Suicide Girls has published an excerpt from Rapture of the Nerds, the novel Charlie Stross and I wrote, which will come out in September. Charlie and I will be touring the book together briefly after Labor Day. The details are still being settled, but there’s going to be some very exciting stops!

Rapture is the novel-length version of the two novellas Charlie and I wrote, Jury Service and Appeals Court. For this volume, we re-wrote those two, and added a long third section, Parole Board, from which the Suicide Girls excerpt is drawn. It’s a comic novel of the Singularity, party mash-note to technophilia and part indictment. As the title suggests, we’re both a little ambivalent on the idea of machine transcendence.

Of course, the sim is far too realistic. A virtual champagne bath should somehow manage to keep the champagne drinking-temp cold while still feeling warm to the touch. And it shouldn’t be sticky and hot and flat; it should feel like champagne does when it hits your tongue—icy and bubbly and fizzy. And when Huw’s nonbladder feels uncomfortably full and relaxed in the hot liquid and she lets a surreptitious stream loose, it should be magicked away, not instantly blended in with the vintage Veuve to make an instant tubworth of piss-mimosa.

This is what comes of having too much compute-time at one’s disposal, Huw seethes. In constraint, there is discipline, the need to choose how much reality you’re going to import and model. Sitting on an Io’s worth of computronium has freed the Galactic Authority—and isn’t that an unimaginative corker of a name? — from having to choose. And with her own self simulated as hot and wide as she can be bothered with, she can feel every unpleasant sensation, each individual sticky bubble, each droplet clinging to her body as she hops out of the tub and into the six-jet steam-shower for a top-to-bottom rinse, and then grabs a towel —every fiber slightly stiff and plasticky, as if fresh out of the wrapper and never properly laundered to relax the fibers—and dries off. She discovers that she is hyperaware, hyperalert, feeling every grain of not-dust in the not-air individually as it collides with her not-skin.

An Excerpt From The Final Rapturous Installment Of Cory Doctorow And Charles Stross’ Rapture of The Nerds

My latest Guardian column is “Google admits that Plato’s cave doesn’t exist,” a discussion of how Google has changed the way it talks about its search-results, shifting from the stance that rankings are a form of pure math to the stance that rankings are a form of editorial judgment.

Google has, to date, always refused to frame itself in those terms. The pagerank algorithm isn’t like an editor arguing aesthetics around a boardroom table as the issue is put to bed. The pagerank algorithm is a window on the wall of Plato’s cave, whence the objective, empirical world of Relevance may be seen and retrieved.

That argument is a convenient one when the most contentious elements of your rankings are from people who want higher ranking. “We have done the maths, and your page is empirically less relevant than the pages above it. Your quarrel is with the cold, hard reality of numbers, not with our judgement.”

The problem with that argument is that maths is inherently more regulatable than speech. If the numbers say that item X must be ranked over item Y, a regulator may decide that a social problem can be solved by “hard-coding” page Y to have a higher ranking than X, regardless of its relevance. This isn’t censorship – it’s more like progressive taxation.

Google admits that Plato’s cave doesn’t exist

The IEEE’s Computer and Reliability Societies recently published “Embracing the Kobayashi Maru,” by James Caroland (US Navy/US Cybercommand) and Greg Conti (West Point) describing an exercise in which they assigned students to cheat on an exam — either jointly or individually. The goal was to get students thinking about how to secure systems from adversaries who are willing to “cheat” to win. The article describes how the students all completed the exam (they all cheated successfully), which required them to provide the first 100 digits of pi, with only 24h to prepare. The students used many ingenious techniques as cribs, but my heart was warmed to learn that once student printed a false back-cover for my novel Little Brother with pi 1-100 on it (Little Brother is one of the course readings, so many copies of it were already lying around the classroom).

James and Greg have supplied a link to a pre-pub of the paper (the original is paywalled), and sent along a video of a presentation they gave at Shmoocon where they presented the work. The students’ solutions are incredibly ingenious — the audience is practically howling with laughter by the end of the presentation.

(Thanks, Ben!)

Last Friday, June 8, I was immensely, fantastically thrilled to receive an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University, an institution I have long held in high esteem and where it has been my privilege to serve as a visiting senior lecturer. The degree was conferred in a fabulous ceremony at the Milton Keynes Theatre, just one of the OU’s many graduation ceremonies for the year (the OU specialises in adult and continuing education and is a tremendously democratising force in UK education, and so awards huge numbers of non-honorary degrees every year). As I sat at the front of the stage with my OU colleagues, I had a great seat from which to observe the year’s grads, and to marvel at their diversity in age and background, and to delight in the cheers from the guests they’d brought with them to the event.

My own parents came from Toronto for the occasion, and I was also joined by my wife and daughter. Later in the day, we threw a party with many friends from around the world at Bletchley Park, a nearby historic site famous for being one of the birthplaces of modern computers and cryptography (Bletchley turns out to be a brilliant place to throw a party — take note if you’re thinking of having an event somewhere in the region).

I just wanted to put up a short post here to publicly thank the OU, especially my computer science colleagues Marian Petre, Blaine Price, Ray Corrigan, and Mike Richards, for this honour; and to thank again all the friends, colleagues, and family who made the day so special.

Ray Corrigan has posted Prof Marian Petre‘s introduction from the day, which sets out the case the degree. I was given a few moments to speak about what I think my work means; I’ve pasted that in below the jump.

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I wrote a piece for MIT’s Technology Review on the way that Internet privacy works, and the deficiency of our tools — browsers, phones — in protecting it:

Even if you read the fine print, human beings are awful at pricing out the net present value of a decision whose consequences are far in the future. No one would take up smoking if the tumors sprouted with the first puff. Most privacy disclosures don’t put us in immediate physical or emotional distress either. But given a large population making a large number of disclosures, harm is inevitable. We’ve all heard the stories about people who’ve been fired because they set the wrong privacy flag on that post where they blew off on-the-job steam.

The risks increase as we disclose more, something that the design of our social media conditions us to do. When you start out your life in a new social network, you are rewarded with social reinforcement as your old friends pop up and congratulate you on arriving at the party. Subsequent disclosures generate further rewards, but not always. Some disclosures seem like bombshells to you (“I’m getting a divorce”) but produce only virtual cricket chirps from your social network. And yet seemingly insignificant communications (“Does my butt look big in these jeans?”) can produce a torrent of responses. Behavioral scientists have a name for this dynamic: “intermittent reinforcement.” It’s one of the most powerful behavioral training techniques we know about. Give a lab rat a lever that produces a food pellet on demand and he’ll only press it when he’s hungry. Give him a lever that produces food pellets at random intervals, and he’ll keep pressing it forever.

The Curious Case of Internet Privacy