Hey, St Louis, MO! I’m headed your way, for the kick-off of the tour for my latest YA novel, Pirate Cinema. I’ll be at the St. Louis County Library on Tuesday, October 2 at 7PM for an event hosted by Left Bank Books. There are 18 (!) cities on this tour, so be sure and check out the whole schedule. Next on the itinerary: Menlo Park, San Francisco, Berkeley, Pasadena, Redondo Beach — then back across the country to Lansing, MI, and then Chicagoland, New York, DC-area, Edmonton, Vancouver, Seattle, Toronto, and, finally, Boston. I hope to see you (and tell your friends!).

My latest Guardian column, “Automated calls, fraud and the banks: a mismatch made in hell,” reacts to the news that UK banks are using robo-call machines to check in with customers on possibly fraudulent transactions, and going about it in the worst way possible:

The banks, bless them, are only trying to prevent fraud, but this is a pretty silly way of going about it. For starters, there’s the business of calling up people and asking them to give you all the information necessary to prove that they are indeed a bank customer – all the information that a fraudster needs to impersonate that person at the bank, in other words. The banks have spent decades systematically conditioning us to give our personal information to fraudsters, which is a strange way to prevent fraud.

But at least this silliness had one saving grace: a fraudster can only make so many calls per day, and so the scope of losses from such a programme of bad security education is limited by the human frailties of con-artists.

Enter the robo-caller. The banks are now outsourcing their fraud prevention to computers that can make dozens of calls all at once, around the clock, fishing (or phishing) for someone who just happened to have made an unusual purchase and is thus willing to spill all his details down the phone to get it approved. Note that most of the categories of purchase that trigger false positives from fraud detection systems are also the sort of thing that customers are anxious to see go off without a hitch. The unusual and the urgent often travel together.

Automated calls, fraud and the banks: a mismatch made in hell

As many of you will know, I’m about to kick off the tour for a new YA science fiction novel, Pirate Cinema, which comes out next week. As with all my other novels, I’ll be putting up Creative Commons-licensed editions of the book for your downloading pleasure.

Now, whenever I do this, many readers write to me and ask if they can send me a tip or a donation to thank me for sharing the book with them. This isn’t a great way for me to earn money, as it cuts my (awesome, DRM-free, kick-ass) publisher out of the loop. I’ve come up with a much better solution: I publish the names of librarians, teachers, and other affiliated people who would like to receive hardcopies of my books, and then point generous donors to that list, so that they can send copies there. I pay an assistant, Ogla Nunes, who keeps track of who’s received their donations, crossing their names off the list when their requests are fulfilled. We’ve collectively donated thousands of books to schools, libraries and similar institutions. As one reader said, this is like paying your debts forward, with instant gratification. What a fine thing indeed.

Here’s where you come in. If you’re a librarian, teacher, or similar person and you would like a free copy or free copies of Pirate Cinema sent to you by one of my readers, please send Olga an email at freepiratecinema@gmail.com with your institutional details and your name so that we can populate the list and have it ready for release day, so that the generous impulses this generates in my readers can be converted to instantaneous action.

We just did this for Rapture of the Nerds, my novel for adults, co-written with Charles Stross, which was published earlier this month, and got an amazing response, both from would-be donation recipients and donors. But with your help, we can leave that signal success in the dust with Pirate Cinema.

Here’s a plot-summary to whet your appetite. I hope I’ll see you on the tour!

Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household’s access to the internet is cut off for a year, with no appeal.

Trent’s too clever for that too happen. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where he slowly he learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. This brings him in touch with a demimonde of artists and activists who are trying to fight a new bill that will criminalize even more harmless internet creativity, making felons of millions of British citizens at a stroke.

Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people’s minds….

Read the prologue from Pirate Cinema

Great news, West Torontonians! The free Oakville Public Library event I’m doing next Wednesday has been opened to all comers (it was previously teen-only). There’s refreshments, too. You need to pick up a ticket at a local OPL branch, or you can call or email (ecole@oakville.ca or 905-815-2042 ext. 5037) to book ahead. Hope to see you there!

Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, For the Win) will be at the Oakville Public Library to introduce high school students to his latest novel, Pirate Cinema! Pick up your free ticket at all Oakville Public Library branches starting September 10 for your chance to hear Cory read from his book due out October 5. He’ll then talk about creativity, copyright and bill C-11 followed by a Q&A.

Wednesday, September 26: 6-8pm
Central Branch Auditorium – 120 Navy Street
Refreshments will be served

And for those of you in central Toronto, I’m at the Glenn Gould Variations this weekend and I’ll be at BakkaPhoenix books on the 27th at 7PM.

OPL : Cory Doctorow!

My latest Guardian column, “Why Philip Roth needs a secondary source,” explains why it makes sense for Wikipedians to insist that Roth’s claims about his novels be vetted by and published in the New Yorker before they can be included on Wikipedia:

Wikipedians not only have no way of deciding whether Philip Roth is an authority on Philip Roth, but even if they decided that he was, they have no way of knowing that the person claiming to be Philip Roth really is Philip Roth. And even if Wikipedians today decide that they believe that the PhilipRoth account belongs to the real Philip Roth, how will the Wikipdians 10 years from now know whether the editor who called himself PhilipRoth really was Philip Roth?

Wikipedia succeeds by “not doing the things that nobody ever thought of not doing”. Specifically, Wikipedia does not verify the identity or credentials of any of its editors. This would be a transcendentally difficult task for a project that is open to any participant, because verifying the identity claims of random strangers sitting at distant keyboards is time-consuming and expensive. If each user has to be vetted and validated, it’s not practical to admit anyone who wants to add a few words to a Wikipedia entry.

Why Philip Roth needs a secondary source

Charlie Stross and I are doing a public interview on The WELL’s Inkwell.vue conference — you don’t have to be a WELL member to ask questions, either! While I’m on the subject, Charlie and I are doing a live online Torchat tomorrow, Sept 19 at 16h Eastern/13h Pacific.

After a short delay, Charlie Stross and I have finally managed to get the site for our new novel, Rapture of the Nerds, live and online, including Creative Commons licensed ebook versions of the book. If you enjoy the free downloads, we hope you’ll buy a personal hardcopy at your local bookseller, or from your favorite online seller, or donate a copy to a library or school.

And if you’d like to reward us for our use of Creative Commons licenses, and reward Tor Books for its decision to drop DRM on all its ebooks, we hope you’ll buy an ebook at your favorite ebook retailer.

USA:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free)

Google Books (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Apple iBooks (DRM-free)

Amazon

Booksense (will locate a store near you!)

Barnes and Noble

Powells

Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Chapters/Indigo

Amazon.ca

Rapture of the Nerds

Charlie Stross and I have a new book out and I’m about to put up a website were readers can download free, CC-licensed copies of it in ebook form. As with other recent books, I’m going to collect and publish the names of librarians, teachers, and public institutions that would like to get free copies of the hardcover, and then ask people who want to thank me for the free ebook by buying copies for these institutions.

So! If you’re a librarian, teacher, instructor, or similar, and you would like a free copy of Rapture of the Nerds for your institution, please send your name and the name and address of your institution to freerotnbook@gmail.com. I think we’ll launch the site early next week, and it’d be great to go live with a good, long list of potential donation recipients, so act quick! My assistant Olga Nunes (thanks, Olga!) is staffing that address and will get your listing up ASAP.

Note for teachers: this isn’t a young adult novel, and it deals with some decidedly adult themes and contains a lot of cussin’. Here’s the plot summary:

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.

The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth’s networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden apple.

So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth’s anthill, there’s Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.