Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 57
May 9, 2016
Peace in Our Time: how publishers, libraries and writers could work together
Publishing is in a weird place: ebook sales are stagnating; publishing has shrunk to five major publishers; libraries and publishers are at each others’ throats over ebook pricing; and major writers’ groups are up in arms over ebook royalties, and, of course, we only have one major book retailer left — what is to be done?
In my new Locus Magazine column, “Peace in Our Time,” I propose a pair of software projects that could bring all together writers, publishers and libraries to increase c...
May 3, 2016
The open web’s guardians are acting like it’s already dead
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The World Wide Web Consortium — an influential standards body devoted to the open web — used to make standards that would let anyone make a browser that could view the whole Web; now they’re making standards that let the giant browser companies and giant entertainment companies decide which browsers will and won’t work on the Web of the future.
When you ask them why they’re doing this, they say that the companies are going to build technology that locks out new entrants no matter what th...
March 23, 2016
30% off O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention in Austin, May 16-19
O’Reilly’s venerable, essential OSCON is in Austin, Texas this year, meaning that you’ll get to combine brain-thumpingly good talks and workshops of free/open source tools and techniques with some of the world’s best BBQ, millions of bats, my favorite toy store anywhere, and one of the best indie bookstores you could hope to visit.
I’m delivering one of this year’s keynotes, and I’ll certainly be doing all of the above!
The O’Reilly folks are offering 30% off your OSCON badge when you boo...
March 16, 2016
Screw optimism, we need hope instead
I wrote an essay called “Fuck Optimism” for a print project from F-Secure, about how we’ll make the Internet a 21st century electronic nervous system that serves humanity and stop it from being a tool to oppress, surveil and displace humans.
In honor of Digital Freedom Month, F-Secure and Little Atoms have republished it online.
Say that I believed that the Internet – presently treated by regulators as the world’s best video-on-demand service, or the world’s most perfect pornography di...
March 4, 2016
Whuffie would be a terrible currency
My latest Locus column, Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies, explains the ways in which “reputation” makes a poor form of currency — in a nutshell, reputation doesn’t fulfill most of the roles we expect from currency (store of value, unit of exchange, unit of account), and it is literally a popularity contest where the rich always get richer.
Reputation economics are closely bound up with the idea of “meritocracy,” itself a convenient, self-serving delusion that effec...
Apple vs FBI: The privacy disaster is inevitable, but we can prevent the catastrophe
My new Guardian column, Forget Apple’s fight with the FBI – our privacy catastrophe has only just begun, explains how surveillance advocates have changed their arguments: 20 years ago, they argued that the lack of commercial success for privacy tools showed that the public didn’t mind surveillance; today, they dismiss Apple’s use of cryptographic tools as a “marketing stunt” and treat the proportionality of surveillance as a settled question.
The privacy disaster is inevitable. Personal...
March 3, 2016
Scroogled: the day Google went evil
My short story Scroogled has been reprinted on Lithub, as part of the promotion for Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, a forthcoming anthology about surveillance with stories by Etgar Keret, T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu and others.
Scroogled is the story of “the day Google became evil” — what happens when a former Googler discovers that his company has been made into an arm of the state.
“Want to tell me about June 1998?”
Gre...
February 25, 2016
South Korean lawmakers stage filibuster to protest “anti-terror” bill, read from Little Brother
Since 2001, authoritarians in the South Korean government have been attempting to pass mass surveillance legislation, and they have seized upon the latest North Korean saber-rattling as the perfect excuse for ramming it through the SK Parliament.
Members of the opposition Minjoo Party have vowed to block the legislation by staging the first Korean parliamentary filibuster in more than 45 years. To succeed, they will have to keep their filibuster running until March 11, speaking without p...
February 24, 2016
Math denialism: crypto backdoors and DRM are the alternative medicine of computer science
My latest Guardian column, The FBI wants a backdoor only it can use – but wanting it doesn’t make it possible, draws a connection between vaccine denial, climate denial, and the demand for backdoors in secure systems, as well as the call for technologies that prevent copyright infringement, like DRM.
The thing all these issues share is that the relevant scientific communities view them as settled questions: vaccines don’t cause autism, humans are warming the world, you can’t make a copy-...
February 17, 2016
The Eleventh HOPE: NYC, Jul 22-24 (I’m keynoting!)
After literally decades of trying to make it to one of 2600 Magazine’s legendary HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) events, held every two years in NYC, I will be coming to town this year for it — and giving one of the keynotes.
HOPE is in the pantheon of great information security, electronic privacy and digital rights conferences, with DEFCON in Vegas and CCC in Hamburg. Last year, Snowden keynoted.
Tickets are for sale now — and the conference has a history of selling out, so be warned!...
