Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 57

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-...

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!...

I was a Jeopardy! clue

I got quite a treat yesterday afternoon when my email and Twitter filled up with people letting me know that I was mentioned in a Jeopardy! clue!

I was joined in a category about science fiction novels with John Redshirts Scalzi, Jeff Annihilation VanderMeer, and Ernest Ready Player One Cline. Presumably, there was a fifth clue, but either it was never revealed or I haven’t been able to find it (please update the comments if you know what it was!).

My talk at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE)

Last Friday, I travelled to Pasadena to give the morning keynote at SCaLE; they livecast the whole event, and you can watch it here.

No Matter Who’s Winning the War on General Purpose Computing, You’re Losing

If cyberwar were a hockey game, it’d be the end of the first period and the score would be tied 500-500. All offense, no defense. Meanwhile, a horrible convergence has occurred as everyone from car manufacturers to insulin pump makers have adopted the inkjet printer business model, i...

We’ll probably never “Free Mickey”

It’s Copyright Week, and I’ve kicked it off with a post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deep Links explaining why, regardless of copyright term extension, Mickey Mouse will probably never be “free” — but that doesn’t mean that Disney is acting irrationally in its fight as hard as they are for eternal copyrights.

Rather, they’re acting in their cold-blooded self-interest, playing a very long game indeed.

That’s because Disney has another body of law it can use to suppress creativ...