Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 60

Data breaches are winning the privacy wars, so what should privacy advocates do?

Data breaches are winning the privacy wars, so what should privacy advocates do?

My latest Guardian column, “Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy,” argues that the hard part of the privacy wars (getting people to care about privacy) is behind us, because bad privacy regulation and practices are producing wave after wave of people who really want to protect their privacy.

From now on, our job is figuring out what to tell those people when they come to us, to give them...

How to save online advertising

My latest Guardian column, How to save online advertising, looks at the writing on the wall for ad-blockers and ad-supported publishing, and suggests one way to keep ads viable.

The mistrust between advertisers and publishers has given rise to a fourth entity in this ecosystem: ad counters. These are companies that generously offer to independently count the number of times the publishers serve the advertisers’ ads – all the advertiser needs to do is tell the publisher to put the ad-count...

My novel “Utopia” will hit shelves in 2017

My biggest (and, IMO, best) adult novel has just sold to Tor for a very pleasing sum of money; it will hit shelves in 2017.

Here’s my editor in Publishers Weekly:

The novel, which marks Doctorow’s first solo adult fiction effort since 2009’s Makers, is set in the latter part of this century; Hayden described it as a “big, sprawling story” about what happens when advancements in technology make peace and abundance for all a possibility, allowing humans to “simply walk away from the syste...

NYC to-do: “Art, Design, and The Future of Privacy,” Sept 17

A night of talks and conversations about privacy and tech, centered on humane design and user-experience — I’m speaking there!

There’s a really full roster of hackers, cryptographers, designers, writers, architects, critical theorists, sociologists and others appearing. The event’s at 1930h at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, and it’s free!

Join artists, cryptographers, critical theorists, architects, designers, sociologists, user experience researchers and other bright luminaries for a casual...

Dear Internet of Things: human beings are not things

My new Locus column is What If People Were Sensors, Not Things to be Sensed?

The column’s argument is that the Facebook model for the IoT is a nightmare: your devices are emissaries of distant corporations that gather data on you and decide what information to derive from it and to feed back to you.

But there’s another model: things that belong to you, that monitor your life on your behalf, keeping the data to themselves. When a company wants to interact with your network and devices, i...

Little Brother optioned by Paramount

My bestselling 2008 novel YA novel Little Brother has been optioned by Paramount, with Don Murphy (Natural Born Killers, Transformers) as the producer.

Suffice it to say, I’m pretty excited about this.

The rights to the Orwellian-themed novel were picked up by Angry Films in 2010, with Don Murphy now bringing the property to Paramount. Murphy will continue to produce via his shingle, with Gaby Canton developing for Paramount.

Sources cite that the studio is currently securing a writer...

Coming to Reno’s Grassroots Books this Friday!

I’m doing a Q&A and signing at Reno’s Grassroots Books — a local, indie store with an emphasis on affordable reading for all — this Friday, Aug 28 at 6:30PM — just a quick stop on the way to That Thing in the Desert. I hope you’ll come by and say hello!

Guardian column: Ulysses pacts and spying hacks: warrant canaries and binary transparency

As the world’s governments exercise exciting new gag-order snooping warrants that companies can never, ever talk about, companies are trying out a variety of “Ulysses pacts” that automatically disclose secret spying orders, putting them out of business.

A “Ulysses pact” is a negotiating tactic in which one party voluntarily surrenders some freedom of action, named for the story of Ulysses ordering his men to tie him to the mast of his ship so that he couldn’t jump into the sea when he hea...

Interview with O’Reilly Radar podcast

I did an interview (MP3) with the O’Reilly Radar podcast at the Solid conference last month; we talked about the Apollo 1201 project I’m doing with EFF.

In the absence of any other confounding factors, obnoxious stuff that vendors do tends to self-correct, but there’s an important confounding factor, which is that in 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In order to try and contain unauthorized copying, they made it a felony to break a lock that protects access to a...

Parenting and the Internet: the smarter, missing third way

My new Guardian column, What is missing from the kids’ internet? discusses three different approaches to teaching kids information literacy: firewall-based abstinence education; trust/relationship-based education, and a third way, which is the proven champion of the offline world.

That third way is making media for kids and grownups to use/enjoy/experience together. It’s what made the mission-driven Sesame Street so successful in its mission and the profit-driven Disneyland so profitable....