Cory's in two new sf anthologies

Grok Headline matches for Cory's in two new sf anthologies

Cory's DRM talk

Cory's DRM talk 06/19/2004 12:03 AM

Here's the great thing about the public domain, I can grab Anil's copy of Cory's HTMLized talk, improve the readability (to me) and post it here.

Like other interesting public domain texts, I bet it eventually shows up on a t-shirt at the next tech conference (insert sound of a thousand keys punching up Photoshop and cafepress.com).

Cory's new book released

Cory's new book released 02/10/2004 02:53 AM
Cory Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, has been released. The draft I saw was brilliant, and it was only a draft! The book is for sale in bookstores and online. And it is also available as a free download, under a Creative Commons license.

Cory's DRM talk in Finnish

Cory's DRM talk in Finnish 08/31/2004 11:39 AM
Cory Doctorow: Herkko Hietanen, Tero Tilus, Antti Vähä-Sipilä and Kuisma Lappalainen from EF Finland have translated my Microsoft DRM talk into Finnish, bringing the total number of translations up to 10 (with two more that I know of underway). Freaking cool. Link

Cory's DRM talk in pig-latin

Cory's DRM talk in pig-latin 09/01/2004 01:43 PM
Cory Doctorow: Scotto has converted my Microsoft DRM talk into pig-latin. Link

Cory's next novel pre-sales at Amazon

Cory's next novel pre-sales at Amazon 09/13/2004 07:15 AM
Cory Doctorow: Amazon's put up their sell-page for my next novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," offering a 32% discount off the cover-price of $24.95 ($16.97 in total). The book's out in Februrary, and coincidentally, I just a couple hours ago overnighted the final version of the manuscript to my editor in NYC.

Someone Comes to Town is longest thing I've ever written -- longer than Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe put together. It's a kind of "Little, Big"-meets-"Crypotonomicon" story, a contemporary fantasy about free, unlicensed wireless networking, set in Toronto's bohemian Kensington Market.

I'm going to be posting the full text of this one under a Creative Commons license again when the time comes, and I've got some beautiful supplementary artwork to go with the gorgeous Dave McKean cover; McKean provided five digital paintings to Irene Gallo, Tor's brilliant, award-winning art director, and he's kindly granted me permission to use them all on the book's website when I ship it.

In the meantime, there's an excerpt or two online already. Enjoy! Link

Audiobook of Cory's DRM talk

Audiobook of Cory's DRM talk 12/27/2004 03:36 PM
Cory Doctorow: Telltale Weekly has recorded a 53 minute audiobook of my Microsoft DRM Talk, which they're selling for a dollar, with 20 percent going to EFF. You can get it as an Ogg, MP3 or AAC! Link

Agony Column on Cory's next novel

Agony Column on Cory's next novel 01/05/2005 03:58 PM
Cory Doctorow: Rick Kleffel's "Agony Column" has a fun piece on my next book, and the thing I'm working on these days:

Now however, Doctorow has taken a very different track. His forthcoming novel, 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town' (Tor Books / Tom Doherty Associates ; May 1, 2005 ; $24.95) is in the first place coming to town a bit later in the year. The early draft I first read of this novel was nearly three times as long as 'Eastern Standard Tribe'. But the big ch-ch-ch-changes come as Doctorow turns to face the strangeness not of a science fictional future, but instead a fantastically rendered present. Alan, the protagonist of 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town', is a middle-aged man who moves into a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. He only barely fits in with the college-roomie types next door, and that's even before the gal who lives there reveals to him that she has wings that grow back even if she cuts 'em off.

Alan is a sensitive guy, and he understands, because, we're told, his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. This is clearly the type of reproduction that will not be taught in your hygiene classes. So, you know, when one of his brothers, a set of nested Russian nesting dolls, shows up on his doorstep starving because the innermost doll has disappeared, you can imagine that the whole family relationship issue is a bit more complex than usual. Especially since brother Davey, whom Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.

What's a guy like Alan to do but hook up with a cybergeek who plans to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet access? I've got to admit that under the circumstances set out by Doctorow, that seems like a more than reasonable reaction. Now as to how readers will react to the novel, well, that's a different matter entirely. I'm totally engrossed by this slight shift for Doctorow from the purely technological to the absurd and fantastic. That's because Doctorow writes with the kind of hardheaded humor and logic that makes one suspect this book will be a mind-boggling delight. And perhaps a bit of a revelation for Doctorow's audience, which could really grow to include a swathe of readers who enjoy literary fantasy.

Link

Cory's "I, Robot" for the Palm

Cory's "I, Robot" for the Palm 04/16/2005 09:52 AM
Cory Doctorow: Last month, Eileen Gunn's brilliant sf webzine published my short story "I, Robot," a remix of Isaac Asimov's robots stories, bent on showing the totalitarian underpinnings a world in which only one kind of robot is lawful and only one company is allowed to make it, and what happens when that world meets a post-Singularity civilization.

Habi, a reader in Switzerland, took the initiative to convert the story to a Palm PDB file, and today it went live on the Infinite Matrix site.

"Greetings," the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. "I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits --"

L ink

Cory's interview with Ray Kurzweil

Cory's interview with Ray Kurzweil 04/18/2005 06:24 PM
Cory Doctorow: This month's Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine has a long interview I did with AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil, who invented optical character recognition, cured his own diabetes, and is now planning to live forever. The good folks at Asimov's were good enough to put the full text of the interview online, too.

So how do you know if the backed-up you that you've restored into a new body-or a jar with a speaker attached to it-is really you? Well, you can ask it some questions, and if it answers the same way that you do, you're talking to a faithful copy of yourself.

Sounds good. But the me who sent his first story into Asimov's seventeen years ago couldn't answer the question, "Write a story for Asimov's" the same way the me of today could. Does that mean I'm not me anymore?

Kurzweil has the answer.

"If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years ago, I could not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. But once the requisite uploading technology becomes available a few decades hence, you could make a perfect-enough copy of me, and it would pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. The copy doesn't have to match the quantum state of my every neuron, either: if you meet me the next day, I'd pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. Nevertheless, none of the quantum states in my brain would be the same. There are quite a few changes that each of us undergo from day to day, we don't examine the assumption that we are the same person closely.

(Disclaimer: Yeah, I got the Heinlein title wrong: it's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, not The Man Who Sold the Moon -- d'oh!) Link

Photos from Cory's travels

Photos from Cory's travels 08/30/2004 10:02 AM
Cory Doctorow: I've been travelling nonstop for a couple years now, shooting pix of various amusing, pretty or outre things as I go. I find myself with hundreds of photos that I took basically because I thought it'd be funny to show them to friends, but I never do.

This morning, I used Flickr's Uploadr tool for OSX to upload about 160 of them, tagging them with some metadata as I went. It was a pretty neat experience, reliving all those moments. I'm gonna try to keep my public Flickr library up to date on this stuff from now on. Link

Cory's DRM talk in Danish

Cory's DRM talk in Danish 08/12/2004 11:58 PM
Kim Pedersen has translated my Microsoft DRM talk into Danish. Link

Cory's WorldCon schedule

Cory's WorldCon schedule 08/12/2004 11:58 PM
Well, I'm off for a week-and-chage-worth of holidays in a couple hours -- I really need it! I'll see you again in ten days or so.

Meanwhile, here's my schedule for the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston this Labor Day -- hope to see you:

* THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2:

4PM: Unlimited Access: Issues involving unlicensed access to spectrum. With Harold Feld from the the Media Access Project.

* FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3:

10AM: Group reading from The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

11AM: Locus Award ceremony

5PM: Drunk on Technology: With Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Charlie Stross

* SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4:

12PM: The End of Copyright: Can the Arts Survive the Digital Age? With Charlie Petit, Daniel Grotta, Steve Miller, and James M. Turner

1PM: Tradeoffs between Freedom, Security, and Privacy. With Joseph Lazzaro, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Don Sakers

2-2:30PM: Charlie Stross and I will be signing our new short novel, Rapture of the Nerds, just published in the new issue of Argosy Magazine, at the Borderlands Books table in the Dealers' Room

5PM: Postcapitalist Social Mechanisms. With M. M. Buckner, David Friedman, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Charlie Stross

* SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5:

10:30AM Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. A recapitulation of my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference

4PM: Reading

5PM: Sign at the Asimov's Magazine table in the Dealer's Room

* MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6:

11AM: Kaffeeklatsch

12-12:30: International Copyright Issues

Link

Cory's DRM talk in Hungarian

Cory's DRM talk in Hungarian 08/09/2004 07:53 AM
Karoly Negyesi has translated my Microsoft DRM Talk into Hungarian. I've been corresponding this morning with two translators working on different Spanish versions -- once those are posted, the total number of translations will be nine -- including two Italian and two Spanish versions. This is pretty cool. Link (Thanks, Karoly!)

Cory's DRM talk in Swedish

Cory's DRM talk in Swedish 07/27/2004 07:54 AM
Ulf Benjaminsson has translated my DRM talk into Swedish: Link

Cory's Vienna photos

Cory's Vienna photos 05/27/2004 06:25 PM
I had a killer day in Vienna today -- I am here to give a couple of talks at the LinuxWeek event in MuseumsQuartier. My hosts took me through Prado Park, a cool old amusement park, and then to a beer garden in the old Swiss World's Fair pavillion where I got an entire roast haunch of pig (!), then Monochrom staged a performance of the world's first "massively multiplayer thumbwrestling tournament." I shot a ton of pix -- here they are. Link

Kick-ass cover-art for Cory's next novel

Kick-ass cover-art for Cory's next novel 07/08/2004 03:24 PM
My next novel is called "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and Tor Books will publish it next spring (here's an excerpt). It's a bit of a departure for me: it's a fantasy novel -- well, more of a magic realist thing, actually -- about community wireless networking. I'm really happy with how it's come out. Really, really happy.

Happy as I am with it, I'm unbelievably ecstatic over the cover-art. Tor Books commissioned superstar Dave McKean (whom you may know from the covers of Neil Gaiman's Sandman books), and then the genius art-director Irene Gallo applied her skill and turned it into this wonderful work of art (my editor's strapline, "A miraculous novel of secrets, lies, magic -- and Internet connectivity" doesn't hurt either!).

Colour me ecstatic. 336K JPEG Link

Cory's drm rant wikified

Cory's drm rant wikified 06/20/2004 08:34 PM

Cory's excellent drm rant which he presented at Microsoft Research has now been wikified to allow people to comment and add to it. Excellent.

Video of Cory's panel on 10 Years of the
Web

Video of Cory's panel on 10 Years of the
Web 03/14/2005 05:29 PM
Cory Doctorow: Teddy sez, "Last year, Cory was one of the keynote speakers at the WWW@10 Conference held at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Video of his talk, as well as the other keynotes and the closing panel he participated in, have now been posted. I'm only sorry we didn't get a recording of the lively dinner discussion at the closing banquet (the back and forth between Cory and Charles Nesson was fantastic)." Link (Thanks, Teddy!)

HTML version of Cory's MS DRM speech

HTML version of Cory's MS DRM speech 06/18/2004 11:48 PM
suitable for reading by suits, with key concepts hyperlinked

Cory's Sunburst acceptance speech

Cory's Sunburst acceptance speech 09/24/2004 07:05 AM
Cory Doctorow: Nalo Hopkinson sent me this photo of my pal and collaborator Karl Schroeder accepting the Sunburst Award (presented by Michelle Sagara) for my short story collection, A Place So Foriegn and Eight More on my behalf at last night's ceremony at Toronto's Merril Collection sf library. Here's the speech he read for me:

It is a cliche to note that receiving an award conveys an honour upon its recipient, but this is a stupendous honour and I would be remiss if I failed to tell you all how mightily chuffed I am. I am deeply sorry that I am not able to be there tonight: I am with you in spirit.

The list of people who deserve to be thanked for this is long indeed: the friends and colleagues; the fans and readers; the editors and critics; the collaborators and the writers who inspired me -- and the jury, them too! My most sincere thanks to all of you.

No writer is an island, no idea is original, no effort is a solo effort. We stand upon the shoulders of giants, we collaborate with our colleagues and with the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors. Literature -- indeed, all human endeavor -- is dignified and uplifted through collaboration and cooperation. We sit atop a great erected infrastructure of human invention and effort, all of it embodied in the bricks and boards that surround us, and, most importantly, in the traditional knowledge that allows each generation to improve upon the bricks and boards of the last one.

The writer is engaged in dialog with the world and with posterity. Our words go on to form a layer of the substrate of human creation. Those who tell us that our words, our art and our posterity are best served with strong locks and high fences are *not on our side*. No writer could pen a single word but for the rich humus of public domain effort with which we garden our notions and conceits.

So thank you all, and thanks most of all to our ancestors, the bringers of fire and the inventors of the wheel, the Judith Merrils and the Phyllis Gotleibs, the Gilgameshes and the golems, the Turings and the Teslas. Thanks to the brave pirates who continue to preserve our posterity in the face of outrageous insult to creation. Thanks to the readers and to you all.

Link

Cory's DRM talk as a print-centric PDF

Cory's DRM talk as a print-centric PDF 09/21/2004 08:37 AM
Cory Doctorow: Change This, the org that publishes manifestos on the Web as print-centric, beautifully laid-out PDFs, has republished my Microsoft DRM speech as a printable, laid-out, typographically sophisticated and pretty PDF. How cool! Link

Cory's final WorldCon schedule

Cory's final WorldCon schedule 09/02/2004 08:11 AM
Cory Doctorow: I'm in Dallas Ft Worth airport en route from an EFF gig in Chile to Boston for the WorldCon and thought I'd post my finalized WorldCon schedule, which has a couple minor changes from the last time around:

* THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2:

6PM: Unlimited Access: Issues involving unlicensed access to spectrum. With Harold Feld from the the Media Access Project.

* FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3:

10AM: Group reading from The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases

11AM: Locus Award ceremony

5PM: Drunk on Technology: With Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Charlie Stross

* SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4:

12PM: The End of Copyright: Can the Arts Survive the Digital Age? With Charlie Petit, Daniel Grotta, Steve Miller, and James M. Turner

1PM: Tradeoffs between Freedom, Security, and Privacy. With Joseph Lazzaro, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Don Sakers

2:30-3PM: Charlie Stross and I will be signing our new short novel, Rapture of the Nerds, just published in the new issue of Argosy Magazine, at the Borderlands Books table in the Dealers' Room

5PM: Postcapitalist Social Mechanisms. With M. M. Buckner, David Friedman, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Charlie Stross

* SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5:

10:30AM Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. A recapitulation of my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference

4PM: Reading

5PM: Sign at the Asimov's Magazine table in the Dealer's Room

6PM: Group signing for Re/Visions anthology in Room 107 in the Hynes

* MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6:

11AM: Kaffeeklatsch

12-12:30: International Copyright Issues

Link

Cory's PopSci column: How Hollywood
broke DVD

Cory's PopSci column: How Hollywood
broke DVD 12/29/2004 04:49 AM
Cory Doctorow: I've begun writing a regular column for Popular Science magazine, about technology and policy. The first one's just hit the stands, called "Go Ask Hollywood: Why can't you back up your DVDs? Because entertainment execs don't want you to."

They set up a cartel in 1995, now called the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA), to dole out these licenses. Anyone making players without one is breaking the law. A Fox Studios executive told me, "It's a polite marketplace." Sure, if polite means stagnant.

Think of all the things you can do with a track from a CD now that you couldn't do 10 years ago: rip it to your laptop, turn it into a ring tone, send it to your friends, burn a mix. Many of these capabilities are illegal, and the recording industry has tried to stop them all, but they're out there, challenging the old rules and feeling their place in the market. Innovators have tried to enable the same flexibility for the DVD. Last year 321 Studios released software that let you back up prerecorded DVDs, but the MPAA sued it into bankruptcy before a court could rule on whether or not the product was legal.

Just last month, this magazine gave a Best of What's New award to a $27,000 movie jukebox from Kaleidescape, praising the maker's efforts to appease Hollywood by locking down content on the device so it can't be shared. Kaleidescape thinks the product is within the boundaries of its DVD-CCA license, but my Deep Throat on the cartel says the group disagrees and is currently deciding how the company will be punished. Penalties range from a stern warning to fines to lawsuits. (When I called the DVD-CCA for an official line, I got this reply: "I've been asked to tell you we have no comment." "Who asked you to tell me that?" "I can't tell you.")

Link

Cory's book on preliminary Nebula
ballot!

Cory's book on preliminary Nebula
ballot! 01/05/2005 03:41 AM
Cory Doctorow: The preliminary ballot for the Nebula Award came out yesterday, and my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is one of six novels that made the first cut. Between now and Feb 15, my colleagues in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) will vote on a final ballot. It's exhilarating to have just gotten this far, but it will be truly amazing if my first novel makes the final ballot. If you're a SFWA member, I hope you'll remember the book when your preliminary ballot arrives in the mail!

Paladin of Souls -- Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos, Oct03)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- Cory Doctorow (Tor, Feb03)
Omega -- Jack McDevitt (Ace, Nov03)
Perfect Circle -- Sean Stewart (Small Beer Press, Jun04)
Conquistador -- S.M. Stirling (Roc, Feb04)
The Knight -- Gene Wolfe (Tor, Jan04)

Link

Cory's Web2.0==AOL1.0 speech audio

Cory's Web2.0==AOL1.0 speech audio 03/14/2005 05:29 PM
Cory Doctorow: I gave a fifteen minute speech last year at the first Web 2.0 conference, called "Does Web2.0=AOL 1.0? How the sneaky forces of darkness are criminalizing the Web in smoke-filled rooms that you can't get into." IT Conversations has put the audio online. Link (Thanks, Doug!)

Cory's copyright talk video from UCSD

Cory's copyright talk video from UCSD 04/14/2005 12:47 PM
Cory Doctorow: I gave a talk on copyright reform last month to librarians and other interested parties at the University of California at San Diego. The video's online now:

Doctorow talked about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the new Access to Knowledge movement underway to safeguard the rights of archivists, disabled people, and educators. This movement has been successful in helping to create a development agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). For some background see "WIPO to convene meetings on ‘development agenda’".

Link (Thanks, James!)

Cory's editorial on chicken companies
and copyright

Cory's editorial on chicken companies
and copyright 03/30/2005 02:37 PM
Cory Doctorow: I wrote this editorial for the Edinburgh law school's website on how the copyright wars are being waged today because big technology companies have lost their nerve. It has extra meaning this week, when Grokster is being played out at the Supreme Court, where a tech company has exhibited the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the entertainment industry bullies.

Time was, companies like Sony could be relied upon to spend hundreds of millions of dollars defending its right to market good technology to its customers -- the company spent eight years in court sticking up for the VCR at a time when the consensus among legal scholars was that giving the public the ability to copy movies in their sitting rooms was flat-out illegal.

Time was companies shipped products that sat at the intersection of the limits of engineering and what the public could be convinced to buy: jukeboxes, cable TV, radio, VCRs, MP3 players, you name it, if it was dodgy, cool and likely to freak out an entertainment exec, someone out there would offer it for sale.

Time was that copyright changed whenever some entrepreneur invented something cool and infringing and compelling and the courts or lawmakers legalized it with reforms to copyright.

Times have changed. Today, businesses shrink away from offering general-purpose technology whose suite of uses includes ones that fall outside the confines of today's copyright -- like automatic commercial-skipping in PVRs. They run screaming from businesses that are clearly infringing by today's standards -- like DVD-ripping movie jukeboxes.

Link< /a>

Another chance to have Cory's books
signed and shipped to your door

Another chance to have Cory's books
signed and shipped to your door 06/01/2004 02:09 PM
Back when I lived in San Francisco, the nice people at Borderlands Books did this super-cool thing where they'd take orders for my books, along with details for personal inscriptions, then get me to sign them when I dropped round the store, and ship them for free within the US (and for a modest fee elsewhere).

Of course, that became a lot less practical last winter, when I moved to London. But you've got another chance to get a signed, inscribed book shipped right to your door: I'm swinging briefly through SF in June (and I do mean *briefly* -- sorry, no time to socialize) and I'm gonna stop by Borderlands and sign any stock that they have. If you get your order in before June 15, I'll sign your copy that week and you'll have it before July 1 -- pretty cool!

Borderlands' contact info is

866 Valencia St.
San Francisco CA 94110 USA
415 824-8203
888 893-4008

Call or email them with your order and payment details and they'll get you sorted out.

Speed-reader edition of Cory's EST for
Java phones

Speed-reader edition of Cory's EST for
Java phones 04/06/2005 05:27 PM
Cory Doctorow: One of the coolest remixes that anyone's done of my books has been the speed reader that Trevor Smith put together, which flashes the books one word at a time, at high speed, inside a Java applet. Though the words fly past so fast that they practically flicker, they are still readable -- there's some heretofore unsuspected talent buried in our brains for parsing sentences when rendered as rapid-fire flashcards.

Now Crutcher Dunnavant has adapted the speed-reader to run on Java-capable mobile phones, which makes sense: the screen on a handy is just the right size to show one word at a time. Link (Thanks, Crutcher!)

Contest to produce in-game book based on
Cory's next novel

Contest to produce in-game book based on
Cory's next novel 03/29/2005 02:13 AM
Cory Doctorow: When my next novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town comes out this July, I'm going to do an in-game signing and talk in Second Life, the massively mutiplayer online world (I did this before, for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it was really fun!).

To commemorate the event, Second Life's Wagner James Au is coordinating an in-game contest to design a virtual book based on the text of the novel, a digital 3D object wiht turn-able pages, etc. I really hope that what they end up building is more than a simple 3D version of a meatspace book, though: electronic text is so much more protean than printed words, so it would be a shame to constrain it to behaving the way that dumb matter does.

...[F]or the next couple months, in preparation for Cory's appearance, Residents will be creating book prototypes, and submitting them to me for an in-world expo, so the community can choose which one provides the best in-world reading experience. Within 48 hours of the announcement, one Resident had already submitted a screenshot of his own prototype (bottom screenshot), which sharp-eyed readers will recognize as the opening page to Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the novel he discussed with Residents at the first Book Club. The one to win the most votes at the Expo will get the honor of publishing Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Second Life. (Though of course, my personal hope is that this also helps launch a mini-explosion of virtual book technology in-world.)

Li nk

Cory's talk from ETECH: All Complex
Ecosystems Have Parasites

Cory's talk from ETECH: All Complex
Ecosystems Have Parasites 03/17/2005 03:56 AM
Cory Doctorow: I've just given my speech at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. The talk was called Al l Complex Ecoystems Have Parasites (a line I nicked from my friend Kathryn Myronuk). As with last year's talk, I've dedicated this one to the public domain and put it online.

CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites -- entrepreneurial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely. In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs to ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music -- and on and on.

DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in a bottle where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars' worth of ten-year old DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten years ago: watching. You can't put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can't downsample the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can't lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs.

Link

Cory's Nimby story in Chinese scanned
and downloadable

Cory's Nimby story in Chinese scanned
and downloadable 09/07/2004 10:55 AM
Cory Doctorow: zhouyuanchi was good enough to provide a set of high-resolution scans of my story "Nimby and the D-Hoppers" as it appears in the September issue of Sci Fi World. While I'm waiting for the editors to provide me with the electronic text, I've uploaded the scans in a tarball, under a Creative Commons by-noncommercial-share-alike license. Enjoy! 1.7MB Tarball Link (Thanks, zhouyuanchi!)

Winner of Second Life contest to design
Cory's book

Winner of Second Life contest to design
Cory's book 06/22/2005 01:50 AM
Cory Doctorow: On July 24, I'll be appearing in the online world Second Life to do a book signing/launch for my new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. The Second Lifers have been conducting a contest to see who can come up with the coolest in-game programmed book-object to decant the novel into, and they've picked a winner:

Falk Bergman was the first to bring me by to have a look at his prototype in development, a giant book positioned next to a seat. Sitting on it automatically fixes your camera position in place, to give you the best possible view of the book.

"The viewer in-world itself is very simple," Falk tells me modestly. "It is basically a shopping agent with two displays that hooks into Page Up and Down [on the keyboards] for changing the pages."

Li nk (Thanks, Ernest!)

Update: Dragonpage radio have recorded a podcast with me about the book and it went live today. Here's the MP3 link

American Airlines' dossier on Cory's
friends: the latest installment

American Airlines' dossier on Cory's
friends: the latest installment 04/10/2005 07:25 AM
Cory Doctorow: Back in January, I flew American Airlines from London Gatwick to San Francisco. At the checkin counter, I was shocked when an AA security guard (not a customs officer -- private, corporate contract-security for AA) demanded that I produce a written dossier of the names and addresses of the friends I planned on staying with in the USA. She cited an unspecified TSA regulation that required this, and could not tell me what AA's document retention policy was, nor what would be done with this information. Her aggressive supervisor accused me of undermining the safety of airlines in the sky by refusing to answer, and affirmed that the TSA required it. I stood fast, and finally the terminal supervisor told me that since I fly American enough to hold a Platinum card, I wouldn't be required to turn over this information.

I wrote an open letter to AA asking why they asked me for this info, and what TSA rule they were operating under when they did so.

Imagine my surprise when I got a reply from AA telling me that they'd been telling the press that my "specific behaviors" had triggered the secondary screening and that I had been told that they would give me the information they were taking on my friends' names and addresses when I left the counter. The latter is a flat out lie -- not a misunderstanding or a grey area of the truth, a total and utter fabrication. The former is intriguing -- what behaviors "triggered the secondary screening?" Moreover, AA told me that this was a case of a screener who misunderstood the policy, but if that's so, why did her supervisor back her up?

So I wrote a response, pointing out all of this and repeating my unanswered questions about the screening procedure.

On Friday, I got a terse reply from AA, telling me that a Federal Aviation Administration rule forbid them discussing the specifics of their procedures. That's a weird answer, since nearly all of my questions had nothing to do with the specifics of their procedures, and since the FAA no longer oversees much in the way of airline security, having been deprecated in favor of the Transport Security Agency.

My latest letter points all of this out. The FAA may tell them not to tell me which behaviors trigger secondary screening (ah, security through obscurity, I feel safer already), but it surely doesn't prevent them from explaining why they issued a press-release that lied about what happened at the counter, nor does it require them not to disclose their privacy policy, which they are required under British law to have and to produce on demand. And of course, it's not a law if it's not written down and subject to inspection, so they should certainly be able to tell me the number, name or reference for this regulation.

In your letter of the 22nd, you say, "Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit us from discussing the details of security measures so as to avoid compromising the purpose and integrity of the process."

This came as a surprise to me: I was under the impression that the FAA had basically ceded security administration to the TSA. Indeed, it was the TSA which the AA representatives at Gatwick cited when they asked me for a written dossier on my friends' names and addresses.

It's good to hear that this is the FAA and not the TSA. However, I have never heard of an FAA regulation that prohibits airlines from sharing details of their security procedures with the public.

Which leads me to ask:

* What is the name, number or reference for this regulation, please?

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