Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 56

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...

How to protect the future web from its founders’ own frailty

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Earlier this month, I gave the afternoon keynote at the Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Summit, and my talk was about how the people who founded the web with the idea of having an open, decentralized system ended up building a system that is increasingly monopolized by a few companies — and how we can prevent the same things from happening next time.

The speech was very well received — it got a standing ovation — and has attracted a lot of discussion since.

Jonke Suhr has done me t...

Video: Guarding the Decentralized Web from its founders’ human frailty

Earlier this month, I gave the afternoon keynote at the Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Summit, speaking about how the people who are building a new kind of decentralized web can guard against their own future moments of weakness and prevent themselves from rationalizing away the kinds of compromises that led to the centralization of today’s web.

The talk was very well-received — it got a standing ovation — and I’ve heard from a lot of people about it since. The video was heretofore...

How we will keep the Decentralized Web decentralized: my talk from the Decentralized Web Summit

At yesterday’s Internet Archive Decentralized Web Summit, the afternoon was given over to questions of security and policy.

I gave the opening talk, “How Stupid Laws and Benevolent Dictators can Ruin the Decentralized Web, too,” which was about “Ulysses pacts“: bargains you make with yourself when your willpower is strong to prevent giving into temptation later when you are tired or demoralized, and how these have benefited the web to date, and how new, better ones can protect the decentr...

You are not a wallet: complaining considered helpful

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My new Guardian column, It’s your duty to complain – that’s how companies improve, is a rebuttal to those who greet public complaints about businesses’ actions with, “Well, just don’t buy from them, then.”

This idea posits that your role in the market is to be a kind of ambulatory wallet, whose only options are to buy, or not to buy. But not only does complaining sometimes solve your problems, it also warns others away from bad decisions, helping better companies thrive.

Finally, some bu...

How security and privacy pros can help save the web from legal threats over vulnerability disclosure

I have a new op-ed in today’s Privacy Tech, the in-house organ of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, about the risks to security and privacy from the World Wide Web Consortium’s DRM project, and how privacy and security pros can help protect people who discover vulnerabilities in browsers from legal aggression.

I’ve got an open letter to the W3C asking it to extend its existing nonaggression policy — which prohibits members from using patents to threaten those who impl...

Revealed: the amazing cover for Walkaway, my first adult novel since 2009

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Next April, Tor Books will publish Walkaway, the first novel I’ve written specifically for adults since 2009; it’s scheduled to be their lead title for the season and they’ve hired the brilliant designer Will Staehle (Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Darker Shade of Magic) for the cover, which Tor has just revealed.

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Staehle’s cover features a die-cut dustjacket that offers a peek at the design printed on the boards beneath and highlights the blurb from Edward Snowden (!).

I’ll be going out...

O’Reilly Hardware Podcast on the risks to the open Web and the future of the Internet of Things

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I appeared on the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast this week (MP3, talking about the way that DRM has crept into all our smart devices, which compromises privacy, security and competition.

In this episode of the Hardware podcast, we talk with writer and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow. He’s recently rejoined the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight a World Wide Web Consortium proposal that would add DRM to the core specification for HTML. When we recorded this episode with Cory, the...