I’m incredibly chuffed to learn that the Japanese edition of Little Brother is up for this year’s Seiun award, along with Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl, Mieville’s The City & the City, Wilson’s Chronoliths, Delany’s Dhalgren and Ballad’s Millennium People.
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?:
Late in March, I started to get a steady stream of emails from concerned readers: did you see that the Internet Society has appointed the former chief technology officer of the MPAA to be their North American regional director?
I was as alarmed as they were. The Internet Society – ISOC – is an international nonprofit organisation whose mission is “to assure the open development, evolution and use of the internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world”. More concretely, ISOC is also in charge of the .ORG registry, through its subsidiary, the Public Interest Registry.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Jesse2014 writes:
‘For The Win’ was incredibly exciting and inspiring. It is not the first book of yours that made me feel that way, but it was the difference in motivating me to become a small part of the movement to use gold farming for development and freedom. The kind of stuff you were writing about seems so possible.
So I’ve created a wiki where people might work together to undertake the quest. I wanted to let you know because of your huge role in this already.
My next plan is to help build a free online marketplace where some kind of ‘fair trade’ gold/power-leveling can be exchanged. I’d like to make this website as open and collaborative as possible so that anyone can improve and build on it. Then to help gold farmers get access to computers, games and bandwidth that don’t come with the same requirements of their current bosses – donated for free, that they can use on their own terms.
There will be many challenges on the way but I believe it will be worth it. As you said, we can all lead ourselves.
Jesse2014 writes:
‘For The Win’ was incredibly exciting and inspiring. It is not the first book of yours that made me feel that way, but it was the difference in motivating me to become a small part of the movement to use gold farming for development and freedom. The kind of stuff you were writing about seems so possible.
So I’ve created a wiki where people might work together to undertake the quest. I wanted to let you know because of your huge role in this already.
My next plan is to help build a free online marketplace where some kind of ‘fair trade’ gold/power-leveling can be exchanged. I’d like to make this website as open and collaborative as possible so that anyone can improve and build on it. Then to help gold farmers get access to computers, games and bandwidth that don’t come with the same requirements of their current bosses – donated for free, that they can use on their own terms.
There will be many challenges on the way but I believe it will be worth it. As you said, we can all lead ourselves.
I gave a talk at Google’s DatenDialog — a privacy conference — in Berlin some months ago, and they’ve posted the video.
Last month, I gave a version of my “War on General Purpose Computing” lecture to the University of Westminster Law School. The Guardian captured the talk on video and edited it for length, then posted it.
My latest Guardian column is “Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?” which digs into the backstory on the appointment of former MPAA CTO Paul Brigner as North American director of the copyright-reforming, pro-net-neutrality Network Society group, which manages the .ORG domain name registry.
I asked Brigner whether his statements about DNS blocking and seizure and net neutrality had been sincere. “There are certainly a number of statements attributed to me that demonstrate my past thoughts on DNS and other issues,” he answered. “I would not have stated them if I didn’t believe them. But the true nature of my work was focused on trying to build bridges with the technology community and the content community and find solutions to our common problems. As I became more ingrained in the debate, I became more educated on the realities of these issues, and the reality is that a mandated technical solution just isn’t a viable option for the future of the internet. When presented with the facts over time, it was clear I had to adjust my thinking.
“My views have evolved over the last year as I engaged with leading technologists on DNSSEC. Through those discussions, I came to believe that legislating technological approaches to fight copyright violations threatens the architecture of the internet. However, I do think that voluntary measures could be developed and implemented to help address the issue.
“I will most definitely advocate on Internet Society’s behalf in favor of all issues listed, and I share the organization’s views on all of those topics. I would not have joined the organisation otherwise, and I look forward to advocating on its behalf.”
Update: Joly sez, “After his appointment we (ISOC-NY) did pull Paul up on the carpet to explain himself – you can find the salient MPAA passage here
Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?
(Image: Stop SOPA!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 51295441@N07’s photostream)
I was in Prague last Saturday, giving an address to the General Assembly of Pirate Parties International. The video is on YouTube.
Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords:
Facebook has threatened to sue companies that force their employees to reveal their Facebook login details. As laudable as this is, I worry that it will fail to accomplish its primary objective – protecting Facebook users from employer snooping.
Increasingly, firms configure the computers and devices on their internal networks to trust “self-signed certificates”. These cryptographic certificates are the same files used by your browser to establish secure, eavesdropping-proof connections to websites and to validate software updates, and to generally validate the identity of remote machines and guard the files they send you from tampering and spying.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
