Here’s a short video in Arte Creative’s “From Sketch” series explaining the copyright wars while attempting to create a meaningful accompanying graphic. I love how this came out, though I really can’t draw very well!
Here’s a podcast of my last Locus column, What’s Inside the Box?:
The answer to this that most of the experts I speak to come up with is this:
The owner (or user) of a device should be able to know (or control) which software is running on her devices.
This is really four answers, and I’ll go over them in turn, using three different scenarios: a computer in an Internet cafe, a car, and a cochlear implant. That is, a computer you sit in front of, a computer you put your body into, and a computer you put in your body.
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.
My latest Locus column is “What’s Inside the Box,” a discussion of whether owners, users or third parties should be able to know and/or control what their computers are doing:
The answer to this that most of the experts I speak to come up with is this:
The owner (or user) of a device should be able to know (or control) which software is running on her devices.
This is really four answers, and I’ll go over them in turn, using three different scenarios: a computer in an Internet cafe, a car, and a cochlear implant. That is, a computer you sit in front of, a computer you put your body into, and a computer you put in your body.
My latest Guardian column is “Censorship is inseparable from surveillance,” which discusses the fact that network censorship entails surveillance, and how this exacerbates the public health problem caused by our difficulty in evaluating privacy trade-offs.
There was a time when you could censor without spying. When Britain banned the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the 1920s and 1930s, the ban took the form on a prohibition on the sale of copies of the books. Theoretically, this entailed opening some imported parcels, and it certainly imposed a constraint on publishers and booksellers. It was undoubtedly awful. But we’ve got it worse today.
Jump forward 80 years. Imagine that you want to ban www.jamesjoycesulysses.com due to a copyright claim from the Joyce estate. Thanks to the Digital Economy Act and the provision it makes for a national British copyright firewall, we’re headed for a system where entertainment companies can specify URLs that have “infringing” websites, and a national censorwall will block everyone in the country from visiting those sites.
In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.
Review:
Midwest Book Review
The well written essay/presentation provides the audience with insight into Mr. Doctorow’s views especially on intellectual property ownership in an on demand digital world.
Harriet Klausney, Midwest Book Review
Review:
San Francisco Book Review
In a scant one hundred pages, Doctorow infuses our imagination with engaging characters, a tightly woven narrative, and carefully woven themes of isolation, family, and genetic engineering into Jimmy’s journey through the American wasteland. Doctorow eloquently marks the differences between change and progress as one of Jimmy’s preoccupations.
Wendy Iraheta, San Francisco Book Review
Here’s a short interview I did last week in Chicago with WNIJ, an NPR affiliate. MP3 link
Nicole Powers from Suicide Girls sat down with me at my office last month for a long, in-depth interview that’s just been published: “You can’t escape it anywhere. It’s a race to the bottom all around the world right now. Canada, Germany, the US, and the UK, as well as the rest of the EU, are basically locked in a race to see who can implement 1984 the fastest. The US — obviously now you’ve got indefinite detention for American citizens on US soil. In Canada we’re on the verge of getting this lawful intercept bill that’s as bad as anything anywhere else in the world. In the UK we have the Digital Economy Act and widespread biometrics. In Germany the police just got caught deploying what they’ve called the 0zapftis Trojan, the government trojan where when people cross the borders and they examine their laptops they covertly put spyware on their computers so they can watch them after the fact. I mean really, at every turn there’s somebody doing this, so it doesn’t matter where you live. It really doesn’t at this point. That’s one of the things that I’ve really come to realize, the fight is global.”
