Part five of Themepunks (earlier installments), my novel-in-progress, is up on Salon this morning. Themepunks is the story of a tech-boom driven by commodity hardware, three-d printers, and leftover geek talent going begging after the dotcom bust. Part five tells the story of Lester and Perry’s next invention, and of Andrea’s miserable homecoming to Northern California:

“Resource contention readily decomposes into a bunch of smaller problems, with distinctive solutions. Take dishes: every dishwasher should be designed with a ‘clean’ and a ‘dirty’ compartment — basically, two logical dishwashers. You take clean dishes out of the clean side, use them, and put them into the dirty side. When the dirty side is full, the clean side is empty, so you cycle the dishwasher and the clean side becomes dirty and vice-versa. I had some sketches for designs that would make this happen, but it didn’t feel right: making dishwashers is too industrial for us. I either like making big chunks of art or little silver things you can carry in your pocket.”

She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a day by doing near-to-nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting ads on the site — lots of feelers from blog “micro-labels” who’d wanted to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she broke down when one of them showed her a little spreadsheet detailing the kind of long green she could expect to bring in from a couple of little banners, with her getting the right to personally approve every advertiser in the network. The first month, she’d made more money than all but the most senior writers on the Merc. The next month, she’d outstripped her own old salary. She supposed it meant that she should make it official and phone in a resignation to Jimmy, but they’d left it pretty ambiguous as to whether she was retiring or taking a leave of absence and she was reluctant to collapse that waveform into the certainty of saying goodbye to her old life.

“So I got to thinking about snitch-tags, radio frequency ID gizmos. Remember those? When we started talking about them a decade ago, all the privacy people went crazy, totally sure that these things would be bad news. The geeks dismissed them as not understanding the technology. Supposedly, an RFID can only be read from a couple inches away — if someone wanted to find out what RFIDs you had on your person, they’d have to wand you, and you’d know about it.”

“Yeah, that was bull,” Perry said. “I mean, sure you can’t read an RFID unless it’s been excited with electromagnetic radiation, and sure you can’t do that from a hundred yards without frying everything between you and the target. But if you had a subway turnstile with an exciter built into it, you could snipe all the tag numbers from a distant roof with a directional antenna. If those things had caught on, there’d be exciters everywhere and you’d be able to track anyone you wanted — christ, they even put RFIDs in the hundred-dollar bill for a while! Pickpockets could have figured out whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!”

I’m speaking at the O’Reilly European Open Source conference in Amsterdam next week. I’m at a standards body meeting for the first couple days of the conference, but I get in Wednesday night and give a talk on the European Broadcast Flag on Thursday morning. Hope to see you there!

EuroOSCON targets the specific needs of European developers, programmers, strategists, entrepreneurs, and technologists, helping them to deliver the benefits of open source technology to their companies and organizations. Tutorials, sessions, panel discussions, and on-stage conversations focus on all aspects of building applications, services, and systems with an emphasis on practical skills.

Last Sunday I was a guest on the This Week in Tech podcast, recorded live at the Gallery Cafe in San Francisco. This is the podcast that a lot of the old TechTV/screensavers people migrated to — I had a TON of fun. Audio’s live!

Update: There’s video, too! (Thanks, Costoa!)

This coming Monday, October 10th, I’ll be doing a reading/signing at the Oxford Street Borders in London. Also appearing is Jon Courtenay-Grimwood, author of the newly released 9Tail Fox. The whole thing is organized by legendary cyberpunk doyenne Pat Cadigan, and the event promises to be a ton of fun. Festivities begin at 6:30, but Cadigan sez, “Come early, get good seats.”

When: Monday, October 10th, 6:30PM
Where: Borders Oxford Street, London (Oxford Circus tube)

Part Four of my serialized novel-in-progress, Themepunks, is up on Salon today. This installment deals with the arrival of the first MBA on the little hacker enclave in South Florida, and what he plans to do with their imaginations:

“You know,” he said, after they’d ordered coffee and desert, “it’s all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, it’s providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can’t find room for — that’s superabundance.”

“I have a locker in Milpitas,” she said.

“There you go. It’s a growth industry.” He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, “My daughter, Anushka, is 12, and my son, Lee, is 8. I haven’t lived with them in four years and I’ve only seen them twice since. They’re good kids, though. It just couldn’t work with their mother. She’s Russian, and connected — that’s how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connections — so after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But they’re good kids.”

“Only twice?”

“We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?”

Part One Link,

Part Two Link,

Part Three Link

I’ve just come from giving a talk on DRM to HP’s research group in Corvallis, Oregon — a kind of sequel to last year’s Microsoft DRM talk. The text of the talk is dedicated to the public domain, and live on the web.

* Privacy

In privacy scenarios, there is a sender, a receiver and an attacker.
For example, you want to send your credit-card to an online store. An
attacker wants to capture the number. Your security here concerns
itself with protecting the integrity and secrecy of a message in
transit. It makes no attempt to restrict the disposition of your
credit-card number after it is received by the store.

* Use-restriction

In DRM use-restriction scenarios, there is only a sender and an
attacker, *who is also the intended recipient of the message*. I
transmit a song to you so that you can listen to it, but try to stop
you from copying it. This requires that your terminal obey my
commands, even when you want it to obey *your* commands.

Understood this way, use-restriction and privacy are antithetical. As
is often the case in security, increasing the security on one axis
weakens the security on another. A terminal that is capable of being
remotely controlled by a third party who is adversarial to its owner
is a terminal that is capable of betraying its owner’s privacy in
numerous ways without the owner’s consent or knowledge. A terminal
that can *never* be used to override its owner’s wishes is by
definition a terminal that is better at protecting its owner’s
privacy.

I’ve finally started podcasting! I love reading my stuff aloud, but it’s not practical for me to find quiet places to sit down with a mic and a Powerbook and record. So the idea is that I’m going to record my stories in serial form from wherever I am: hotel rooms, friends’ sofas, airport lounges, whatever, and post ’em. You can subscribe to the feed here, or download individual installments as MP3s here. The podcast is also available through iTunes. Thanks to the Internet Archive for hosting the MP3s and to Feedburner for munging the feed.

I’ve started the podcast by reading aloud from a novellette-in-progress called “After the Siege,” inspired by my grandmother’s hair-raising stories of being a little girl in Leningrad during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, which she recounted this summer while we were at a family reunion in St Petersburg, Russia (Leningrad that was).

This Friday, I’m speaking at an event in Berkeley, California, called Online Video and the Future of Television, sponsored by the Intelligent Television project. I’m on a 3PM panel with Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Archive and Peter Kaufman of Intelligent TV. Hope to see you there!

Friday, September 30, 2005
9.30 a.m. – 4.30 p.m.
The Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street
Berkeley, CA 94709

More than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every year worldwide, and a growing fraction of it is digital, along with a flood of video from individuals, new production companies, and archives. The availability of large-scale public and private archives of television, video, and film offers enormous promise for educators, entrepreneurs, producers, broadcasters, and investors.

Nearly every aspect of television and video today is in transition. Storage is moving from tape to disk, distribution is moving from broadcast networks to the Internet, schedules are giving way to unscheduled or on-demand access, and viewing now happens via PCs, mobile phones, and home theaters.

This one-day conference, created by Archival.tv and Intelligent Television (http://www.intelligenttelevision.com), brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse — and until now, largely disconnected — specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.

Salon is serializing the first third of a novel I’m working on, whose working title is Themepunks. The first 50,000 words are a stand-alone short novel, and every week for ten weeks, Salon is publishing another ~5,000 words from the story.

The third installment is online. In this week’s piece: Perry and Lester, the garage hackers that Andrea (the tech journalist) is profiling, take her on a tour of the new technology esthetic, brought on by the lost generation of out-of-work photoshoppers, html jocks, and perl hackers left behind by the dot-bomb.

He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. “Christ, it’s huge,” she said.

“Yeah, isn’t it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when it shipped? ‘A thousand songs in your pocket!'”

That made her actually laugh out loud. She fished in her pocket for her earbuds and dropped them on the table where they clattered like M&Ms. “I think I’ve got about 40,000 songs on those. Haven’t run out of space yet, either.”

He rolled the buds around in his palm like a pair of dice. “You won’t — I stopped keeping track of mine after I added my hundred-thousandth audiobook. I’ve got a bunch of the Library of Congress in mine as high-rez scans, too. A copy of the Internet Archive, every post ever made on Usenet… Basically, these things are infinitely capacious, given the size of the media we work with today.” He rolled the buds out on the workbench and laughed. “And that’s just the point! Tomorrow, we’ll have some new extra fat kind of media and some new task to perform with it and some new storage medium that will make these things look like an old iPod. Before that happens, you want this to wear out and scuff up or get lost–”

“I lose those things all the time, like a set a month.”

“There you go then! The iPods were too big to lose like that, but just look at them.” He passed back the iPod. The chrome was scratched to the point of being fogged, like the mirror in a gas-station toilet. The screen was almost unreadable for all the scratches. “They had scratch-proof materials and hard plastics back then. They chose to build these things out of Saran Wrap and tin-foil so that by the time they doubled in capacity next year, you’d have already worn yours out and wouldn’t feel bad about junking them.

“So I’m building a tape-loading seashell robot toaster out of discarded obsolete technology because the world is full of capacious, capable, disposable junk and it cries out to be used again. It’s a potlatch: I have so much material and computational wealth that I can afford to waste it on frivolous junk. I think that’s why the collectors buy it, anyway.”

(Link to part one, Link to part two)

Salon has just posted part two of its ten-part serialization of my novel-in-progress, “Themepunks.” Last week, we met Andrea Fleeks, a tech journalist; Lionel Kettlewell, a brazen Silicon Valley VC; and Rat-Toothed Freddy, a sleazy UK tabloid tech journalist, and learned that Kettlewell had bought up and liquidated Kodak and Duracell, two companies that have no place in a filmless, batteryless twenty-first century. Kettlewell proposes to use the money to fund micro-startups that combine cool commodity hardware, open source software and imagination to create new tools that are profitable for 3-6 months, until they are cloned and the margin on them falls to near-zero.

In this week’s installment, Andrea goes on assignment to Hollywood, Florida, where she meets Lester and Perry, a pair of tech-freaks who live in a junkyard where they remix dead high-tech toys into one-of-a-kind works of art:

Perry set Boogie Woogie Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB cable into his chest cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front.

“This thing is running InstallParty — it can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is a little different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day it was built. InstallParty doesn’t care, though: one click and away it goes.” The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, montages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical fine art.

“All done. Now, have a look — this is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either, see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand — that’s because it’s from India. If it was from Malaysia, you’d see all kinds of wobble in the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it, which means that somewhere in the device’s karmic history, there’s a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff.

“So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I’ve turned these things into wall-climbing monkeys; I’ve modded them for a woman from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I’ve done with them so far is the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster. Come on,” he said, and took off deeper into the barn’s depths.