The Wall Street Journal just published a short interview with me about my story Scroogled, which appears in Radar this month. It’s a commissioned piece where the brief was, “Write a story about the day Google turned evil,” and it’s the first Creative Commons-licensed story to appear in Radar Magazine.

WSJ.com: Are there signs of that at Google? Are they doing something that concerns you?

Mr. Doctorow: Sure, absolutely, there have been lots of signs of that. I mean, one of the things that I think is in Google’s DNA is a real tension about, on the one hand, being good to people, but on the other hand, acquiring as much information about them as they can, under the rubric that it allows them to be better to people.

And it does, a lot of the time. There are lots of ways in which Google knowing more about you makes Google better for you. But without much regard to what’s happening in the world around us, in an era in which the national security apparatus has turned into a kind of lumbering, savage, giant toddler, it behooves us to not leave things within arm’s reach that it might stick in its mouth. And that includes things like my search history. And I’d prefer that Google not be storing a lot of that stuff, especially today, especially after Patriot [Act] and so on. They’re inviting abuse, I think, by doing that. The steps you don’t save can’t be subpoenaed. And by saving them, Google is inviting a subpoena.

So Google’s always had this kind of “We will collect all your information, and it will belong to us, and you won’t be able to take it away, but it’s OK because we’ll only do good things for you” attitude, and that’s a bit of a problem.

Link

(Thanks, Chris!)

See also: Scroogled: CC-licensed story about the day Google turned evil

Update: Hervé Le Crosnier and C and F Editions have translated the story into French and put the translation online under the same Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Rich sez, “The webcomic XKCD had a meetup in Cambridge today. A few hundred nerdy folk showed up, and a few dressed as the stick figure characters, but even better were the people dressed up like Cory Doctorow!

For more pics of the event, see Flickr photos tagged with ‘xkcddreams’.”

(A word of explanation: XKCD is a marvellous, unapologetically nerdy comic, and Randall Munroe, the creator, once did me the immense honor of making me the punchline of a strip, wearing goggles and a cape. This has become something of a running joke now, much to my delight)

Link

(Thanks, Rich!)

See also:
Geeky comic strip uses Cory as the punchline
Geeky comic about chess and roller-coasters
Xkcd fans bring chess-sets on roller-coasters
Nerd humor about Katamari Damacy
Bloggin’ ’bout my generation
Pi joke
Funny map of online communities in the style of a D&D map
Sarcastic comic about computational linguistics (and emo kids)
Where LOLCats come from
Ironic Internet malapropism grid

My latest Guardian column, “Free data sharing is here to stay,” is live — it’s an argument about the “information economy,” and whether restricting copying hurts or helps it.

It used to be that copy-prevention companies’ strategies went like this:

“We’ll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an
unauthorised copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the
cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy.”

But every time a PC is connected to the internet and its owner is taught to use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears: you can just download a copy from the internet. Every techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for the cracked copy on the public internet. If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that an information economy will increase the technological literacy of its participants.

Link

IDW comics have produced a six-issue series of comics based on my short stories (they’ve adapted Anda’s Game, After the Siege, Craphound, I, Robot, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, and Nimby and the D-Hoppers). I had approval on all the scripts, interiors and covers — and I’m really happy with the caliber of work IDW got for me. The series launches this month with Anda’s Game, and IDW will sell you a subscription to the whole run for $23.99. Once the series concludes, IDW will publish a trade paperback collection, and we’ll be doing a Creative Commons release of the whole work to coincide with the trade.

Link

See also:
IDW will do six comics based on my stories
Sam Kieth cover for comic of Cory’s Anda’s Game
Model contract clause for works in Creative Commons