Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 81

I got tired of people savvying me about the revelations of NSA surveillance and asking why anyone would care about secret, intrusive spying, so I wrote a new Guardian column about it, "The NSA's Prism: why we should care."

We're bad at privacy because the consequences of privacy disclosures are separated by a lot of time and space from the disclosures themselves. It's like trying to get good at cricket by swinging the bat, closing your eyes before you see where the ball is headed, and then bei...

Neil Gaiman's taken over the Guardian's Books Podcast, and had me and agent Jonny Geller and Henry Volans, head of Faber Digital, in the studio for a wide-ranging and awfully fun podcast. The first 20 minutes are a fascinating look at weird London by Damien Walter, and then we kick off with the discussion.

MP3 link

The UK edition of my novel Pirate Cinema hits stores officially today! Tell your friends!

When Trent McCauley's obsession for making movies by reassembling footage from popular films causes his home s internet to be cut off, it nearly destroys his family. Shamed, Trent runs away to London. A new bill threatens to criminalize even harmless internet creativity. Things look bad, but the powers-that-be haven't entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people's minds...

Pirate C...

The Institute for the Future commissioned me to write a story about the "Internet of Things," and I wrote them a piece called By His Things Will You Know Him, about death, networks, and computers. It's part of an anthology called "An Aura of Familiarity: Visions from the Coming Age of Networked Matter," which we'll be publishing on Boing Boing in the following weeks. The stories to come are from great authors including Rudy Rucker, Ramez Naam, Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, and Warren Ellis....

By His Things Will You Know Him, "An Aura of Familiarity: Visions from the Coming Age of Networked Matter," Institute for the Future

I recorded an interview with the PRI show The World yesterday about Orwell, Huxley and the NSA. It came out well, I think.

MP3 Link

Boys from Brett Wierzbicki's English class at Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in Queens, NY have been reading my novel Little Brother and Brett gave them the option of doing a book-remix instead of a traditional book-report. All told, they produced seven absolutely terrific remixes of the book, and they were good enough to send them all along for me to share:

Joel's chapter: Joel wrote his own ending for the book, describing the jail-time Marcus served between the final chapter and the epilogue...

I'm delighted to announce that Chariho High School in Wood River Junction, RI, has chosen my novel Little Brother for its One School/One Book program. Above is a video I recorded for the students; here's a press release [PDF] from Chariho:

FOR THE FIRST TIME, Chariho Regional High School’s Summer Reading Program is One School - One Book: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow has been chosen for the Chariho Regional High School’s One School – One Book 2013 Summer Reading Program. Programming events w...

I've just signed up for the Clarion Write-a-Thon, an annual fundraiser that brings in money to run the non-profit Clarion Writers Workshop, a kind of bootcamp for science fiction writers held every year at UCSD's La Jolla Campus. I'm a Clarion grad, volunteer board-member, and I'm back teaching the program this year, so I guess you could say I believe in it pretty strongly. Here's my profile on the Write-a-Thon, should you wish to sponsor the story I'm working on (it's a short called "The Man...

The Guardian