Hacker Innovation and Consumer Artefacts

Hacking consumer artefacts

Hackers believe one can learn “essential lessons about systems [and] about the World by taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and more interesting things” . When a hacker is faced with a closed and locked-down artefact this cannot happen so easily, if at all, and merely prevents the ability to act in a hands-on approach to a technology and access its potential state of being open and modifiable. In so doing hackers adopt a sense of what is defined as wilful blindness in pursuit of their passions and interests. More concretely, this means circumventing manufacturer access restrictions (device encryptions, boot-loaders, copy protection and rights management) resulting in breaches of end user license agreements (EULAs), copyright, trademark, intellectual property and patent law. Ironically the more a device is protected, locked and secured against hacking, the higher the chance of motivation by hacker-innovators to employ their skills to circumvent and gain higher meritocratic status within the community by doing so. George Hotz, hacker of the Sony PlayStation 3, who published the console’s core root access keys on his Twitter account, demonstrated this. His ‘criminal acts’ according to Sony, did not in any way harm his career prospects, going on to an unknown work position at Facebook.

Hacking of consumer artefacts can be split into various didactic dimensions dependent upon one’s moral, ethical, political and legal viewpoints:

• Illegal to legal
• Immoral to moral
• Destructive to constructive
• Value creation to value destruction
• Ethical to unethical
• Degenerative to generative
• Destroy to creating
• Stealing to sharing
• Contributing to taking
• Learning to using

Firms who create and depend upon the appropriation of rents from their intellectual property tend to adopt a critical view of hacking whilst keen to protect their vested interests within the market built on proprietary IP. Those who benefit from unrestricted exploration and optimisation of technologies adopt a beneficial, positive, useful and in some case essential view of hacking activities.

Meaning change and swings of the pendulum

Over time the meaning of a hacker has swung between the positive to negative dimensions as we have seen. Originating in the positive sense, as someone tinkering in a clever and previously unthought-of of way (woodwork, carpentry and craftsmanship), to the negative, with the emergence of the World Wide Web and computer criminals. Within the Open Source communities it has become a complimentary badge or term for a brilliant programmer; but in exploration of consumer artefacts it has swung back towards negativity (even in some cases if such consumer devices actually depend upon openly developed code, critical and fundamental to their function and operation). In TV, music, film and software it has come to reflect illegally pirated and distributed intellectual property, whether through bootlegging or creative mash-ups of other artist’s and labels work.

The problem with the general and popular usage of the hacker term in various forms is that it describes a common set of knowledge and skills that can be used for very different purposes, at both the positive and negative ends of the legal to illegal hacker dimension. The critical difference described so far is that of the intent of such hacker acts. At the negative and non-generative end, the intent is to steal, subvert, corrupt and destroy value; whilst at the more positive end, the intent is to generate value and societal usefulness by collaborating, sharing and cooperating in networks that optimise the functionality of artefacts through the unrestricted exploration of higher value design configuration states.

The original consumer hacker innovators: moonshine runners

With the emergence of consumerism in the early 20th Century (during the economic focus on the production of capital goods), a group of product hackers or bootleggers began to develop innovations that could allow for the unhindered distribution of illegal alcohol or ‘moonshine’ around the United States during Prohibition. These product hackers purchased small consumer standard specification cars and heavily modified or hacked them to improve speed, storage and handling capabilities in order to outrun law enforcement authorities and distribute illegal alcohol. When Prohibition ended in 1933, much of the illicit trade ceased, but innovation upon the cars continued and evolved into regularly organised race meets for prize money and profit, later to become the second most watched sport in the USA, second only to the National Football League (NFL) with an estimated 75 million fans.

What made early NASCAR innovations attributable to the hacker mind-set were that significant modifications were made to existing (internally developed) technologies of the time that did not perform to the high standards requirements of the market’s lead consumers. As the sport matured and became legitimised by evolving into NASCAR, product hacking continued and provided the industry with a complimentary external R&D innovation source that has directly influenced the design trajectory of the entire consumer automotive industry as a whole. Some examples of these racing-bred hacker innovations include:

Manual transmission to allow racers to control the power to the wheels.

• Direct-shift gearboxes to allow gear changes quickly.
• Ignition keys on the right side (right hand drive) or left side (left hand drive) of car dashboards to allow simultaneous ignition and gear selection.
• Suspension design during cornering.
• Longevity of tyre rubber compounds.
• Disk brake development.
• Engine air intake and supercharger modifications.
• Dual Overhead Cam (DOHC) engines allowing for fuel and air valves to be open and shut more efficiently.
• Exterior design to make the most efficient and aerodynamic shapes.
• New materials development (carbon fibre, ceramics etc.) to make cars lighter and more efficient.
• Safety improvements (roll cages and rear view mirrors).

The NASCAR origins example demonstrates the influence and importance of hacker innovation upon the later evolution of the wider industry. Examples discussed later in this paper reflect the same phenomena with an important difference: hacker innovation occurs to existing technologies, but is largely dismissed or ignored by firms entirely (despite the potential importance and wider significance these activities may have on future design trajectories). Perhaps falling foul of the Not Invented Here Syndrome and demonstrating a lack of absorptive capacity .

Nerf Sports Toys

Hacker innovation can originate externally from users of all ages but in some cases may not be suitable for reabsorption by the firm. One such example is Nerf, a children’s toy manufacturer of foam-based weapons that fire foam based projectiles to around 60 feet. Children’s toy guns must meet strict US safety regulations in order to enter products into the market, so child hackers developing blaster mods directly challenge the company’s safety-based marketing messages. As such all forms of modding are in no way endorsed by Nerf. Hacker innovators do not have to meet such safety regulations at home and a vast array of ‘Nerf mods’ are available in online community Web sites. Both the firm and the consumer have an innovation desire to design weapons that can fire foam projectiles as far as technically possible. The difference being hacker consumers are free to modify as the see fit and firms are strictly controlled.

Hacker mods include removing air restrictors, sealing air releases, lengthening barrels from Crayola Washable Markers, homebrew darts and recombining models in new configurations. All mods are designed to increase the artefact performance through the use of the same design module operators as discussed in computer programming context; but the crucial difference being these particular resultant hacks are not legally admissible by the firm for reabsorption. Where health and safety considerations do not pose barrier issues to firms, then resultant hacks may be suitable for firms to listen, learn, absorb innovations from external hackers to develop and alter future design trajectories within product classes.

Key moment in consumer goods: open code hits the mainstream marketplace

The industry life cycle model of Open Source software development has surpassed the initial introduction and growth phases and is entering the mature stage of its development . This occurred after the purchase of Android Inc., by Google in 2005. Linux at this point became embedded for the first time in a true mass-market consumer product: the smartphone. By the end of 2012, 400 million Android handsets were in use with over 1,000,000 devices activated every day at an estimated 54% market share . Never before has an Open Source software platform been so extensively diffused and adopted in the hands of everyday consumers as a truly dominant mass-market product based almost entirely upon openly developed code in direct competition to internally developed proprietary offerings.

Up until this point previous variants of the Linux kernel and operating system had been deployed mainly in infrastructure environments, desktop computers, Web servers and mainframes, industrial automation and medical instruments to name a few. But in more recent years (due to its low cost and ease of portability), Linux has been deployed in more and more consumer electronic devices such as routers, set-top boxes, televisions, games consoles, media players, tablets and desktop computers. Such embedded Linux devices incur little or no royalty or licensing fees to other firms under the GPL license and can be modified, ported and redistributed along with underlying source code to other platforms and devices remarkably easily and quickly compared to closed development, proprietary code.

As well as smartphones, Android is being deployed in a variety of other consumer devices such as laptops, netbooks, wristwatches, headphones, car audio players, tablet computers, headphones, digital cameras and portable music players. The list is constantly growing. The result has been a relatively fast spread in the application of common, openly developed knowledge within the consumer marketplace. The tools and means for developing and improving mass produced artefacts is being democratised, allowing for development contributions made to existing technologies from many different sources, amplified by the use of the Linux kernel at the core and its availability of surrounding knowledge. Hacking opens up devices to further modifications, regardless of firm efforts in attempting to lock out unauthorised access. As the Linux kernel is developed within a vastly distributed Open Source ecosystem comprising contributors and developers from all over the World, there is a vast audience of consumers with directly applicable knowledge and experience in developing and modifying the software for employment as well as hobbyist, passionate activities.

The Linux Foundation recently reported statistics demonstrating the extent of Linux adoption by firms in consumer electronic devices (Foundation, 2012). Statistics reveal that 700,000 televisions and 850,000 Android mobile phones are sold with Linux every day. Since 2005, 800 developers in 800 companies were contributing to the Linux kernel, which now consists of 15 million lines of code, with development cycles every two to three months (compared to two or three years for proprietary operating systems).

Combined with hacker ethics, code originating in the Open Source model with proprietary software module layers developed by firms in the product development process (closing-off external access to hybrid code), also ends up being hacked open again by hacker groups. The result is a hotbed of divergent interests, copyright infringements, uncontrollable and unregulated design evolution trajectories developed in various distributed organisational forms diffused through interconnected digital technologies. In short, hackers further contribute to industry fragmentation based upon an openly developed platform in the aftermarket after initial consumption.

As the demand for multifunction devices (telephony, mp3 and media players, gaming, photo and video cameras) increases with progress and complexity, Linux offers a pre-packaged suite of multi-threaded software capable of modular adaptation to ever more complex environments with free source code, no license fees and no unit royalties . Use of Linux reduces internal R&D and time to market, but also causes product differentiation problems with other product manufacturers in the same markets. Manufacturers are forced to differentiate on top of the core platform by adding proprietary software shell layers and when hackers open up the devices to modifications they immediately tread on murky legal waters in terms of handling, modifying and using proprietary code.

The first foray for Linux into the mass consumer electronic market came in 1999 with TiVo Inc. by launching a new Linux based personal digital video recorder (DVR), allowing for a plethora of new features and functionality over the extant cassette tape video recorders with features such as pausing live TV, selecting programmes based on personalised interests and skipping advertisements in recordings. One crucial feature was the ability to connect to user’s home network and Internet connection to receive and download online scheduling information and service updates. The networking functionality allowed a way in and means for hackers to write programs and execute code within the system itself in ways unintended or even possibly imagined by TiVo Inc. themselves.

Both Computer Hobbyist and Enthusiast Programmer hacker types worked in collaborative innovation networks sharing knowledge via online technologies in to hack the TiVo box to enable service improvements such as circumventing country and regional blocks, installing larger hard drives, extracting videos to other PC’s and other TiVo boxes as well as file format decoding and encoding restriction removals. Essentially these hacks were carried out not to steal data, commit crime, destroy property or for personal financial gain, but were made to explore, unlock and share the unrealised potential functionality of design module configurations for personal benefit and as a passionate and pleasurable experience.

Manufacturer and hacker artefact configuration states

The work undertaken by firm and hacker environments results in different artefact states as new module configurations are created, diffused and adopted by both parties (see conceptual diagram in Figure 1 below). Here artefacts pass from: an open to closed to open again configuration state.

1. A manufacturer develops a new product based upon Open Source code with propriety software modules incorporated at shell layers.
2. Proprietary and open code enters the marketplace locked and held within software and hardware configurations.
3. Where access restrictions are found, hackers re-open the artefact to enable exploration of more optimised and feature rich design configuration states (at the hack point).
4. Hacker groups emerge through the use of ICT’s technologies sharing knowledge, learning and experience in order to optimise the new artefact configuration states to generate higher forms of market value.
5. Further design module artefact states are freely made available.

Figure 1. Artefact openness state within hacker innovation activities. Artefacts are made open by hackers at the ‘hack point’ allowing for new artefact configuration states to exist in the pursuit of higher value.

In the case of the Android smartphone market, the state of artefact openness occurs by the following states:

1. Open (core Linux kernel)
2. Open (Android software layer)
3. Closed (proprietary firm shell layers added)
4. Closed (product delivered to consumers)
5. Open (hackers re-open artefact states to allow for further innovations)

Consequences of open code in consumer products

As more and more consumer products depend upon embedded open code platforms such as Linux, there will most likely be a rise in the number of hacker innovations occurring to them. Hacker ethics, spirit and incentives, combine to create free data and information in the sense that it is free from ownership and used to pursue yet higher forms of value and functionality through exploration and experimentation of optimal artefact configuration states. The end goal for hackers is to fully optimise a technology for its intended and unintended use in executing tasks.

Firms prepared to learn and deeply understand, manage and leverage hacker innovation occurring to their product classes in distributed networks should be in a position to better meet wider consumer needs by absorbing new knowledge from continually developing and optimised module configuration states throughout a products lifecycle. Flowers (2006) discussed a framework detailing potential firm responses to hacker innovation, but primary research is yet to reveal empirical evidence on how different strategies are being employed by incumbents in a selection of product markets.

Knowledge in hacker communities is distributed among network actors, forming in similar ways to ad-hoc film production teams as project networks . Self-organising, self-governing collaborative teams form into loose and fluid organisational forms to pursue and complete creative hacker projects. Members freely decide to form, leave and contribute to development teams as they wish, without the direction of any upper management. Despite this, complete and detailed records of actor communications, module configurations and changes are publicly available held in MySQL database records held in online forum databases for potential primary data analyses.

This discussion will move on to some real world examples of collaborative hacker innovation outputs by communities and individuals where firms have directly opposed and fought outputs in an attempt to protect vested interests and intellectual property as well as those who have sought to leverage hacker outputs to help build further forms of competitive advantage.

References

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• Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations. New York, The Free Press.
• Telecom, S. a. S. (2012). Android Smartphone Activations Reached 331 Million in Q1 2012.
• Baldwin, C. C., B. (2000). Design Rules Volume 1. The Power of Modularity. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press.
• Sydow, J. and U. Staber (2002). "The Institutional Embeddedness of Project Networks: The Case of Content Production in German Television." Regional Studies 36(3): 215-227.
• ^{[Flowers, 2006]} Flowers, S. (2006). KNOWLEDGE, INNOVATION AND COMPETITIVENESS: DYNAMICS OF FIRMS, NETWORKS, REGIONS AND INSTITUTIONS. DRUID Summer Conference 2006. Denmark.