Last Sunday I was a guest on the This Week in Tech podcast, recorded live at the Gallery Cafe in San Francisco. This is the podcast that a lot of the old TechTV/screensavers people migrated to — I had a TON of fun. Audio’s live!
Update: There’s video, too! (Thanks, Costoa!)
I’ve just uploaded the sixth of my podcasts (MP3) of After the Siege. I’ve caved to popular demand and bought a nice Sennheiser USB headset and the audio quality is about 10 million times higher than before.
BTW, if you’re into getting these at other bitrates or in OGG format, you can get them from the this bookmarked search on the amazing Internet Archive, where these are hosted.
This coming Monday, October 10th, I’ll be doing a reading/signing at the Oxford Street Borders in London. Also appearing is Jon Courtenay-Grimwood, author of the newly released 9Tail Fox. The whole thing is organized by legendary cyberpunk doyenne Pat Cadigan, and the event promises to be a ton of fun. Festivities begin at 6:30, but Cadigan sez, “Come early, get good seats.”
When: Monday, October 10th, 6:30PM
Where: Borders Oxford Street, London (Oxford Circus tube)
Here’s the MP3 of me reading installment five of After the Siege — back in London, with a slight sniffle. Argh. Got lots of the story written on the plane last night, though.
Update: This recording cuts off mid-sentence! Whups! I’ll pick it up where I left off the next time I record. I believe that the reason the hiss cuts out midway on this recording is that’s where my laptop’s fan switched itself off. If I can figure out how to keep it from switching itself on in future, I’ll do so.
Part Four of my serialized novel-in-progress, Themepunks, is up on Salon today. This installment deals with the arrival of the first MBA on the little hacker enclave in South Florida, and what he plans to do with their imaginations:
“You know,” he said, after they’d ordered coffee and desert, “it’s all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, it’s providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can’t find room for — that’s superabundance.”
“I have a locker in Milpitas,” she said.
“There you go. It’s a growth industry.” He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, “My daughter, Anushka, is 12, and my son, Lee, is 8. I haven’t lived with them in four years and I’ve only seen them twice since. They’re good kids, though. It just couldn’t work with their mother. She’s Russian, and connected — that’s how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connections — so after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But they’re good kids.”
“Only twice?”
“We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?”
Here’s the fourth installment of me reading my story After the Siege — get the MP3.
I’ve just come from giving a talk on DRM to HP’s research group in Corvallis, Oregon — a kind of sequel to last year’s Microsoft DRM talk. The text of the talk is dedicated to the public domain, and live on the web.
* Privacy
In privacy scenarios, there is a sender, a receiver and an attacker.
For example, you want to send your credit-card to an online store. An
attacker wants to capture the number. Your security here concerns
itself with protecting the integrity and secrecy of a message in
transit. It makes no attempt to restrict the disposition of your
credit-card number after it is received by the store.* Use-restriction
In DRM use-restriction scenarios, there is only a sender and an
attacker, *who is also the intended recipient of the message*. I
transmit a song to you so that you can listen to it, but try to stop
you from copying it. This requires that your terminal obey my
commands, even when you want it to obey *your* commands.Understood this way, use-restriction and privacy are antithetical. As
is often the case in security, increasing the security on one axis
weakens the security on another. A terminal that is capable of being
remotely controlled by a third party who is adversarial to its owner
is a terminal that is capable of betraying its owner’s privacy in
numerous ways without the owner’s consent or knowledge. A terminal
that can *never* be used to override its owner’s wishes is by
definition a terminal that is better at protecting its owner’s
privacy.
Here’s part three of “After the Siege” as an MP3, 12+ minutes recorded at 5:21 AM in a friend’s guestroom in Portland before driving to HP to give a talk on DRM.
I’ve finally started podcasting! I love reading my stuff aloud, but it’s not practical for me to find quiet places to sit down with a mic and a Powerbook and record. So the idea is that I’m going to record my stories in serial form from wherever I am: hotel rooms, friends’ sofas, airport lounges, whatever, and post ’em. You can subscribe to the feed here, or download individual installments as MP3s here. The podcast is also available through iTunes. Thanks to the Internet Archive for hosting the MP3s and to Feedburner for munging the feed.
I’ve started the podcast by reading aloud from a novellette-in-progress called “After the Siege,” inspired by my grandmother’s hair-raising stories of being a little girl in Leningrad during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, which she recounted this summer while we were at a family reunion in St Petersburg, Russia (Leningrad that was).
I’ve just recorded and uploaded part two of “After the Siege” in MP3 form (there will be a couple days’ delay while I wait for the Internet Archive to clear the recording). For what it’s worth, the story was recorded with my Powerbook while sitting up in bed in a friend’s spare room in Portland, moments before showering and heading out.
