Here’s part eighteen of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
My Nebula-award-nominated story 0wnz0red has been translated into Swedish by Johan Anglemark for the Finnish fanzine Enhörningen, and released under a Creative Commons license. 0wnz0red was the first sf story ever published on Salon and it has been reprinted several times — nice to see it reaching Nordic fans, too! It seems that “0wnz0red” translates into Swedish as “Ägd!”
Tio år i Silicon Valley, och allt Murray Swain hade fått ut av det var en bilring, begynnande flint och ett liv som var ensamt och tomt och genomruttet. Hans enda vän i Kalifornien, Liam, hade förvandlats från en lönnfet programmerarformad potatis till ett levande skelett på dödsbädden ett år tidigare, med herpesblemmor i full blom över hela kroppen i brist på immunförsvar. Minnesgudstjänsten pryddes av ett inramat foto av Liam på examensdagen; hans kropp hade skänkts till vetenskapen.
Liams bortgång hade verkligen sabbat allt för Murray. Han hade hamnat i en av de spiraler med klinisk depression som förr eller senare hade drabbat alla åldrande smarta unga kodare som han känt i datorbranschen. Ögonen blev fuktiga på morgonen vid andra kaffekoppen och när blodsockerkraschen inträffade på eftermiddagen satt han och grät tyst i sitt bås och klinkade slumpmässigt på tangentbordet för att dölja sitt motbjudande hulkande. Hans papperskorg svämmade över med använda näsdukar och det gick ett rykte bland kvällsstädarna att han var obotlig onanist. Det omöjliga i ryktet blev snabbt uppenbart för alla andra kodare på våningsplanet som, ständigt på jakt efter pr0n, hade utforskat omfattningen och gränserna för censurproxyn på huvudkontorets nätverk. Trots detta upprepades det med illa dold glädje i den kollegialt grabbiga atmosfären på arbetsplatsen och lustigkurrar envisades med att dumpa samlingar av miniatyrflaskor med handkräm som de stulit från konferenshotell på hans skrivbord.
My latest Guardian column is online: “Why a rights robocop will never work.” In it, I address the issue of automated copyright enforcement systems and why they are a bad idea:
It would have to perform with near-perfection: even if it turns out that it catches every single infringement except for video that is re-cut to 16:9 with letterboxing at 31fps, then all the pirates will just encode it that way and evade the filter, meaning that the system would generate an unacceptable level of false negatives.
In other words, all the money spent on the system would be for naught because it would fail to catch a significant proportion of pirates.
It would also have to be nearly perfect in regards to false positives – every time it misidentified a home movie of your kids’ first steps or your gran’s 85th birthday as Police Academy 29 or Star Wars: Episode 0, Jedi Teen Academy, your own right to use the Internet to communicate with your friends and family would be compromised – likewise unacceptable.
Here’s part seventeen of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
Christian Spließ just posted this fan-translation of my story Craphound, my very first professional publication! Like pretty much everything I’ve published, Craphound is under a CC license, as is this translation. Thanks, Christian!
Craphound hatte für einen verfluchten dreckigen Alien-Bastard ein abgefahrenes Garagenflohmarkt-Karma. Er war einfach zu gut darin aus einem rasenden Fluss der Nutzlosigkeit das einzige Körnchen Gold herauszuwaschen als dass ich ihn nicht hätte mögen können – oder jedenfalls respektieren. Aber dann fand er die Cowboy-Truhe. Für mich waren das zwei Monatsmieten und für Craphound nichts als ein verrückter Alien-Kitsch-Fetisch. Also tat ich das Undenkbare. Ich verletzte den Code. Ich geriet in einen Bietkrieg mit einem Kumpel. Lasst euch nicht erzählen Frauen würde Freundschaften vergiften; laut meiner Erfahrung heilen die Wunden von Auseinandersetzungen über Frauen recht schnell; Auseinandersetzungen über Schrott hinterlassen nichts als verbrannte Erde.
Christian Spließ just posted this fan-translation of my story Craphound, my very first professional publication! Like pretty much everything I’ve published, Craphound is under a CC license, as is this translation. Thanks, Christian!
Craphound hatte für einen verfluchten dreckigen Alien-Bastard ein abgefahrenes Garagenflohmarkt-Karma. Er war einfach zu gut darin aus einem rasenden Fluss der Nutzlosigkeit das einzige Körnchen Gold herauszuwaschen als dass ich ihn nicht hätte mögen können – oder jedenfalls respektieren. Aber dann fand er die Cowboy-Truhe. Für mich waren das zwei Monatsmieten und für Craphound nichts als ein verrückter Alien-Kitsch-Fetisch. Also tat ich das Undenkbare. Ich verletzte den Code. Ich geriet in einen Bietkrieg mit einem Kumpel. Lasst euch nicht erzählen Frauen würde Freundschaften vergiften; laut meiner Erfahrung heilen die Wunden von Auseinandersetzungen über Frauen recht schnell; Auseinandersetzungen über Schrott hinterlassen nichts als verbrannte Erde.
Pavol Hvizdos just finished translating two of my works into Slovakian, releasing the translations under Creative Commons licenses and putting them on the Internet Archive. Pavol chose my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and my short story Truncat (a sequel, of sorts, to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). This is way too cool.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Slovakian,
Pavol Hvizdos just finished translating two of my works into Slovak, releasing the translations under Creative Commons licenses and putting them on the Internet Archive. Pavol chose my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and my short story Truncat (a sequel, of sorts, to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). This is way too cool.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Slovakian,
Today, two groups of readers wrote to me to report that they’d translated my story “Scroogled” into other languages: Russian and Persian, to be precise. “Scroogled” appeared last month in Radar Magazine, a commissioned short story that tells the story of “the day Google became evil.” The story was published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike license (the first time Radar used a CC license) and it has already inspired translation into French and Spanish.
The Russian translation was undertaken by Ruslan Grokhovetskiy along with “about a dozen” of his friends, and they also whipped up this fan-art poster (also in English and Photoshop source-file) for their translation.
The Persian translation is from Jadi, who hopes that the Persian edition will be enjoyed by “Iranian, Tajik and Afghan audiences.”
See also:
Spanish fan-translation of Scroogled
Scroogled: CC-licensed story about the day Google turned evil
Scroogled in the Wall Street Journal
Update: John Walker has some format conversions, too: OpenDocument,
PDF,
Plain text
