Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 60
October 21, 2015
How a mathematician teaches “Little Brother” to a first-year seminar
Derek Bruff teaches a first-year college writing seminar in mathematics, an unusual kind of course that covers a lot of ground, and uses a novel as some of its instructional material — specifically, my novel Little Brother.
Bruff’s written up an excellent and fascinating description of the unit that uses the novel, which he’s just taught again. After students read the novel and blog brief reactions to the book, they come to class where they participate in an exercise in comparing argumen...
October 15, 2015
Korean edition of Little Brother
It hits shelves today, featuring an essay I wrote specifically for this edition, tying together Korean politics — especially surveillance and censorship — with global mass-surveillance and the themes in the book.
October 6, 2015
See me in Utah, Boston, Toronto and Waterloo!
This/next week, I’m speaking in events in Park City, Utah (Future in Review); Boston (The Freedom to Innovate Summit, the Berman Center and Suffolk University); Toronto (Seneca College); Markham (In Conversation and Storytellers); and the University of Waterloo! Come say hi! (Image: Terri Oda, CC-BY)
October 2, 2015
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...
September 23, 2015
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...
September 12, 2015
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...
September 9, 2015
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...
September 8, 2015
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...
August 22, 2015
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!
