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0wnz0red
Robotech_Master writes "Salon Magazine is running an interesting and thought-provoking short story/novella by Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the b0ing b0ing weblog. This story, 0wnz0red, features programmer/geek terms and references, Descartes, "trustworthy computing," and what happens when programmers gain the ability to hack their own autonomic functions. A really fun read...like Stephenson's works, it feels like it's aimed squarely at the geeks' demographic."
on that boingboing webpage, the author says that "pr0n" is a synonym for "porn" due to common typing errors, i was under the impression that "pr0n" was used to hide your porn from sysops on multi user systems using find / -name *porn* or something like that.
whos right, me or him ?
...like Stephenson's works, it feels like it's aimed squarely at the geeks' demographic.
Maybe this is a different type of "slashdot effect." Where a content publisher puts up articles knowing they will get linked from slashdot.
Just for CmdrTaco, I would like to differentiate this type by calling it the "slashdot affect."
"And like that
He's probably aiming at writing it in the style of the former for accessibility, but I prefer paragraphs you can sit and think about after having read them for a fuller effect as with Brian Herbert's Dune or Issac Asimov's Foundation (think about what they could have accomplished had they lived to see -- and write about -- the Internet!)
As he aimed his remote at it and initiated the cryptographic handshake -- i.e., unlocked the doors -- he spotted the guy leaning against the car.
Come on! "Cryptographic handshake" as a metaphor for unlocking a car door? Here's a quick writing lesson: if your metaphor is so abstruse that you have to explain it immediately thereafter, you should just cut it.
The writer is clearly enthralled by his own cleverness and understanding of computer lingo past the point where he could be expected to construct a narrative that normal people might enjoy.
Consider the paragraph on the first page where he mentions that the protagonist loses commit privileges on CVS. I know what CVS is, but that's beside the point. I shouldn't have to, because CVS doesn't relate to the story at all! The story is filled with little things like that, things that conspire to make it inaccessible to the average reader for no discernible reason, unless that reason is to heighten its appeal to the (presumed) minority of those interested in computers who give a damn about keeping the average user out of their party.
It's like the whole thing was written by someone who goes around calling everyone uninvolved in the computer industry "sheeple" or "lusers" and automatically assumes that they don't get it, for various definitions of "it", just because their existence doesn't revolve around a microprocessor.
Personally I think the use of l33t-speak is symptomatic of such a juvenile mentality, and should have been a major red flag. If this guy is one of SF's bright young stars, give me the old luminaries any day of the week.
Since I bothered reading to the end of the story, I have to both agree and disagree with the comments posted. The first couple of pages were remarkably cringe-worthy, dropping as many '1337' terms in as possible, but once it got into the meat of the story, things picked up a bit.
It certianly isn't a masterpiece, but the concepts raised in it are interesting and there's a fairly good plug for anti-palladium issues, in terms that the layman could work through.
The characterisation isn't the best and throughout there is the edge of wanting to be accepted as part of the tech crowd, at the expense of the ordinary reader, but these can be overlooked with an open mind. If you let you mind create and fill out the characters and situtations, it's not a bad read for fifteen minutes.
Ultimately, if you don't like the way it's going don't read it, but a bit of perseverance will see you through to the good bit. If only the author had realised that most readers won't do that and had made the story a little more engaging from the start.
Goblin
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
Except that judging from the writing around here, most Slashdotters wouldn't know the difference...
Affect and effect are two different words, people.
But seriously, on topic, I really liked that Doctorow story. The beginning was definitely a bit klunky by my standards, but by the middle it started to pick up quite a bit. The self-conscious (or didn't you guys catch that part?) references to '1337-speak' (the written language with no spoken form!) were rather amusing.
It's nice to see someone play with language, and it's nice to see someone who apparently knows a little bit of something (instead of a whole lot of nothing) about computers writing speculative fiction, for a change. Or don't you guys get a little bit annoyed about totally impossible (instead of wildly improbable) computers (and/or technology) in speculative fiction?
Also, another question: Considering all the geek holy wars, can geeks truly be said to have a demographic?
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
...but it was a damn good read, and the Fritz chip might become reality. Though, one thing the story didn't bring up that I had in my head all the time was that this would open for the absolutely best way to break any copy protection:
The piece talks about how the Fritz chip ran at Ring minus one. From the first mentioning of hacking wetware, I saw one thing; your own body runs at Ring minus TWO. So, if you actually could directly interface with your body, you could extract any information that at some time entered your body. Which means that no matter how secure and complicated the media corporations' deliverance to your eyeballs/ears is, the moment it enters your brain, it's yours. I imagined that somebody would 'hack' their brain into feeding out exactly what they received through their senses - movie in, perfectly copyable rip out.
The only way the media corporations would be able to evade THIS would be to check that the person in front of the video screen doesn't have any biological modifications - and there's no way there will be an effective, non-invasive procedure of doing that.
Now, this might be quite some years into the future, but it illustrates that no matter how deeply the media corps entrench their copy prevention systems, there's always the analog hole. And until we can hack our brains, we still have the excellent circumvention techniques known as 'pointing a video camera at the screen' and 'placing a microphone in front of the speaker'.
The sooner RIAA/MPAA realize this, the sooner they can give up trying to lock down everyting and instead try to give the masses what they want instead..