It's a reading of this. https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/
Cory Doctorow Podcast feed https://craphound.com/feed/
#economy #economists #economics #capitalist #capitalists #capitalism #audio #mp3 #cory #cory-doctorow #podcast #cory-doctorow-podcast #locus-magazine
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith
We want to be able to vote with our wallets, because it's so much faster and more convenient than voting with our ballots. But the vote-with-your-wallet election is rigged for the people with the thickest wallets. Try as hard as you'd like, you just can't shop your way out of a monopoly – that's like trying to recycle your way out of the climate emergency. Systemic problems need systemic solutions – not individual ones.
#cory #doctorow #cory-doctorow #monopoly #competition #democracy #freedom #liberty
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/02/macedoine/#the-public-option
They first came on my radar in 2001 when they sent a legal threat to a blogger for linking to their website without permission
The actual link was to KPMG's corporate anthem, which remains, to this day, a banger
KPMG's Corporate Anthem
https://web.archive.org/web/20040428063826/http://chkpt.zdnet.com/chkpt/uknewsita/http://anthems.zdnet.co.uk/anthems/kpmg.mp3
The time is now to lead the way,
We share the same the idea
That may win by the end of the day.
Our strength is here to stay.
Identity, one energy,
One strategy, with sympathy.
These are the words that will lead us into a new world.
Notice the link is to a page on the Wayback Machine.
more about KPMG from Cory's blog
They're the architects of Microsoft's tax-evasion plot:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougherAnd they were behind Canada's dysfunctional covid contact-tracing app, which never worked, but generated tens of millions in billings to the government of Canada, who used KPMG to hire programmers at $1,500/day, plus KPMG's 30% commission:
KPMG's most bizarre scandal is literally stranger than fiction. The company bribed SEC personnel help its own accountants cheat on ethics exams. The corrupt officials were then given high-paid jobs at KPMG:
https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/sec-probe-finds-kpmg-auditors-cheating-on-training-exams-061819But all of that is just scene-setting (and a gratuitous plug for my book) for the latest KPMG scandal, which is, possibly, the most KPMG scandal of all KPMG scandals. The Australian government hired KPMG to audit Paladin, a security contractor that oversees the asylum seekers the country locks up on one of its island gulags (yes, gulags, plural).\
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Ever since, Paladin has been the subject of a string of ghastly human rights scandals – the worst stuff imaginable, rape and torture and murder of adults and children. Paladin made AU423 million on this contract.\
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And here's the scandal: KPMG audited the wrong company. The Paladin that the Australia government paid KPMG to audit was based in Singapore. The Paladin that KPMG audited was a totally different company, based in Papua New Guinea, who already had a commercial relationship with KPMG. It was this colossal fuckup that led to the manifestly unfit Singaporean company getting nearly half a billion dollars in public funds:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/24/incredible-failure-kpmg-rejects-claims-it-assessed-the-wrong-company-before-423m-payment-to-paladin
#kpmg #cory #doctorow #cory-doctorow #corporate-anthem #corporation #corporations #scandal #paladin #canada #australia #singapore #bezzle #corruption #dishonesty #scum-bags #brunchlords #gulags #australian-gulags
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#more-5712
#woke #conservatism #right-wing #plutocracy #plutocrats #oligarchy #culture-wars #politics #doctorow #cory #cory-doctorow
https://wilwheaton.net/2023/06/the-wait/
Here's the beginning.
Pat Robertson walks past thousands of souls, smugly and full of pride, and cuts to the front of the line at the velvet rope in outside the entrance to his version of Heaven.\
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The bouncer looks up from their clipboard, observing Robertson with thousands of eyes in a swirling cascade of light.\
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“Pat Robertson,” they say. “We’ve been expecting you.”
#cory #cory-doctorow #wil-wheaton #pat-robertson #heaven #hell #afterlife #rush-limbaugh #death #life-after-death #the-wait
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/17/have-you-tried-not-spying/
BTW, Cory has already read this aloud himself into his podcast.
Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow Podcast starts at 9:21
The audio book of this novel is read by Wil Wheaton. Here's part of it recorded on Wheaton's phone as he reads into the mic for the audio book. This is also from Cory's podcast
[The Cory Doctorow Podcast is at https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast]
Here's the first installment.
One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park? It had both a triple-Michelin-star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the Unsalted Hash, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to walk home and crawl into bed.\
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I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected—well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.\
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Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.\
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Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the Unsalted Hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone. After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked. I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.\
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That’s how I learned that Danny Lazer was looking for me. He was working the usual channels—DMs from people who I tended to check in with when I was looking for work—and it put a shine on my evening, because sixty-seven or no, there was always work for someone with my skill set. Danny Lazer had a problem with his Trustlesscoin keys, which relied on the best protected cryptographic secrets in the world (nominally). So I messaged him. One rest stop later, just past Gilroy, I got his reply. He was eager to see me. Would I call on him at his home in Palo Alto?\
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My pathetic little ego swelled up at his eagerness. I told him I had a big dinner planned the next night, but I’d see him the morning after. Truth be told, putting off a man as important as Danny Lazer, even for twenty-four hours, made me feel more important still. I could tell from his reply that the delay chafed at him. I felt petty, but not so much so that I canceled my dinner. My dear old friend was a lively sort, and it was possible we’d walk from the restaurant to her place for an hour or three before I returned to the Walmart parking lot.\
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Dinner didn’t disappoint, and neither did the fun and games afterward. It was a very nice capstone to a very successful job, and a very good prelude to another job for one of the nicest rich men (or richest nice men) in Silicon Valley.\
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Danny was old Silicon Valley, a guy who started his own UUCP host so he could help distribute the alt hierarchy and once helped Tim May bring a load of unlicensed firearms across state lines from a Nevada gun show. He’d lived like a monk for decades, writing cryptographic code and fighting with the NSA over it, and had mortgaged his parents’ house back east to keep himself and a couple of programmers in business in a tiny office for a decade while he and Galit lived in a thirty-foot motor home that needed engine tuning once a month just so it could trundle from one parking space to the next.\
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It was a bet that there would come a day when the internet’s innocence would end and people would want privacy from each other and their governments, and he kept doubling down on that bet through every boom and bust, living on ramen and open cereal boxes from the used food store, refusing to part with any equity except to promising hackers who’d join him, and then the bet paid off, and he became Daniel Moses Lazar, with a 75 percent stake in Keypairs LLC, whose crypto-libraries and workflow tools were the much-ballyhooed picks and shovels of the next internet revolution. Keypairs wasn’t the first unicorn in Silicon Valley, but it was the first one that never took a dime in venture capital and whose sole angels were Danny’s parents back in Jersey, to whom Danny sent at least $100 million before they made him stop, insisting that they had nothing more they wanted in this world.\
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Galit picked out a big place in Twin Peaks that you could see Alcatraz from on a clear day, gutted it to the foundation slab, bare studs, and ceiling joists, completely rebuilt it while being mindful of both Danny’s specification for networking receptacles throughout, and Galit’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Arts and Crafts Movement. One day, as she was bringing out some Mendocino grig and a cheese board for the two of them to enjoy from their half-built porch, she gasped, complained of pain in both arms, then her chest, and then she collapsed and was dead before the ambulance arrived.\
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It had been a good marriage: twenty-two years and no kids, because there was nowhere in their old RV to put them unless they wanted to hang them from the rafters. She’d been his rock while he’d built up Keypairs, but he’d been hers, too, rubbing her feet and helping her deal with the endless humiliations that a woman doing administrative work in Silicon Valley had to put up with. He didn’t see it that way, though: after he took possession of her ashes, all he could talk about was how they’d wasted nearly a quarter of a century chasing a fortune that didn’t do either of them a bit of good, and it had cost them the time they could have spent in a beach shack in the Baja while he did two hours of contract work a month to pay for machete sharpening and new hammocks once a year.\
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A procession of Silicon Valley’s most powerful leaders and most respected technologists filed through the Palo Alto teardown they’d bought to perch in while the Twin Peaks project was underway. People who weren’t merely wealthy but famous for their vision, their sensitivity, their insight. They argued with him about his crushing regrets and tried to tell him how much good he’d done, both for Galit and for the world, but he was unreachable. A consensus emerged among the Friends of Danny that he was not long for this world. Not that he was going to kill himself or anything but that he would simply stop caring about living, and then nature would take its course.\
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They were right—given all facts in evidence, that was a foregone conclusion. But there was one hidden variable: Sethuramani Balakrishnan, who was twenty-five, brilliant, and had made a series of lateral moves within Keypairs: customer support, then compliance, and finally Danny’s PA, a job she was vastly overqualified for.\
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She helped him flip the house, then to turn Keypairs over to a management committee carefully balanced between hackers who’d been with Danny since the PDP-8 days, people with real managerial experience and proven experience growing companies and running big teams. He got rid of all the shares he’d taken in over the years to sit on advisory boards and stuck everything into Vanguard index-tracker funds—the ones that didn’t buy a lot of tech stocks.\
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As far as anyone could tell, Sethu didn’t try to talk him out of any of this, just offered efficient, intelligent, and supremely organized help in getting Danny’s life’s work out of a realm in which it had to be actively managed by someone with Danny’s incredible drive, insight, and technical knowledge, and into an investment vehicle managed by an overgrown spreadsheet, one that would multiply his money ahead of the CPI, year on year, until someone built a guillotine on his lawn.\
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What Sethu did talk him into was buying a condo around the corner from that Palo Alto teardown, an eight-story place, quiet, built on the grave of another Palo Alto teardown that had been snapped up by property developers in the glory days before NIMBY planning ended all high-density infill within fifty miles of Stanford.
#cory #cory-doctorow #red-team-blues #novel #fiction #audio #mp3 #audio-book #wil-wheaton
https://www.tni.org/en/article/seizing-the-means-of-computation
#cory #cory-doctorow #doctorow #monopoly #monopolies #eff #big-tech #gafam #google #amazon #facebook #apple #microsoft #chokepoints #chokepoint-capitalism
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/07/sensory-deprivation/#sensorship
Northeastern's Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the "Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute," where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If there's one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.\
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Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern's Senior Vice Provost for Research decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. The provost signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being.After the sensors were discovered, the students wrote to the administrators demanding their removal, on the grounds that there was no scientific purpose for them, that they intimidated students, that they were unnecessary, and that the university had failed to follow its own rules and ask the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to review the move as a human-subjects experiment.
#privacy #surveillance #security #grad-school #grad-students #northwestern-university #cybersecurity #doctorow #cory-doctorow #cory
So now there is one Cory Doctorow audio book on Audible, and it's all about how Audible screws over writers, publishers, audio book narrators, and customers.
You can read the text here. https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/
You can listen to Cory read it here. https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_431/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_431_-_Why_none_of_my_books_are_available_on_Audible.mp3 It starts at 4:26. This is the latest episode of the Cory Doctorow podcast, so there is other stuff too.
It is now available as an ebook for Kindle for $0.98 (presumably with DRM) on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5RWTPR7/
And, finally, the audio of Cory reading it is now available on Audible (definitely with DRM). https://www.audible.com/pd/B0B7KH8KSD
In 2011, I gave a speech at Berlin's Chaos Communications Congress called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing." In it, I explained that Digital Rights Management was technologically incoherent, a bizarre fantasy in which untrusted users of computers could be given encrypted files and all the tools needed to decrypt them, but somehow be prevented from using those decrypted files in ways that conflicted with the preferences of the company that supplied those files:\
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https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/\
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As I said then, computers are stubbornly, inescapably "general purpose." The only computer we know how to make – the Turing-complete von Neumann machine – is the computer that can run all the programs we know how to write. When someone claims to have built a computer-powered "appliance" – say, a smart speaker or (God help us all) a smart toaster – that can only run certain programs, what they mean is that they've designed a computer that can run every program, but which will refuse to run programs unless the manufacturer approves them.
BTW, here's the RSS feed for the Cory Doctorow podcast. https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
#cory #cory-doctorow #amazon #audible #kindle #copyright #drm #law #dmca #1201 #creators #narrators #audio-book-narrators #podcast
