily VGA it to a bigger monitor… but I can’t because those fucking cock-wits at HP have made the VGA out a proprietary cable, without providing you with the cable – so you have to ring up HP to “buy it”, but instead you get passed around a load of people and eventually wind up with someone who doesn’t pick up the fucking phone.

So yes – the project above is probably breaking the DMCA, but the DMCA deserves to be broken and the people who lobbied for it and passed it into law deserve to be thrown off the Tarpeian rock and eaten by alligators and toddlers.

And they will be. Oh yes, they will be.

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But that aside, this is a neat little project – and it’s an example of… what? Something. It’s an example of something.

It’s an example of the abundance/scarcity divide not just being a pattern in the wallpaper, but being an actual, real, unspannable chasm… and this unspannable chasm isn’t just a biproduct of what’s going on, it IS what’s going on. It is the fundamental thing that is happening. There has been a shift in the technology, allowing this polarity – and now this polarity is driving the technology.

The killer app of Apple’s stuff is that greed-heads can control information, and create fake-scarcity. The killer app of the open web… of open-everything, is that it provides specific tools to break fake scarcity.

That’s is THE killer ecosystemic-enabler of Android – people will buy Android specifically so they can break IP law… because IP law deserves to be broken. IP law is wrong – it serves wealthy corporations who have shown total disregard for the democratic integrity of the nations that host them – so it’s a moral imperative now that they be destroyed. The fact that Murdoch and Steve Jobs teamed up recently, really ought to come as no surprise to anyone. They’re vectors of the same mental-illness. Scarcity. Control. Prevention. Prohibition.

And sometimes I worry you know? The web has been attacked a lot this year, and freedom generally is being attacked everywhere… but I sometimes get these fleeting flashes of just how big, and how powerful the memosphere really is… we’re going to sweep everything before us… and what was once just a hey-neato passing novelty – entertainment… is now war.

Still whatever. Stephen Fry told me about the OpenVizsla thing – saying he’d invested in it, and that maybe we should to. So I… will.