Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 61
August 20, 2015
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...
August 17, 2015
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...
August 5, 2015
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....
July 30, 2015
Q&A from Clarion West benefit/reading in Seattle
Here’s the Q&A portion of the Cory Doctorow in Conversation event I did to benefit the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop in Seattle on July 28, 2015. The audio was provided Frank Catalano, who also conducted the interview. MP3
July 9, 2015
My upcoming events in Seattle
I’m teaching the Clarion West writing workshop in Seattle in late July, and you can come see me at two events, one on July 25, the other on July 28.
Postcyberpunk and Paella: An intimate evening with Cory Doctorow and Peter Biddle to benefit Clarion West. July 25, 2015 at 7 p.m.
Cory Doctorow in Conversation: Please join us for an evening of conversation with Cory Doctorow on July 28 at 7 p.m. at the University Temple United Methodist Church, 1415 Northeast 43rd Street, Seattle (across th...
July 3, 2015
Why we’re still talking about Terminator and the Matrix
My July 2015 Locus column, Skynet Ascendant, suggests that the enduring popularity of images of homicidal, humanity-hating AIs has more to do with our present-day politics than computer science.
As a class, science fiction writers imagine some huge slice of all possible futures, and then readers and publishers select from among these futures based on which ones chime with their anxieties and hopes. As a system, it works something like a Ouija board: we’ve all got our fingers on the planche...
July 1, 2015
Summer reading lists!
Canada’s public institutions were very good to me today!
The CBC included Little Brother on its list of 100 Great YA Novels that make you proud to be Canadian.
Not to be outdone, the Toronto Public Library put the book on its Fight The Power: Books For Youth Activists.
As if that wasn’t enough, TPL also put For the Win on its Boy Meets Boo list, featuring “Great books for guys: adventure, humour, fantasy and suspense.”
June 30, 2015
On Big Data’s shrinking returns
In my new Guardian column, I point out that the big-data-driven surveillance business model is on the rocks.
Once upon a time, you could sell soap with a slogan like “You will be clean,” but we become resistant to ads. While Big Data initially generated some promising sell-through results, these days, companies like Facebook are relying on non-surveillance techniques for their growth.
Remember when Xynga’s “social games” like Farmville seemed to colonise the limbic systems of everyone yo...
June 27, 2015
The Internet of Things That Do What You Tell Them – my talk at last week’s Solid Conference
From Solid Conference 2015: From “ecosystem” strategies to the war on terror, from the copyright wars to the subprime lending industry, it seems like everyone wants to build an Internet of Treacherous Things whose primary loyalty is to someone other than the people with whose lives they are intimately entwined.
Your gesture-driven, voice-controlled future is a future in which you are never off-camera, never out of range of a mic. The difference between a world where computers say “Yes, Mas...
