I’m heading to Ann Arbor, DC and Baltimore this week for a series of talks — I did a a quick interview with Baltimore’s WYPR (MP3) that came out very well!
All About:
Podcast
My Podcast is a regular feed in which I read from one of my stories for a few minutes at least once a week, from whatever friend’s house, airport, hotel, conference, treaty negotiation or what-have-you that I’m currently at. Here’s the podcast feed.
Here’s an MP3 of the audio from the Reigniting Society’s Ambition with Science Fiction event that I did with Neal Stephenson and Ed Finn at Seattle Town Hall on Oct 26, to promote the Hieroglyph anthology, designed to inspire optimistic technologies to solve the Earth’s most urgent problems. I had a story in it called The Man Who Sold the Moon.
I sat down at New York Comic-Con with Aaron from The Geekcast podcast for a long, interesting interview (MP3) on a wide variety of subjects about art, computers, games and justice!
Here’s the audio of my closing keynote speech at last Friday’s Dconstruct (this was the tenth Dconstruct; I’m pleased to say that I also gave the closing speech at the very first one!).
You can hear audio from the rest of the speakers too.
Here’s a reading (MP3) of the first part of my story “Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts” from the new MIT Tech Review anthology Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling. The anthology also features fiction by William Gibson, Lauren Beukes, Chris Brown, Pat Cadigan, Warren Ellis, Joel Garreau, and Paul Graham Raven. The 2013 summer anthology was a huge hit — Gardner Dozois called it “one of the year’s best SF anthologies to date, perhaps the best.”
Here’s a reading (MP3) of my latest Guardian column, How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage, which examines how Hachette’s insistence on DRM for their ebooks has taken away all their negotiating leverage with Amazon, resulting in Amazon pulling Hachette’s books from its catalog in the course of a dispute over discounting:
Under US law (the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and its global counterparts (such as the EUCD), only the company that put the DRM on a copyrighted work can remove it. Although you can learn how to remove Amazon’s DRM with literally a single, three-word search, it is nevertheless illegal to do so, unless you’re Amazon. So while it’s technical child’s play to release a Hachette app that converts your Kindle library to work with Apple’s Ibooks or Google’s Play Store, such a move is illegal.
It is an own-goal masterstroke. It is precisely because Hachette has been so successful in selling its ebooks through Amazon that it can’t afford to walk away from the retailer. By allowing Amazon to put a lock on its products whose key only Amazon possessed, Hachette has allowed Amazon to utterly usurp its relationship with its customers. The law of DRM means that neither the writer who created a book, nor the publisher who invested in it, gets to control its digital destiny: the lion’s share of copyright control goes to the ebook retailer whose sole contribution to the book was running it through a formatting script that locked it up with Amazon’s DRM.
The more books Hachette sold with Amazon DRM, the more its customers would have to give up to follow it to a competing store.
Here’s a reading (MP3) of a short story I wrote for the July, 2014 issue of Wired UK in the form of a news dispatch from the year 2024 — specifically, a parliamentary sketch from a raucous Prime Minister’s Question Time where a desperate issue of computer security rears its head:
Quick: what do all of these have in common: your gran’s cochlear implant, the Whatsapp stack, the Zipcar by your flat, the Co-Op’s 3D printing kiosk, a Boots dispensary, your Virgin thermostat, a set of Tata artificial legs, and cheap heads-up goggles that come free with a Mister Men game?
If you’re stumped, you’re not alone. But Prime Minister Lane Fox had no trouble drawing a line around them today during PMQs in a moment that blindsided the Lab-Con coalition leader Jon Cruddas, who’d asked about the Princess Sophia hacking affair. Seasoned Whitehall watchers might reasonably have expected the PM to be defensive, after a group of still-anonymous hackers captured video, audio and sensitive personal communications by hijacking the Princess’s home network. The fingerpointing from GCHQ and MI6 has been good for headlines, and no one would have been surprised to hear the PM give the security services a bollocking, in Westminster’s age-old tradition of blame-passing.
Nothing of the sort. Though the PM leaned heavily on her cane as she rose, she seemed to double in stature as she spoke, eyes glinting and her free hand thumping the Dispatch Box: “The Princess Sophia affair is the latest installment in a decades-old policy failure that weakened the security of computer users to the benefit of powerful corporations and our security services. This policy, the so-called ‘anti-circumvention’ rules, have no place in an information society.
This morning, I gave the keynote speech the 2014 conference of The Literary Consultancy in London, about the future of publishing. They got the audio up with lightning speed (I’m in the auditorium, listening to the follow-on panel).
Here’s a reading (MP3) of a recent Guardian column, ‘Cybersecurity’ begins with integrity, not surveillance, in which I suggest that the reason to oppose mass surveillance is independent of whether it “works” or not — the reason to oppose mass surveillance is that mass surveillance is an inherently immoral act:
The Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman and I presented an introductory session at SXSW before Edward Snowden’s appearance, and he made a thought-provoking comparison between surveillance and torture. Some of the opponents of torture argue against it on the ground that torture produces low-quality intelligence. If you torture someone long enough, you can probably get him to admit to anything, but that’s exactly why evidence from torture isn’t useful.
But Gellman pointed out that there are circumstances in which torture almost certainly would work. If you have a locked safe – or a locked phone – and you want to get the combination out of someone, all you need is some wire-cutters, a branding iron, some pliers, and a howling void where your conscience should be.
The “instrumental” argument against torture – that it doesn’t work – invites the conclusion that on those occasions where torture would work, there’s nothing wrong with using it. But the primary reason not to torture isn’t its efficacy or lack thereof: it’s that torture is barbaric. It is immoral. It is wrong. It rots societies from the inside out.
Here’s a reading (MP3) of a my latest Locus column, How to Talk to Your Children About Mass Surveillance, in which I describe the way that I’ve explained the Snowden affair to my six-year-old:
So I explained to my daughter that there was a man who was a spy, who discovered that the spies he worked for were breaking the law and spying on everyone, capturing all their e-mails and texts and video-chats and web-clicks. My daughter has figured out how to use a laptop, phone, or tablet to peck out a message to her grandparents (autocomplete and spell-check actually make typing into an educational experience for kids, who can choose their words from drop-down lists that get better as they key in letters); she’s also used to videoconferencing with relatives around the world. So when I told her that the spies were spying on everything, she had some context for it.
Right away, we were off to the races. ‘‘How can they listen to everyone at once?’’ ‘‘How can they read all those messages?’’ ‘‘How many spies are there?’’ I told her about submarine fiber-optic taps, prismatic beam-splitters, and mass databases. Again, she had a surprising amount of context for this, having encountered digital devices whose capacity was full – as when we couldn’t load more videos onto a tablet – and whose capacities could be expanded with additional storage.
Then I talked about not reading everything in realtime, and using text-search to pick potentially significant messages out of the stream. When I explained the spies were looking for ‘‘bad words’’ in the flow, she wanted to know if I meant swear words (she’s very interested in this subject). No, I said, I mean words like ‘‘bank robbery’’ (we haven’t really talked about terrorism yet – maybe next time
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
