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Hitting the Books: The latest 'Little Brother' is a stark cybersecurity thriller
Back in 2008, New York Times best-selling author and Boing Boing alum, Cory Doctorow introduced Markus “w1n5t0n” Yallow to the world in the original Little Brother (which you can still read for free right here). It follows Yallow’s archrival, Masha Maximow, an equally talented hacker who finds herself working as a counterterrorism expert for a multinational security firm.
The Engadget Show 45: Security with Cory Doctorow, John McAfee, Microsoft, the EFF and more!
Welcome to the wild world of security and surveillance. From CCTV to massive government spying initiatives, there's no escaping it. Recent high-profile leaks have served as a sobering reminder of just how present it is in all of our lives, so we figured what better time to take a deep dive? We kick things off with one of the strangest (and raciest) segments in Engadget Show history: a visit to the set of John McAfee's latest web video. The one-time security software guru and fugitive discusses the state of antivirus, bath salts and offers some unsolicited advice to Edward Snowden, one exile to another. Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation sits down for an animated discussion of recent NSA surveillance revelations, including a breakdown of which major tech companies are doing right by their user base. Boing Boing editor, sci-fi author and privacy activist Cory Doctorow climbs a tree in San Diego to discuss Wikileaks, the NSA, the "surveillance state" and more. "Edward Snowden is a hero," he begins, not speaking on behalf of the EFF, mind you -- and things get really good from there. Cryptographer and computer security specialist Bruce Schneier also chimes in on wiretapping, whistleblowing and "security theater." Next up, we pay a visit to The New Yorker's midtown office to talk Strong Box, the magazine's secure deposit box for anonymous whistleblowers. The team behind Ubisoft's Watch Dogs joins us to discuss partnering with computer security company Kaspersky to bring a realistic portrait of the world of hacking to its much anticipated title. And one-time hacker turned head of security community outreach at Microsoft, Katie Moussouris, discusses Redmond's Bluehat bounty program and working with the hacking community to build safer software. All that, plus the usual prognosticating from resident philosopher John Roderick in this month's Engadget Show, just after the break.
Humble Bundle goes literary, offers octuplet of books at a humble price
The Humble Bundle tends to be associated with not just low prices, but also indie video games (and occasionally music). Today's bundle, however, centers on the literary-minded among us, offering a set of eight e-Books for just under $10. Of course, a main staple of the bundle is its pay what you want price model, which applies here as well -- should you only want six of the books, you can pay any price (one penny for six books! hot dog!). If you want access to John Scalzi's Old Man's War and Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, you've gotta shell out over the average payment price (currently sitting at $9.84). If you want that sub-$10 price, we'd suggest heading over sooner than later. Another good reason? You've only got two weeks before this humble e-Book bundle disappears forever.
15 Minutes of Fame: (Almost) 15 authors of fame
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. 15 Minutes of Fame tries to feature as wide a variety of WoW players as possible. It's not only about being famous in the real world, or being a somebody in the WoW community, or playing WoW despite some remarkable circumstance. 15 Minutes covers all those things, yes ... But we also try to talk with players who are representative of the typical player experience -- ambassadors of the Folks Next Door, if you will. But no matter how we try to balance things, we always seem to end up back at another interview with an author. Writers who game are a particular bunch. They always have a lot to say about the fantasy genre and the game lore and way the world of Azeroth is unfolding; it makes for a pretty interesting interview. So when we realized that we'd pretty much overshot the bottom of our dance card despite the line of authors winding past the punch bowl and out the door ... Well, we decided it was time to give everyone a full helping of nothing but WoW-playing writers. With our common enjoyment of WoW and the fantasy genre, we figure most readers will find something from these authors they'll want to curl up with on the couch. Welcome, then, to 15 Minutes of Fame's list of (Almost) 15 WoW-Playing Authors of Fame.
15 Minutes of Fame: Cory Doctorow on gold farming
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. digg_url = 'http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/08/04/15-minutes-of-fame-cory-doctorow-on-gold-farming/'; A conversation with Cory Doctorow plunges into the matter at hand so quickly that it's almost impossible not to imagine yourself falling through an internet-era rabbit hole of pop culture and technology. Doctorow is all about synthesizing ideas and spitting them out in as accessible a fashion as possible, and the ground he manages to cover in a single stride can be mind-boggling; he's a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger, father, gamer ... A former WoW player and husband of gaming standout Alice Taylor (also previously profiled here in 15 Minutes of Fame), he's widely known as the co-editor of Boing Boing and author of the bestselling young adult novel Little Brother. Doctorow's latest young adult novel, For the Win, pries open the seams of the shady scene behind MMO gold farming. Its young protagonists are gold farmers and gamers themselves. Doctorow has woven his own experience and sensibilities with focused research to outline a world of gold farming that sprawls far beyond the lines of cartoon-image gold farmers that most of us have painted in our heads. We chatted by phone with Doctorow for this lengthy conversation on gold farming and game economies, plus a companion piece at our sister publication Massively.com on gaming culture and his recent fiction.
15 Minutes of Fame: Cory Doctorow on gold farming, part 2
Cory Doctorow: Well as practical matter, I think that you can't not. At the same time, here in World of Warcraft, we have the dungeon finder system that some people say may be actually helping to break down some of the server communities and relationships that exist in the game.
New sci-fi novel features gold farmer protagonists
Ever wanted to read about the exploits of young gold farmers toiling away in Asian sweat shops and ruining/enabling your MMORPG experience? Science fiction author and Boing Boing founder Cory Doctorow thinks you might, and has devoted his newest novel to fleshing out the torrid existence of a group of young grinders who decide to organize. When we say organize, we don't mean making lists or using spreadsheets to farm at the optimum rate, but rather, organizing as in worker's unions. Doctorow has made an audio excerpt of the novel, titled For the Win, available on his web site. He calls the book a spiritual successor to his Anda's Game short story, and has targeted it specifically to a young adult audience. For the Win debuts on May 11 and will be freely available online under the Creative Commons license.
Why I will buy an iPad, and think you should too
Cory Doctorow doesn't like the iPad because it is laden with DRM. In other news today: water is still wet. Joel Johnson and John Gruber already took apart one aspect of Cory's argument, the kid tinkering/creating with his new computer. I'm going to focus on another part of it: my mom. Last year my mom called me and wanted to buy a new laptop. Her old e-Machine, which I had routinely patched, updated, and kept going as long as I could, would no longer work. She saw a US$400 laptop in the Sunday paper and asked me what I thought about it. I told her that she would be much better off spending more and getting a refurbished MacBook. She bought the $400 laptop anyway. When I asked her why, she said that someone at work told her she couldn't take home files from work if she had a Mac. When I asked her what kind of files, she said "Oh, mostly Word and Excel." She was surprised when I told her that not only was there a version of Office for Mac, but it was actually newer than the Windows version.
15 Minutes of Fame: Alice in Warcraftland
15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.Who's on your list of the proverbial 10 People to Invite to My Dream Dinner Party? Leave a spot for Alice Taylor. When it comes to gaming and geekery, there's nowhere you won't find traces of Alice and her self-mocking, good-natured humor. She's the face behind the popular social media and gaming blog Wonderland Blog. She commissions cross-platform education content for teens for Channel 4. As a gaming writer, she's been seen at BBC News, Kotaku, The Guardian and Paste. She was a semi-pro Quake player on the UK's first Quake team. She's an indie crafts maven. You may have heard of her husband, Cory Doctorow. Oh -- and of course, she's a WoW player.
WoW's EULA and Blizzard's OS support
Cory Doctorow posted on Boing Boing the other day about WoW's EULA being unreadable when installing the game on Linux. And obviously he's right -- Linux doesn't always have the font that Blizzard's installer uses, and so when you try to run it on Linux, you get gibberish, at least during installation. But there's more to this story here -- running WoW on Linux is actually unsupported by Blizzard: you can do it, and it's not against the EULA or ToS (in fact, Blizzard actually worked with the WINE guys to make sure the game ran correctly), but obviously any issues you have are an "at your own risk" kind of situation. So Doctorow's pretty much out of luck (or in luck as the case may be -- it's unlikely a EULA could be enforced on an unsupported system).And Linux isn't the only unsupported major OS out there -- Microsoft will release the beta of Windows 7, the new version of Windows, into the wild on January 10th, and Blizzard has made it clear that they won't support that, either, at least until it gets out of beta and into a release state. Of course, Microsoft has an interest in making sure old versions of Windows software work with the new OS, but if you only have one computer and absolutely need to play WoW on it, you should stay away from Windows 7 until the bugs are ironed out.Then again, there are worse OSes to deal with.
Bloggers at BlizzCon: Cory Doctorow and Alice Taylor
Those wacky kids over at Joystiq have managed to snag a couple of very interesting interviews with high-profile bloggers attending this years' BlizzCon, and both of them provide an interesting persperctive on the event. First up, the opinions of Cory Doctorow, blogger, journalist, and science-fiction author. When asked what he thought about BlizzCon, he replied:Well, it was awfully commercial. I'd envisioned a lot more of the social stuff -- guild stuff, "friends" who'd never met f2f getting together. But that was pretty thin on the ground -- it was so damned dark, you could hardly spot your friends even if they were there.Then there's Alice Taylor, whom you may know from the excellent game blog Wonderland (StarCraft origami wars ftw!). Asked about her experiences at BlizzCon, she told Joystiq:It was okay. It was expensive, and sparse on content, really. Lots of showy stuff from Blizzard, and some from sponsors, and very little from the players, considering, and they're a very important part of the whole thing!In both interviews, comments are made about the lighting in the convention center. I can vouch for the interior being extremely dark (I'm sure they had a couple of lights on, but at least half of my photos only show dark shadows of people), especially when coming in from bright, sunny southern California!
BlizzCon: interview with Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, a blogger, and arguably, a futurist. In fact, we'll let Wikipedia do a much more thorough job of informing you who Cory is. After you've digested that, be sure and visit his website, where you can download many of his books for free, and check out Boing Boing, which he co-edits.I first discovered Cory Doctorow by reading his excellent novel "Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom" a few years ago. I had worked at Disney World for most of 1992, and as a result I've always had a bizarre fascination with all things Disney. So it was somewhat fitting that I caught up with Cory at Disneyland during the recent BlizzCon and asked him about MMOs, WoWers, and other acronyms.
Cory Doctorow on Steve's 'Thoughts on Music'
We all know that Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing fame, hates DRM with the red hot passion of a thousand suns. Most people aren't fans of DRM, but view it as a necessary evil in a world where it is very easy for one person to copy and distribute your 'product' without one red cent going into your pocket. Steve's open letter heard 'round the web was seen by some as a rallying cry to rid the world of DRM (audio only, I mean no one wants to see pirated copies of 'A Bug's Life' popping up everywhere), however, Mr. Doctorow makes a case (that's a Salon article, so you either need have a Salon membership, or sit through a short ad to read it) that Steve was merely posturing. Furthermore, Doctorow thinks the letter was a clever way to shift blame from Apple to the record labels and hide the fact that the iTunes/iPod combo is a 'roach motel'.Cory is a good writer (I have enjoyed a few of his novels greatly), however, I think he is really over selling the FUD here. Sure, FairPlay is lame. I hate DRM as much as the next guy (well, unless I am standing next to Cory that is) but FairPlay is ridiculously easy to get around, even without breaking the letter of the law. Simply burn an audio CD of your purchased iTunes tracks and like magic you can do whatever you want with that CD (though this only works if you burn an audio CD). You can put it in a Walkman, you can toss it out the window, you can make thousands of copies of it (from the CD, iTunes does limit you to 7 burns of a playlist with FairPlay, though you can get around that too since the limit is based on the order of the songs), or you can even re-import the music on the CD into any format you like (Ogg anyone?).That solves the iTunes Store lock in problem, because if you are really that passionate about moving from iTunes you'll figure this trick out. So we now know you can rid all of your iTunes audio purchases of DRM with a little time and effort but what about Cory's assertion that 'once you put music on your iPod, you can't get it off again without Apple's software?' While that is what Apple would like you to believe, once again this limitation is laughably easy to get around. There are a boatload of apps that will move stuff off of your iPod and onto your Mac (I'm a big fan of iPodRip) which are all able to function because the music folder on your iPod is simply hidden, and not really 'locked down'. Furthermore, if you're comfortable using some rudimentary Terminal commands you can even navigate to the music folder yourself and get at your music that way without spending a cent (though, I suppose in that case you would technically be using Apple's software in the form of OS X). Cory's point, even though it is obfuscated by a slight tint of overreaction, remains valid: DRM treats consumers like thieves and really serves as nothing more than a point of contention between those willing to buy their music legally and the companies that want to sell it. The only way that we will know for certain if Steve really meant what he wrote in that letter is to wait and see. Here's hoping that the future of the iTunes Store is DRM free.
Charles Wiltgen responds to Cory Doctorow's 'DRM is bad for business'
Cory Doctorow, well known for his work at BoingBoing and other projects, wrote an article titled Apple's Copy Protection Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business. If you've been following anything this guy's written, this isn't the first time he's spoken out about DRM in general, as well as Apple's market-leading role in its use. If you haven't been following his work - that linked article is a great introductory read into Cory's very vocal disapproval of the current state of legitimate media distribution systems (almost all of them use DRM).John Gruber recently linked a response to Cory's article from Charles Wiltgen titled OMG DRM is r33ly bad!, and quite the response it is. Whether you're a stark advocate of either side of the DRM debate or you're just getting your feet wet with all this 'Digital Rights Management' stuff, I think both of these articles are interesting reads in their own right. Cory can be somewhat of a dramatic voice for the anti-DRM movement, and Charles' response is an interesting reality check for a situation that might not be as bad as some think. DRM always heats up the comment threads here at TUAW though, so for now I'll leave you to read Cory's article and Charles' response and form your own conclusions.
PRESS RELEASE: TUAW writer bucks trend, sticks with Mac OS X
Conrad Quilty-Harper, a writer for Mac site TUAW.com, has decided to continue using his Macintosh computer, countering the recent trend for high profile Ubuntu switchesFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASECanterbury, Kent, United Kingdom (July 26th, 2006) - Conrad Quilty-Harper, a writer for the popular Macintosh blog, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, has announced a bold plan to continue using Mac OS X for the foreseeable future. According to Conrad, this move is partly in reaction to the recent trend for relatively high profile figures across the web to announce their plan to switch away from the Mac OS operating system to Linux-based operating systems, in particular Ubuntu.On the subject of Ubuntu switchers Cory Doctorow, Mark Pilgrim and now Bryan O'Bryan, the owner of Mac modding and hacking site ResExcellence, Conrad said, "I just don't care." He also poses the question, "Since when did a person's computing platform of choice become a matter that must be announced to the public?"As an example of his extraordinary resilience, Conrad says that he will continue to use the Mac until either his needs exceed the Mac operating system's capabilities, or he gets a life and decides that he didn't need a computer anyway. Conrad also states that he agrees with John Gruber's point of view regarding the Ubuntu switching trend. "I defend the right of others to switch to other operating systems, and even to point out the shortcomings of the OS they are switching away from, but please, can we stop the whole 'NEWSFLASH: random dude switches away from the Mac!' nonsense?"
