I did a quickie interview on privacy and technology with the Associated Press yesterday at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam:

«Google’s undue optimism about data collection and retention and the potential harm that arises from that has only been checked by European regulators: American regulators have been powerless and indeed not eager to intervene,» he said.

«The U.S. intelligence apparatus has a long history of using private data collectors to supplement its own collection,» he said, citing credit rating agency information as an example.

But he slammed the EU for the flip side of its «Data Retention Directive,» which says European ISPs must keep all communications data _ including tracking every Web site an individual user visits _ for at least six months.

The directive is supposed to be enacted in all European Union countries by this month, but most have asked for an extension to prepare for compliance.

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Zend PHP Con is coming to San Francisco Oct 8-11, a kind of gathering of the tribes for PHP hackers from all over the world. I’m giving one of the keynotes, along with Joel “on Software” Spolsky. Hope to see you there!

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My award-winning short story I, Robot has been translated into Romanian by SCI-FI Magazin. Both the original story and the translation are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license — remix away!

Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, detectiv de poliţie de rangul trei, din cadrul Sferei de Comerţ a Americii de Nord Unite, Districtul al treilea, Prefectura a Patra, Divizia a Doua, avusese multe aventuri în distinsa sa carieră, arestând escrocii cu o combinaţie imbatabilă de instinct şi devotament total faţă de meseria sa.

Fusese decorat în trei ocazii diferite de către comandantul său şi de către Managerul Regional pentru Armonie Socială, iar mama lui îi dedicase un mic altar, unde erau adunate toate articolele din presă şi medaliile sale, care ocupa aproape întreaga sufragerie a micului ei apartament de pe Steeles Avenue.

Dar, când venea vorba să o convingă pe fiica lui de 12 ani să se pregătească de şcoală, toată experienţa lui de poliţist nu îi folosea prea mult.

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The Wall Street Journal just published a short interview with me about my story Scroogled, which appears in Radar this month. It’s a commissioned piece where the brief was, “Write a story about the day Google turned evil,” and it’s the first Creative Commons-licensed story to appear in Radar Magazine.

WSJ.com: Are there signs of that at Google? Are they doing something that concerns you?

Mr. Doctorow: Sure, absolutely, there have been lots of signs of that. I mean, one of the things that I think is in Google’s DNA is a real tension about, on the one hand, being good to people, but on the other hand, acquiring as much information about them as they can, under the rubric that it allows them to be better to people.

And it does, a lot of the time. There are lots of ways in which Google knowing more about you makes Google better for you. But without much regard to what’s happening in the world around us, in an era in which the national security apparatus has turned into a kind of lumbering, savage, giant toddler, it behooves us to not leave things within arm’s reach that it might stick in its mouth. And that includes things like my search history. And I’d prefer that Google not be storing a lot of that stuff, especially today, especially after Patriot [Act] and so on. They’re inviting abuse, I think, by doing that. The steps you don’t save can’t be subpoenaed. And by saving them, Google is inviting a subpoena.

So Google’s always had this kind of “We will collect all your information, and it will belong to us, and you won’t be able to take it away, but it’s OK because we’ll only do good things for you” attitude, and that’s a bit of a problem.

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(Thanks, Chris!)

See also: Scroogled: CC-licensed story about the day Google turned evil

Update: Hervé Le Crosnier and C and F Editions have translated the story into French and put the translation online under the same Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Rich sez, “The webcomic XKCD had a meetup in Cambridge today. A few hundred nerdy folk showed up, and a few dressed as the stick figure characters, but even better were the people dressed up like Cory Doctorow!

For more pics of the event, see Flickr photos tagged with ‘xkcddreams’.”

(A word of explanation: XKCD is a marvellous, unapologetically nerdy comic, and Randall Munroe, the creator, once did me the immense honor of making me the punchline of a strip, wearing goggles and a cape. This has become something of a running joke now, much to my delight)

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(Thanks, Rich!)

See also:
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Geeky comic about chess and roller-coasters
Xkcd fans bring chess-sets on roller-coasters
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Bloggin’ ’bout my generation
Pi joke
Funny map of online communities in the style of a D&D map
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
Where LOLCats come from
Ironic Internet malapropism grid

My latest Guardian column, “Free data sharing is here to stay,” is live — it’s an argument about the “information economy,” and whether restricting copying hurts or helps it.

It used to be that copy-prevention companies’ strategies went like this:

“We’ll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an
unauthorised copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the
cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy.”

But every time a PC is connected to the internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public internet. If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that an information economy will increase the technological literacy of its participants.

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