Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

By Cory DoctorowArts

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Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com episodes

June 11, 2012 The Curious Case of Internet Privacy
Here’s a podcast of my recent Tech Review feature, The Curious Case of Internet Privacy:
Why do we seem to value privacy so little? In part, it’s because we are told to. Facebook has more than once overridden its users’ privacy preferences, replacing them with new default settings. Facebook then responds to the inevitable public outcry by restoring something that’s like the old system, except slightly less private. And it adds a few more lines to an inexplicably complex privacy dashboard.
Even if you read the fine print, human beings are awful at pricing out the net present value of a decision whose consequences are far in the future. No one would take up smoking if the tumors sprouted with the first puff. Most privacy disclosures don’t put us in immediate physical or emotional distress either. But given a large population making a large number of disclosures, harm is inevitable. We’ve all heard the stories about people who’ve been fired because they set the wrong privacy flag on that post where they blew off on-the-job steam.
The risks increase as we disclose more, something that the design of our social media conditions us to do. When you start out your life in a new social network, you are rewarded with social reinforcement as your old friends pop up and congratulate you on arriving at the party. Subsequent disclosures generate further rewards, but not always. Some disclosures seem like bombshells to you (“I’m getting a divorce”) but produce only virtual cricket chirps from your social network. And yet seemingly insignificant communications (“Does my butt look big in these jeans?”) can produce a torrent of responses. Behavioral scientists have a name for this dynamic: “intermittent reinforcement.” It’s one of the most powerful behavioral training techniques we know about. Give a lab rat a lever that produces a food pellet on demand and he’ll only press it when he’s hungry. Give him a lever that produces food pellets at random intervals, and he’ll keep pressing it forever. /blockquote>
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 link
15 min
May 21, 2012 The problem with nerd politics
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, The problem with nerd politics:
Since the earliest days of the information wars, people who care about freedom and technology have struggled with two ideological traps: nerd determinism and nerd fatalism. Both are dangerously attractive to people who love technology.
In “nerd determinism,” technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 Link
12 min
May 14, 2012 Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers:
At the end of April, Tor Books, the world’s largest science fiction publisher, and its UK sister company, Tor UK, announced that they would be eliminating digital rights management (DRM) from all of their ebooks by the summer. It was a seismic event in the history of the publishing industry. It’s the beginning of the end for DRM, which are used by hardware manufacturers and publishers to limit the use of digital content after sale. That’s good news, whether you’re a publisher, a writer, a dedicated reader, or someone who picks up a book every year or two.
The first thing you need to know about ebook DRM is that it can’t work.
Like all DRM systems, ebook DRM presumes that you can distribute a program that only opens up ebooks under approved circumstances, and that none of the people you send this program to will figure out how to fix it so that it opens ebooks no matter what the circumstances. Once one user manages that, the game is up, because that clever person can either distribute ebooks that have had their DRM removed, or programs to remove DRM (or both). And since there’s no legitimate market for DRM – no readers are actively shopping for books that only open under special approved circumstances – and since the pirated ebooks are more convenient and flexible than the ones that people pay for, the DRM-free pirate editions drive out the DRM-locked commercial editions.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 link
12 min
May 07, 2012 A Prose By Any Other Name
Here’s a podcast of my last Locus column, A Prose By Any Other Name:
Back in 2005, I did something weird. I decided that I would embark on a project to write short stories with the same (or similar) titles to famous science fiction books and stories. My initial motivation for this was Ray Bradbury objecting to Michael Moore calling a movie Fahrenheit 9/11, which led Bradbury to call Moore an ‘‘asshole’’ and a ‘‘horrible human being’’ who’d ‘‘stolen’’ the title. Like many other writers, Bradbury has rightfully never shied from taking and adapting titles from other writers and works (‘‘I Sing the Body Electric’’, ‘‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’’, ‘‘The Women’’, etc.), and I thought that this was a silly thing for a respected writer to say. I suspected that, despite his denials, Bradbury disagreed with Moore’s politics and invented an ad hoc ethical code regarding titles to explain why what he did to Walt Whitman was fundamentally different from what Moore had done to him.
The more I thought about writing stories with ‘‘borrowed’’ titles, the more interesting it all got. Every time I thought about a famous title – one I hated, one I loved, one I had mixed feelings about – I found my subconscious simmering and then bubbling over with ideas. Stories – more so than novels – are often the product of odd subconscious associations. I’ll see something, I’ll see something else, the two will rub together, and wham, there’s a story idea crystallizing in my mind, and off I go to find a keyboard.
But for every story fragment that finds a complementary fragment to bond with and form into an idea, there are dozens of lonely haploids, grains of potential that never find another grain to join and synthesize with. Seven years into the project, the single most significant and reliable trait of ‘‘title’’ stories is that the titles exert a powerful gravity on story fragments, aggregating them into full-blown inspiration.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 Link
14 min
April 30, 2012 Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?:
Late in March, I started to get a steady stream of emails from concerned readers: did you see that the Internet Society has appointed the former chief technology officer of the MPAA to be their North American regional director?
I was as alarmed as they were. The Internet Society – ISOC – is an international nonprofit organisation whose mission is “to assure the open development, evolution and use of the internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world”. More concretely, ISOC is also in charge of the .ORG registry, through its subsidiary, the Public Interest Registry.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 Link
12 min
April 16, 2012 Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords:
Facebook has threatened to sue companies that force their employees to reveal their Facebook login details. As laudable as this is, I worry that it will fail to accomplish its primary objective – protecting Facebook users from employer snooping.
Increasingly, firms configure the computers and devices on their internal networks to trust “self-signed certificates”. These cryptographic certificates are the same files used by your browser to establish secure, eavesdropping-proof connections to websites and to validate software updates, and to generally validate the identity of remote machines and guard the files they send you from tampering and spying.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 Link
9 min
April 02, 2012 A Whip to Beat Us With
Here’s a podcast of my last Publishers Weekly column, A Whip to Beat Us With:
Jim C. Hines’s e-books are marketed both through a big publisher and solo. The books that were re-priced by Amazon were his solo titles—unagented, and unrepresented by a major publisher. As an individual, Jim has no leverage over Amazon. Not so Macmillan, which controls a much larger number of SKUs and has much more leverage. Macmillan made headlines during its tense standoff with Amazon in 2011 over e-book pricing, but the publisher was able to sway Amazon because it could make a credible threat that it might get up from the negotiating table and take all its books, too—and others might follow.
But Macmillan’s edge—its scale—is also its undoing. Every day, Macmillan sells more e-books that have been locked into Amazon’s format. The millions of dollars that Amazon customers spend on Macmillan’s DRM-locked e-books represent millions of dollars of e-books Macmillan customers lose if they wanted to follow Macmillan away from Amazon. Publishers believe DRM protects their books. But DRM has created a world where publishers who walk away from negotiations with a DRM vendor like Amazon leave their customers behind.
Not just Macmillan. Any publisher that sees a substantial portion of its income from DRM vendors becomes little more than a commodity supplier to those vendors. If Hachette or HarperCollins decided to bite the bullet and pull their titles from Amazon during a dispute, how many of their authors would stay with them, knowing that the world’s largest bookseller and most popular e-book platform no longer carried their titles?
To appreciate this vulnerability, just look at what happened in February with the Independent Publishers Group, a distributor that asked Amazon to hold the line on its discount. They weren’t able to reach an agreement, and Amazon removed all IPG’s e-books from the Kindle store. The day that happened, IPG sent out a communique describing the situation and asking its readers to avoid the Kindle store in future.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 link
14 min
March 26, 2012 Copyright isn’t dead just because we’re not willing to let it regulate us
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Copyright isn’t dead just because we’re not willing to let it regulate us:
The first time I ever heard someone declare the death of copyright, it wasn’t a dreadlocked GNU/Linux hacker or a cyberpunk in mirror shades: it was a music executive, circa 1999, responding to the launch of Napster.
I thought he was wrong then and I think he’s wrong now — as is everyone else who’s declared copyright to be dead.
The problem is in the name: copyright. The Statute of Anne and other early copyright rules concerned themselves with verbatim copying because copying was the only industrial activity associated with creative expression at the time. There were lots of crafts associated with culture, of course, – performing music, plays and dance, painting pictures, and so on – but these weren’t industrial activities.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 Link
17 min
March 12, 2012 Censorship is inseparable from surveillance
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Censorship is inseparable from surveillance:
There was a time when you could censor without spying. When Britain banned the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the 1920s and 1930s, the ban took the form on a prohibition on the sale of copies of the books. Theoretically, this entailed opening some imported parcels, and it certainly imposed a constraint on publishers and booksellers. It was undoubtedly awful. But we’ve got it worse today.
Jump forward 80 years. Imagine that you want to ban www.jamesjoycesulysses.com due to a copyright claim from the Joyce estate. Thanks to the Digital Economy Act and the provision it makes for a national British copyright firewall, we’re headed for a system where entertainment companies can specify URLs that have “infringing” websites, and a national censorwall will block everyone in the country from visiting those sites.
In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
MP3 link
15 min
March 06, 2012 What’s Inside the Box?
Here’s a podcast of my last Locus column, What’s Inside the Box?:
The answer to this that most of the experts I speak to come up with is this:
The owner (or user) of a device should be able to know (or control) which software is running on her devices.
This is really four answers, and I’ll go over them in turn, using three different scenarios: a computer in an Internet cafe, a car, and a cochlear implant. That is, a computer you sit in front of, a computer you put your body into, and a computer you put in your body.
MP3 Link
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: [email protected]
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
29 min