Ulrich Oberender and his 11th grade students in a German high school created this “Edu-Breakout” based on my novel Little Brother: it’s a series of puzzles and challenges based on the book that engage deeply with both the privacy technology and the privacy ethics that run through the book! They call it “a digital escape room” and you’ll need to solve some challenges really early on to get very far! If you’re a teacher and want access to the Teacher’s Guide, you can email obucate@gmail.com or hit him on Twitter at @obucate to get the password.
It’s been a few years since I last sat down with Carey Parker and his Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons podcast, and last week I corrected that oversight, recording a long interview about the Right to Repair, Adversarial Interoperability, and Sonos’s e-waste gambit. Part I is up now (MP3), and part II will be up in a week.
For my latest podcast, I read my Copyright Week post for EFF’s Deeplinks blog, , In Serving Big Company Interests, Copyright Is in Crisis.
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Baycon is a large, regional science fiction convention that’s been serving the Bay Area for 38 years; I attended several times when I lived in San Francisco and this year I was tickled to be invited to attend as Author Guest of Honor. The event is May 22-25 (Memorial Day Weekend) at the San Mateo Airport San Francisco Marriott (at Hwy 92 & 101 in San Mateo, CA). The convention is one of the best regional cons I’ve ever attended, with an outstanding mix of fannish activities (boffer swords! flint-knapping! multiple warring Klingon clades!), literary panels, and panels on tech, politics and other subjects salient to the Bay Area. I’m so pleased to be invited and I’m looking forward to seeing you there!
For my latest podcast, I read my Guardian Cities column, “The case for … cities that aren’t dystopian surveillance states,” which was the last piece ever commissioned for the section.
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My 2019 book Radicalized has been named one of the five finalists for Canada Reads, the CBC’s annual book prize — Canada’s leading national book award, alongside of the Governor General’s award!
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The editors of Guardian Cities (previously) saw my Toronto Life blurb about how a “smart city” could be focused on enabling its residents, rather than tracking and manipulating them, and asked me to write a longer piece on the theme: The case for … cities where you’re the sensor, not the thing being sensed is the result.
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In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action,, where I I discuss how the US government’s unwillingness to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws has resulted in the dominance of a handful of giant tech companies who get to decide what kind of speech is and isn’t allowed — that is, how the USG’s complicity in the creation of monopolies allows for a kind of government censorship that somehow does not violate the First Amendment.
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The Canadian Broadcasting Coporation’s annual Canada Reads prize is one of Canada’s top literary prizes, ranking with the Governor General’s prize for prestige and reach; it begins early in January with the announcement of a longlist of 15 recommended books, and then these are whittled down to a shortlist of five books later in the month. Over the months that follow, each of the shortlisted books is championed by a Canadian celebrity in a series of events across the country, with the grand prize winner being announced in late March after a televised debate among the five books’ “champions.”
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