Yesterday's threads: Newsom's California fiber dream; The S&L crisis perfected finance crime; Big Pharma's vicious battle against universal covid vaccination; and more!
My latest novel is Attack Surface, a sequel to my bestselling Little Brother books. @washingtonpost called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."
My book "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" is a critique of Big Tech connecting conspiratorial thinking to the rise of tech monopolies (proposing a way to deal with both) is now out in paperback:
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
My first picture book is out! It's called Poesy the Monster Slayer and it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by @MCRockefeller. It's the monster book I dreamt of reading to my own daughter.
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "🧢". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
"What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy?" That's the question @brainwane set out to answer in her @github talk earlier this week - a talk that considers #FLOSS in the broadest possible terms and still makes specific, concrete proposals.
Harihareswara starts with the obvious proposition that "open source" can't be healthy if the programmers who create it aren't healthy, and draws a link between basic income, child care and universal health care and the health of open source.
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She also points out that the "health" of open source has been systematically poisoned by harassment, misogyny and racism, and names people who were driven out of OSS because of their gender and race - as well as people like @aaronsw, hounded to death by the FBI.
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Bruce Schneier coined "feudal security" to describe the dominant Big Tech security model, in which you surrender your autonomy by moving into a warlord's fortress (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc) and in return get protection from the bandits that roam the badlands without.
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The historian Stephen Morillo pointed out that this is more like "manorialism" than "feudalism." As I wrote in January, digital manorialism works well (if the warlord wants the same thing as you) but fails badly (if they decide to sell you out).
Google wants to kill third party cookies to protect you from randos doing tracking and targeting - but it wants to retain the ability to nonconsensually track and target you on its own:
Last Jan, @NorthwellHealth was the subject of a viral @nytimes story about the thousands of patients it had sued over medical debt, in the midst of a pandemic. The publicity was so bad that the company abandoned its legal campaign of terror.
But not every bloated, financialized hospital chain got the message. The massive chain Community Health Systems has long been addicted to suing the shit out of its patients, and the pandemic didn't change that.
CHS's financial crimes are investigated in a must-read @CNN story by @caseytolan. While the company insists that it doesn't sue poor patients over their medical debts, Tolan debunks this claim, revealing the cruel and ugly lengths CHS has gone to during the pandemic.
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A truism in security is "attribution is hard." It's really hard to know who hacked you, first, because it's easy to deflect suspicion by leaving false clues, and second, because the bar for hacking even big, critical systems is so low.
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The ransomware epidemic has been raging for years now, and it's quite a tangle. It includes idiots who download (or pay for) some off-the-shelf malware and turn it loose on whatever systems they can find, who don't even know WHO they've hacked.
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It includes sophisticated crime-gangs with high degrees of specialization: tooling, payment processing, even "customer service" for victims who can't figure out how to buy cryptocurrency to pay their ransoms.
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This week on my podcast, the seventh and final part of my serialized reading of my 2020 @ozm book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, a book arguing that monopoly – not AI-based brainwashing – is the real way that tech controls our behavior.