The Humble Ebook Bundle — a two-week, pay-what-you-like, DRM-free ebook sale — has just revealed the four bonus books in week two: XKCD Volume 0 by Randall Munrow; Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean; Poison Eaters and Other Stories by Holly Black and the bestselling Machine of Death anthology. To get these bonus titles, you have to pay more than the present average for the books (if you bought already and paid more than the average at the time, these books are already yours to download, otherwise, you can top up your payment to get them). Remember, you can also buy the bundle as a gift-code to give to a friend!

(Reminder: the Bundle also includes Peter Beagles The Last Unicorn; Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek; Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor; Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker and my Little Brother)

I sat down in Toronto with Steve Paikin and The Agenda, a great TVOntario programme, and talked about liberty, technology, kids, and surveillance.

Agenda Plus: Cory Doctorow on the Future of the Library

Last Sunday I gave the keynote speech at the Maker Meetup after the London mini Maker Faire. Make’s write-up of the event includes a video of my speech, which came out well (I think!).

This Thursday, I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA with a bunch of authors from the current Humble Ebook Bundle, at 1230h Eastern/0930h Pacific/1730h UK. Then I head to San Diego to teach the Clarion Workshop, and I’ll be taking part in the instructor’s lecture series at the Mysterious Galaxy bookstore, speaking on July 16 at 7PM. And then I’ll be at ComicCon, speaking on the Ode to Nerds panel in Room 6A on July 18 at 1345h and signing at 17h. All my upcoming gigs are listed here, in case you want to see where I’ll be next. I hope to see you!

My latest Guardian column is a one-act historical drama about metadata, starring Winston Churchill, Alan Turing and UK Home Secretary Theresa May:

May: Mr Turing and his colleagues have laboured hard with every hour that God has sent, but try as they might, they can extract nothing of use from the Enigma cipher.

Churchill: (roaring) Nothing? All these years, all this work, and you have nothing?

May: Well, not precisely nothing, prime minister. The lads have got far enough that they are able to extract “meta-data,” but I stress again that this is of no strategic import and would in no way help us to compromise the foe.

Churchill: Meta-data? Tell me more of this meta-data? Is it a Greek word?

(May turns to Turing, who wipes his palms on his trousers)

Metadata – a wartime drama

My latest Locus column is Teaching Computers Shows Us How Little We Understand About Ourselves, an essay about how ideas we think of as simple and well-understood — names, families, fairness in games — turn out to be transcendentally complicated when we try to define them in rule-based terms for computers. I’m especially happy with how this came out.

Systems like Netflix and Amazon Kindle try to encode formal definitions of “family” based on assumptions about where you live — someone is in your immediate family if you share a roof — how you’re genetically related — someone is immediate family if you have a close blood-tie — how you’re legally related — someone is in your family if the government recognizes your relationship — or how many of you there are — families have no more than X people in them. All of these limitations are materially incorrect in innumerable situations.

What’s worse, by encoding errors about the true shape of family in software, companies and their programmers often further victimize the already-victimized — for example, by not recognizing the familial relationship between people who have been separated by war, or people whose marriage is discriminated against by the state on the basis of religion or sexual orientation, or people whose families have been torn apart by violence.

The ambiguity that is inherent in our human lives continues to rub up against our computerized need for rigid categories in ways small and large. Facebook wants to collapse our relationships between one another according to categories that conform more closely to its corporate strategy than reality — there’s no way to define your relationship with your boss as “Not a friend, but I have to pretend he is.”

Teaching Computers Shows Us How Little We Understand About Ourselves