I’m headed to Anticipation, the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal, Canada at the start of August (Aug 6-10) and I’d like to rent someone’s 3G modem. The conference centre charges $395/DAY (!!!) for WiFi. I’ll happily pay your whole monthly data tariff for the favour. If you’re in Montreal and you can part with your modem for a few days (maybe you’re going camping?) send me an email, doctorow@craphound.com. I promise not to download porn, pirate movies or music, or anything else that might get you in trouble with your ISP. And if you’ve got two 3G modems, I’ll rent ’em both, as my wife needs one too!

Here’s a question for the hivemind: a typographer friend of mine is laying out a book for me, and delivering a printer-ready PDF. After he sends me the PDF, I need to be able to make minor edits and corrections to the type, preferably using Linux. How can I do this?

Update: So it may be that PDF is a poor choice here. My designer uses InDesign and can deliver a file in any of its standard output formats. Is there something that InDesign can produce that I can maintain under Ubuntu?

What I’ve tried so far: (None of this stuff works for my purposes)

* PDFEdit

* OpenOffice PDF Editor

* Scribus

* Inkscape

* PDFScape

My latest Guardian column, “Stop worrying, Hollywood – nobody is stealing your films with mobiles,” looks into the curious practice of forcing attendees at preview screenings to surrender their phones while they see the movie. The industry admits that no one has ever camcordered a movie with a phone, and further, they admit that 100 percent of pre-release leaks come from insiders, not camcordering. And then there’s the small matter of all the data on those hundreds of VIPs’ phones that are left in care while they spend a couple hours watching giant robots throw buildings at each other.

If I wanted to stop movies from being pirated, I’d focus my effort on the places where they leak. In the case of the Oscars, that’s the insider awards voters who leak every movie they’re sent within six days, not the film critics – who have never, ever leaked a movie by recording it at a preview.

Likewise, if I wanted to secure hundreds of mobile phones, my first resort would be to leave them where they are, in cinemagoers’ pockets, which is surely the safest place for them to be. Failing that, I’d have a top-notch security system, with tamper-evident, shielded, opaque bags for storing phones, a system of multiple watchers who kept an eye on each other as well as the phones, and special background checks into anyone allowed anywhere in the vicinity of the handsets.

Oh, and I’d make sure I was carrying special insurance that specifically covered losses due to data breaches from phones in my care.

What does the film industry do to safeguard your phone when you see a preview? It’s very hard to say. No one could really tell me what the details were.

Stop worrying, Hollywood – nobody is stealing your films with mobiles

Here’s a talk I gave to the Python hackers at Europython in Birmingham, England earlier this month, explaining why Python hackers need to care about the copyright wars.