Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

I’m on the latest episode of Torrentfreak’s Steal This Show podcast (MP3), where I talk with host Jamie King about “Whether file-sharing & P2P communities have lost the battle to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, and why the ‘copyfight’ is still important; how the European Copyright Directive eats at the fabric of the Web, making it even harder to compete with content giants; and why breaking up companies like Google and Facebook might be the only way to restore an internet — and a society — we can all live with.”

Here’s my reading (MP3) of Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags, a Locus Magazine column about the corruption implicit in surveillance capitalism, which creates giant risks to users by collecting sensitive information about them in order to eke out tiny gains in the efficacy of targeted advertising. The commercial surveillance industry may not be very good at selling us fridges, but they’re very good at locating racists and thugs and getting them to support violent political movements. MP3

Here’s my reading (MP3) of Let’s get better at demanding better from tech, a Locus Magazine column about the need to enlist moral, ethical technologists in the fight for a better technological future. It was written before the death of EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, whose life’s work was devoted to this proposition, and before the Google uprising over Project Maven, in which technologists killed millions in military contracts by refusing to build AI systems for the Pentagon’s drones. MP3

Here’s the fourth and final part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one, part two, part three), a story from MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz — about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem. MP3

Here’s the third part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one, part two), a story from MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz — about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem. MP3

I recorded a great interview (MP3) about my novel Walkaway and how it fits into radical politics; a free, fair and open internet; the Nym Wars, parenting, and insurgency.

Earlier this spring, while I was on my Australia/NZ tour, I sat down with Australian author Nick Earls for his Green Room show, (MP3) to gossip, complain, and daydream about the writer’s life.

Here’s the second part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one), a story from MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz — about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem. MP3

Thomson Reuters interviewed me for their new series on data privacy and the EU General Data Protection Regulation; here’s the audio! What if you just said when you breach, the damages that you owe to the people whose data you breached cannot be limited to the immediate cognizable consequences of that one breach but instead has to take recognition of the fact that breaches are cumulative? That the data that you release might be merged with some other set that was previously released either deliberately by someone who thought that they’d anonymized it because key identifiers had been removed that you’ve now added back in or accidentally through another breach? The merger of those two might create a harm. Now you can re-identify a huge number of those prescriptions. That might create all kinds of harms that are not immediately apparent just by releasing a database of people’s rides, but when merged with maybe that NIH or NHS database suddenly becomes incredibly toxic and compromising. If for example we said, “Okay, in recognition of this fact that once that data is released it never goes away, and each time it’s released it gets merged with other databases to create fresh harms that are unquantifiable in this moment and should be assumed to exceed any kind of immediate thing that we can put our finger on, that you have to pay fairly large statutory damages if you’re found to have mishandled data.” Well, now I think the insurance companies are going to do a lot of our dirty work for us. We don’t have to come up with rules. We just have to wait for the insurance companies to show up at these places that they’re writing policies for and say, “Tell me again, why we should be writing you a policy when you’ve warehoused all of this incredibly toxic material that we’re all pretty sure you’re going to breach someday, and whose liability is effectively unbounded?” They’re going to make the companies discipline themselves.

Here’s the first part of my reading (MP3) of Petard, a story from MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz — about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem. MP3