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"Information wants to be free"
Altalicious
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
...has been regularly quoted at me recently, without anyone seeming to consider either what the phrase itself means or the consequences of it happening. People will happily state this in support of general disclosure of information not directly related to them, where they would never, for example, openly disclose their own bank account details.
I'm not entirely sure they've thought through the meaning of "information wants to be free", therefore: a thread. I would include pictures and flashy things and shit, but there aren't really many relevant flashy things so we'll just have to use words like what our forebears did.
Our forebears, using words.
What it is not
Plenty of people seem to use it interchangably with "information should be free". That is an entirely different idea - it is a statement of intent, a principle of how the world should work. The title phrase suggests a latent process which will happen inevitably: the latter suggests something we should make happen.
Therefore, I'm assuming for this thread that if someone says "information should be free", they are talking about something entirely different (though I'm sure the thread might morph to address that question later). Moreover, if someone uses "information wants to be free" interchangably, then we should all poke them with something sharp and suggest a refresher course in grammar, perhaps with bright pictures or Hooked-on-Phonics this time to really make it sink in.
History
Apparently this dude said it first, and what he actually said adds some interesting context:
The point being that there are competing pressures on information. On one hand, people want access to information. On the other, people want to protect it. This is important because it elucidates a key point which often seems to get lost when people say "information wants to be free", which is that there are also very good reasons why it shouldn't be. The value of information has a source: that it can be used to create effects. If those effects include transferring all your monies into the hands of a skeezy Nigerian scammer, then you can be forgiven for suggesting that there is some value in keeping that information private.
There is also another key point to note here. Though the phrase in general is somewhat ambiguous due to the multiple possible meanings of "free" (i.e. democratically free; free access; free to roam; no value attached to it), the context of the phrase is that of value. When he says "information wants to be expensive", he sets up the opposite "information wants to be free" to refer to the value of information, not a point of principle about access or suggesting wild safari pastures be set up in Kenya (or somewhere suitably sunny, for the sake of analogy) where herds of bytes can wander free, only concerned about finding a good source of packets in the summer months and the occasional pack of predatory kilobits who might try to pick off the weaker members suffering from data degradation.
A byte herd, yesteday
This is important because it relates back to my previous point. If the context of the phrase is talking about the value of information, then it follows that there are valid reasons for protecting that information as well, just as there valid and widely accepted reasons for protecting your money in a bank.
"Information wants to be free"
So if you take the entire quote from Stewart Brand, actually he meant neither that information should be free, nor that it inevitably will be free, but that - just as there are pressures which work to give it value - there are pressures which work to decrease that value, such as the proliferation of technology which eases the transfer of and thus access to information. In no way does this negate the idea of a value to information, and therefore a necessity to protect it, but simply points out that there are a variety of factors which work against the easy protection and accumulation of information and it's value.
Which is a perfectly sensible position, and one which allows people who disagree about what information should be disclosed to argue within a framework where both sides accept that total disclosure is neither realistic nor desirable. It also suggests that, as with most things, judging the value of information is a cross between what the buyer will pay for it, and what the seller believes it is worth. As such, though both the buyer and seller are welcome to put in an offer price on the information, since by the nature of the product only the seller actually has access to the information he is both the best placed to dictate how much it is worth, and to dictate whether it should be sold or not. This is an important point when you consider that, say, people who demand for disclosure of classified material from governments cannot understand the true value of that information, and therefore cannot judge its value or damage caused by its release, whereas the government - as the seller / owner - can judge that. Whether you trust the government to do so is a whole heap of separate issues, but the basic concept that one can judge the value of one's own information better than outsiders is sound.
Idiocy...
But pretending I win the argument by reducing it to the original quote is copping out, because as I previously stated, I think most people are using it with a different meaning.
One. People who use it to mean "information should be free". Aside from the fact that I am still ignoring them for being both grammatically and factually wrong, they tend to be quite persistent so I figured I would give them a mention again to boost their confidence on the principle that everyone likes a tryer, or at least secretly hopes that if they give an encouraging nod to whatever dribbling insanity the loud person happens to be adding to the general noise pollution of modern life, then perhaps said loud person will become more reasonable as a result.
Hang on, wait, that doesn't sound like me at all. In fact, they are just as stark bonkers as they were at the start of this post, and giving any shrift to their incessant mental leakage is just like scratching that really annoying itch or letting a Jehova's Witness into your house. Sure, there might be temporary relief as the sheer shocking novelty of the universe actually paying attention sinks in, but pretty soon it's going to come back worse or start to tell you in great detail why you are wrong about everything you think or do. More to the point, "information should be free" people suffer from the worst trait of most mindless acolytes: they don't practice what they preach. I've had this demonstrated many times by their failure to give me, when asked, their full bank details and personal history, which is pretty ideologically abhorrent to me because I believe stupid people should be freed of their information so I can go have a nice holiday somewhere. Nigeria looks tempting this time of year.
[I would post a picture of a stupid person here, but since you frequent the PA forums, I'm pretty sure most of you already have a firm mental image that you relate to several times a day. Some of the people I described above are probably thinking of it right now, with my name in a little italicised tag underneath.]
...and Inevitability
Two. People who take "information wants to be free" as a quote in isolation. Alternatively, people who look at the entire quote and, preferring the above sentiment to "information wants to be expensive", use "information wants to be free" as a principle. An example of this was an intriguing phrase from a PA forumer:
This treats the phrase as somewhere between a statement of principle or intent, and an inevitable process which will happen whether we humans try to help it along or not. So let's look at how that might work.
Clearly, information itself doesn't desire any particular freedoms of any kind, because it is not a sentinent thing. It is a neutral collection of data. So what to we mean by "wants"? Surely, we are saying - as in the original - that there are various pressures on it which induce it to go in certain directions. These pressures are generically refered to in circles which deal with information as push (i.e. the information owner trying to disseminate it) or pull (i.e. an outside party trying to get information from the owner). The Brand argument is that technological advance means that, since it is easier to disseminate information, it will naturally be disseminated more as technology makes it easier to do so. Or in the words of another PAer:
In other words: inevitability of information disclosure.
But there is a crucial fallacy in this. It presupposes that information gets "out of the bottle". Therefore, surely we should question how that happens in the first place? Aside from some clever automated information miners owned by states or criminal gangs, technology itself doesn't desire information. Technology itself doesn't initiate either push or pull. People do that - even in the case of automated engines, people devised them to perform that function. Whether information is disseminated or not is always a function of human desire for that information. Technology simply makes achieving that dissemination easier or harder.
This is the fundamental point. So long as people are driving information dissemination or protection, disclosure is never inevitable. It is simply a matter of the will and measures being invested into the protection side outweighing the will and measures invested into disclosure. Like identical polarities of two magnets, it is a contest between two competing pull pressures.
As such, the inevitability argument that "information wants to be free" is only true so long as people believe it is true. If they do, then they will not act as a competing pull pressure, but either fail to act at all or actively push, believing that it will happen anyway. But as we all know, we act as a pull pressure every day with our personal information, against the multiplicity of scammers, hackers, thieves and criminals who are trying to pull our information from us. Sure, the internet and technological advances have made it easier for them to do so in some ways, but equally most of us instinctively know steps we can take to counteract that, whether it be avoiding internet banking or simply setting up a firewall or virus checker.
My question is: why do we accept, when applied on a grand and indirect scale, the inevitablity that "information wants to be free", when fundamentally we know in our day-to-day lives that this is not the case and the freedom or otherwise of information relies on our own actions?
So, you know...
I'm not entirely sure they've thought through the meaning of "information wants to be free", therefore: a thread. I would include pictures and flashy things and shit, but there aren't really many relevant flashy things so we'll just have to use words like what our forebears did.
Our forebears, using words.
What it is not
Plenty of people seem to use it interchangably with "information should be free". That is an entirely different idea - it is a statement of intent, a principle of how the world should work. The title phrase suggests a latent process which will happen inevitably: the latter suggests something we should make happen.
Therefore, I'm assuming for this thread that if someone says "information should be free", they are talking about something entirely different (though I'm sure the thread might morph to address that question later). Moreover, if someone uses "information wants to be free" interchangably, then we should all poke them with something sharp and suggest a refresher course in grammar, perhaps with bright pictures or Hooked-on-Phonics this time to really make it sink in.
History
Apparently this dude said it first, and what he actually said adds some interesting context:
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
This dude
This dude
The point being that there are competing pressures on information. On one hand, people want access to information. On the other, people want to protect it. This is important because it elucidates a key point which often seems to get lost when people say "information wants to be free", which is that there are also very good reasons why it shouldn't be. The value of information has a source: that it can be used to create effects. If those effects include transferring all your monies into the hands of a skeezy Nigerian scammer, then you can be forgiven for suggesting that there is some value in keeping that information private.
There is also another key point to note here. Though the phrase in general is somewhat ambiguous due to the multiple possible meanings of "free" (i.e. democratically free; free access; free to roam; no value attached to it), the context of the phrase is that of value. When he says "information wants to be expensive", he sets up the opposite "information wants to be free" to refer to the value of information, not a point of principle about access or suggesting wild safari pastures be set up in Kenya (or somewhere suitably sunny, for the sake of analogy) where herds of bytes can wander free, only concerned about finding a good source of packets in the summer months and the occasional pack of predatory kilobits who might try to pick off the weaker members suffering from data degradation.
A byte herd, yesteday
This is important because it relates back to my previous point. If the context of the phrase is talking about the value of information, then it follows that there are valid reasons for protecting that information as well, just as there valid and widely accepted reasons for protecting your money in a bank.
"Information wants to be free"
So if you take the entire quote from Stewart Brand, actually he meant neither that information should be free, nor that it inevitably will be free, but that - just as there are pressures which work to give it value - there are pressures which work to decrease that value, such as the proliferation of technology which eases the transfer of and thus access to information. In no way does this negate the idea of a value to information, and therefore a necessity to protect it, but simply points out that there are a variety of factors which work against the easy protection and accumulation of information and it's value.
Which is a perfectly sensible position, and one which allows people who disagree about what information should be disclosed to argue within a framework where both sides accept that total disclosure is neither realistic nor desirable. It also suggests that, as with most things, judging the value of information is a cross between what the buyer will pay for it, and what the seller believes it is worth. As such, though both the buyer and seller are welcome to put in an offer price on the information, since by the nature of the product only the seller actually has access to the information he is both the best placed to dictate how much it is worth, and to dictate whether it should be sold or not. This is an important point when you consider that, say, people who demand for disclosure of classified material from governments cannot understand the true value of that information, and therefore cannot judge its value or damage caused by its release, whereas the government - as the seller / owner - can judge that. Whether you trust the government to do so is a whole heap of separate issues, but the basic concept that one can judge the value of one's own information better than outsiders is sound.
Idiocy...
But pretending I win the argument by reducing it to the original quote is copping out, because as I previously stated, I think most people are using it with a different meaning.
One. People who use it to mean "information should be free". Aside from the fact that I am still ignoring them for being both grammatically and factually wrong, they tend to be quite persistent so I figured I would give them a mention again to boost their confidence on the principle that everyone likes a tryer, or at least secretly hopes that if they give an encouraging nod to whatever dribbling insanity the loud person happens to be adding to the general noise pollution of modern life, then perhaps said loud person will become more reasonable as a result.
Hang on, wait, that doesn't sound like me at all. In fact, they are just as stark bonkers as they were at the start of this post, and giving any shrift to their incessant mental leakage is just like scratching that really annoying itch or letting a Jehova's Witness into your house. Sure, there might be temporary relief as the sheer shocking novelty of the universe actually paying attention sinks in, but pretty soon it's going to come back worse or start to tell you in great detail why you are wrong about everything you think or do. More to the point, "information should be free" people suffer from the worst trait of most mindless acolytes: they don't practice what they preach. I've had this demonstrated many times by their failure to give me, when asked, their full bank details and personal history, which is pretty ideologically abhorrent to me because I believe stupid people should be freed of their information so I can go have a nice holiday somewhere. Nigeria looks tempting this time of year.
[I would post a picture of a stupid person here, but since you frequent the PA forums, I'm pretty sure most of you already have a firm mental image that you relate to several times a day. Some of the people I described above are probably thinking of it right now, with my name in a little italicised tag underneath.]
...and Inevitability
Two. People who take "information wants to be free" as a quote in isolation. Alternatively, people who look at the entire quote and, preferring the above sentiment to "information wants to be expensive", use "information wants to be free" as a principle. An example of this was an intriguing phrase from a PA forumer:
my personal policy is that information wants to be free.
This treats the phrase as somewhere between a statement of principle or intent, and an inevitable process which will happen whether we humans try to help it along or not. So let's look at how that might work.
Clearly, information itself doesn't desire any particular freedoms of any kind, because it is not a sentinent thing. It is a neutral collection of data. So what to we mean by "wants"? Surely, we are saying - as in the original - that there are various pressures on it which induce it to go in certain directions. These pressures are generically refered to in circles which deal with information as push (i.e. the information owner trying to disseminate it) or pull (i.e. an outside party trying to get information from the owner). The Brand argument is that technological advance means that, since it is easier to disseminate information, it will naturally be disseminated more as technology makes it easier to do so. Or in the words of another PAer:
"Information wants to be free" is one of the most misunderstood phrases ever. It doesn't mean "all information should be free", it means that once information is out of the bottle, there's not much you can do about it - such as the identities of the two women here.
In other words: inevitability of information disclosure.
But there is a crucial fallacy in this. It presupposes that information gets "out of the bottle". Therefore, surely we should question how that happens in the first place? Aside from some clever automated information miners owned by states or criminal gangs, technology itself doesn't desire information. Technology itself doesn't initiate either push or pull. People do that - even in the case of automated engines, people devised them to perform that function. Whether information is disseminated or not is always a function of human desire for that information. Technology simply makes achieving that dissemination easier or harder.
This is the fundamental point. So long as people are driving information dissemination or protection, disclosure is never inevitable. It is simply a matter of the will and measures being invested into the protection side outweighing the will and measures invested into disclosure. Like identical polarities of two magnets, it is a contest between two competing pull pressures.
As such, the inevitability argument that "information wants to be free" is only true so long as people believe it is true. If they do, then they will not act as a competing pull pressure, but either fail to act at all or actively push, believing that it will happen anyway. But as we all know, we act as a pull pressure every day with our personal information, against the multiplicity of scammers, hackers, thieves and criminals who are trying to pull our information from us. Sure, the internet and technological advances have made it easier for them to do so in some ways, but equally most of us instinctively know steps we can take to counteract that, whether it be avoiding internet banking or simply setting up a firewall or virus checker.
My question is: why do we accept, when applied on a grand and indirect scale, the inevitablity that "information wants to be free", when fundamentally we know in our day-to-day lives that this is not the case and the freedom or otherwise of information relies on our own actions?
So, you know...
Altalicious on
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First of all, information has different value to different people. There is no objective value to any information; The value of my knowing your bank details can be zero if I do not act on it, more than zero if I sell the information to someone else, and possible even larger still if I were to just steal the money myself. The general idea that the holder of information is actually able to assign to it the appropriate value - by virtue of being the holder - is trivially untrue. In a way, government rubberstamp classification is an aknowledgement of this; It's not about each and every piece of information being worth lots, it's about not knowing which parts are worth lots and which parts are barely worth wiping your ass with.
Along the same lines; Information can have a decidedly negative value for an individual, while having a massive positive value for the organization the individual works for, or a counterparty in a legal dispute, or what we'll cordially refer to as "the citizenry". Corruption is a pretty easy one, pollution is another. The holder's freedom or livelyhood can depend on certain information remaining with the holder. The holder will not sell this information, at any price, even when the information in question is beneficial to the employer of the holder, because it's consequences for the holder is severe.
The interests of the holder can be directly opposed to the interests of the people who appointed the holder, and blanket assuming that the holder is both inherently more capable of deciding the value of a specific piece of information as well as being a non-interested party with no personal stakes in said information is false, as is your original assertion.
That said, I'm not sure I get your last question. In most cases any information we seek to maintain private is protected by measures that are trivially easy to overcome, indeed, most legal frameworks - requiring a warrant, invasion of privacy, etcetc - are based on artifically limiting access to information, limiting the push other people are allowed to bring upon us. Depending on how you look at it we've spent centuries ensuring that some information does not proliferate and you're postulating that this relies on our own actions? Any government agency that wished to learn everything there is to know about me, could do so. There is no action in my daily life I can take to prevent this, no amount of pull I can generate that is sufficient.
i.e. the only fundamental knowledge we have about out day-to-day lives is that my firewall ensures that breaking into my computer is not the easiest thing to do, it doesn't actually make it impossible.
(PS I tend to prefer "information osmoses". It means the whole push and pull analogy is implied from the start and I think it's a lot more neat than assigning an antromorphological 'willpower' to it DS)
are you saying the information already is free you just have to know how to find it?
They totally would, all I can do is make them work a bit harder. Goverment agency investigations is a pretty basic example.
Surely the idea refers more the inherent reproducibility of information. Whereas my car, were someone to take it, would still remain singular, the blueprints for it - once taken by anyone - do not deprive me of it in the slightest, and can be copied ad nauseum. Hence information wants to be free: it's nigh impossible to stop it's spread once someone gets a hold of it.
how was my question in conflict with what you said?
Taking your OP to be a questioning of this central thesis, I was taking issue with "you just have to know how to find it" as being the major issue. I'd say the expression is a clever summing up of what I said it was.
oh okay, I thought you were somehow in disagreement.
He was pretty clearly referring to the fact that once information is public, it isn't feasible for that information to ever become secret again. This isn't necessarily a purely human-motivated phenomenon, either, especially where the internet is concerned.
Take this post for example. In a few minutes it'll be in Google's cache. It will be crawled by any bot that happens across it. It will be in the browser cache of everyone that views it for an unspecified period of time. It may very well be copied and pasted, saved, emailed, etc. and there isn't any way for anyone to track down everywhere it will end up. Sometimes this requires direct human intervention, sometimes it doesn't. If it contained any information that any non-trivial number of people gave a shit about then, sure, people would help it along (see: the CSS master key and our very own PA's "American McGee's Strawberry Shortcake" comic).
The point is more that as long as someone with access to information wants to make that information public, there isn't any going back once they do it.
why would you want to do that?
Convenience. Austerity. The risk that some important research might be hidden in the vagaries of things I've written, spoken of or otherwise idly considered.
talk about data overload, even if you did say something awesome, what are the chances it is uncovered?
It seems really weird that you would want everything you say or do recorded. Have you seen the movie final cut?
I think we've gotten to the point where speech can be relatively easily encoded as text, and also therefore indexed and searched rationally. So it'd actually be pretty easy for you (or someone with the data) to sift through it looking for stuff. We're starting to get there with images too, and no doubt video will follow.
The idea of being able to record everything I do, see or say, index that information and sift through it later (or pass it onto my children --no doubt with some omissions- and let them sift through it later) appeals to me, as well.
Look at it this way: How much, offhand, do you know about your grandfather? I know lots about my grandfather. I spent a lot of time with him when I was growing up.
How much do you know about your grandfather's grandfather? My grandfather knew his own gramps pretty damned well. All I have are a few stories passed on to me by my grandfather, a few pictures, and a name.
How about his grandfather?
Imagine all the interesting shit we might be able to see if the next Einstein indexed their life and allowed everyone to view it after their passing?
Don't worry, we can remember for you wholesale.
Sure you can sift through the information easily if you know what you are looking for. But if mike said some amazing thing or had some epiphany, we wouldn't know to look for that epiphany unless we ourselves had it, then what do we need the recordings of mike for?
I think it would just be weird to watch videos of my great great great great great grandfather, some dude I never knew.
I mean is this about you leaving some legacy in the world after you die?
I also feel like that much information laying around about a loved one you lost would greatly hinder the grieving process.
I feel there is something I am missing here, a big key point. I don't think we have gotten to the heart of this yet by any means.
I'm not really seeing the bolded as a problem --or at least not the sort of problem that means it wouldn't be worth doing regardless. Consider how the internet relates to the above: you can sift through information easily if you know what you're looking for, but there's so much awesome stuff that you'll never see at all and miss out on. Shitty deal, but what can you do? Still, you get to see a fair bit of awesome, so I don't really mind the flaw.
I can see how it'd be kinda weird. I mean, when I watch some random person on youtube talk about stuff I don't care about, it strikes me as weird. At the same time, wouldn't it be slick to be able to look back at someone going about Mauritius 400 years ago and see how dodo birds walked around? Wouldn't someone 400 years from now love to look back and have proper snapshots of this time period? They'll already get some of that from documentaries, but imagine how much more depth of experience you'd get from being able to see 'living autobiographies'.
I often think about how people in the future will have so much more access to history than we do (given storage improvements and ease of digital conversion) and am outright jealous of how little extra-somatic information we truly have at hand today compared to how much our future selves will have tomorrow.
It is about legacy, though not my legacy in particular. I guess it's the legacy of humanity.
To comment on the lost loved ones thing, I expect it'd go both ways. Anecdotally, my father died a couple years ago and being able to sit down at his computer, set up the way he had it set up (you know, all the little settings and whatnot a person changes,) listen to some of his music or read stuff he wrote on it... doing that really warms my heart. It's like looking through an old photo album. It's a unique snapshot or reflection of him and who he was.
But that's anecdotal, I'm sure it can go both ways.
It is kind of a leap from what Echo said, but it is not terribly unreasonable. Information, in general, is only useful when shared. There are rare exceptions, of course, but there is a basic difficulty with the OP's interpretation...
...in that the goal of security is not to prevent information dissemination, but the control what information is disseminated to whom. Security isn't just about stopping access, it's about establishing a web of trust for authorized access. If an organization doesn't need anybody to read a particular file, there's generally no reason to keep it - just burn it. Even if it's being kept for archival purposes, say, to stay in compliance with a government regulation covering what information needs to be kept and for how long, you still have to establish access rights or else that information is nonrecoverable and therefore useless.
In this way, there is an intrinsic property of information itself that it exists to be read. Preventing information dissemination is a little bit like stopping entropy - we can stop the outward flow of information in finite systems for finite periods of time, but we cannot prevent it in all systems at all times. In this way, Altalicious is right in that we can always devote more willpower and more resources towards preventing information from getting in the hands of the wrong people, but it needs to be recognized that we only do so because we're fighting the fundamental freedom-philic nature of information.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Couldn't you make the exact opposite argument? That information is locked until we fight to unlock it? I mean we can always devote more willpower and more resources towards unlocking information. Isn't that what science basically is? The information is hidden away until we bother to go looking for it.
A consequence of recognizing this heterogeneous quality to information is that although "you wouldn't want to disclose your bank statements!" may well be true, it nonetheless has no implications for the disclosure of other types of information in other circumstances. Given that this point establishes nothing in the general case (the general case is too vague), it is somewhat surprising the sheer amount of condescension with which it is put forward in the OP.
Second, the more valuable information is the more it wants to be free. That's a pretty important idea to have here. If a piece of information is valuable its more likely to be distributed. A naked picture of a famous actress is going to spread more rapidly than that of a Denny's waitress. The more a piece of information is distributed, the more difficult it is to restrain it (ie to make it not free). As accessing and copying information is essentially equivalent, in order to ensure a piece of information is un-free you have to make it completely valueless by making sure no one accesses it.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
The picture of the dennys waitress is just as free, its just that no one wants it as much. Sure it may not spread around like the celebrity picture but that doesnt make it less free. I imagine we may be having a disagreement what exactly the word free means when pertaining to information though. To me you seem to be using the word free to mean more exposure, but if I get the picture of the denny waitress on the same website I got the picture of the celebrity, they are both just as free to me.
Though I guess when it comes to how free information is, we are going to end up talking about ease of access. Can something be more free than something else, since most people could find the celebrity picture with more ease than they could find the dennys picture? Even accessing the celebrity picture has at the very least the cost of time associated with it.
To me information seems to be the opposite of free and we have to work to get that information. The reason I think that information seems so free these days with the internet and all is that humanity has put a lot of work into it. I mean basically every scientific advance leading up to the internet contributes to this illusion of "free" information.
"Information" in this context usually refers to recorded information - text, diagrams, intellectual property, etc. The very act of recording information is to transcode it into something easily communicated. Writing something down packages it for dissemination.
If you're using the term "information" in a broader sense of "ordered patterns in the natural world," then again, by definition it is not hidden away. Information has to be perceivable, even if not by a conscious being - it has to affect something else in the physical universe in an ordered manner for it to be information.
I suppose you might be able to make an argument that quantum information is hidden away until it is perceived, and I will totally admit that discussions of quantum information go over my head.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Right. We're always asking the question "who gets access to what information?" This makes the conversation highly contextual and specific.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well, we are talking about, basically, read vs. write access.
However, almost all information security models that laypeople will run into rely on shared secrets. In order to determine what information you have access to, I need to find out who you are, and I'm probably going to do that by asking you a question that (ideally) only you know the answer to. The problem with this model is obvious. Even more advanced security methods like biometrics, client-side SSL certificates, and secure ID tokens still rely on the shared secrets model. They just make the secrets harder to [strike]guess[/strike] share.
(When we're selling things like fingerprint readers or secure ID tokens to business managers, we might talk a lot about how it'll stop hackers from performing brute force attacks or some other TV movie scenario, but what we're really doing it making it a pain in the ass for users to give out their passwords.)
So, ultimately, in a shared-secret model, the line between read vs. write access is blurry. If I can read your shared secrets, I can obtain write access to protected information.
Unfortunately, there aren't really ideal alternatives to the shared-secret model for most common applications. Usually, when you're talking about getting off of a shared-secret model, you're talking about doing something like restricting physical access - putting the data on a closed network that is only accessible within the building, for instance. So basically what we're left with is just creating incrementally more complex, hard-to-share secrets.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yes but does it not take effort/work to acquire/perceive/understand the information? The information doesn't just pop into my head freely.
I think that we're fundamentally making the same point, but from different existential viewpoints:
You say that information exists to be read.
I say that the reading makes the information exist.
My point about push/pull is that the latter has an active component, the desire for information, which means it can be quantified / controlled. It's pretty hard to quantify the inertia of information which simply exists - without the prime mover of someone to 'read' it, it will never be absorbed, so (in true tree falling in woods style) will it actually be information? Surely it becomes information at the point that it is 'read'. Before that - as you point out - it is simply material with potential, which is what I would call your inertia argument.
Either way, shit is about to get philosophical if we go down that route.
PS I see CasedOut got there before me.