Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 77

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...

Interview with Circulating Ideas library podcast

I did an interview with the Circulating Ideas library podcast (MP3) at the American Library Association conference this year. We talked about information politics, DRM and libraries, my own history with reading and books, and the future of librarianship.

Why Helsinki should host the WorldCon

Here's a video of me explaining why the Helsinki bid committee should be awarded the next World Science Fiction Convention -- it's a grab-bag of all the things I love about Finland. (Thanks, Eemeli)

Talking about the writing life

I did an interview with ShelfAwareness that came out well, I think (I wrote this a long while ago and it's just coming out now, so I have the necessary distance to say that). I particularly like my answer to "Name your five favorite authors": "My favorite authors are the ones living, dead, read and unread, published and unpublished, who write because they can't stop and because something inside them burns to be outside. That doesn't necessarily mean that I want to read their books, but they a...