person:cory doctorow

  • Cory Doctorow: Fake News Is an Oracle – Locus Online
    https://locusmag.com/2019/07/cory-doctorow-fake-news-is-an-oracle

    In the same way, science fiction responds to our societal ideomotor responses. First, the authors write the stories about the futures they fear and rel­ish. These futures are not drawn from a wide-open field; rather, they make use of the writer’s (and audience’s) existing vocabulary of futuristic ideas: robots, internets and AIs, spaceships and surveil­lance devices. Writers can only get away with so much exposition in their fiction (though I’ve been known to push the limits) and so the imaginative leaps of a work of fiction are constrained by the base knowledge the writer feels safe in assuming their readers share.

    So the writers write the stories. Then the editors choose some of those stories to publish (or the writers publish them themselves). Then readers choose some of those stories to elevate to the discourse, making them popular and integrating them into our vocabulary about possible futures, good and bad. The process of elevation is complicated and has a lot of randomness in it (lucky breaks, skilled agents, PR wins, a prominent reviewer’s favor), but the single incontrovertible fact about a SF work’s popularity is that it has captured the public’s imagination. The warning in the tale is a warning that resonates with our current anxieties; the tale’s inspiration thrums with our own aspirations for the future.

    Reading a writer’s fiction tells you a lot about that writer’s fears and aspira­tions. Looking at the awards ballots and bestseller lists tells you even more about our societal fears and aspirations for the future. The system of writers and readers and editors and critics and booksellers and reviewers act as a kind of oracle, a societal planchette that our hands rest lightly upon, whose movements reveal secrets we didn’t even know we were keeping.

    Which brings me to “fake news.”

    “Fake news” is a nearly useless term, encompassing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, unfalsifiable statements, true facts spoken by people who are seek­ing to deceive audiences about the identity of the speaker, and as a catch-all meaning, “I read a thing on the internet that I disagree with.”

    But for all that, “fake news” is useful in one regard: the spread of a given hoax, or unfalsifiable statement, or truth delivered under color of falsehood, or conspiracy, or objectionable idea undeniably tells you that the idea has caught the public imagination. The fake news that doesn’t catch on may have simply been mishandled, but the fake news that does catch on has some plausibility that tells you an awful lot about the world we live in and how our fellow humans perceive that world.

    The anti-vaxers have a point. Not about the safety of vaccines. I believe they are 100% wrong about vaccines and that everyone who can should get a full schedule of vaccines for themselves and their children.

    But anti-vaxers have a point about the process.

    About 20 years ago, Purdue Pharma introduced a new blockbuster pain­killer to replace its existing flagship product, MS Contin, whose patent had expired. The new drug, Oxycontin, was said to be safe and long-lasting, with effects that would last an incredible 12 hours, without provoking the fast adaptation response characteristic of other opioids, which drives users to take higher and higher doses. What’s more, the company claimed that the addictive potential of opioids was vastly overstated, citing a one-paragraph letter to the New England Journal of Medicine penned by Boston University Medical Center’s Dr. Hershel Jick, who claimed that an internal, un-reviewed study showed that opioids could be safely given at higher doses, for longer times, than had been previously thought.

    Purdue Pharma weaponized the “Jick Letter,” making it one of the most-cited references in medical research history, the five most consequential sentences in the history of NEJM. Through a cluster of deceptive tactics – only coming to light now through a string of state lawsuits – Purdue cre­ated the opioid epidemic, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans and counting, more than died in the Vietnam War. Purdue made $31 billion. The Sackler family, owners of Purdue, are now richer than the Rockefellers.

    The regulators had every reason to know something terrible was going on, from the small town pharmacies ordering millions of pills to the dead piling up on the streets of American cities and towns. The only way they could miss the opioid crisis and its roots in junk science was if they were actively seeking not to learn about it – and no surprise, given how many top regulators come from industry, and have worked at an opioid giant (and more: they are often married to pharma execs, they’re godparents to other pharma execs’ kids, they’re executors of pharma execs’ estates – all the normal, tight social bonds from the top players in concentrated industries).

    Ten years ago, if you came home from the doctor’s with a prescription for oxy, and advice that they were not to be feared for their addictive potential, and an admonition that pain was “the fourth vital sign,” and its under-treatment was a great societal cruelty, you might have met someone who said that this was all bullshit, that you were being set up to be murdered by a family of ruthless billionaires whose watchdog had switched sides.

    You might have called that person an “opioid denier.”

    #Fake_news #Cory_Doctorow #Science_fiction #Vaccins #Opioides

  • Opinion | I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opinion/future-free-speech-social-media-platforms.html

    Une nouvelle de Cory Doctorow sur la régulation des plateformes : briser les monopoles, ou leur laisser le choix d’être eux-mêmes les régulateurs algorithmiques de l’expression de chacun.

    Editors’ note: This is part of a series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.

    I shouldn’t have to publish this in The New York Times.

    Ten years ago, I could have published this on my personal website, or shared it on one of the big social media platforms. But that was before the United States government decided to regulate both the social media platforms and blogging sites as if they were newspapers, making them legally responsible for the content they published.

    The move was spurred on by an unholy and unlikely coalition of media companies crying copyright; national security experts wringing their hands about terrorism; and people who were dismayed that our digital public squares had become infested by fascists, harassers and cybercriminals. Bit by bit, the legal immunity of the platforms was eroded — from the judges who put Facebook on the line for the platform’s inaction during the Provo Uprising to the lawmakers who amended section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in a bid to get Twitter to clean up its Nazi problem.

    While the media in the United States remained protected by the First Amendment, members of the press in other countries were not so lucky. The rest of the world responded to the crisis by tightening rules on acceptable speech. But even the most prolific news service — a giant wire service like AP-AFP or Thomson-Reuters-TransCanada-Huawei — only publishes several thousand articles per day. And thanks to their armies of lawyers, editors and insurance underwriters, they are able to make the news available without falling afoul of new rules prohibiting certain kinds of speech — including everything from Saudi blasphemy rules to Austria’s ban on calling politicians “fascists” to Thailand’s stringent lese majeste rules. They can ensure that news in Singapore is not “out of bounds” and that op-eds in Britain don’t call for the abolition of the monarchy.

    But not the platforms — they couldn’t hope to make a dent in their users’ personal expressions. From YouTube’s 2,000 hours of video uploaded every minute to Facebook-Weibo’s three billion daily updates, there was no scalable way to carefully examine the contributions of every user and assess whether they violated any of these new laws. So the platforms fixed this the Silicon Valley way: They automated it. Badly.

    Which is why I have to publish this in The New York Times.

    The platforms and personal websites are fine if you want to talk about sports, relate your kids’ latest escapades or shop. But if you want to write something about how the platforms and government legislation can’t tell the difference between sex trafficking and sex, nudity and pornography, terrorism investigations and terrorism itself or copyright infringement and parody, you’re out of luck. Any one of those keywords will give the filters an incurable case of machine anxiety — but all of them together? Forget it.

    If you’re thinking, “Well, all that stuff belongs in the newspaper,” then you’ve fallen into a trap: Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be.

    And the worst part is, the new regulations haven’t ended harassment, extremism or disinformation. Hardly a day goes by without some post full of outright Naziism, flat-eartherism and climate trutherism going viral. There are whole armies of Nazis and conspiracy theorists who do nothing but test the filters, day and night, using custom software to find the adversarial examples that slip past the filters’ machine-learning classifiers.

    It didn’t have to be this way. Once upon a time, the internet teemed with experimental, personal publications. The mergers and acquisitions and anticompetitive bullying that gave rise to the platforms and killed personal publishing made Big Tech both reviled and powerful, and they were targeted for breakups by ambitious lawmakers. Had we gone that route, we might have an internet that was robust, resilient, variegated and dynamic.

    Think back to the days when companies like Apple and Google — back when they were stand-alone companies — bought hundreds of start-ups every year. What if we’d put a halt to the practice, re-establishing the traditional antitrust rules against “mergers to monopoly” and acquiring your nascent competitors? What if we’d established an absolute legal defense for new market entrants seeking to compete with established monopolists?

    Most of these new companies would have failed — if only because most new ventures fail — but the survivors would have challenged the Big Tech giants, eroding their profits and giving them less lobbying capital. They would have competed to give the best possible deals to the industries that tech was devouring, like entertainment and news. And they would have competed with the news and entertainment monopolies to offer better deals to the pixel-stained wretches who produced the “content” that was the source of all their profits.

    But instead, we decided to vest the platforms with statelike duties to punish them for their domination. In doing so, we cemented that domination. Only the largest companies can afford the kinds of filters we’ve demanded of them, and that means that any would-be trustbuster who wants to break up the companies and bring them to heel first must unwind the mesh of obligations we’ve ensnared the platforms in and build new, state-based mechanisms to perform those duties.

    Our first mistake was giving the platforms the right to decide who could speak and what they could say. Our second mistake was giving them the duty to make that call, a billion times a day.

    Still, I am hopeful, if not optimistic. Google did not exist 30 years ago; perhaps in 30 years’ time, it will be a distant memory. It seems unlikely, but then again, so did the plan to rescue Miami and the possibility of an independent Tibet — two subjects that are effectively impossible to discuss on the platforms. In a world where so much else is up for grabs, finally, perhaps, we can once again reach for a wild, woolly, independent and free internet.

    It’s still within our reach: an internet that doesn’t force us to choose between following the algorithmically enforced rules or disappearing from the public discourse; an internet where we can host our own discussions and debate the issues of the day without worrying that our words will disappear. In the meantime, here I am, forced to publish in The New York Times. If only that were a “scalable solution,” you could do so as well.

    Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is a science fiction writer whose latest book is “Radicalized,” a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an M.I.T. Media Lab research affiliate.

    #Cory_Doctorow #Régulation_internet #Plateformes #Liberté_expression #Monopoles

  • Cory Doctorow : « #propriété_intellectuelle » est un euphémisme malencontreux
    https://cfeditions.com/coryDoctorowIP

    La raison pour laquelle l’[?OMPI] utilise ce terme est simple à comprendre : ceux dont on « vole la propriété » entrent bien plus en sympathie dans l’imagination du public que « les entités industrielles qui ont vu empiéter sur le périmètre de leur monopole », qui était la manière la plus commune de parler des #contrefaçons avant que la « propriété intellectuelle » ne prenne l’ascendant.

    En dernière instance, ce que nous appelons « propriété intellectuelle » est justement du #savoir - des #idées, des #mots, des #musiques, des #modèles, des #marques, des #secrets ou des bases de données. Ces choses-là ressemblent à la propriété par certains côtés. On peut les vendre, et parfois vous devez investir de fortes sommes d’argent et de travail dans les développements nécessaires à leur réalisation.

    Hors de contrôle

    Mais la connaissance est différente de la propriété par bien d’autres aspects, au moins aussi importants. En premier lieu, elle n’est pas spontanément « exclusive ». Si vous entrez chez moi, je peux vous en faire sortir (vous exclure de ma maison). Si vous volez ma voiture, je peux la reprendre (vous exclure de ma voiture). Mais une fois que vous avez entendu ma chanson, une fois que vous avez lu mon livre, une fois que vous avez vu mon film, il n’est plus sous mon contrôle. A part avec des électrochocs à forte dose, je ne peux pas faire en sorte que vous oubliiez les phrases que vous venez de lire.

    C’est cette différence qui rend le terme « propriété » si troublant dans l’expression « propriété intellectuelle ».

  • ’The Pirate Bay of Science’ Continues to Get Attacked Around the World
    After publishers sued #Sci-Hub, Russian ISPs are now preventing users from accessing the valuable scientific data repository and paywall killer.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/gy7d7j/sci-hub-and-lib-gen-continue-to-get-attacked-around-the-world

    Sci-Hub has shown time and again that it’s better at cat-and-mouse than the giant science publishing monopolies it undermines,” activist and author Cory Doctorow said in an email exchange with Motherboard.

    “That said, unless your science is public, it’s not science, it’s just alchemy,” Doctorow added. “With the major science funders around the world declaring war on the likes of Springer, it’s bizarre that they’re focused on Sci-Hub, rather than addressing the fact that the entire world of science practitioners and funders thinks that they’re useless and greedy parasites.”

    https://telegram.me/scihubot

  • The Messy Fourth Estate – Trust Issues – Medium
    https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-messy-fourth-estate-a42c1586b657

    par dans boyd

    I want to believe in journalism. I want to believe in the idealized mandate of the fourth estate. I want to trust that editors and journalists are doing their best to responsibly inform the public and help create a more perfect union. But my faith is waning.
    Many Americans — especially conservative Americans — do not trust contemporary news organizations. This “crisis” is well-trod territory, but the focus on fact-checking, media literacy, and business models tends to obscure three features of the contemporary information landscape that I think are poorly understood:
    Differences in worldview are being weaponized to polarize society.
    We cannot trust organizations, institutions, or professions when they’re abstracted away from us.
    Economic structures built on value extraction cannot enable healthy information ecosystems.

    Contemporary propaganda isn’t about convincing someone to believe something, but convincing them to doubt what they think they know.

    Countless organizations and movements exist to pick you up during your personal tornado and provide structure and a framework. Take a look at how Alcoholics Anonymous works. Other institutions and social bodies know how to trigger that instability and then help you find ground. Check out the dynamics underpinning military basic training. Organizations, movements, and institutions that can manipulate psychological tendencies toward a sociological end have significant power. Religious organizations, social movements, and educational institutions all play this role, whether or not they want to understand themselves as doing so.
    Because there is power in defining a framework for people, there is good reason to be wary of any body that pulls people in when they are most vulnerable. Of course, that power is not inherently malevolent. There is fundamental goodness in providing structures to help those who are hurting make sense of the world around them. Where there be dragons is when these processes are weaponized, when these processes are designed to produce societal hatred alongside personal stability. After all, one of the fastest ways to bond people and help them find purpose is to offer up an enemy.

    School doesn’t seem like a safe place, so teenagers look around and whisper among friends about who they believe to be the most likely shooter in their community. As Stephanie Georgopulos notes, the idea that any institution can offer security seems like a farce.
    When I look around at who’s “holding” these youth, I can’t help but notice the presence of people with a hateful agenda. And they terrify me, in no small part because I remember an earlier incarnation.
    In 1995, when I was trying to make sense of my sexuality, I turned to various online forums and asked a lot of idiotic questions. I was adopted by the aforementioned transgender woman and numerous other folks who heard me out, gave me pointers, and helped me think through what I felt. In 2001, when I tried to figure out what the next generation did, I realized that struggling youth were more likely to encounter a Christian gay “conversion therapy” group than a supportive queer peer. Queer folks were sick of being attacked by anti-LGBT groups, and so they had created safe spaces on private mailing lists that were hard for lost queer youth to find. And so it was that in their darkest hours, these youth were getting picked up by those with a hurtful agenda.

    Teens who are trying to make sense of social issues aren’t finding progressive activists. They’re finding the so-called alt-right.

    Fast-forward 15 years, and teens who are trying to make sense of social issues aren’t finding progressive activists willing to pick them up. They’re finding the so-called alt-right. I can’t tell you how many youth we’ve seen asking questions like I asked being rejected by people identifying with progressive social movements, only to find camaraderie among hate groups. What’s most striking is how many people with extreme ideas are willing to spend time engaging with folks who are in the tornado.
    Spend time reading the comments below the YouTube videos of youth struggling to make sense of the world around them. You’ll quickly find comments by people who spend time in the manosphere or subscribe to white supremacist thinking. They are diving in and talking to these youth, offering a framework to make sense of the world, one rooted in deeply hateful ideas. These self-fashioned self-help actors are grooming people to see that their pain and confusion isn’t their fault, but the fault of feminists, immigrants, people of color. They’re helping them believe that the institutions they already distrust — the news media, Hollywood, government, school, even the church — are actually working to oppress them.
    Most people who encounter these ideas won’t embrace them, but some will. Still, even those who don’t will never let go of the doubt that has been instilled in the institutions around them. It just takes a spark.
    So how do we collectively make sense of the world around us? There isn’t one universal way of thinking, but even the act of constructing knowledge is becoming polarized. Responding to the uproar in the news media over “alternative facts,” Cory Doctorow noted:
    We’re not living through a crisis about what is true, we’re living through a crisis about how we know whether something is true. We’re not disagreeing about facts, we’re disagreeing about epistemology. The “establishment” version of epistemology is, “We use evidence to arrive at the truth, vetted by independent verification (but trust us when we tell you that it’s all been independently verified by people who were properly skeptical and not the bosom buddies of the people they were supposed to be fact-checking).”
    The “alternative facts” epistemological method goes like this: “The ‘independent’ experts who were supposed to be verifying the ‘evidence-based’ truth were actually in bed with the people they were supposed to be fact-checking. In the end, it’s all a matter of faith, then: you either have faith that ‘their’ experts are being
    truthful, or you have faith that we are. Ask your gut, what version feels more truthful?”
    Doctorow creates these oppositional positions to make a point and to highlight that there is a war over epistemology, or the way in which we produce knowledge.
    The reality is much messier, because what’s at stake isn’t simply about resolving two competing worldviews. Rather, what’s at stake is how there is no universal way of knowing, and we have reached a stage in our political climate where there is more power in seeding doubt, destabilizing knowledge, and encouraging others to distrust other systems of knowledge production.
    Contemporary propaganda isn’t about convincing someone to believe something, but convincing them to doubt what they think they know. And once people’s assumptions have come undone, who is going to pick them up and help them create a coherent worldview?

    Meanwhile, local journalism has nearly died. The success of local journalism didn’t just matter because those media outlets reported the news, but because it meant that many more people were likely to know journalists. It’s easier to trust an institution when it has a human face that you know and respect. And as fewer and fewer people know journalists, they trust the institution less and less. Meanwhile, the rise of social media, blogging, and new forms of talk radio has meant that countless individuals have stepped in to cover issues not being covered by mainstream news, often using a style and voice that is quite unlike that deployed by mainstream news media.
    We’ve also seen the rise of celebrity news hosts. These hosts help push the boundaries of parasocial interactions, allowing the audience to feel deep affinity toward these individuals, as though they are true friends. Tabloid papers have long capitalized on people’s desire to feel close to celebrities by helping people feel like they know the royal family or the Kardashians. Talking heads capitalize on this, in no small part by how they communicate with their audiences. So, when people watch Rachel Maddow or listen to Alex Jones, they feel more connected to the message than they would when reading a news article. They begin to trust these people as though they are neighbors. They feel real.

    Building a sustainable news business was hard enough when the news had a wealthy patron who valued the goals of the enterprise. But the finance industry doesn’t care about sustaining the news business; it wants a return on investment. And the extractive financiers who targeted the news business weren’t looking to keep the news alive. They wanted to extract as much value from those business as possible. Taking a page out of McDonald’s, they forced the newsrooms to sell their real estate. Often, news organizations had to rent from new landlords who wanted obscene sums, often forcing them to move out of their buildings. News outlets were forced to reduce staff, reproduce more junk content, sell more ads, and find countless ways to cut costs. Of course the news suffered — the goal was to push news outlets into bankruptcy or sell, especially if the companies had pensions or other costs that couldn’t be excised.
    Yes, the fragmentation of the advertising industry due to the internet hastened this process. And let’s also be clear that business models in the news business have never been clean. But no amount of innovative new business models will make up for the fact that you can’t sustain responsible journalism within a business structure that requires newsrooms to make more money quarter over quarter to appease investors. This does not mean that you can’t build a sustainable news business, but if the news is beholden to investors trying to extract value, it’s going to impossible. And if news companies have no assets to rely on (such as their now-sold real estate), they are fundamentally unstable and likely to engage in unhealthy business practices out of economic desperation.

    Fundamentally, both the New York Times and Facebook are public companies, beholden to investors and desperate to increase their market cap. Employees in both organizations believe themselves to be doing something important for society.
    Of course, journalists don’t get paid well, while Facebook’s employees can easily threaten to walk out if the stock doesn’t keep rising, since they’re also investors. But we also need to recognize that the vast majority of Americans have a stake in the stock market. Pension plans, endowments, and retirement plans all depend on stocks going up — and those public companies depend on big investors investing in them. Financial managers don’t invest in news organizations that are happy to be stable break-even businesses. Heck, even Facebook is in deep trouble if it can’t continue to increase ROI, whether through attracting new customers (advertisers and users), increasing revenue per user, or diversifying its businesses. At some point, it too will get desperate, because no business can increase ROI forever.

    At the end of the day, if journalistic ethics means anything, newsrooms cannot justify creating spectacle out of their reporting on suicide or other topics just because they feel pressure to create clicks. They have the privilege of choosing what to amplify, and they should focus on what is beneficial. If they can’t operate by those values, they don’t deserve our trust. While I strongly believe that technology companies have a lot of important work to do to be socially beneficial, I hold news organizations to a higher standard because of their own articulated commitments and expectations that they serve as the fourth estate. And if they can’t operationalize ethical practices, I fear the society that must be knitted together to self-govern is bound to fragment even further.
    Trust cannot be demanded. It’s only earned by being there at critical junctures when people are in crisis and need help. You don’t earn trust when things are going well; you earn trust by being a rock during a tornado. The winds are blowing really hard right now. Look around. Who is helping us find solid ground?

    #danah_boyd #Médias #Journalisme #Post_truth

  • Cory Doctorow : Let’s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech
    https://diasp.eu/p/6838178

    Cory Doctorow: Let’s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech

    (...) the rapid technological changes in our lifetime have been accompanied by rapid economic changes. The rise of neoliberal capitalism – less regulated, more global, driven by the proposition that firms have a legal duty to maximize profit at the expense of all other considerations (...)

    https://locusmag.com/2018/03/cory-doctorow-lets-get-better-at-demanding-better-from-tech

    #internet #surveillance #capitalism

  • Alors tu suis Cory Doctorow sur Twitter et tu te retrouves à lire ça : Gwyneth Paltrow wants you to squirt coffee up your asshole using this $135 glass jar. Évidemment, maintenant mon week-end est foutu.
    https://boingboing.net/2018/01/06/rectum-damn-near-kilt-im.html

    Both Goop and Alex Jones are big on “detoxing,” an imaginary remedy that poses a very real health-risk, especially when it involves filling your asshole with coffee.

    Coffee enemas are, of course, bullshit, whose history and present are rife with hucksters whose smooth patter is only matched by their depraved indifference for human life.

    But as stupid as coffee enemas are, they’re even stupider when accomplished by means of Goop’s, $135 “Implant O’Rama,” manufactured by Implant O’Rama LLC. It’s a $135 glass jar with a couple silicon hoses attached to it.

  • Lutte fratricide dans les coulisses du web | InaGlobal
    http://www.inaglobal.fr/numerique/article/lutte-fratricide-dans-les-coulisses-du-web-10024

    le #W3C a été le théâtre d’un affrontement qui est allé jusqu’à une procédure d’appel qui n’avait encore jamais été nécessaire, et a débouché sur le départ d’une des institutions les plus représentatives sans doute de l’esprit des pionniers d’Internet : l’Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    #EFF

    • La sécurité, autre problème majeur
      Aux États-Unis, personne, dans aucun cas, n’a le droit de contourner un DRM. Il est en outre interdit d’essayer de regarder ce qui se passe à l’intérieur ou même d’évoquer avec quelqu’un la possibilité de contourner un DRM (un courriel dans lequel vous évoqueriez un tel contournement peut normalement être retenu contre vous en cas de procès). Ces interdictions proviennent de la section 1201 du Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Ainsi, l’EME crée un espace auquel on n’a pas le droit d’accéder et à propos de l’accès duquel il est interdit de discuter. Cela pose un problème en termes de sécurité, puisque même les chercheurs et les producteurs d’antivirus n’ont pas le droit d’accéder à cet espace.

      C’est pourquoi l’EFF avait proposé en janvier 2016, au sein du W3C, que fût mis en place d’un accord formel impliquant que les ayants droit des vidéos protégées par l’EME s’engageraient à ne pas poursuivre en justice les personnes qui auraient procédé à des tests dans la mesure où ils auraient ensuite publié les anomalies identifiées. Malgré la signature de 198 chercheurs en informatique favorables à cette proposition et le soutien de l’Open Source Initiative (OSI), la proposition de l’EFF a été refusée par les parties prenantes de la discussion concernant l’EME au W3C. C’est également une des raisons qui a motivé le départ de l’EFF, Cory Doctorow pointant du doigt dans son communiqué le refus de la part des parties prenantes d’accepter un tel compromis et accusant la direction du W3C, en particulier Jeff Jaffe, de s’en être rendu complice.

  • Les processeurs #Intel « haut de gamme » (en gros ceux qui équipent les serveurs donc, pour une fois, @mmemichu peut dormir sur ses deux oreilles) ont une faille tellement énorme qu’il m’est difficile de ne pas penser à une porte dérobée. Le processeur inclut un serveur Web (oui !!!), activé par défaut et, comme c’est le processeur, il ne dépend pas du système d’exploitation. Même si Windows ou Unix est éteint, ce serveur Web répond. Évidemment, il est protégé par un système d’authentification et, non moins évidemment, ce système est programmé avec les pieds, et est contournable. Ce service se nomme #AMT et fait partie d’un ensemble plus vaste nommé #ME (Management Engine).

    Les articles des deux chercheurs qui ont (indépendamment) découvert la faille :
    https://www.embedi.com/files/white-papers/Silent-Bob-is-Silent.pdf
    http://www.tenable.com/blog/rediscovering-the-intel-amt-vulnerability

    Le truc officiel d’Intel https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/26755

    Le serveur en question écoute sur les ports 16992 et 16993. Vous pouvez donc chercher des machines vulnérables sur votre réseau, par exmeple avec nmap (’nmap -p 16992-16993 192.0.2.0/24’) ou Nessus <https://www.tenable.com/blog/intel-amt-vulnerability-detection-with-nessus-and-pvs-intel-sa-00075> ou ce script nmap <https://github.com/nmap/nmap/blob/7bd54ab0989a8412a000d0475c90da36367eb574/scripts/http-vuln-cve2017-5689.nse> Évidemment, #Shodan trouve des tas de processeurs Intel ainsi accessible de l’extérieur.

    Question politique, Cory Doctorow note à juste titre que la faille vient du désir d’Intel de mettre un ordinateur complet dans chaque processeur, afin de contrôler l’usage qu’on en fait : http://boingboing.net/2017/05/09/management-engine.html

    #sécurité_informatique #foutage_de_gueule

  • Cory Doctorow : How to support a writer’s career

    Je pourrais dire la même chose pour le soutien aux éditeurs indépendants. Une série de règles d’usage qui sont essentiels dans le monde très concurrentiel du livre.

    Since the earliest days of my novel-writing career, readers have written
    to me to thank me for my books and to ask how they can best support me
    and other writers whose work they enjoy. Nearly 15 years later, I have a
    pretty comprehensive answer for them!

    Writers’ commercial and critical fortunes are intertwined: a writer
    whose books perform well is a writer whose publisher buys and promotes
    more books from them, creating a virtuous cycle, as promotions beget
    more sales and more promotions.

    The most important time to support a writer is just after their latest
    book comes out — my novel, Walkaway, is in its first week of
    publication — because that is the make-or-break moment for that book,
    and, conceivably, for its writer.

    Books that perform well in their first weeks become bestsellers.
    Bestsellers are more likely to be reviewed by major outlets, they are
    ordered in larger quantities by booksellers (a bookseller who takes five
    or more copies of a book will very likely place that book face-out in a
    new releases section and/or on a table at the front of the store). They
    are given close attention by collections-development staff in libraries,
    and are snapped up for translations by foreign publishers. They are read
    by production staffers for TV and movie studios. They renew interest in
    the author’s backlist, too.

    Contrariwise, books that flop go into a death-spiral. They are returned
    by booksellers, their sales-figures are used to justify a smaller
    advance for the next book (and less promotions budget), and booksellers
    order fewer copies of the author’s next book. In really dire situations,
    a badly performing book can kill a writer’s career.

    Thankfully, Walkaway looks to be on course to be a bestseller, judging
    from early numbers and indicators. You readers have helped me in
    innumerable ways to make this happen and I am very, very grateful to you
    for it. Here are ways that you can continue to support Walkaway, my
    career, and future books from me:

    1. Buy Walkaway or check it out of the library. Either one sends a
    strong signal to my publisher, to reviewers, to foreign publishers and
    to the industry. This is the most important thing you can do.

    2. Review the book and tell your friends. Put your recommendation in
    your social media, in an online bookseller’s page, on Goodreads. There
    is literally nothing that sells books better than personal
    recommendations. This is the second-most important thing you can do.

    3. Buy Walkaway from an indie bookseller. The independent booksellers
    are the best friends authors can have. They support our tours, hand-sell
    our books, write shelf-reviews and talk the book up to other bookish
    people. I am visiting 30+ indie bookstores on my tour and leaving signed
    copies in my wake — any of the stores I’ve visited will be glad to send
    you one by mail-order (and you can always call a store with an upcoming
    event to request a personalized, inscribed copy). Indie bookstores are
    experiencing a renaissance and your custom gives them the stability they
    need to continue.

    4. Come out for the tour! I’m in Chicago tonight at Volumes Bookcafe,
    with Max Temkin from Cards Against Humanity. Bring along your old books
    to sign, but buy the new one from the store that’s hosting the event, to
    help them recoup the cost of extra staff, promo, etc. Coming to a tour
    stop tells bookstores that you value their place in your community and
    encourages them to continue bringing authors in.

    5. Buy a fair-trade ebook. I just launched the first-ever fair-trade
    ebook store. I am a retailer for my own ebooks and audiobooks, selling
    on behalf of my publishers worldwide. Buying direct from me doubles my
    royalties, and the book you get not only has no DRM, but it also comes
    without any kind of license agreement, and it is the only way to buy
    ebooks from a major publisher without having to sign away your legal
    rights in the bargain. Buying a book this way tells publishers and the
    industry that fair compensation for authors and fair legal bargain
    matter to you.

    6. Buy the audiobook. The Walkaway audiobook is amazing, read by Wil
    Wheaton, Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Amanda Palmer (The
    Dresden Dolls), Mirron Willis, Gabrielle de Cuir, Lisa Renee Pitts and
    Justine Eyre. I produced it independently and it is without question the
    best audio adaptation of any of my work, ever. Of course, it’s DRM-free,
    too.

    I’ve been on the road for a week now and I’m just hitting my stride.
    I’ve met thousands of readers so far on this tour and every meeting has
    been a pleasure and an honor. You readers are what make my writing
    possible. Thank you so much for your support, I literally would not have
    a career without you.

    Cory

    #édition

  • Snowden’s Chronicler Reveals Her Own Life Under Surveillance | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/2016/02/snowdens-chronicler-reveals-her-own-life-under-surveillance


    La déscripion que donne Laura Poitras des effets nocifs causées par la surveillance risquent de modifier la vie des peuples du monde entier.

    Being Constantly Watched

    Private as ever, Poitras declined to detail to WIRED exactly how she experienced that federal investigation in the years that followed. But flash forward to late 2012, and the surveillance targeting Poitras had transformed her into a nervous wreck. In the book, she shares a diary she kept during her time living in Berlin, in which she describes feeling constantly watched, entirely robbed of privacy. “I haven’t written in over a year for fear these words are not private,” are the journal’s first words. “That nothing in my life can be kept private.”

    She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life. She notes her computer glitching and “going pink” during her interviews with NSA whistleblower William Binney, and that it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free. Eventually she moves to a new apartment that she attempts to keep “off the radar” by avoiding all cell phones and only accessing the Internet over the anonymity software Tor.

    When Snowden contacts her in January of 2013, Poitras has lived with the specter of spying long enough that she initially wonders if he might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like Julian Assange or Jacob Appelbaum, an activist and Tor developer. “Is C4 a trap?” she asks herself, using an abbreviation of Snowden’s codename. “Will he put me in prison?”

    #politique #psychologie #surveillance

  • Laura Poitras reveals her own life under surveillance
    (Andy Greenberg, February 2016)

    https://www.wired.com/2016/02/snowdens-chronicler-reveals-her-own-life-under-surveillance

    “After returning to the United States [from Iraq] I was placed on a government watchlist and detained and searched every time I crossed the US border. It took me ten years to find out why.”

    [...]

    She sleeps badly, plagued with nightmares about the American government. She reads Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and re-reads 1984, finding too many parallels with her own life. She notes her computer glitching and “going pink” during her interviews with NSA whistleblower William Binney, and that it tells her its hard drive is full despite seeming to have 16 gigabytes free. Eventually she moves to a new apartment that she attempts to keep “off the radar” by avoiding all cell phones and only accessing the Internet over the anonymity software Tor.

    When Snowden contacts her in January of 2013, Poitras has lived with the specter of spying long enough that she initially wonders if he might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like Julian Assange or Jacob Appelbaum, an activist and Tor developer. “Is C4 a trap?” she asks herself, using an abbreviation of Snowden’s codename. [Citizenfour] “Will he put me in prison?”

    [...]

    In the end, Poitras has not only escaped the arrest or indictment she feared, but has become a kind of privacy folk hero: Her work has helped to noticeably shift the world’s view of government spying, led to legislation, and won both a Pulitzer and an Academy Award. But if her ultimate fear was to “become the story,” her latest revelations show that’s a fate she can no longer escape–and one she’s come to accept.

    #Snowden #Edward_Snowden
    #Poitras #Laura_Poitras

  • Brianna Wu running for US Congress in 2018
    http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-12-21-brianna-wu-running-for-us-congress-in-2018

    Already on the team is sci-fi author and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow, with Wu planning to add “legal experts on cyber-bullying and revenge porn” soon. As and when she formally runs, Wu will step back from her role at her studio Giant Spacekat.

    Même personne :
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brianna_Wu

    Brianna Wu is an American video game developer and computer programmer. She cofounded Giant Spacekat, an independent video game development studio with Amanda Warner in Boston, Massachusetts. She is also a blogger and podcaster on matters relating to the video game industry.

    https://seenthis.net/messages/278442 @grommeleur #harcèlement
    @alda
    #historicisation #femmes #videogames #jeux_video #gamergate

  • 33c3 — 33ᵉ édition du Chaos Communication Congress
    http://linuxfr.org/news/33c3-33-edition-du-chaos-communication-congress

    Le Chaos Communication Congress, célèbre rassemblement de hackers organisé par le Chaos Computer Club, revient cette année pour sa trente‐troisième mouture (aussi nommée 33c3), du 27 au 30 décembre 2016.

    Cet évènement est l’occasion de nombreuses conférences, ateliers et évènements divers pendant quatre jours sur la technologie, la société, les utopies. De nombreuses conférences seront retransmises en direct en flux vidéo. Cette année, une traduction partielle sera assurée en français (en plus de l’anglais et de l’allemand).

    lien n°1 : 33c3 — page d’accueil du wiki de l’édition 2016lien n°2 : 31c3 : le Chaos Communication Congress de retour avec « A New Dawn »lien n°3 : « Guerre et paix » : Tolstoï au 21ᵉ siècle, par Cory Doctorow au 28C3lien n°4 : 28ᵉ Chaos Communication Congress : « Derrière les lignes ennemies »lien (...)

  • 33c3 - 33e édition du Chaos Communication Congress
    http://linuxfr.org/news/33c3-33e-edition-du-chaos-communication-congress

    Le Chaos Communication Congress, célèbre rassemblement de hackers organisé par le Chaos Computer Club, revient cette année pour sa 33e mouture (aussi nommée 33c3), du 27 au 30 déc 2016.

    Cet évènement est l’occasion de nombreuses conférences, ateliers et évènements divers pendant quatre jours sur la technologie, la société, les utopies. De nombreuses conférences seront retransmises en direct en flux vidéo. Cette année, une traduction partielle sera assurée en français (en plus de l’anglais et de l’allemand).

    lien n°1 : 33c3 - page d’accueil du wiki de l’édition 2016lien n°2 : 31c3 : le Chaos Communication Congress de retour avec « A New Dawn »lien n°3 : « Guerre et paix » : Tolstoï au 21e siècle, par Cory Doctorow au 28C3lien n°4 : 28ème Chaos Communication Congress : « Derrière les lignes ennemies (...)

  • In 2000, the NSA hacked the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - Cory Doctorow
    http://boingboing.net/2016/11/06/in-2000-the-nsa-hacked-the-ha.html

    A reader writes, “According to last week’s Shadow Brokers leak, the NSA compromised a DNS server of the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in September 2000, two years after the Iraq Liberation Act and Operation Desert Fox, but before the Bush election.”

  • La prise de conscience et la suite.
    https://framablog.org/2016/07/11/la-prise-de-conscience-et-la-suite

    C’est peut-être le début du début de quelque chose : naguère traités de « paranos », les militants pour la vie privée ont désormais une audience croissante dans le grand public, on peut même parler d’une prise de conscience générale partielle et lente mais irréversible…
    Dans un article récent traduit pour vous par le groupe Framalang, Cory Doctorow utilise une analogie inattendue avec le déclin du tabagisme et estime qu’un cap a été franchi : celui de l’indifférence générale au pillage de notre vie privée.
    Mais le chemin reste long et il nous faut désormais aller au-delà en fournissant des outils et des moyens d’action à tous ceux qui refusent de se résigner. C’est ce qu’à notre modeste échelle nous nous efforçons de mener à bien avec vous.

    #vieprivée

  • Bonjour #obsolescence imposée - Framablog
    http://alireailleurs.tumblr.com/post/144290421803

    Le Framablog a eut la bonne idée de traduire un excellent billet de Cory Doctorow revenant sur le rachat de Revolv par Google, une centrale de contrôle pour maison connectée. Or, comme ce système est en concurrence avec Nest, son thermostat connecté, Google a donc décidé qu’à partir du 15 mai, tous tous les Revolvs, où qu’ils soient, seraient mis hors-service et deviendraient inutilisables. “Ce n’est pas encore un tremblement de terre, mais une secousse annonciatrice. Qu’il s’agisse de votre voiture, de vos ampoules ou de votre stimulateur cardiaque, les objets que vous possédez reposent de plus en plus sur des logiciels en réseau. Supprimez ces logiciels et ils deviennent des déchets électroniques inutilisables. (…)Nous venons d’entrer dans une ère où les lave-vaisselle peuvent refuser de laver la (...)

    #droit #consommation

  • La surveillance, vigile de la paix sociale au service des plus riches ? | Framablog
    http://framablog.org/2015/04/08/doctorow-la-surveillance-vigile-de-la-paix-sociale

    Cory Doctorow, auteur de science-fiction canadien et américain, cofondateur du site boing-boing, est l’un de ces monstres sacrés du monde du logiciel libre, du partage de la connaissance, bref, de l’époque qu’Internet profile à l’horizon des historiens du futur. Dans le dernier numéro de LocusMag, journal de science-fiction en langue anglaise, il évoque avec son habituelle précision deux sujets qui me sont chers : la stabilité de nos sociétés et la surveillance des populations. Sur l’instabilité de nos sociétés, j’évoque souvent la complexité croissante du droit, Cory va ici beaucoup plus loin. Sur la surveillance de masse, on compare souvent à tort la NSA et la Stasi d’ex-RDA, à nouveau Doctorow enfonce le clou et nous pousse dans nos derniers retranchements, invitant à mots couverts à une révolution du partage et de l’égalité.

    #surveillance #inégalités

  • Cory Doctorow: Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free | TechCrunch
    http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/09/worse-than-nothing

    One thing we know about audiences is that they aren’t very interested in hearing excuses about why they can’t buy the media they want, when they want it, in the format they want to buy it in. Study after study shows that overseas downloading of U.S. TV shows drops off sharply when those shows are put on the air internationally. That is, people just want to watch the TV their pals are talking about on the Internet—they’ll pay for it if it’s for sale, but if it’s not, they’ll just get it for free. Locking users out doesn’t reduce downloads, it reduces sales.

    Digital-lock vendors will tell you that their wares aren’t perfect, but they’re “better than nothing.” But the evidence is that digital locks are much worse than nothing. Industries that make widespread use of digital locks see market power shifting from creators and investors to intermediaries. They don’t reduce piracy. And customers who run into frustrations with digital locks are given an incentive to learn how to rip off the whole supply chain.

    If you’re a publisher, label, or studio, the answer is simple: don’t let companies sell your goods with digital locks on them. And if a company refuses to sell your goods unless they can put their locks on your products? Well, you can be pretty sure that those locks aren’t there for your benefit.

    It’s harder if you’re a creator, because many of the biggest investors have bought into the idea of selling with DRM or not at all. When it comes down to negotiating DRM, you just have to make a decision about whether you’re willing to let your creative work be put in some tech company’s jail in order to make your investors happy, or whether you’ll keep shopping for a saner, better investor.

    #copyright #téléchargement #offre_legale

  • 11月8日のツイート
    http://twilog.org/ChikuwaQ/date-141108

    [くるねこ大和]「本日休業 里親募集と写真のみ」 #日刊ねこ新聞 blog.goo.ne.jp/kuru0214/e/361… posted at 09:38:34

    Papier is out! paper.li/ChikuwaQ/13277… Stories via @ChronCulture @Louizeline @kounodanwawoma1 posted at 09:16:55

    Top story: Cory Doctorow: “We’re all sharecroppers in Google’s fields for the r… www.salon.com/2014/11/06/cor…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=tnp posted at 07:43:07

    CINEMA – « Mommy », ou comment être libre ? - Nonfiction.fr le portail des livres et des idées www.nonfiction.fr/article-7311-c… | Comment cela ? posted at 00:13:33

  • La bataille épique de l’internet des objets - BoingBoing
    http://alireailleurs.tumblr.com/post/98379321064

    Pour BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow signale la publication d’un court essai de l’écrivain américain de SF Bruce Sterling au format numérique, La bataille épique de l’internet des objets, une critique de l’internet des objets tel qu’il nous est préparé par les grands acteurs du secteur. Et en livre le début…

    "La première chose à comprendre sur "l’internet des objets" c’est qu’il ne s’agit pas de choses sur l’internet. C’est un mot codé que de puissants acteurs ont mis en place pour servir leurs propres fins. Ils aiment le slogan “Internet des objets” car il sonne pacifique et progressif. Il masque la lutte épique pour le pouvoir, l’argent et l’influence qui est sur ​​le point d’en découler. (…) Dans la pratique, l’internet des objets signifie une transformation épique : il désigne tout usage de l’automatisation (...)

    #iot #Internet_des_objets