Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

I did an interview (MP3) with the O’Reilly Radar podcast at the Solid conference last month; we talked about the Apollo 1201 project I’m doing with EFF. In the absence of any other confounding factors, obnoxious stuff that vendors do tends to self-correct, but there’s an important confounding factor, which is that in 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In order to try and contain unauthorized copying, they made it a felony to break a lock that protects access to a copyrighted work or to tell people information that they could use to break that lock. I’m way more worried about the fact that the [DMCA] law also criminalizes disclosing information about vulnerabilities in these systems. Lawrence Lessig, who was on our board for many years and is a great friend and fellow of Electronic Frontier Foundation, talks about how there are four factors that regulate our society. There’s code, what’s technologically possible. There is law, what’s allowed. There’s norms, what’s socially acceptable. And then there are markets, what’s profitable. In many cases, the right thing is profitable and also socially acceptable and legal and also technologically possible. Every now and again you run up against areas where one or more of those factors just aren’t in harmony. This summer, the EFF is launching its own certificate authority called ‘Let’s Encrypt‘ to try and overcome the fact that in order to have secure Web sessions, you effectively need permission from a big corporation that issues you a certificate. We’re going to issue free certificates to all comers starting this summer. If you had a mobile device that was yours and that you trusted and that didn’t give your information to other people, it could amass an enormous amount of both explicit and implicit information about you. … Then, as that device moved thorough space, the things around it could advertise what kinds of services, opportunities, availabilities they had to the device without the device ever acknowledging that it received them, without the device telling them a single thing about you. Because your device knows a lot about you, more than you would ever willingly give out to a third party, it could actually make better inferences about what you should be doing at this time in this place than you would get if it were the other way around, if you were the thing being sensed instead of you being the thing that’s doing the sensing. I quite like that model. I think that’s a very exciting way of thinking about human beings as entities with agency and dignity and not just ambulatory wallets. I think we’re already in a world where markets don’t solve all of our problems, but markets actually do discipline firms.

Here’s the Q&A portion of the Cory Doctorow in Conversation event I did to benefit the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop in Seattle on July 28, 2015. The audio was provided Frank Catalano, who also conducted the interview. MP3

I’m a guest on this week’s New America Foundation cybersecurity podcast, hosted by Amanda Gaines and Peter Warren Singer (whose new book, Ghost Fleet, a novel about cybersecurity, is about to hit the stands) and edited by the great John Taylor Williams. MP3 link

Here’s the audio from last night’s talk on the Internet of Things at Central European University in Budapest! It was recorded by the Mindenki Joga Radio Show.

It’s that time again! School is out, but I’m still working, so the kid came to the office with me, just in time to record a new podcast. This year, Poesy performs a stirring rendition of Jingle Bells, with dirty words! MP3

I’ve posted the first chapter (MP3) of Wil Wheaton’s reading of my book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (which sports introductions by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer!), which is available as a $15 DRM-free audiobook, sweetened by samples from Amanda Palmer and Dresden Dolls’ “Coin-Operated Boy.” Buy Now In sharply argued, fast-moving chapters, Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free takes on the state of copyright and creative success in the digital age. Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today — about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them. An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next. DRM-free audiobook

Radio New Zealand National’s This Way Up recorded this interview with me, which airs tomorrow (Saturday), about my book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (MP3).

I just appeared on the Command Line podcast (MP3) to talk about Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free — Thomas and I really had a wide-ranging and excellent conversation: In this episode, I interview Cory Doctorow about his latest book, “Information Doesn’t Want to be Free: Laws for the Internet Age.” If you are interested in learning more about the topics we discuss and that that book covers, you can also check out books by the scholars we mention: Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle and William Patry. I compared Cory’s book to “The Indie Band Survival Guide” the authors of which are friends of the show whom I have also interviewed. The audiobook version of the book is already available. Check Cory’s site, the free download and electronic editions should be available soon.

I appear in the latest edition of the Writing Excuses podcast (MP3), recorded live at Westercon in Salt Lake City last summer, with Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells and Howard Tayler, talking about why we care about characters.

Last month, I sat down for a long conversation (MP3) with Ken Jones for the Between the Covers at Portland, Oregon’s KBOO community radio station, talking about my book Information Doesn’t Want to be Free. They’ve posted the audio so people from outside of Portland can hear it too!