Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 55

See you at Burning Man!

I’m about to switch off my email until September 5 and drive to Black Rock City for 10 days of incinerating the dude.

If you’re going this year, drop by Liminal Labs — with whom I am immensely privileged to camp — and have some cold brew and say hi! We’re at 5&F this year (look for the giant steel gate, the flaming chandelier, and the flying car).

I’m also giving my annual talk at Palenque Norte/Soft Landing which is at 8:00 & Botticelli this year. It’s called “When the better web we’re...

Talking about the pro-security, anti-DRM business model on the O’Reilly Radar Podcast

On this just-released episode of the O’Reilly Radar podcast (MP3), I talk about EFF’s lawsuit against the US government to invalidate Section 1201 of the DMCA, which will make it legal to break DRM in order to fix security vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things devices that, today, are almost invariable insecure, and are also designed to be as privacy-invading as possible (to create “monetizable” data-streams) — a brutal combo.

Auditing IoT products is a liability for security researc...

Podcast: Live from HOPE on Radio Statler

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While I was in NYC to keynote the 11th Hackers on Planet Earth convention, I sat down with the Radio Statler folks and explained what I was going to talk about, as well as bantering with the hosts about the relative merits of DEFCON and HOPE and the secret to managing cons and marriages (MP3).

Podcast: How we’ll kill all the DRM in the world, forever

I’m keynoting the O’Reilly Security Conference in New York in Oct/Nov, so I stopped by the O’Reilly Security Podcast (MP3) to explain EFF’s Apollo 1201 project, which aims to kill all the DRM in the world within a decade.

A couple things changed in the last decade. The first is that the kinds of technologies that have access controls for copyrighted works have gone from these narrow slices (consoles and DVD players) to everything (the car in your driveway). If it has an operating system...

My Kansas City World Science Fiction Convention schedule

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I’m flying into Kansas City for part of Midamericon II, the 74th World Science Fiction Convention, and while there, I’ll be on panels, give a reading, and sit down with fans for a kaffeeklatsch.

Here’s my schedule:

Thursday:

Is Cyberpunk Still a Thing?
Thursday 12:00 – 13:00, 3501H (Kansas City Convention Center)
Cyberpunk hit with a big splash, but as personal computers became more prevalent, smaller, and portable, the genre seems to have faded. Or has it? Our panelists take a renewed...

EFF is suing the US government to invalidate the DMCA’s DRM provisions

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just filed a lawsuit that challenges the Constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA, the “Digital Rights Management” provision of the law, a notoriously overbroad law that bans activities that bypass or weaken copyright access-control systems, including reconfiguring software-enabled devices (making sure your IoT light-socket will accept third-party lightbulbs; tapping into diagnostic info in your car or tractor to allow an independent party to repai...

My interview on Utah Public Radio’s “Access Utah”

Science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow joins us for Tuesday’s AU. In a recent column, Doctorow says that “all the data collected in giant databases today will breach someday, and when it does, it will ruin peoples’ lives. They will have their houses stolen from under them by identity thieves who forge their deeds (this is already happening); they will end up with criminal records because identity thieves will use their personal information to commit crimes (th...

As browsers decline in relevance, they’re becoming DRM timebombs

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My op-ed in today’s issue of The Tech, MIT’s leading newspaper, describes how browser vendors and the W3C, a standards body that’s housed at MIT, are collaborating to make DRM part of the core standards for future browsers, and how their unwillingness to take even the most minimal steps to protect academics and innovators from the DMCA will put the MIT community in the crosshairs of corporate lawyers and government prosecutors.

If you’re a researcher or security/privacy expert and want t...

Peak indifference: privacy as a public health issue

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My latest Locus column, “Peak Indifference”, draws a comparison between the history of the “debate” about the harms of smoking (a debate manufactured by disinformation merchants with a stake in the controversy) and the current debate about the harms of surveillance and data-collection, whose proponents say “privacy is dead,” while meaning, “I would be richer if your privacy were dead.”

Smoking’s harms were hard to pin down in part because the gap between cause (a drag on a cigarette) and...

I’m profiled in the Globe and Mail Report on Business magazine

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The monthly Report on Business magazine in the Canadian national paper The Globe and Mail profiled my work on DRM reform, as well as my science fiction writing and my work on Boing Boing.

I’m grateful to Alec Scott for the coverage, and especially glad that the question of the World Wide Web Consortium’s terrible decision to standardize DRM as part of HTML5 is getting wider attention.

If you want learn more, here’s a FAQ, and here’s a letter you can sign onto in which we’re asking the W...