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chaincodeconsultant · 10 months

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How Blockchain Enhances Pharmaceutical Supply Chain?

We blindly buy medicines from pharmacies or get them at a hospital with a doctor’s prescription.

But do you check your medicines?

Some of us check the expiry date. While others at most check if the medicine is the right one as written on the prescription or not.

Have you ever thought that the medicine you are taking might be a fake drug?

This takes us to the next question.

Is there a way to check the authenticity of the medicines?

The traditional pharmaceutical supply chain does not offer that level of transparency and tracking. Currently, with the conventional supply chain, you cannot verify the origin, authenticity, and journey of the drugs.

So, what is the solution?

Blockchain with its decentralization and immutability features offers an ideal solution to prevent drug counterfeiting. Moreover, it can efficiently track drug origin, transport and procurement of raw materials.

That’s not all!

Blockchain technology in healthcare with the help of digital tokens and smart contracts can record all crucial drug and transportation data ensuring the quality of the drugs is maintained in the supply chain.

In this blog, we will analyse how blockchain supply chain solutions can benefit the pharmaceutical industry.

Challenges in the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

Counterfeiting has become a common problem in most industries. However, when we talk about counterfeiting and supply chain failures in pharmaceuticals, the consequences are adverse.

Counterfeit expired or low-quality drugs can:

● Degrade the quality of care

● Lead to health complications

● Inefficient to cure disease

● Might even lead to death

These consequences are the result of loopholes in the existing supply chain.

Here are some of the common challenges in the pharma supply chain.

Lack of Transparency: Tracking the Product’s Journey

The traditional medical supply chain is vague. You have no means to verify and check the origin, journey or data of the drugs.

This lack of transparency raises serious concerns about the quality of the drugs and their impact on our health.

Dealing with Counterfeit Drugs: Ensuring Patient Safety

Counterfeit drugs pose a significant challenge in the pharmaceutical industry.

These fake or substandard medicines can harm patients in several ways. It can interfere with the treatment, delay the process and even create more complexities.

WHO reports indicate that an estimated one in ten medical products in developing countries are falsified or fail to meet standards.

For instance, in Egypt 10% of the total drugs sold are counterfeit.

This not only has tragic consequences for patients but also poses a threat to antimicrobial resistance, making medicines less effective over time.

Further, counterfeit drugs result in 100,000 to 1,000,000 deaths annually.

Managing Cold Chain Losses: Ensuring Product Efficacy

Counterfeiting is not the only problem in the medical supply chain.

Several drugs require specific transportation and storage facilities to maintain their quality. Some drugs need strict temperature control during transportation and storage.

In several cases, these factors about the drugs are ignored. As a result, the chemicals in the drugs react and lose their efficiency.

This results in expired and ineffective drugs which can be harmful for the patients. Sometimes these drugs are recalled which leads to financial losses.

According to IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, the biopharma industry loses approximately $35 billion annually due to supply chain temperature control failures.

Implementing better cold chain management protocols can help minimize these losses.

Enhancing Cybersecurity: Safeguarding Sensitive Data

The fragmented supply chain involving research arms, facilities, and distribution partners worldwide exposes the pharmaceutical industry to cybersecurity risks.

Cyberattacks can compromise sensitive data, disrupt operations, and undermine product integrity.

As seen in the Merck cyberattack in 2017, such incidents can result in substantial financial losses.

Strengthening your cybersecurity measures is crucial to protect against potential threats and maintain your operations’ integrity.

The above reasons are enough for us to start finding a robust solution to this problem.

NFTtrace is one such blockchain supply chain use case that harnesses the power of tokenisation for credential verification, provenance tracking and data protection across the healthcare supply chain.

How Can Blockchain Supply Chain Solutions Benefit Pharma Industry?

Medicine Tracking

Blockchain supply chain solutions create a single shared ledger for the manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and pharmacists to track every movement of the drugs.

Moreover, the distributed ledger also enables parties in the supply chain to verify and process payments and transactions.

Even you can also drug journey and access related data with blockchain. Companies using blockchain in the medical supply chain put smart tags on their products.

You can scan these smart labels to verify all the information about the drug, including its origin, batch number, expiry date, and temperature control.

High Security

Blockchain stores all the data in blocks which contain cryptographically calculated hash. Any changes in the data of the blocks alter the hash which then mismatches with other blocks.

This makes the data in the blocks immutable. It means that no one can change the data once it’s recorded on the blockchain.

When you apply this to the pharma supply chain, it proves as the most useful feature.

As the drug moves along the supply chain, its data is recorded on the blockchain. Once the data is recorded on the blockchain no one can go back and change it.

Therefore, no one can change the information about the drug like its batch number, origin, manufacturer details, supplier details and other info.

So, this restricts access to unauthorized parties and illegal activities in the medical supply chain.

In short, no one can disrupt the supply chain and replace the original drugs with counterfeit ones.

Further, the blockchain supply chain also prevents cyberattacks and safeguards confidential drug data.

Prevents Counterfeiting

Blockchain tracking records every movement of the drug and records all the data about its raw materials, composition to manufacturing and distribution.

Therefore, anyone from manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacists to consumers, can access the entire journey of the drugs.

This prevents fake drugs from entering the market as people can easily differentiate between fake and original drugs.

Secure Transactions

Blockchain supply chain in healthcare also enables its participants to process transactions securely and transparently.

All the transactions at every step of the supply chain are recorded on the blockchain. So, no one can forge the payments.

Being recorded on a single shared ledger, involved parties in the supply chain can verify the transactions and their details.

Thus, it establishes trust among parties and reduces conflicts.

Temperature Control Shipping

By employing Blockchain, temperature data can be traced, guaranteeing that storage conditions remain uncompromised.

These innovative healthcare solutions based on Blockchain promptly alert operators about any temperature control inefficiencies, enabling timely interventions to safeguard the vaccine supply.

How Blockchain Pharma Supply Chain Solutions Work?

Let us now understand how blockchain supply chain solutions in pharma work.

Step 1

The manufacturer produces the drug and attaches a smart tag to it.

The smart tag contains the following data:

● Batch number

● Origin

● Expiry date

● Item name

● Manufacturing date

● Specific temperature control transportation details

The tag may contain more information depending on the drug variety.

This information is then stored on the blockchain. Once it’s processed on the blockchain, it generates a hash ID. It’s similar to a tracking ID.

Using these hash ID parties in the supply chain can track the drug.

The drugs are then shipped to the distributors in IoT enables devices. These devices also have temperature sensors that track every little change in temperature during the transport process.

If the temperature deviates from the permissible limits, the device alerts the concerned parties. moreover, these devices also record the time and location of the drug shipment. So, the stakeholders and government can easily track the progress of the drug shipment.

Step — 2

The distributors receive the drugs and then use the hash ID to check the drugs.

Now the distributors can easily verify the origin of the drugs. They can check if the drugs sent to them are the same ones from their manufacturer or different.

Once the drugs pass the quality checks, the distributors sign the transaction digitally.

This digital signature is added to the blockchain. The smart contract on the blockchain triggers the system to process drug transportation to hospitals and pharmacies.

Step — 3

The pharmacies and hospitals receive the drugs. Now they can verify the originality and quality of the drugs using the hash ID.

For instance, if a distributor tries to sell fake drugs with fake IDs, the pharmacies can easily track them down. When the pharmacist enters the fake ID on the blockchain, it will come out as invalid.

Moreover, data on the blockchain is immutable. So, the distributor could not hack into the system and alter the original data.

Also, any other third party cannot disrupt the supply chain and push counterfeit products. It is because you need a valid private key to sign the transaction on the blockchain.

Therefore, pharmacists will easily find out anomalies in case of any illegal activity in the supply chain.

Once the pharmacy verifies the drugs, they sign off the transaction which is also recorded on the blockchain.

Step 4

Now suppose you have to buy some medicines.

You can go to the pharmacy and get the medicine as usual. However, unlike before, now you can verify your medicine.

You can scan the smart tag on the medicine. It will give you access to its origin, manufacturing details, expiry date, shipment details and more.

Therefore, you can ensure that you are not taking counterfeit drugs.

The entire blockchain medical supply chain process is transparent and decentralized. It is consensus-driven, thus, no central authority has control over the data or the blockchain.

A decentralized medical supply chain will also enable government and regulatory bodies to keep strict surveillance.

Conclusion

Blockchain technology in the pharma supply chain transforms the entire infrastructure bringing more transparency, efficiency, trust and security. It establishes a decentralized medical supply chain system that prevents low standard and fake drugs from entering the market.

The blockchain supply chain is a ray of hope towards better care facilities by overcoming the challenges in the pharmaceutical industry.

Chaincode Consulting, a leading blockchain development company holds the key to build efficient blockchain-based medical supply chain software for your business. With extensive technical know-how in implementing blockchain in the healthcare supply chain, we excel in crafting secure and scalable solutions.

Our approach involves a meticulous analysis of your requirements, gaining a deep understanding of your specific business needs, and creating customized software solutions with strict adherence to HIPAA compliance.

Book a call with our experts today!

#blockchain #supply chain #PHARMACEUTICAL SUPPLY CHAIN #healthcare #digital tokens

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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