In my latest Guardian column, I tell the story of my recent lecture at West Point’s Cyber Institute, where a young cadet took me aside as asked what I thought of their plans for joining the NSA.
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I have an editorial in the current issue of Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery, a scholarly journal for computer scientists, in which I describe the way that laws that protect digital locks (like America’s DMCA) compromise the fundamentals of computer security.
At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we’re anxious to talk with computer scientists whose research is impeded by DMCA and laws like it, and to discuss how they can improve their odds of coming out on top in legal challenges. It’s part of the Apollo 1201 project to kill all the world’s DRM within a decade.
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After my spam hit a point where I couldn’t actually download my email faster than it was arrivingI spent a month clicking the unsubscribe links in all the spams in my inbox. Weirdly, it worked.
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Have you ever wondered why the Internet is always just a little bit too slow to support the kind of activity you’re trying to undertake? My latest Locus column, The Internet Will Always Suck, hypothesizes that whenever the Internet gets a little faster or cheaper, that unlocks a bunch of applications that couldn’t gain purchase at the old levels, and they rush in to fill in the new space that’s been opened up. The good news is that new ways of connecting with one another are always being opened up. The bad news is that this means that the net will always be more-or-less broken for whatever we depend upon it most.
Data breaches are winning the privacy wars, so what should privacy advocates do?
My latest Guardian column, “Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy,” argues that the hard part of the privacy wars (getting people to care about privacy) is behind us, because bad privacy regulation and practices are producing wave after wave of people who really want to protect their privacy.
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My latest Guardian column, How to save online advertising, looks at the writing on the wall for ad-blockers and ad-supported publishing, and suggests one way to keep ads viable.
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My new Locus column is What If People Were Sensors, Not Things to be Sensed?
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As the world’s governments exercise exciting new gag-order snooping warrants that companies can never, ever talk about, companies are trying out a variety of “Ulysses pacts” that automatically disclose secret spying orders, putting them out of business.
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My new Guardian column, What is missing from the kids’ internet? discusses three different approaches to teaching kids information literacy: firewall-based abstinence education; trust/relationship-based education, and a third way, which is the proven champion of the offline world.
That third way is making media for kids and grownups to use/enjoy/experience together. It’s what made the mission-driven Sesame Street so successful in its mission and the profit-driven Disneyland so profitable. We have some great media for grownups and kids to do beside one another (Scratch, Minecraft, Youtube), but nothing to do with each other.
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My July 2015 Locus column, Skynet Ascendant, suggests that the enduring popularity of images of homicidal, humanity-hating AIs has more to do with our present-day politics than computer science.
As a class, science fiction writers imagine some huge slice of all possible futures, and then readers and publishers select from among these futures based on which ones chime with their anxieties and hopes. As a system, it works something like a Ouija board: we’ve all got our fingers on the planchette, and the futures that get retold and refeatured are the result of our collective ideomotor response.
