Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 77

Coming to San Francisco next week for SFPL’s One City/One Book events

As I've mentioned before, my novel Little Brother is the San Francisco Public Library's pick for its first One City/One Book citywide book-club. They're already in the middle of the three months' worth of events, from debates to robotics and crypto workshops to movie screenings (and much more), and I'm gearing up to head to San Francisco for several days' worth of school visits and other presentations.

If you'd like to catch me while I'm there, your best bet is my evening presentation with Nic...

Coming to San Francisco next week for SPFL’s One City/One Book events

As I've mentioned before, my novel Little Brother is the San Francisco Public Library's pick for its first One City/One Book citywide book-club. They're already in the middle of the three months' worth of events, from debates to robotics and crypto workshops to movie screenings (and much more), and I'm gearing up to head to San Francisco for several days' worth of school visits and other presentations.

If you'd like to catch me while I'm there, your best bet is my evening presentation with Nic...

How to foil NSA sabotage: use a dead man’s switch (podcast)

In this week's podcast, I read aloud a recent Guardian column, "How to foil NSA sabotage: use a dead man's switch, which proposes a "dead-man's switch" service that'll tip people off when the NSA serves a secret order demanding that Web operators sabotage their systems.

No one's ever tested this approach in court, and I can't say whether a judge would be able to distinguish between "not revealing a secret order" and "failing to note the absence of a secret order", but in US jurisprudence, comp...

Homeland UK edition launch this Wednesday at London’s Forbidden Planet Superstore

Hey, Londoners! I'm launching the UK edition of Homeland this Wednesday at the Forbidden Planet Megastore from 18h-19h. This is the sequel to Little Brother, and it includes the novella Lawful Interception, which follows on from the action in Homeland.

If you're not a Londoner, don't despair! Forbidden Planet has a great mail-order service and will ship signed copies anywhere.

Interview with South Africa’s Tech Central

I just got back from South Africa's Internet Service Provider Association annual conference, iWeek 13. While there, I sat down with TechCentral's Craig Wilson for an interview (MP3) -- about privacy, the NSA, DRM and the future of the Internet.

Little Brother bus-ads in San Francisco

How cool is this? My novel, Little Brother, is the San Francisco Public Library's "One City One Book pick for 2013, which means that it's the book for the annual "citywide book-club." The library is advertising the initiative with bus-shelter, bus- and coffee-sleeve-ads all over town, and the librarians just tweeted me this pic of the first ads going up in situ.

Holy.

Awesome.

There's a whole ton of events, from screenings of movies like Sneakers, Source Code and Existenz to a "LED Robot Plus...

Fighting back against NSA sabotage with a dead-man’s switch

My latest Guardian column, "How to foil NSA sabotage: use a dead man's switch," conducts a thought-experiment for a "dead-man's switch" to undermine the system of secret surveillance orders used by American government agencies. If you're worried about getting a secret order to sabotage your users' security, you could send a dead-man's switch service a cryptographically secured regular message saying, "No secret orders yet." When the secret order comes, you stop sending the messages. The servi...

I have cancelled my appearance at Campus Party London tonight

On close inspection, I saw that the contract they wanted me to speak under required me:

* to exclusively assign all rights to the talk to them;

* to indemnify them against all claims (including nuisance claims) arising from the talk (meaning that they could simply hand money to nuisance complainants and send me the bill).

Effectively, this would have meant that I could not adapt this speech for further use, use parts of it in articles, or allow people to share it under CC licenses. It would also...

How publishers should learn to stop worrying and love library ebook lending

My latest Locus column, Libraries and E-books, talks about the raw deal that libraries are currently getting from the big five publishers on ebook pricing (libraries pay up to five times retail for their ebooks, and are additionally burdened with the requirement to use expensive, proprietary collection-management tools). I point out that libraries are effectively the last main-street "retailer" of books, and represent a valuable ally for publishing in the age of ebooks, where all the other ma...

Why it matters that you can’t own an electronic copy of the Oxford English Dictionary

In my latest Guardian column, I talk about the digital versions of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the two most important lexicographic references to the English language. As a writer, my print copies of the OED and HTOED are to me what an anvil is to a blacksmith; but I was disturbed to learn that the digital editions of these books are only available as monthly rentals, services that come with expansive data-collecting policies an...