The talented folks at DaveFilms have produced a full-cast audiobook adaptation of my award-winning novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. They’re transmitting it in ten parts, as a podcast — part 1 just went live.

This is the second audio adaptation of Down and Out — the podcaster Mark Forman read the book aloud on his podcast in August 2005.

I love the different adaptations of the book — it’s amazing to hear my words read by so many different people, with so many different choices about how to dramatize it. Often, the reading isn’t how I heard it in my own head when I wrote it, which is cool — it’s wild to hear how your own words sound to someone else.

Link to part 1 as MP3, Link to part 1 as streaming Quicktime, Podcast feed

The video of my keynote at ToorCon 8, the annual hacker’s convention in San Diego, is online. I talked about how the future of computing is endangered by new trends in our approach to computers and the Internet, treating them as systems to be locked down in a return to the dark ages of mainframes.

My Creative Commons-licensed, Hugo/BSFA-nominated story “I, Robot” has been translated into Hebrew by the Israeli sf magazine Bli Panika. They’ve posted the story, translated by Haggay Averbuch, and the translation is under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license.

ארטוּרוֹ איקאזה דה אראנה-גולדברג, בלש דרג ג’, תחום מסחר אמריקה הצפונית, מחוז שלישי, רשות רביעית, מחלקה שניה (פרקדייל) חווה שלל הרפתקאות במהלך הקריירה המכובדת שלו. כשלכד נוכלים עשה זאת באמצעות שילוב מנצח של חריפות חושים ומסירות בלתי מתפשרת לחובתו.

בשלושה אירועים שונים זיכו אותו מפקדו והמנהל המחוזי של המחלקה להרמוניה חברתית בעיטורי כבוד, ואמו טיפחה מקדש של גזירי עיתונים וציונים לשבח, שתפס את מרבית חדר האורחים הצפוף שבדירתה הסמוכה לשדרות סטילס.

See also:
I, Robot on The Infinite Matrix
I, Robot, the podcast

Joseph Petviashvili is a fan of my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom — he likes it so much that he’s created a software version of “Whuffie,” the reputation currency that forms the basis of the Bitchun Society I described in the book.

Bitchun.org is runs on open source code (still in alpha release), creating a marketplace for trading and rewarding favors for your friends and like-minded strangers. It’s pretty amazing to have something I invented for a science fiction novel turned into running code!

What’s the Bitchun Society and what’s whuffie?
Whuffie is a high five, it’s that look of appreciation you give for a job well done, it’s a thumbs up. It’s your personal capital with your friends and neighbors. It’s whuffie! People who give out and receive whuffie are in the Bitchun Society. It was first mentioned in Cory Doctorow’s novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

What is the Bitchun Society for?
Right now, being part of the Bitchun Society lets you find people who share your interests and can help you through the use of a special Skype bot we call the Bitchun Butler.

(Thanks, Joe!)

My new Information Week column is called “High-Definition Video — Bad For Consumers, Bad For Hollywood” and it explains the way that HDTV has become a Trojan horse for smuggling DRM into your living room — and how the broadcast industry doesn’t know how to make a decent HD show:

The new HD technologies include anti-user nasties like “renewability” — the ability to remotely disable some or all of the device’s features without your permission. If someone, somewhere, figures out how to use your DVD burner to make copies of Hollywood movies, they can switch off *everyone’s* burner, punishing a limitless number of innocents to get at a few guilty parties.

The HD DRM systems also include gems like “selectable output control” — wherein? some programs will refuse to be played on some devices. As you flip up and down the dial, parts of your home theater will go dark. Creepier still is “authorized domain” — the ability to flag content so that it can only be played within a “household,” where the studios get to define what is and isn’t a valid living arrangement.

On top of these restrictions are the punishing “robustness” regimes that come with HD DRM systems. These are the rules manufacturers have to follow to ensure that the anti-user stuff in their devices isn’t compromised. It’s a requirement to add expensive armor to products that stop a device’s owner from opening up her device to see what’s inside, and make changes. That’s bad news for open source, of course, since open source is all about being able to look at, modify and republish the code that runs a device.