Next April, Tor Books will publish Walkaway, the first novel I’ve written specifically for adults since 2009; it’s scheduled to be their lead title for the season and they’ve hired the brilliant designer Will Staehle (Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Darker Shade of Magic) for the cover, which Tor has just revealed.
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I appeared on the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast this week (MP3, talking about the way that DRM has crept into all our smart devices, which compromises privacy, security and competition.
Publishing is in a weird place: ebook sales are stagnating; publishing has shrunk to five major publishers; libraries and publishers are at each others’ throats over ebook pricing; and major writers’ groups are up in arms over ebook royalties, and, of course, we only have one major book retailer left — what is to be done?
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The World Wide Web Consortium — an influential standards body devoted to the open web — used to make standards that would let anyone make a browser that could view the whole Web; now they’re making standards that let the giant browser companies and giant entertainment companies decide which browsers will and won’t work on the Web of the future.
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O’Reilly’s venerable, essential OSCON is in Austin, Texas this year, meaning that you’ll get to combine brain-thumpingly good talks and workshops of free/open source tools and techniques with some of the world’s best BBQ, millions of bats, my favorite toy store anywhere, and one of the best indie bookstores you could hope to visit.
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I wrote an essay called “Fuck Optimism” for a print project from F-Secure, about how we’ll make the Internet a 21st century electronic nervous system that serves humanity and stop it from being a tool to oppress, surveil and displace humans.
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My latest Locus column, Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies, explains the ways in which “reputation” makes a poor form of currency — in a nutshell, reputation doesn’t fulfill most of the roles we expect from currency (store of value, unit of exchange, unit of account), and it is literally a popularity contest where the rich always get richer.
My new Guardian column, Forget Apple’s fight with the FBI – our privacy catastrophe has only just begun, explains how surveillance advocates have changed their arguments: 20 years ago, they argued that the lack of commercial success for privacy tools showed that the public didn’t mind surveillance; today, they dismiss Apple’s use of cryptographic tools as a “marketing stunt” and treat the proportionality of surveillance as a settled question.
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My short story Scroogled has been reprinted on Lithub, as part of the promotion for Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, a forthcoming anthology about surveillance with stories by Etgar Keret, T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Alissa Nutting, Charles Yu and others.
Scroogled is the story of “the day Google became evil” — what happens when a former Googler discovers that his company has been made into an arm of the state.
Since 2001, authoritarians in the South Korean government have been attempting to pass mass surveillance legislation, and they have seized upon the latest North Korean saber-rattling as the perfect excuse for ramming it through the SK Parliament.
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