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The Hacker Crackdown, Part 26

Here's part twenty-six of my reading of Bruce Sterling's brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.

MP3 Link

Neil Gaiman on Little Brother

Neil Gaiman gave me an unexpected Christmas present this year -- a stellar review of my forthcoming novel Little Brother (a YA novel that pits hacker kids in San Francisco against the DHS in a bid to restore the Bill of Rights to America) on his blog. He has a few quibbles with some of the plot elements, but closes with this:

I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.

Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.

Link

See also:
Cory's Little Brother reading
Holy crap, I love the cover of my next book!

Reading of Alice in Wonderland

Happy xmas! I've just posted a 2:23 reading I did of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland -- the first book I ever read to myself, and one of my all time favorites. The reading's under a Creative Commons Attribution-only license, so do anything you'd like with it!

MP3 Link,

Other formats

Taugshow video

Last month, I popped in on Taugshow, the madcap "talkshow" put on by the Monochrom net-arts collective in Vienna. I was interviewed along with Sean Bonner, Evelyn Fuerlinger, GameJew, Tim Pritlove and Jeff Moss. Monochrom just posted the video -- there's some damned funny stuff here and lots of good stuff to think about.

Link

The Hacker Crackdown, Part 25

Here's part twenty-five of my reading of Bruce Sterling's brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.

MP3 Link

I’m a Forbes Web Celeb!

Hey, this is keen! I just made the Forbes Web Celebs 25 for the second year in a row! I'm in great company -- two of my Boing Boing co-editors, Mark Frauenfelder and Xeni Jardin, are also on the list!

Cory Doctorow is a prominent activist for digital rights, and serves as a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He's one of the editors of Boing Boing, a hugely influential and popular blog about technology, culture and politics. And he's also a science fiction novelist, particularly famous on the Web, where he gives his novels away for free (For more, see his essay, " Giving It Away.") In 2007, Doctorow raised his profile with a new short story collection, Overclocked, numerous columns and articles around the Web (including on Forbes.com) and participation in Boing Boing's new podcasts and videocasts.

Link

The Hacker Crackdown, Part 24

Here's part twenty-four of my reading of Bruce Sterling's brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.

MP3 Link

Scroogled in Latvian, Italian and Portuguese

The fan-translations for Scroogled (my Creative Commons-licensed story from Radar Magazine in which I ponder "the day Google became evil") keep on rolling in -- this week, there's been two Italian translations (one from Reginazabo, the other from Decio Biavati), a Portuguese one from Carlos Martins, and a Latvian translation from the Bar Camp Baltics folks. (Previous translations include Buglarian, Dutch, French, German, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Russian and Spanish).

As an added bonus, the Italian magazine Delos Science Fiction has just posted Stefano Bonora's Creative Commons-licensed translation of my award-winning story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.

It's great to see such an emergent community of translators who are using their linguistic skills to make English-only works available in other parts of the world. I've done some amateur translation from Spanish, but it's hard to keep the motivation up when you're only working for yourself (as is necessarily the case when you're working with traditional copyright). The "derivatives-friendly" Creative Commons licenses allow amateur translators to share the fruits of their work, get friendly feedback, collaborate and gain reputation, encouraging them to do more and more work.

Now, if only more non-English works would be translated for us Anglos! Everywhere I go, I meet non-English-speakers who've read English writers in translation, as well as French, German, Russian, Japanese, etc -- lots of stuff gets translated out of English, but precious little comes to us, leaving us monolinguals with no choice but to live the provincial life of someone who can't compare their native literature to those of other lands.

Link to Scroogled in Italian (Reginazabo),
Link to Scroogled in Italian (Decio Biavati),
Link to Scroogled in Portuguese,

Link to Scroogled in Latvian

Other Scroogled translations

Link to When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth in Italian

Downloads give Amazon jungle fever

The Guardian

My Guardian column on Amazon and downloads

My latest Guardian column, "Downloads give Amazon jungle fever," asks the question: how can a company that gets online selling so right get downloads so wrong?

As a consumer advocate and activist, I'm delighted by almost every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author's Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this."

More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who'd gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers. The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won.

It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright "takedown" notices for the material that its customers post on its site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every single notice, no matter how frivolous.

But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web.

Link

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