Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 54

Mr Robot has driven a stake through the Hollywood hacker, and not a moment too soon

Mr Robot is the most successful example of a small but fast-growing genre of “techno-realist” media, where the focus is on realistic portrayals of hackers, information security, surveillance and privacy, and it represents a huge reversal on the usual portrayal of hackers and computers as convenient plot elements whose details can be finessed to meet the story’s demands, without regard to reality.

There’s a problem with this: information security really matters, and practically no one unde...

A new edition of the Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free audiobook featuring Neil Gaiman

“Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free” is my 2014 nonfiction book about copyright, the internet, and earning a living, and it features two smashing introductions — one by Neil Gaiman and the other by Amanda Palmer.

I released an audio edition of the book in 2014, read by the incomparable Wil Wheaton, who also read the audiobook of my novel Homeland). At the time, I tried to get Neil and Amanda into a studio to record their intros, but we couldn’t get the stars to align.

But good things c...

My keynote from the O’Reilly Security Conference: “Security and feudalism: Own or be pwned”

Here’s the 32 minute video of my presentation at last month’s O’Reilly Security Conference in New York, “Security and feudalism: Own or be pwned.”

Cory Doctorow explains how EFF is battling the perfect storm of bad security, abusive business practices, and threats to the very nature of property itself, fighting for a future where our devices can be configured to do our bidding and where security researchers are always free to tell us what they’ve learned.

Car Wars: a dystopian science fiction story about the nightmare of self-driving cars

Melbourne’s Deakin University commissioned me to write a science fiction story about the design and regulation of self-driving cars, inspired by my essay about the misapplication of the “Trolley Problem” to autonomous vehicles.

The story, Car Wars, takes the form of a series of vignettes that illustrate the problem with designing cars to control their drivers, interspersed with survey questions to spur discussion of the wider issues of governments and manufacturers being able to control t...

I’m helping launch Echoes of Sherlock Homes at LA’s Chevalier Books tomorrow night

In 2014, lawyer and eminent Sherlockian Les Klinger comprehensively won the legal battle to establish that Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain and available for anyone to use, abuse, alter, celebrate or mock; now with a new anthology of completely unauthorized Sherlock tales, Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, Klinger and co-editor Laurie R. King have shown just how much life there is in the old tales.

I’m one of the contributors to the anthology. My story, “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure o...

Sole and Despotic Dominion: how a 20th century copyright law is abolishing property for humans (but not corporations)

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In the 18th century, William Blackstone wrote the seminal “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” which contained one of the foundational definitions of property: “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”

Today, software enabled devices can and are controlled by their manufacturers long after they’ve been sold on to customers, and laws like Section 120...

Interview with IEEE-USA Insight Podcast

I was interviewed for the IEEE-USA Insight Podcast last summer in New Orleans, during their Future Leaders Summit, where I was privileged to give the keynote (MP3)

Talking about Allan Sherman on the Comedy on Vinyl podcast

Jason Klamm stopped my office to interview me for his Comedy on Vinyl podcast, where I talked about the first comedy album I ever loved: Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Nut.

I inherited my mom’s copy of the album when I was six years old, and listened to it over and over until I discovered — the hard way — that you can’t leave vinyl records on the dashboard of a car on a hot day.

Our discussion ranged far and wide, over the golden age of novelty flexidiscs, Thomas Piketty, Hamilton, corporat...

Apply for a Shuttleworth Fellowship!

https://vimeo.com/54762523

I’m the “Honourary Steward” for this year’s Shuttleworth Fellowship, this being a valuable and prestigious prize given to people who are undertaking to make the world a better, more open place (“social innovators who are helping to change the world for the better and could benefit from a social investment model with a difference”).

Being Honourary Steward means that I help choose the grantees; I’m the second Honourary Steward, following in Joi Ito’s footsteps....

Come see me in Portland, Riverside, LA, and San Francisco

I’ve got a busy couple of weeks coming up! I’m speaking tomorrow at Powell’s in Portland, OR for Banned Books Week; on Wednesday, I’m at UC Riverside speaking to a Philosophy and Science Fiction class; on Friday I’ll be at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, speaking on Canada’s dark decade of policy denial from climate science to digital locks; and then on Oct 6, I’m coming to SFMOMA to talk about museums, technology, and free culture. I hope to see you soon!

(Image: Al...