Have you used technology to overcome the odds when fighting back against authority? I’d love to hear about it!

The UK edition of my young adult novel Little Brother is coming out next November, and HarperCollins, the UK publisher, have asked me to come up with some new material for the British book. I’m noodling with a bunch of different ideas on this score, but one of my favourites is of compiling an appendix of real-world stories of people who’ve successfully used technology to subvert authority and level the playing field between just-regular-folks and The Powers That Be.

To that end, I’m interested in getting your stories — ones that you’re happy to have published — of technological triumph over blind, goofy, obdurate authority. Post them here on the post or email me with them. If I get enough great material, I’ll make it an appendix in the Brit edition!

Ian sends word of the ParanoidLinux project, inspired by the Linux distro used by the freedom fighters in my novel, Little Brother:

Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of “chaff” communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you’re doing anything covert. So while you’re receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)

When those words were written, ParanoidLinux was just a fiction. It is our goal to make this a reality. The project officially started on May 14th, and has been growing ever since. We welcome your ideas, contributions, designs, or code. You can find us on freenode’s irc server in the #paranoidlinux channel. Hope to see you there!

Link

(Thanks, Ian!)

Remember four weeks ago when I told you that my young adult novel Little Brother made the New York Times bestseller list? Well, I’ve just heard from my publisher that it’s about to go into its fourth week on the list, having climbed to position eight! Color me ecstatic! My sincere thanks to all of you who talked about the book, gave it to your friends, sent it to teachers and librarians, and downloaded it — you all helped make this the first-ever Creative Commons-licensed novel to get on the NYT list!

A couple weeks back, I stopped into KQED, the San Francisco NPR affiliate, and did an interview with Rick Kleffel, the top science fiction person on NPR nationwide. As with all my Kleffel interviews, this one was wide-ranging and interesting.

MP3 Link