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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 ?
Seriously. It would be a somewhat entertaining (but second-rate) cyberpunk short story if he hadn't been trying so hard to drop 'leet k-radspeak all over the place.
Sorry Cory, you're 14/\/\3r than Jon Katz
"it feels like it's aimed squarely at the geeks' demographic"
Nothing with word "demographic" in it could truly appeal to the geek demographic.
Wait a minute....
Steve
How dare you post a short story first thing in the morning. And a FRIDAY at that too! I might as well just go home now; I'm not getting anything worthwhile done at work today.
Karma: NaN
I'd like to thank the submitter of the story for calling it a "weblog" instead of some lame-ass made-up-for-the-sake-of-making-a-name-up name like a "blog" or a "wiki". :)
:)
I'm sure I'm not alone in my praise
siri
...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
Somebody owes me 15 minutes added back to my life timer for suggesting this was a worthwhile read.
Sorry, but the most credit I can give you on refund is five minutes. After that long, you should be smart enough to bail out on your own. So let's see, five minutes, um... carry the one... so I'll be seeing you at 4:33 PM next Thurs... oh! er, never mind. Wasn't 'sposed to say that. Have a nice day!
-- G. Reaper, Esq.
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!)
What are you doing? You can't post an article that actually requires people to read it before they respond.. it's against the Slashdot Code of Ethics! Next you'll expect us not to pull comments out of our asses.. yeah, right.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Surely there must be better material than this on a smaller site. Its no big deal to find a short story on Salon
Actually, it is a big deal. There has never been, AFAIK, an original sci-fi story posted on Salon (of course those cynical enough will say that some news stories must be...).
Regardless of whether that statment is true, the point is that not only is this a really good story, with interesting characters, fresh situations, and nice twists, but that it also deals with Trusted Computing and the dreaded Palladium (Palladium in gibberish is Taliban, didn't ya know). How hardware in the future will be encrypted with keys and codes only unecrypted by those in control and power so they know exactly what you're doing all the time. This story takes that concept from the computer and applies to human beings. It's like 1984, only a bit more hip and filled with enough buzzwords so that geeks will get a nice, big smile every three paragraphs or so.
The arc of the story is not the technology or the use of it in regards to its manipulation on the body. The arc is the two friends and how loyalties are shared, and how loyalties are disregarded for the sake of one's well being (or selfishness, if you'd rather). The circular and sometimes disconnected view of one man's life (Murray) and his spiral into depression and boredom after the loss of his junkie friend (Liam). How, when they are rejoined, those old friendly traits, both good and bad, are showing up again, just like old times. Sometimes you can change, but deep down most people are the same. How, when it comes down to it, just like in Orwell's opus 1984, people will look out for #1 before they would ever bother to keep their loyalties true.
This is a great story that is mentioned because not only does it make a great point about the future of corporate-controlled computer content, but how in essence it deals with friendships, those fragile beasts that we all crave and have to put up with, just to have someone to attend LAN parties with.
Yeah, I just don't get the Stephenson fascination. Everyone said Snow Crash was such a great book, so I read it. I will never read another Stephenson book again. Ever. That was the WORST ending to a decent setup ever. I just couldn't believe what I was reading. It's like he totally gave up on even attempting a reasonable conclusion.
--- witty signature
As someone who's 'website' evolved into an interactive weblog, I happily await the day when the term 'blog' falls into the same pit of disused linguistics as 'cyber', 'breaker, breaker, good buddy' and 'where's the beef'.
As for 'Wiki', the very word gives me the heebie-jeebies and makes me wonder if I should give up computers completely.
(As for your sig, I'd say the only reason to use Netscape 7.x instead of Mozilla is if you're still hanging onto those shares of NSCP, just in case...)
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
for you are conductive and can support 110 volts.
Best Slashdot Co
So to a nontechnical audience, it sounds like "modulate the shield harmonics" on Star Trek. Big deal, that's par for the course in SF.
What was important about the story, IMHO, was the way he made it very clear (to a technical or a nontechnical audience alike) what DRM, Palladium, the "Fritz chip" and "Trustworthy" computing were all about. In that vein, it's on a par with "The Right To Read".
I've recommended this story to nontechnical folks who want both a good cyber-yarn, and a good explanation of what kinds of laws Hollywood's buying from Congress.
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..
The ending to snowcrash did suck, and so did the ending to Cryptonomicon.
Sthephenson's work is really more about the trip then the destination. You should really read Cryptonomicon though, don't be put off by Snow Crash (which I enjoyed reading, personaly). Cryptonomicon can't really even be called Sci-fi, and it's a very enjoyable, fun, read.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.