#15yrsago Scotland Yard wants DNA samples from 5-year-olds in case they grow up to be criminals; Oyster card records to become part of “war on terror” theguardian.com/society/2008/m…
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, @beaconPressBks et al) 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."
If you're a @Medium subscriber, you can read these essays - as well as previews of upcoming magazine columns and early exclusives on doctorow.medium.com.
My latest Medium column is "Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk"
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Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? You can read my work elsewhere, but it is now a #TwitterCrime to tell you how. Please visit my site, pluralistic.net, for links to find me on less-unhinged places (I can only imagine that my days here are numbered). 22/
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Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money.
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When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea!
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The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.
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Back in 2010, @SuperWuster published *The Master Switch*, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:
Like you, I've heard a *lot* about Project 2025, Heritage Foundation's roadmap for Trump, should he win the presidency. Given the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect.
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In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst breach in history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans, 15m Britons and 19k Canadians, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and readymade identity-theft:
Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just their top execs liquidating their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach - it was also that they ignored *years* of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.
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We're living through one of those moments when millions of people become suddenly and overwhelmingly interested in fair use, one of the subtlest and worst-understood aspects of copyright law. It's not a subject you can master by skimming a Wikipedia article!
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I've been talking fair use with laypeople for decades. I've met so many people with the unshakable, serene confidence of the *truly* wrong, like those who think fair use means you can always take x words from a book, or y seconds from a song, and no more.
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