I’ve just put up my site for Little Brother, my young adult novel about hacker kids who use technology to reclaim the Bill of Rights from the DHS after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Included on the site are:
Borderlands Books, San Francisco’s wonderful science fiction bookstore, has offered to free US shipping for signed, inscribed copies of Little Brother. Just order before my in-store appearance on May 22, and they’ll take care of having me sign and personalize your copy. People outside of the US can order, too — but there’s a small charge for shipping, depending on where you live.
Borderlands Books 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110 +1 888 893 4008
Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its ongoing series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of a teen underground that uses technology to fight back against surveillance and control.
This week’s HOWTO is “Avoiding Camera Noise Signatures” — AKA, anonymizing your photos before you post them online:
If you take enough images with your digital camera, they can all be compared together and a unique signature can be determined. This means that even when you think that you are posting a photo anonymously to the internet, you are actually providing clues for the government to better tell who you are. The larger the sample size of images they have, the easier it is them to track down images coming from the same camera. Once they know all the images are coming from the same camera, all they then have to do is find that camera and take a picture to confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt.
It is important to remove this noise signature so that you cannot be tracked down. I cannot guarantee any of these methods will work beyond the shadow of a doubt because the woman doing research for the government on how to find the signature is very good. I can only promise that this will make their work more difficult.
Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its ongoing series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of a teen underground that uses technology to fight back against surveillance and control.
This week’s HOWTO is “Avoiding Camera Noise Signatures” — AKA, anonymizing your photos before you post them online:
If you take enough images with your digital camera, they can all be compared together and a unique signature can be determined. This means that even when you think that you are posting a photo anonymously to the internet, you are actually providing clues for the government to better tell who you are. The larger the sample size of images they have, the easier it is them to track down images coming from the same camera. Once they know all the images are coming from the same camera, all they then have to do is find that camera and take a picture to confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt.
It is important to remove this noise signature so that you cannot be tracked down. I cannot guarantee any of these methods will work beyond the shadow of a doubt because the woman doing research for the government on how to find the signature is very good. I can only promise that this will make their work more difficult.
In my latest Guardian column, I disclose my five email power-tips — the system I use to manage hundreds of emails every single day:
Sort your inbox by subject
This is my favorite one by far. If something big is going on in the world, chances are lots of people are going to be emailing you about it, and they’ll generally use pretty similar subject lines.
When my daughter was born, the majority of congratulatory emails began with the word “Congratulations.” When I’d asked my friends to help me find an office, most of the tips I got began with “office.”
Best of all, if some spammer manages to get a few hundred copies of a message through my filter and into my inbox, they’ll all have the same subject line, making them easy to bulk-select and delete.
Foreign-alphabet spam is also a doddle, since non-Roman characters will all alphabetise at the bottom or top of your inbox; if you don’t read Cyrillic, Korean, Hebrew or Simplified Kanji, you can just delete them all with a couple of key presses.
Tor Books and Expanded Books produced a funny interview/trailer thing for John Scalzi and me in honor of our latest books — he’s bringing out a young adult novel in the Old Man’s Warverse in August called Zoe’s Tale that I’ve read a little from and it’s dynamite!
Tor Books and Expanded Books produced a funny interview/trailer thing for John Scalzi and me in honor of our latest books — he’s bringing out a young adult novel in the Old Man’s Warverse in August called Zoe’s Tale that I’ve read a little from and it’s dynamite!
My next novel, Little Brother, officially goes on sale today! In addition to the US print edition, there’s a DRM-free audio edition (there’s also forthcoming editions in the UK, Greece, Russia, France and Norway, with others pending) from Random House Audio. My deal with Random House is that they’re absolutely not allowed to sell the book with DRM on it, which, sadly, means that Audible (the largest audiobook store in the world) won’t carry it — they insist on selling books with DRM, even when authors and publishers don’t want it.
Instead, you can buy the audiobook from Zipidee, a retailer that Random House uses — they have the spiffy embeddable Flash sales-object you see above (feel free to paste it into your own blog or whatnot), and there’s also this static URL for those of you who can’t use Flash.
The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it, you’re free to take up to 30 minutes’ worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it’s clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you’re allowed to do without my permission (of course!).
I’ll also be releasing (as always!) a free, Creative Commons-licensed version of the text of Little Brother, just as soon as I get back to London (I’m presently in Toronto, visiting my family with my newborn daughter). It’ll likely be Monday or so — there’s a bunch of little clean-uppy things I need to do with the Little Brother distribution site that I need to be in my office with uninterrupted time to accomplish.
