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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!)
I agree. This seems more to be an attempt at "acting cool" than any serious science fiction writing.
/l4m3r h4x0r attitude - LART!/ If this guy is one of the best of tomorrow's sci-fi, God save sci-fi.
He's taken standard ideas from the geek community and has jumbled them up in a story. Disney's in league with the **AAs, let them be one of the evil badasses. Sun One + Java gives us JavaOne. And ofcourse, the Big Brother is a badass, so there you go. Plus some 3l337 h4x0r speak, cryptographic terms and ideas of an Orvellian nightmare thrown in. Everything you'd think the average cs-geek would like?
Wrong!
Some aspects of the story are nice, like trust (not only in computing, in life too) and the way companies of tomorrow may try to control the way media dissemination AND their employees work, the burnout of coders and how the safest havens of tomorrow might be the living hells of today. But otherwise, it mostly sounded like lame speak to me.
Good science fiction (the guy can't even say it's sci-fi, he calls it just fiction at b0ing-b0ing) would just inherently impress the readers without trying to go on great lengths to explain some lame ass terms or go into longwinded exaggeration of how somethings are today (whether vapourware will work out?).
Take Arthur C Clarke's The Star or EM Forsters The machine stops , or David Zindell's Shanidar. You don't need to put in any effort for it to strike you as good work. You can just feel it.
This is poor writing, bad content and an attempt at
He does not even come close.
...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..