pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Privacy is not property
26 feb. 2021 - When all you have is market orthodoxy, everything looks like a market failure. Take privacy: giant, rapacious corporations have instrumented the digital and physical worlds to spy on us all the time, so some people think they should pay us for our data.
 · pricacy · privacy-commodification · property

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
EVs as distributed storage grid
24 feb. 2021 - The Texas blackouts weren't caused by renewables – rahter, by a deregulated system that failed to winterize both its wind power (obviously: there are wind-farms in Norway and northern Canada), and its fossil fuel facilities.
 · batteries · electric-cars

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI
17 feb. 2021 - The idea of "centaurs" comes from automation theorists: it describes a system where a human and a machine collaborate to do more than either one could do on their own.
 · artificial-intelligence · automation · dehumanization

www.eff.org > Bennett Cyphers and Cory Doctorow
Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability
12 feb. 2021 - Table of ContentsExecutive SummaryI. IntroductionII. BackgroundIII. Policy Tools to Promote InteroperabilityIV. Interoperability: Risks and MitigationsV. ConclusionExecutive SummaryThe problems of corporate concentration and privacy on the Internet are inextricably linked. A new regime of...
 · interoperability · not-read · privacy

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Tory donors reap 100X return on campaign contributions
10 feb. 2021 - Walmart founder Sam Walton had an iron-clad rule: his buyers were not allowed to take so much as a glass of water from salespeople. He understood that favors create an involuntary urge to reciprocity, and even the tiniest kindness from a salesman would corrupt his buyers.
 · corruption · covid-19 · lobbying · united-kingdom · walmart

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Mexican indigenous telco wins spectrum fight
28 jan. 2021 - In the early 2000s, dramatic shifts in radio spectrum allocation for mobile data applications, combined with advances in radio transmission and receiving prompted some networking engineers to propose a radical rethink of radio.
 · cognitive-radio · mexico · software-defined-radios

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Understanding /r/wallstreetbets
28 jan. 2021 - There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory – at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.
 · gamestop · robinhood · stock-market

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Twitter's Project Blue Sky
26 jan. 2021 - It's been more than a year since Jack Dorsey announced Project Blue Sky, inspired by Mike Masnick's "Protocols, Not Platforms," paper – a critical work explaining how walled gardens can be transformed into open protocols.
 · decentralization · interoperability · social-media · twitter

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
"North Korea" targets infosec researchers
26 jan. 2021 - One of the most fascinating revelations from the Snowden documents was the story of "fourth party collection," which is when the NSA hacks the spy agency of a friendly nation to suck up all the spy data it has amassed on its own people.
 · mass-surveillance · north-korea · spying

www.eff.org > Cory Doctorow
Twitter and Interoperability: Some Thoughts From the Peanut Gallery
25 jan. 2021 - Late in 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey floated "Project Blue Sky," a plan for an interoperable, federated, standardized Twitter that would let users (or toolsmiths who work on behalf of users) gain more control over their participation in the Twitter system. This was an exciting moment for us, a significant lurch towards an interoperable, decentralized social media world. We were especially excited to see Dorsey cite Mike Masnick's excellent Protocols, Not Products paper.
 · interoperability · not-read · twitter

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Machine learning is a honeypot for phrenologists
15 jan. 2021 - When we say that "an algorithm is biased" we usually mean, "biased people made an algorithm." This explains why so much machine learning prediction turns into phrenology.
 · algorithmic-bias · digital-phrenology · machine-learning · project-hva · racist-technology

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
20 years a blogger
13 jan. 2021 - It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.
 · blogging · gtd · writing

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Censorship, Parler and antitrust
9 jan. 2021 - As Parler disappears from the Android and Ios app stores and faces being kicked off of Amazon's (and other) clouds, people who worry about monopolized corporate control over speech are divided over What It Means.
 · apple · censorship · content-moderation · google · hate-speech · monopolies · parler

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
The Data Detective
4 jan. 2021 - Publishing works on long schedules, which means that long-planned books can be overtaken by events…like covid. 2020 was tough for those of us with books in trail, especially nonfiction. But for a few lucky writers, covid imparted a terrible salience to their books. One such writer is Tim Harford, host of BBC Radio 4's More or less, which is hands-down the greatest statistical literacy program in the world, using the numbers in each week's headlines to impart statistical lessons and render the news in perspective.
 · statistics · survivor-bias

locusmag.com > Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow: Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
4 jan. 2021 - As I write this in mid-November 2020, there’s quite a stir over the new version of Apple’s Mac OS, the operating system that runs on its laptops. For more than a year, Apple has engaged in a covert, global surveillance of its users through its operating system, which automatically sent information about which apps you were running to Apple, and which gave Apple a remote veto over whether that program would launch when you double-clicked it. Most Apple customers don’t know about this, but the kind of Apple user who does know about it is also likely to be the kind of security-conscious person who doesn’t like it and even takes steps to block it.
 · apple · cybersecurity · feudal-security · feudalism · science-fiction · security · surveillance · ulysses-pact

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Blockchain voting is bullshit
15 dec. 2020 - The 2020 US elections were a reality check for how fragile the legitimacy of elections really is. This is something that paper ballot advocates have been beating the drum on for decades, even before Bush v Gore.
 · blockchain · electronic-voting

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Ford patents plutocratic lane-changes
8 dec. 2020 - In my 2017 novel WALKAWAY, there's a scene where the protagonists get into a self-driving car owned by a ruthless plutocrat, only to discover that it moves faster than any other vehicle they've ever ridden.
 · ford · patents · self-driving-cars

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Uber pays to get rid of its self-driving cars
8 dec. 2020 - When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.
 · public-transport · self-driving-cars · uber

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting
6 dec. 2020 - In my book "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" I point out that the claims for Big Tech powers of behavior modification powers emanate from the companies' own self-serving boasts pitched to bring in new ad-tech customers.
 · advertising

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Diving bell drawings
1 dec. 2020 - Eugen Ransonnet-Villez was a 19th century Viennese aristo, polymath and prodigy. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts (at age 11!) he went into law, but he is best known for his amateur zoology.
 · art · diving

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
RÄT
30 nov. 2020 - When I learned I was going to be a dad, I asked dads I respected for advice. Mostly, I asked cyberpunks (obviously). Bruce Sterling reminded me that no matter how bohemian and outre I was, I would be the epitome of contemptible bougie normalcy in my kid's eyes by the age of 15.
 · colonialism · music · silicon-valley

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Emailifaction is digital carcinization
24 nov. 2020 - During the first dotcom bubble, Jamie "JWZ" Zawinski coined Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." It's all three kinds of funny: funny ha-ha, funny strange, and funny serious.
 · carcination · email

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
A textbook grift
23 nov. 2020 - Last week, I wrote up Marshall Steinbaum's case for forgiving student debt (we're already doing it, but only after it has destroyed debtors' lives).
 · debt · education · textbooks

www.wired.com > Cory Doctorow
Facebook Is Going After Its Critics in the Name of Privacy
20 nov. 2020 - The company wants to shut down an academic study of political ad targeting, just as it prepares to reinstate targeted political ads.
 · ad-observatory · advertising · disinformation · facebook · politics · privacy · us-2020-elections

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Google's monopoly rigged the ad market
20 nov. 2020 - The quest to bring antitrust law to bear against tech companies is finally paying off, but it's been a long, hard slog. At the vanguard have been two legal scholars: Columbia law's Lina M Khan linamkhan and Yale's Dina Srinivasan.
 · antitrust · google · not-read

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Race, surveillance and tech
18 nov. 2020 - Today, on the Attack Surface Lectures – a series of 8 panels at 8 indie bookstores that Tor Books and I ran to launch the third Little Brother novel in Oct: Race, Surveillance, and Tech with Meredith Whittaker and Malkia Devich-Cyril, hosted by The Booksmith.
 · intersectionality · racist-technology · surveillance

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Embedded machine learning
17 nov. 2020 - One of the machine learning researchers I follow closely is Pete Warden, who writes extensively about the hardware side of ML, something we hear very little about beyond vague accounts of the power-consumption and carbon footprints of cloud-based GPUs.
 · machine-learning · project-hva · self-hosting

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Youtube-dl is back
16 nov. 2020 - The RIAA threw an October Surprise late last month when it sent a takedown demand to Github over Youtube-dl, a general purpose, lawful tool that allowed people to download Youtube videos.
 · copyright · dmca · github · riaa

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Xi on interop and lock-in
12 nov. 2020 - Back in April, Xi Jinping gave a (just released) speech about his "dual circulation" plan for China's economy.
 · ant · china · interoperability · lock-in · second-sourcing

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
UK corporate registrar bans code-injection
9 nov. 2020 - Companies House, the British registrar of newly formed companies, has forced a firm to rename itself on the grounds that merely including the name of the company on a web-page (including the Companies House website) could trigger cross-site scripting attacks.
 · coding · funny · names

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money
5 nov. 2020 - The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
 · ant · china · modern-money-theory · uber

locusmag.com > Cory Doctorow
Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
2 nov. 2020 - In “Full Employment“, my July 2020 column, I wrote, “I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ‘machine learning’ field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine.”
 · antropology · artificial-intelligence · correlation-causation · machine-learning · project-hva · recruitment · statistics · thick-description

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Cracking the Ghislaine Maxwell redactions
23 oct. 2020 - Since the earliest days of digital legal records, redaction failures have been a source of perpetual mirth and chaos. The most common failure is simply adding black boxes over text in PDFs; the text can be easily recovered by selecting the underlying text and copying it.
 · redaction

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Trustbusting is stimulus
21 oct. 2020 - Antitrust enforcement is virtually a dead letter in America (it was killed 40 years ago by Reagan's court sorcerer Robert Bork, better known as the Nixonite criminal who couldn't get approved for a SCOTUS seat).
 · monopolies

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Falsehoods programmers believe about time
21 oct. 2020 - The categories we think of as discrete, bounded entities are most often continua, with broadly coherent centers and hairy, noisy edges that defy categorization.
 · coding · diversity · time

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Happy World Standards Day or not
18 oct. 2020 - Standardization is an amazing and terrible thing. Standards are easy to appreciate when they benefit you, and when standards aren't present, things get pretty awful, both immediately and enduringly.
 · funny · standardization

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Educator sued for criticising
17 oct. 2020 - High-stakes tests are garbage, pedagogically bankrupt assessment tools that act as a form of empirical facewash for "meritocracy."
 · educational-surveillance · proctoring · proctorio

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Facebook vs The Big Lebowski
12 oct. 2020 - Hans de Zwart is a digital rights activist – he used to run the Dutch campaigning group Bits of Freedom – who also happens to be a massive Big Lebowski fan. He created https://www.thebiglebow.ski, a search-engine for Lebowski quotes.
 · censorship · facebook · the-big-lebowski

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Basic income works
11 oct. 2020 - The right has long held that homelessness is a symptom – of a lack of self-control, a lack of foresight, of addiction, mental illness, etc – and therefore the solution to it is training, incarceration, rehab, or rigid discipline.
 · homeless · inequality · poverty · taxation · universal-basic-income

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Leaked EU Big Tech rules
30 sep. 2020 - The EU Commission has been consulting widely on a set of rules for Big Tech companies, and they've made it clear that there's a very wide range of restrictions on the table – far wider than any US bill or proposal.
 · eu · monopolies · regulation

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Packing the court
20 sep. 2020 - The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Mitch McConnell's cynical reversal of his Obama-era prohibition on confirming a new Supreme Court justice in the waning days of an administration has kicked off a lot of interest in the possibility of "packing the court."
 · us-supreme-court

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Youtube's war on algorithmic radicalization
18 sep. 2020 - Writing for Wired, Clive Thompson gets a first-of-its-kind behind-the-scenes look at Youtube's algorithm development team, in order to document the company's attempt to reduce the service's role in spreading and reinforcing conspiracy theories.
 · content-moderation · youtube

locusmag.com > Cory Doctorow
IP
7 sep. 2020 - You’ve probably heard of “open source software.” If you pay at­tention to the politics of this stuff, you might have heard of “free software” and even know a little about the ethical debate underpin­ning the war of words between these two labels. I’ve been involved since the last century, but even I never really understood what’s going on in the background until recently.
 · copyright · drm · fair-use · free-software · freedom · freedom-of-expression · google · intellectual-property · interoperability · monopolies · open-source · patents · power · standardization · switching-costs · trademarks

onezero.medium.com > Cory Doctorow
How to Destroy ‘Surveillance Capitalism’
26 aug. 2020 - Surveillance capitalism is just capitalism — with surveillance. Here’s how to beat it.
 · advertising · amazon · antitrust · apple · attention · big-tech · black-struggle · capitalism · collective-action-problems · conspiracy-thinking · copyright · cybercrime · dark-patterns · data-breaches · data-protection · decentralization · digital-rights · disinformation · domination · drm · epistemology · facebook · false-positives · free-will · google · identity-theft · inequality · instagram · interoperability · machine-learning · mass-surveillance · monopolies · network-effects · patents · persuasion · privacy · privatized-enforcement · regulation · regulatory-capture · ring-doorbell · security · snapchat · surveillance-capitalism · targeting · technical-debt

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Terra Nullius
11 aug. 2020 - For my podcast this week, I read my Mar 2019 Locus column, "Terra Nullius," about the way that Locke's property theory ("I found this stuff nobody was using, added my labor, now it's mine") is an act of erasure and sometimes a prelude to genocide.
 · copyright · property

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Satanic Abortions cut through unconstitutional abortion laws
7 aug. 2020 - States across the US have enacted cruel, unconstitutional abortion laws that require doctors to sexually assault women seeking abortions and lie to them about the health impacts of abortion. Some laws require funerals for foetal remains.
 · abortion-rights · activism · freedom-of-religion · united-states

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Qanon is an ARG
6 aug. 2020 - Qanon is an alternate reality game.
 · alternate-reality-games · qanon

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Contextual ads can save media
5 aug. 2020 - The mainstay of online advertising is "behavioral advertising" in which ads are placed based on dossiers of your activity and preferences that have been compiled by Big Tech giants and shadowy data-brokers.
 · advertising · contextual-advertising

pluralistic.net > Cory Doctorow
Google destroys yet more smart-glasses
30 jul. 2020 - Late last June, Google bought out "North," a tech company based in Waterloo, ON, which manufactured "Focals," a line of "smart glasses." A month later, the company is turning off the servers the glasses rely on, bricking every pair they ever sold.
 · google

slate.com > Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow on Reclaiming Technologies of Oppression
26 oct. 2019 - Who holds the power in tech?
 · adoption-curve · law-enforcement · not-read · racist-technology · science-fiction

www.theguardian.com > Cory Doctorow
The problem with self-driving cars: who controls the code?
23 dec. 2015 - Should autonomous vehicles be programmed to choose who they kill when they crash? And who gets access to the code that determines those decisions?
 · drm · philippa-foot-experiment · project-nhl · self-driving-cars