Forbes Magazine asked me to write a story about the Future of Work — describing what work might be like in 20 years. I wrote them a little vignette called “Other People’s Money” — it’s online today, and licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike:

He went for the fish first. Its scales were individual slices from the skins of old Nokia phones–back when it was just Nokia, not Marvel Comics Mobile–each articulated on its own little sprig of memory wire. The gills were scuffed iPod backings, the logos just recognizable under the fog of scratches. The eyes bore HP and PlayStation logos, respectively, and the lips were made from inner-tube strips that bore the smallest recognizable logomarks. As he lifted it, it settled into his hand, arching back to find his thumb and palm, nestling in there.

“It’ll work like an old-time phone,” she said. “It’ll even do a little lookup from old-style exchange numbers to different identity registers and try to get you a voice-call with someone.”

“Do people really do that?”

“Some do. Most just want it for the object-ness of it. It’s got a lot of emotion.” The scuffs, that’s what did it. They were like stories, those scratches, each one a memento mori for some long-dead instant in some stranger’s life.

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Felixe and his friend Marisol (a professional translator) collaborated on this Spanish fan-translation of my Creative Commons-licensed short story Scroogled from Radar Magazine, about the day that Google became evil. This is the first CC-licensed effort from Radar and it’s attracted a gratifying amount of fun remixes, including fan art and a French translation.

“Dame cinco líneas escritas por el hombre más honorable y encontraré una excusa para colgarlo” — Cardenal Richelieu

“No sabemos suficiente de ti” — Eric Schmidt,

Zen le Renard, a French reader of my stories, has translated my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, which appeared in my short story collection Overclocked and was released under a Creative Commons license that allows for noncommercial remixing. Zen le Renard reads English, but wanted to share the story with his monolingual sysadmin friends in France, so he took on the project. Voila!

Quand le mobile de Félix se mit à sonner à 2 heures du mat, Kelly se retourna, lui tapa l’épaule et grogna « Pourquoi t’as pas éteint ce putain de téléphone avant qu’on se couche ? »

« Par ce que je suis d’astreinte,» lui répondit Félix en s’asseyant au bord du lit. Il attrapa son futal qu’il avait laissé par terre avant de se pieuter et Kelly, en continuant de lui boxer l’épaule, lui dit : «T’es pas un putain de médecin non plus, t’es rien qu’un foutu administrateur système »

« C’est mon boulot,» qu’il lui dit.

« Ils te font bosser plus dur qu’un cheval de trait ! » lui dit Kelly. « Tu sais bien que j’ai raison, bon dieu. T’es un père maintenant, tu peux plus te casser en pleine nuit à chaque fois que quelqu’un perd l’accès à sa dose de porn. Ne réponds pas à ce putain de téléphone »

Il savait bien qu’elle avait raison. Il répondit au téléphone.

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Backup, the German edition of my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has just been published by Heyne. Down and Out was the first novel released under a Creative Commons licensed, distributed for free on the same day the book was shipped to stores — and I’m pleased to announce that Backup is the first German translated novel to be released under a CC license on publication day!

Random House is also working on a German translation of my second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, working with Michael Iwoleit, the translator who worked on Down and Out.

Many thanks to Johannes and Evelyn at Monochrom for their help in translating the oddball concepts like “Whuffie” and “Bitchun Society.”

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InformationWeek’s new department is called “Thinkernet,” and it consists of short essays about the future of the Internet’s evolution. I wrote a piece for it about the coming suite of tools that make it easier to ignore stuff:

Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread.

For example, I’m forever getting cc’d on busy threads by well-meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that I’ll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that I’ve declined, I really don’t need to read the 300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat.

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My latest Guardian column is up: “Online censorship hurts us all,” about the ways that copyright protection laws that make it easier to censor artists are worse for creativity than any amount of unauthorized copying could ever be.

Viacom and others want hosting companies and online service providers to preemptively evaluate all the material that their users put online, holding it to ensure that it doesn’t infringe copyright before they release it.

This notion is impractical in the extreme, for at least two reasons. First, an exhaustive list of copyrighted works would be unimaginably huge, as every single creative work is copyrighted from the instant that it is created and “fixed in a tangible medium”.

Second, even if such a list did exist, it would be trivial to defeat, simply by introducing small changes to the infringing copies, as spammers do with the text of their messages in order to evade spam filters.

In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach us here. Like copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and more are being created every second. Any company that could identify spam messages — including permutations and variations on existing spams — could write its own ticket to untold billions.

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I did a quickie interview on privacy and technology with the Associated Press yesterday at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam:

«Google’s undue optimism about data collection and retention and the potential harm that arises from that has only been checked by European regulators: American regulators have been powerless and indeed not eager to intervene,» he said.

«The U.S. intelligence apparatus has a long history of using private data collectors to supplement its own collection,» he said, citing credit rating agency information as an example.

But he slammed the EU for the flip side of its «Data Retention Directive,» which says European ISPs must keep all communications data _ including tracking every Web site an individual user visits _ for at least six months.

The directive is supposed to be enacted in all European Union countries by this month, but most have asked for an extension to prepare for compliance.

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Zend PHP Con is coming to San Francisco Oct 8-11, a kind of gathering of the tribes for PHP hackers from all over the world. I’m giving one of the keynotes, along with Joel “on Software” Spolsky. Hope to see you there!

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