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Cory Doctorow's Fiction About An Evil Google

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the government-search-engines dept.

ahem writes "I saw a link on Valleywag to a story written by Cory Doctorow about what would happen if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security. Chilling, well written, but the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."

5 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is fiction? by theefer · · Score: 3, Informative

    Granted, I'm not a great fan of fiction outside of Hemmingway, but damn, could you pick a more lame and boring subject?

    Cory was actually commissioned to write a story on this topic.
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    theefer
  2. Re:Fiction? by ta+bu+shi+da+yu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Section 505, "Miscellaneous national security authorities." Allows for National Security Letters that bypass judicial review. Struck down on April 9th, 2004 by Doe v. Ashcroft. Reauthorized legislation later struck down on September 6th, 2007, by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  3. You dont have to use Google by supersnail · · Score: 3, Informative

    Seriously you can reduce google's market share by using another search engine occasionally.
    As Market Share equates directly to income in the search business you deprive google of money and power by using another search engine.

    It would obviously be sinful to use MSN search, but Yahoo! is merely bad taste.

    "www.ask.com" is nearly as good as google and has a nice clean interface.

    Plus there are some Open Source "SETI at home" type search engines under development that are worth
    supporting "grub" and "Majestic-12" are two.

    Although as Majestic-12 is based in the UK, and the UK government is currently under the direct control of the US executive it would be easy to give the NSA direct access to everything.

    --
    Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
  4. Re:The ending by julesh · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ahem wrote, "... the ending was a bit anti-climactic for my tastes."

    Could it really have ended any other way?

    No, it couldn't. For those who missed the significance, the basic structure of the story was copied from 1984.

  5. Re:DES by rjh · · Score: 3, Informative

    According to the IBM design team, this is not so: while the NSA made technical suggestions, not one wire in the S-boxes was dictated by the NSA.

    Other people have noticed that the "technical suggestions" involved the NSA sending back DES hardware with rewired S-boxes, and assumed the IBM DES crew simply used the NSA's new S-boxes without understanding what was going on. Quite the opposite: the IBM team refused to use anything they didn't understand, and thus independently discovered differential cryptanalysis by reverse-engineering the NSA's changed S-boxes.

    Once they understood differential cryptanalysis, they came up with their own S-boxes.