More from @doctorow

Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

18 Jan

After the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended copyright by 20 years, putting existing public domain works back into copyright, we endured a two-decade-long public domain drought. That ended in 2018, and since then, each Jan 1 is a new public domain day.

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This year's public domain day was a doozy, with a flood of works from the 1925 entering the public domain, including vast swathes of the Harlem Rernaissance and F Scott Fitzgerald's classic Gilded Age/coming-of-age novel The Great Gatsby.

pluralistic.net/2020/12/16/fra…

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It's only been weeks and yet there have already been a slew of Gatsby remixes: whimsical, serious, trenchant. You'd be hard pressed to find a better fit for our day - a tale of grifting and impending collapse amidst grotesque inequality.

bnet.substack.com/p/the-greater-…

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

18 Jan

When I think about our historical, profound shifts in attitude and discourse, the model I apply is "peak indifference."

Say you have real, existential problem. More often than not, these are systemic problems, and those are the hardest problems.

locusmag.com/2016/07/cory-d…

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Not just because systemic problems involve collective action (you can't recycle your way out of climate change), but because the cause-and-effect relationships of systemic problems can't be easily known, so it's hard to know what you need to do to avert the problem.

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Systemic problems pose a third difficulty: they enrich small minorities, and those minorities can exploit causal ambiguity to deliberately sow doubt.

To make that more concrete: think about cancer-tobacco denial.

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Cory Doctorow #BLM

@doctorow

18 Jan

With the world in lockdown, most "white-collar" crime (AKA "world-destroying corruption and looting") now takes place over Zoom. If you witness such a crime, you might be tempted to record the meeting and leak it to a journalist.

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But leaking Zoom recordings is seriously fraught because they are full of personally identifying details. Some of these are "traitor-tracing" mechanisms, others are intrinsic to Zoom, and still others come from your end of the recording.

theintercept.com/2021/01/18/lea…

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@theintercept

Nikita Mazurov's guide to anonymizing Zoom videos for @theintercept tackles each of these classes of identifiers.

Traitor-tracing: Zoom meeting hosts have the option to add visual and audio watermarks to their videos.

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