Here’s part six of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”
All About:
Podcast
My Podcast is a regular feed in which I read from one of my stories for a few minutes at least once a week, from whatever friend’s house, airport, hotel, conference, treaty negotiation or what-have-you that I’m currently at. Here’s the podcast feed.
Here’s the audio of my talk at UC Irvine this week on copyright and trade policy — a variation on the video I posted of me speaking at Google a couple weeks back.
Here’s part five of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”
Here’s part four of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”
On April 28, I did a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books with Kage Baker, John Scalzi and Harry Turtledove, called “Science Fiction: The Road From Here to There.” The LA Times just provided us with the audio for this panel on CD and I’ve secured the permission of my co-panelists to rip the disc and put the audio up on the Internet Archive as an MP3, licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Enjoy!
Here’s part three of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”
A couple months back, I did an interview with Sun’s VP of Engineering, Hal Stern. Hal’s an amazing guy, a really smart advocate for open standards and open systems. We had a great conversation:
HS As we start to look at the issues of identity and security and privacy, we also come up with trust. What is the purpose of actually keeping a secret? It’s so you can either control the flow of information where there is no trust or validate information where there’s imperfect trust or less-than-ideal secrecy or less-than-ideal security. You start to build up a model of what particular threats you’re worried about and how those threats represent themselves, and then you can ask, “Well, where is it that I need to go and enforce protection?” Is it keeping things on my laptop that are unencrypted, or is it that if I just keep everything in a network file storage mechanism somewhere, that’s as safe as keeping my money at the bank and just using the ATM for cash and cache, in both homophonic interpretations of the word.
I worry about accidentally divorcing people from their content. In the short-term there are things like theft, or losing your laptop with your book on it. But over longer periods of time, we have to worry about the encoding of the data. Do we actually know how to interpret that five, 10, 50 years from now? I don’t think we have that much experience with it. I think my mom probably asks me at least every six months when she can throw away the paper tape that’s in my old bedroom. It’s a very retro technology placeholder of 25 years ago, but that was the preferred storage and transfer mechanism, lacking anything else, and my Radio Shack TRS-80 with the cassette tape backup was a big improvement over that. It’s hard data, but where are you going to find a KSR 33 Teletype with a paper-tape reader on it? In some museum somewhere…
Update: Here’s the MP3 as well!
Last night, Rudy Rucker and I gave a reading and a fun panel in San Francisco, as part of the SF in SF series hosted by Terry Bisson. Terry and Rudy are two of my favorite writers, and they were absolutely great. Rudy read a wild story about Alan Turing’s efforts to avoid the MI5’s post-war morality squad as he pursues a gay dalliance with a handsome Greek. I read a part of my forthcoming hackers-versus-the-DHS novel Little Brother. Afterwards we talked publishing. Al Billings brought his podcasting rig and recorded the whole thing and he’s already got it online.
(Thanks, Al!)
Here’s part two of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life.”
I recently did an interview with Oort Cloud, a killer copy-friendly science fiction writing site. We talked a lot about creative process, writing (and, of course, copyright).
