Slashdot Mirror

Ellen Spertus writes "I'll be teaching an interdisciplinary college course on how technology is changing the world and how students can influence that change. In addition to teaching the students how to create apps, I'd like for us to read and discuss short stories and essays about how the future (next 40 years) might play out. For example, we'll read excerpts from David Brin's Transparent Society and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. I'm also considering excerpts of Cory Doctorow's Homeland and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. What other suggestions do Slashdotters have?"

An anonymous reader writes "With the advent of national security letters and all the NSA issues of late perhaps the web needs to implement a warrant 'warrant canary' metatag. Something like this: <meta name="canary" content="2013-11-17" />. With this it would be possible to build into browsers or browser extensions a means of alerting users when a company has in fact received such a secret warrant. (Similar to the actions taken by Apple recently.) The advantage the metatag approach would have its that it would not require the user to search out a report by the company in question but would show the information upon loading of the page. Once the canary metatag was not found or when the date of the canary grows older than a given date a warning could be raised. Several others have proposed similar approaches including Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic and Cory Doctorow's Dead Man's Switch." What problems do you see with this approach?

mouthbeef writes "The Guardian just published my investigative story on the BBC and Ofcom's abuse of secrecy laws to hide the reasons for granting permission for DRM on UK public broadcasts. The UK public overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, but Ofcom approved it anyway, saying they were convinced by secret BBC arguments that couldn't be published due to 'commercial sensitivity.' As the article shows, the material was neither sensitive nor convincing — a fact that Ofcom and the BBC tried to hide from the public."

jargon82 writes "A Pennsylvania high school is using laptops they issued to students to spy on them in homes and outside of school. According to a class action filling the webcams and microphones in these laptops could be remotely activated by school officials, and have been used in this role. One student was accused of 'improper behavior in his home' and the school provided a photo taken via his laptop as proof."

mouthbeef writes "A source very close to the UK Labour government just called me to leak the fact that Secretary of State Lord Mandelson is trying to sneak a revision into the Digital Economy Bill that would give him and his successors the power to create future copyright law without debate. Mandelson goes on to explain that he wants this so he can create private copyright militias with investigatory and enforcement powers, and so he can create new copyright punishments as he sees fit (e.g., jail time, three strikes)."

BoingBoing is relating a hair-raising tale from the UK anti-ID-register group 'NO2ID' that claims to have a leaked government document [PDF] detailing how the UK government plans to "coerce" citizens into a national ID register. "UK campaigners NO2ID this morning enlisted the help of bloggers across the world to spread a leaked government document describing how the British government intends to go about "coercing" its citizens onto a National Identity Register. The 'ID card' is revealed as little more than a cover to create a official dossier and trackable ID for every UK resident - creating what NO2ID calls 'the database state'."

FleaPlus writes "Two prominent science fiction authors have recently released their newest novels as free downloads to coincide with their in-store releases. The first is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, by Cory Doctorow. This is an unconventional story about an entrepreneur (who happens to be the child of a mountain and a washing machine) who gets involved in a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless mesh network, among other things. The second is Accelerando, by Charles Stross, which tells the tale of three generations of the Macx family (beginning with perptually-slashdotted venture altruist Manfred Macx) in the years leading up to and beyond a technological singularity."

trickofperspective writes "To defray the cost of this year's session, following budget cuts at host school Michigan State University, the famed Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop is holding an online auction of items donated by past alums. Bidding opens January 28th on items such as a signed limited edition of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, a signed, homeade galley of Cory Doctorow's upcoming Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and more."

matt-fu writes "Cory Doctorow posted a story on boingboing.net this morning describing a recent hassle while flying American Airlines. It seems that since he was traveling from the UK to the US with a Canadian passport, he was actually asked to give out the names and addresses of everyone he would be staying with in the US! He has written an open letter to AA in response. Has anyone else had something like this happen to them?"

An anonymous reader writes "Google's new Google Print service (that lets you see scanned pages from printed books) has a pile of advanced browser-disabling DRM in it ('Pages displaying your content have print, cut, copy, and save functionality disabled in order to protect your content.'). This works with JavaScript turned off, even in Free Software browsers. Seth Schoen has posted preliminary notes on some breaks to the DRM (beyond just automating a screenshotting process), including a proposal for a circumventing proxy that would fetch Google Print pages and strip out the DRM. A full exploration of the html obfuscation and DRM employed by Google would be very interesting; certainly the ability for a remote attacker to disable critical browser features like save, right-click, copy and cut against the user's wishes is a major security vulnerability in Moz/Firefox and should be fixed ASAP."

foobsr writes "Popular Science has an article discussing the growing difficulties that Sci-Fi writers encounter when it comes to extrapolating current trends. Doctorow and Stross , both former computer programmers, are rated to be prototypes of a new breed of guides to a future which due to Vinge's Singularity might not happen for humanity once a proper super-intelligence - maybe as a Matrioshka Brain - has been created."

machinder asks: "In reading Cory Doctorow's notes for the Life Hacks presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, I saw reference to David Allen's book Getting Things Done. Casting about for it a bit, I see a lot of developers have touted the thing in their blogs. I'm sold, and am starting to implement this system, but I'm wondering if any other Slashdot readers have used the system, and if they have any advice?"

VerdeRana writes "I just heard the EFF's Cory Doctorow give this fantastic argument critiquing DRM. He makes a great case for why DRM is bad for society, business, and artists, why it simply don't work, and why Microsoft (the audience for this talk) should not invest in it. Broadcast this far and wide, and maybe someone will listen."

mouthbeef writes "The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping 'signal theft.' But along the way, this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (EFF mirror, UPD mirror), trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!"

2bot_or_not_2bot writes "Spam: The Phenomenon is a detailed analysis of spam: products, scams, viruses, obfuscation methods, etc. Failed, and doomed-to-fail, methods of blocking spam are described. A general solution is proposed that does not: invade privacy, perform wide censorship or blacklisting, or involve payment and cooperation with corporations (beyond the transport and storage of data)." Hmmm.

xanderwilson writes "Author Cory Doctorow has released his paper/speech for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this year into the public domain. A very interesting read about his experience with Magic Kingdom (which he is soon re-releasing under a more lenient Creative Commons license), the failure of e-books, and filesharing as a tool for creators."

OrenWolf writes "Cory Doctorow (of EFF and Boing Boing fame), has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe today.. it should be showing up in bookstores shortly. As with his earlier work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory has made the whole text of the novel available as a free download "in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license." Cory also has a writeup "explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.""

OrenWolf writes "Cory Doctorow (of EFF and Boing Boing fame), has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe today.. it should be showing up in bookstores shortly. As with his earlier work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory has made the whole text of the novel available as a free download "in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license." Cory also has a writeup "explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.""

OrenWolf writes "Cory Doctorow (of EFF and Boing Boing fame), has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe today.. it should be showing up in bookstores shortly. As with his earlier work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory has made the whole text of the novel available as a free download "in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license." Cory also has a writeup "explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.""

OrenWolf writes "Cory Doctorow (of EFF and Boing Boing fame), has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe today.. it should be showing up in bookstores shortly. As with his earlier work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory has made the whole text of the novel available as a free download "in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license." Cory also has a writeup "explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.""

OrenWolf writes "Cory Doctorow (of EFF and Boing Boing fame), has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe today.. it should be showing up in bookstores shortly. As with his earlier work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory has made the whole text of the novel available as a free download "in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license." Cory also has a writeup "explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.""

OrenWolf writes "Cory Doctorow (of EFF and Boing Boing fame), has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe today.. it should be showing up in bookstores shortly. As with his earlier work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory has made the whole text of the novel available as a free download "in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license." Cory also has a writeup "explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.""

belial writes "The FreeNetworks Conference is in less than a month (June 6-8). If you want to find out what's happening in the Community Wireless Network world, this is the place to be. Keynotes include Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing, and a whole gaggle of wireless geeks from the FreeNetworks community. Find out about the latest happenings from BAWUG, Consume, NoCat, NYCWireless,SeattleWireless, WirelessLeiden, and more!"

jhouserizer writes "New Scientist is reporting that an artificial hippocampus is ready to undergo testing. The leader of the team of scientists is Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They hope these artificial hippocampuses can replace damaged (stroke, Alzheimer's, etc.) portions of your brain. I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends? I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs, such as in this story by Cory Doctorow?"

Rob from RPI writes "After a long wait, Cory Doctorow's first novel is out. If you're into SciFi, you've probably read some of his stories - a recent short of his on Salon.com (0wnz0red) was recently mentioned here. With a highly popular blog, and a good amount of Net-Clues, he's also doing a bit of groundbreaking with the release of this book. He's selling it, and, distributing it under a Creative Commons licence at the same time. You can download it in TXT, HTML and PDF here. It's a very good book, too 8-)"

Rob from RPI writes "After a long wait, Cory Doctorow's first novel is out. If you're into SciFi, you've probably read some of his stories - a recent short of his on Salon.com (0wnz0red) was recently mentioned here. With a highly popular blog, and a good amount of Net-Clues, he's also doing a bit of groundbreaking with the release of this book. He's selling it, and, distributing it under a Creative Commons licence at the same time. You can download it in TXT, HTML and PDF here. It's a very good book, too 8-)"

Rob from RPI writes "After a long wait, Cory Doctorow's first novel is out. If you're into SciFi, you've probably read some of his stories - a recent short of his on Salon.com (0wnz0red) was recently mentioned here. With a highly popular blog, and a good amount of Net-Clues, he's also doing a bit of groundbreaking with the release of this book. He's selling it, and, distributing it under a Creative Commons licence at the same time. You can download it in TXT, HTML and PDF here. It's a very good book, too 8-)"

Slashback this fine 23:59 GMT brings you a response to MS GPL FUD, an update on Lessig's challenge, a followup question regarding domain disputes, a reminder that clone claims aren't new, and more. Read on for the details.

Needed: One referee. Quixotic1 writes "A small company I work for has discovered that a domain name has been registered with their U.S.-trademarked (since 1980) name. Requests to the owner of the site (a U.S. citizen) have gone unanswered, so we're now moving on to filing an ICANN dispute. There was a query last week about inexpensive alternatives to the $1000+ UDRP arbiters. The discussion ended up revolving around whether the author had a valid claim or not, but I'd still like to know -- are there inexpensive alternatives?"

I bet there's money to be made if someone can come up with cheaper means of settling such disputes.

Store in the ammunition box. leonbrooks writes "Recently, images from a presentation by Microsoft Belgium were published on the web. The presentation made some startling (for Microsoft) concessions to Open Source, then set about FUDding the GPL into the ground. I whacked together a point-by-point answer to the anti-GPL FUD. Happy linking ..."

Tithe 10 percent. Luke Francl writes "Inspired by Lawrence Lessig's OSCON remarks, Lessig's Challenge is a way for people concerned by the attempts by the entertainment industry to close off the net to fight back. The challenge is to spend more on those who fight for the open network than you do on its enemies. Since it appeared on Slashdot last month, 10 people have joined me and we've raised over $2300 for good causes (organizations like the EFF, the ACLU, the FSF, along with free software/open source programmers and online artists). And that's just the ones I know about! Cory Doctorow wrote to tell me that many people were inspired by the challenge to join the EFF. ... Check out the list of suggested recipients."

Like obsidian, and coal, and dirt ... salimfadhley writes "Today BBC Radio 4 began serialising Phillip Pullman's popular "Dark Materials" trilogy. The beeb will be broadcasting one episode per week, with a RA stream of the latest episode that can be found on the promotional site. You can find "The Golden Compass" (called "Northern Lights" in Europe) on the website now. This stream will be replaced with episode 2 next Saturday.

The Dark Materials series was originally intended as children's fiction, however owing to excellent storytelling and a significantly darker theme than Harry Potter, has done rather well in U.S. and UK adult market.

The central premise of the series is that God is evil, a celestial impostor who pretends to have created the universe and who so intensely hates flesh and blood that he wants people to live a repressed, joyless existence. Unsurprisingly this theme has upset fundamentalist Christians."

Unfamiliar? Read the Slashdot review of the trilogy.

The clones I meet are mostly in pairs. PizzaFace writes "The Washington Post reports that the Raelian clone claim echoes a hoax of 25 years ago. And while we have better technology now for testing the claim quickly, there is still room for deception, and some people don't trust the science (and pseudoscience) reporter the Raelians appointed to test their claim."

Seth Schoen writes "The EFF has started a weblog about the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG), called "Consensus At Lawyerpoint". This is the EFF's first-ever blog, the brainchild of new EFF staffer Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing blogging fame. Consensus At Lawyerpoint covers the efforts of Hollywood -- with the complicity of consumer electronics and computer companies -- to impose a new government mandate for copy controls in digital TV devices. This mandate would outlaw tuner cards for digital HDTV, unless they included DRM (and prevented the end-user from getting a cleartext recording). PVRs and VCRs might be allowed, but only if all their outputs were encrypted. Since all TV broadcasting in the U.S. is supposed to be digital by 2006, this could have an enormous effect on technology and on the competition for video standards in the marketplace. We hope that the blog format will help us get the word out and let interested people see what this group is up to." Interesting for a couple of reasons, both the subject matter (the beloved SSSCA/CBDTPA) and the method.

Bruce Sterling is the sort of writer who invites his audience to an open house with "anyone they'd like and anything they can carry." He's also busy in his non-writing life keeping up with the resurrection and commemoration of dead media and not-dead-yet online freedoms. Fellow online agitator and decorated science fiction writer Cory Doctorow seems more of an Ernster Mensch; Doctorow points out that he's a writer second, activist first. When these two started a freewheeling discussion ("intellectual cyber riffing," as Sterling described it) on The Death of Scarcity Tuesday afternoon, the quotable quotes were everywhere. Read on for the ones I jotted down, and a link to some more.

Within five minutes Doctorow was describing the common ground that economists of all stripes might find in a world of increasingly information flow and decentralization, and Sterling was questioning conventional wisdom on Google, file sharing, and other sacred cows of the techno-elite. This public conversation in a smallish but packed meeting room in Austin's Convention Center served as an endcap on the Interactive portion of this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference, and probably crystalized a lot of what conference attendees had on their mind between panel sessions and parties. Below are some of the thoughts that came out in the course of the Sterling & Doctorow Show. (And Sorry, but the open house is over now. Thanks, Bruce.)

The worth of Information:

Sterling: "All of this circles around the central declaration of S. Brand -- 'Information wants to be free.' Yet, Information also wants to be expensive. ... I have to wonder, what would happen if sheep actually did shit grass -- would mutton be free? ... Doesn't [widespread file trading] crowd out what was formerly a competitive menu of available choices? What if you just can't sell music any more? Nobody's going to go down to [Austin record store] Waterloo, nobody's going to hang out with them afterward. ..."

Doctorow: "Whether Kantian or Marxist, the most valuable stuff isnt the world is the stuff we want to concern ourselves with, because when stuff is really valuable, it becomes scarce. ... [by contrast], the Napster ethic is, 'Be as selfish as you possibly can -- the more crap you download, the more crap there is for everyone to download.' ... Code is a little like speech, a little like a tractor. Keynes and Marx both talked about speech [being different from] a tractor; Code is a little like speech, and a little like tractors. When you've got something that's both speech and a tractor, you've got something really interesting."

Napster, the RIAA and file trading:

Sterling: "[Napster is] a kind of profoundly undemocratic technical fait accompli. 'Look at this neat gizmo that we geeks built while you weren't working. We geeks accidentally ate your industry.' [This is a] techno-imperative market argument which I don't think really makes all that much sense in a stagnant monopoly ... where is the steamroller going, I don't see it going anywhere particular, it's just abolishing other people's money. Does Napster give anybody money for a reelection campaign? Do they have a friendly judge? Is there somebody to sue?"

"What would the music scene look like if the industry disappeared? I imagine things like the Royal family paying for the production of Handel's Water Music. "

Product Interfaces.

Doctorow: "[...] That's what why we have wrappers. If you have good stuff in a crappy interface, somebody will build a wrapper around it. ... This revolution is ongoing -- Travelocity may suck, but it's a lot better than SABRE. This process of wrapping is going on every day."

Sterling: "I think that the crappy interface is one of the reasons for the power of the computer revolution. People are trapped."

Google

Sterling: "It's a beauty contest, not a credibility contest. ... How is [google's reference-count system] different from turning on TV and seeing Dean Kamen talking on 22 channels about this revolutionary scooter? What I want to see ... the kid in Left Elbow, Kazakhstan, you give him an 802.11 Linux box, running google [and left to play]. In 4 years, I want to see him matriculate. [Laughter]

"... Now if we had an idiosyncratic version of google, that was sort of a Bruce Sterling google ... 'Well, Bruce, here are the things you're going to find really great today!" you know. There are things they they always claim on Amazon. 'So you've bought this book, ok? You might want to try this CD.' I've never bought any CDs on Amazon, they always think I have the worst possible taste in music. No luck over there at all.

"People gather together in little tidepools and trust, otherwise there would be no limits [on stagnation]. You'd simply say 'Oh, what's everybody using? Oh, Apple IIe, OK, that's it, end problem, Apple IIe, boy, that's for me ... Macintosh? Never heard of it!"

Doctorow: "I think the problem is that, as a society we've consistently choose the crappier and more available thing over the more beautiful and less available thing."

The last 5 years:

Doctorow: "In the last 5 years, Linux became useable. In the last 5 years we finally got. In the last 5 years we got Tivo. In the last five years we got 802.11 widespread. I mean, my life has been changed."

Sterling: "You mean, 'that fantastic innovation we saw until about 5 years ago.' ... I think [Innovation has] slowed to a crawl, and moving in a slow reverse, you're not going to see a lot of major innovation, outside of Linux --which is in danger of being outlawed. The 802.11b [phenomenon], same thing -- there are people who sit around all day trying to demonize 802.11b users and say that they're stealing -- 'the Parasitic Grid.' It's a social hack, but because of that, they're very vulnerable to political counter-hacks. They're not the same as genuine technical innovation. That's a difficulty."

Cultural spread and cultural inertia:

Doctorow: "There's an amazing story about the day someone sent the first hotmail message with 'Get your free email account at hotmail.com' at the bottom to India. The traffic statistics the next morning, they quintupled overnight, on the strength of one email."

On Copy Protection, the RIAA/MPAA, et cetera:

Sterling: "When will the U.S. snap? What will it take to put the genie back in the bottle, how many times will the genie have to be hit on the back of the head? What if someone accidentally breaks the bottle with his baton? What are we going to be left with that commands value? What can't we copy?"

Doctorow: "By an amazing coincidence, last week Congress held hearings about [copy protection in hardware] I think it's actually possible, I think it's actually possible, but the social consequence is quite horrendous. When Turing machines are outlawed, when universal computers that can do anything are no longer allowed to exist, then that kind of thing, I think the innovation we've seen over the last 20 years [will end].

This being SXSW Interactive, quite a few people in the audience were taking notes. Krow put his on LiveJournal, and I hope others will link to theirs below.

mitd writes: "Cory Doctrow has written an insightful article about Google, search engines and how he stopped worrying."

mouthbeef writes: "The year 2000 Hugo Awards have been awarded. Cryptonomicon didn't win but A Deepness in the Sky did. And hey, so did I. AFAIK, this is the first first-person account of a Hugo win published on the Web, and I know for a fact that my acceptance speech was the only one to contain an URL."

mouthbeef writes: "The year 2000 Hugo Awards have been awarded. Cryptonomicon didn't win but A Deepness in the Sky did. And hey, so did I. AFAIK, this is the first first-person account of a Hugo win published on the Web, and I know for a fact that my acceptance speech was the only one to contain an URL."

mouthbeef writes: "The year 2000 Hugo Awards have been awarded. Cryptonomicon didn't win but A Deepness in the Sky did. And hey, so did I. AFAIK, this is the first first-person account of a Hugo win published on the Web, and I know for a fact that my acceptance speech was the only one to contain an URL."

mouthbeef asks: "What's the future of storage media? With CDs and tapes prone to relatively speedy decay, and hard-drives an entropic nightmare of moving parts, how will we keep our data safe over the long haul? I just got some e-mail from a writer pal who isn't really technologically sophisticated, alarmed because someone told him that his backup CDs would decay and rot in 20 years. He's an sf writer, and he was thinking "big picture:" a coming infopocalypse in which sysadmins devote their every waking moment to re-archiving their old backup data." Is such a scenario likely? Why or why not? (More)

"I wrote back that I didn't think that would happen, because:

• Every time I buy a computer, it's got more storage on-board than all the computers I've owned until then, and I just migrate all the data files I've ever created or saved to the new box, like a hermit-crab changing shells
• With broadband becoming more real and more cheap, it makes sense that in the long run we'll store most (if not all) of our data on remote servers -- encrypted, of course -- that are managed by trained pros with access to mirror drives, climate-controlled vaults, etc. etc.
• Even if this doesn't happen, most of your data files will be in stupid, proprietary formats like Word 3.0 that won't be openable, anyway

(I've since changed my mind about the last one: thinking about it, I'm willing to believe that the high-speed, high-capacity distributed servers of tomorrow will have VMWare-style emulators for every chipset and every OS ever made on them as public utilities like grep or perl)

How reasonable does this seem to you folks? What do you do with data that you need to preserve for the ages? "