Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Here’s part two of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”

MP3 Link

I recently did an interview with Oort Cloud, a killer copy-friendly science fiction writing site. We talked a lot about creative process, writing (and, of course, copyright).

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I’ve just started podcasting a new story, a novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.” It’s a long, weird adventure story about the failure of futurism and the difference between “progress” and “change,” all about immortal children stalking the bones of ruined cities in lethal mechas. Disney fans will recognize the title as coming from the amazing, weird, awful and wonderful Carousel of Progress ride that Disney built for GE at the 1964 World’s Fair in NYC, and subsequently moved to Disneyland, then Walt Disney World.

I’m presently about 18,000 words into this — final length is probably somewhere north of 30,000 words — and I’m planning on reading about 30 minutes’ worth of audio every week.

I piloted the mecha through the streets of Detroit, hunting wumpuses. The mecha was a relic of the Mecha Wars, when the nation tore itself to shreds with lethal robots, and it had the weird, swirling lines of all evolutionary tech, channelled and chopped and counterweighted like some freak dinosaur or a racecar.

I loved the mecha. It wasn’t fast, but it had a fantastic ride, a kind of wobbly strut that was surprisingly comfortable and let me keep the big fore and aft guns on any target I chose, the sights gliding along on a perfect level even as the neck rocked from side to side.

The pack loved the mecha too. All six of them, three aerial bots shaped like bats, two ground-cover streaks that nipped around my heels, and a flea that bounded over buildings, bouncing off the walls and leaping from monorail track to rusting hover-bus to balcony and back. The pack’s brains were back in dad’s house, in the old Comerica Park site. When I found them, they’d been a pack of sick dogs, dragging themselves through the ruined city, poisoned by some old materiel. I had done them the mercy of extracting their brains and connecting them up to the house network. Now they were immortal, just like me, and they knew that I was their alpha dog. They loved to go for walks with me.

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David Weinberger, author of the brand new Everything is Miscellaneous, a book about how the Internet is destroying traditional notions of organization, subject and heirarchy, did a recent interview with me about metadata and civil liberties. He’s posted it as the first part of a podcast series of interviews with interested parties.

Link

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Here’s a reading from my forthcoming young adult novel, “Little Brother,” about San Francisco hacker kids who fight back against the Department of Homeland Security. Tor will publish it in May, 2008.

I really went to town on the samples and mixing in this one, hauling out Audacity, the free/open sound-editing program, and grabbing a boatload of samples from the Freesound project, and a little punk guitar from the Anchormen, a great Boston act.

This reading is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.

Here are the credits for the samples:
Guitar samples:Moonface and Mass Ave Attack by the Anchormen(Used by permission)
Burrito joint:Loud Family Restaurant by cognito perceptu
Crowd sounds:20070402.crowd.flac by dobroide
Laughter:laughter.wav by sagetyrtle
Laughter:laugh loud.wav by ERH
Siren:sirenaMP3.mp3 by zippi1
Helicopter:20070210.helicopter.01.wav by dobroide
Screaming:M207b12_More_screaming.wav by Experimental Illness
Traffic:traffic stereo.wav by cognito perceptu
Bassline:BL_SL004_100.mp3 by bassmatiker

Here’s part four — the conclusion — of my reading of Peter Gutmann’s “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection,” an amazing paper on DRM that was first published in late 2006.

MP3 Link

I did a recent interview with Australia’s Sci Phi show. It was a short but wide-ranging interview about writing.

MP3 Link

Here’s part three of my reading of Peter Gutmann’s “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection,” an amazing paper on DRM that was first published in late 2006.

Here’s part two of my reading of Peter Gutmann’s “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection,” an amazing paper on DRM that was first published in late 2006.

Here’s my reading of Peter Gutmann’s “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection,” an amazing paper on DRM that was first published in late 2006.

Executive Summary

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

MP3 Link