Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

pavelanni.github.io/attack-surface…

1/ Image
Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic (binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

2/
When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a kind of social currency - tricks for getting free payphone calls, or doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House switchboard.

3/
I doted on books that promised more of the same: Paladin Press and Amok Catalog titles, Steal This Book, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Whole Earth Review and the Whole Earth Catalog.

4/
But when I sat down in 2006 to write the first Little Brother book, I realized that facts were now cheap - anything could be discovered with a single search. The thing in short supply now was search terms - knowing what to search FOR.

5/
As John Ciardi wrote,

The old crow is getting slow;
the young crow is not.
Of what the young crow does not know,
the old crow knows a lot.

The young crow flies above, below,
and rings around the slow old crow.
What does the fast young crow not know?
WHERE TO GO.

6/
So I set out to write a book of realistic scenarios, dramatizing what tech COULD do, on the assumption that readers would glean those all-important search-terms from the tale, and that this could launch them on a voyage of discovery.

7/
That's the ethic I've stuck with through all three novels and the short stories in the series. It seems to have worked. Anni's Mashapedia is the apotheosis of that plan: a comprehensive set of search terms masquerading as a glossary.

8/
Anni's hosted Mashapedia on Github, and you can amend, extend or contest his definitions by opening an issue in the repo. What a delight!

eof/

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More from @doctorow

10 Jan
The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

1/ Image
The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @EFF colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

jilliancyork.com/2021/01/10/eve…

2/
Here's some highlights:

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Inside: Mashapedia; The City We Became; Crowdsourcing a list of bad cops; Censorship, Parler and antitrust; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/01/09/the…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
Mashapedia: A third-party glossary of the technical concepts from Attack Surface.



2/ Image
The City We Became: Jemisin relitigates Jacobs v Moses, with Lovecraft refereeing.



3/ Image
Read 21 tweets
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1/ Image
There's an obvious, trivial point to be made here: Twitter, Apple and Google are private companies. When they remove speech on the basis of its content, it's censorship, but it's not GOVERNMENT censorship. It doesn't violate the First Amendment.

2/
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