Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 3

Spill, part four (a Little Brother story)

This week on my podcast, I read part four of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.

My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet co...

Spill, part three (a Little Brother story)

This week on my podcast, I read part three of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.

My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet c...

Spill, part two (a Little Brother story)

This week on my podcast, I read part two of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.

My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet con...

Spill, part one (a Little Brother story)

This week on my podcast, I read part one of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

Doctors smoke. Driving instructors text and drive. Dentists eat sugary snacks before bed. And hackers? Well, we’re no better at taking our own advice than anyone else.

Take “There is no security in obscurity”—if a security system only works when your enemies don’t ...

Vigilant (a Little Brother story)

This week on my podcast, I read “Vigilant“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Nelda Buckman and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

Kids hate email.

Dee got my number from his older brother, who got it from Tina, my sister-in-law, who he knew from art school. He texted me just as I was starting to make progress with a gnarly bug in some logging software I was trying to get running for my cloud servers.

...

Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Pluralistic.net column, “Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster” about the way that gamers were sucked into the coalition to defend trusted computing, and how the Crowdstrike disaster has seen them ejected from the coalition by Microsoft:

As a class, gamers *hate* digital rights management (DRM), the anti-copying, anti-sharing code that stops gamers from playing older games, selling or giving away games, or just *playing* games:

https://www...

Marshmallow Longtermism

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Marshmallow Longtermism” a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality.

I’m no fan of Charles Koch, but I agree that his performance at the helm of Koch Industries demonstrated impressive discipline and self-control, and that his enormous economic and politic...

AI’s productivity theater

This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog/newsletter: “AI’s productivity theater,” about the severe mismatch between the bosses who buy AI to increase their workers’ efficiency, and the utter bafflement of the workers who are expected to use the AI…somehow.

A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting ...

Unpersoned

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Unpersoned>; about the enormous power that we’ve given to tech giants to determine who can participate in modern life, and why the answer to the giants’ failure to wield that power wisely is to take it away, rather than attempting to perfect their use of it.

AT THE END OF MARCH 2024, the romance writer K. Renee discovered that she had been locked out of her Google Docs account, for posting “inappropriate” content in her private...

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

This week on my podcast, I read The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you, a column from one of last week’s editions of my Pluralistic newsletter; it describes a monopoly pattern whereby companies execute a series of mergers to dominate a sector, leaving their IT systems brittle and tangled – and vital to the nation.

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disa...