Here’s part ten 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.
Joe Falconer of the band Midnight.Haulkerton has done another song based on one of my works — this time, a track based on my novel Eastern Standard Tribe. The song is CC-licensed (as is the book) and ready for you to share and play with.
What is the theme of this story?
What is the theme of life?
Do you want to be smart? Do you want to be remembered?
Do you want to be happy? Do you want to be content?
If you want to be smart gotta be unhappy
If you want to be happy gotta live in ignorant bliss
If you want to be remembered gotta go down in flames
If you want to be content you ain’t gonna be missed
I’m in Melbourne, Australia for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and a number of people have written to see if I can get together for coffee or a meal. Unfortunately, my schedule’s too tight for much socializing. Lucky for me, Lachlan Musicman, Guy, and Michael Hillis have put forward a venue for a public get-together for snacks and a drink or two before my first gig.
We’re meeting at a Japanese place called Chocolate Buddha — an informal place that’s vegetarian-friendly. We’re getting together there from 8-9PM on Friday, 24 August. There’s no reservation — we’re just going to turn up and commandeer some tables. The next night, I’ll be at Merlyn Theatre for “Free and easy,” an interview with my by The Chaser’s Charles Firth, along with anyone who wants to attend.
Hope to see you there!
Where: Chocolate Buddha, Federation Square, Melbourne
When: Friday, August 24, 8-9PM
See also: Cory’s schedule at Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Aug 25-26
At this year’s Comic-Con, I sat down for a joint iFanBoy interview with Brian Wood, creator of DMZ, one of the best new comics of the decade. Brian and I talked about creators’ rights, copyright, my forthcoming comics, the next volume of DMZ (which I wrote the intro for) and other assorted bits.
(Thanks, Ron!)
See also:
DMZ: graphic novel, a worthy successor to Transmetropolitan
Demo: Brian Woods’s comic about teens with “powers”
I’m a program participant at the World Science Fiction in Yokohama, Japan this year. Hope to see many of you there! Here’s my schedule:
Thursday, August 30, 4PM: How to Make SF More Inviting to Teens, with David M. Silver, Farah Mendelsohn, Lisa C. Freitag, Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Friday, August 31, 11AM: Reading
Friday, August 31, Noon: Digital Maoism: Drowning the Individual Voice, with Eileen Gunn, Chris O’Shea
Friday, August 31, 4PM: The Tech Savvy Criminal, with Geoffrey A. Landis, Patricia MacEwen
Saturday, September 1, noon: Mundane or Transcendent? with Charles Stross, Robert Silverberg
Saturday, September 1, 2PM: The Universal Library, with Charles Stross, Linda Robinett, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tom Galloway
Sunday, September 2, 10AM: Kaffeeklatsche
Sunday, September 2, Noon, Defending Public Domain from Corporate Copyright Maximalism, with Inge Heyer, Naomi Novik, Patrick Nielsen Hayden
I’ll also be presenting the Hugo Award for Best Novelette.
Here’s part nine 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 latest Guardian column has just gone up — it talks about the “Potemkin Village” effect with DRM, whereby DRM vendors walk their potential customers through a faked-up demo showing how great DRM is, how much people want it, and how easy it is to use. The latest victim of this scam is the BBC, who’ve just decreed that their TV shows will only be delivered online through the iPlayer, a DRM service that lets you do less than you can with your old TV and VCR. Because that’s what the public is crying out for: an Internet TV that does less than a regular TV.
These demos almost never involve real hardware. It’s so much easier to do interoperability when all it takes to make two devices communicate is to draw a dotted line between them on a slide. And when the demos do involve real hardware, it’s usually all from one vendor, and only within a constrained universe of uses.
In reality, it’s bloody hard to get any two technologies to talk to each other successfully. Remember how hard it was to get your new wireless card, printer or DVD recorder to work? Now, imagine that these technologies had been deliberately designed not to work with each other – except under the exactly correct circumstances.
Microsoft’s PlaysForSure platform is typical of this. All such devices, “certified” to work with each other, barely ran on their own. And God help you if you tried to connect them to a competitor’s device (even Microsoft’s Zune won’t handle PlaysForSure music).
See also: Cory’s column on “Digital Lysenkoism” for the Guardian
On Saturday, 25 August and Sunday, 26 August, I’ll be a guest at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in Melbourne, Australia. I met a ton of wonderful people on my last pass through MEL — hoping to see all of you again. Here’s my schedule:
Saturday, 25 August, 9PM: Free and easy, interview by The Chaser’s Charles Firth, Merlyn Theatre
Sunday, 26 August:
11:30AM: Creative commons or common theft?, panel, Merlyn Theatre
3PM: This just in from cyberspace, panel, Beckett Theatre
5:30: Publish or perish: An A-Z of alternative ways to get your name in print, panel, Tower Theatre
I’m also teaching an all-day writing class on Saturday, called “Generation next,” but I believe that most of the slots are now taken.
DailyLit is a fantastic service — they take public-domain and Creative Commons-licensed books and email them to you, one page per day. They put my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town up last year to great response, and now they’ve added a whole slew of science fiction, including the rest of my novels and my latest short story collection, Overclocked, and many other sf books including Charlie Stross’s Accelerando, Flatland, Frankenstein, From the Earth to the Moon, and The Time Machine.
(Thanks, Jeff!)
