Cory Doctorow

A Little Bit Pregnant: Cory Doctorow at Boundaries, Frontiers and Gatekeepers iSchool Conference

by Socrates

Yesterday I attended the keynote speech at the Boundaries, Frontiers & Gatekeepers third annual University of Toronto iSchool student conference. The keynote speaker at the conference was best selling author, activist and blogger Cory Doctorow, whose presentation was titled A Little Bit Pregnant: Why it’s a Bad Idea to Regulate Computers the Way We Regulate Radios, Guns, Uranium and Other Special-Purpose Tools. In his keynote speech Cory addresses the issue of computer regulation in general and, more specifically, asks: What happens when we take the failed regulatory model from the copy-right realm and try to import it into other realms too? What are the consequences? Here are some key points from Doctorow’s speech: “Designing general purpose computers that sneak around their owners’ backs is a terrible idea. We’ve already seen what happens when you add just a little bit of [...]

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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (free book)

by Socrates

I have received a number of emails from blog readers who truly enjoyed different chapters of Cory Doctorow‘s self-published collection of short stories called With A Little Help. Today I decided to follow up with Little Brother - another one of Doctorow’s previous publications. As always, Cory has provided a link to a free Creative Commons version of the text of Little Brother. You can click here to download it in a variety of formats from ePub to Kindle, Pdf, plain text and many others. Alternatively, you can purchase the print version from Amazon here or check out a sample of the DRM-free audio book and buy it below. Related articles Scroogled By Cory Doctorow (The Day Google Became Evil) (singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com) Human Readable By Cory Doctorow (With A Little Help Chapter 6) (singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com) Chicken Little by Cory Doctorow (With A [...]

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Epoch by Cory Doctorow (With A Little Help Chapter 13)

by Cory Doctorow
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A couple of weeks ago Cory Doctorow released his first self-published short story collection titled With A Little Help. Cory has always released his books under the Creative Commons open license, which allows his readers to share and re-mix his books. This time around Doctorow is experimenting in self-publishing the book in a number of different formats from free text and audio podcast, through an audio CD book, to a limited edition hard cover physical book. In my opinion, together with Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow is among the most prolific and visionary science fiction writers of our generation. Amazingly, his prolific writing seems to improve, rather than dilute the quality of his work, and With A Little Help is a good example of that. You can click any of the title links above and visit his book’s home page for [...]

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Chicken Little by Cory Doctorow (With A Little Help Chapter 12)

by Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow wrote Chicken Little for a tribute anthology to Frederik Pohl, since it was inspired by The Space Merchants - a science fiction novel which Frederik Pohl co-wrote with Cyril M. Kornbluth in 1952. In his short story, Cory Doctorow explores the idea that happiness, perceived happiness and predicted happiness can be completely dis-joined. For Cory, this observation raises an interesting and important question about our contemporary era, where often governments tend to see their role as a manager rather than a representative of the people. The main question here is: If you can make people happier by changing the way they feel about their circumstances, isn’t that easier than changing the circumstances themselves?

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Pester Power by Cory Doctorow (With A Little Help Chapter 11)

by Cory Doctorow
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A few days ago, Cory Doctorow released his first self-published short story collection titled With A Little Help. Cory has always released his books under the Creative Commons open license, which allows his readers to share and re-mix his books. This time around Doctorow is experimenting in self-publishing the book in a number of different formats from free text and audio podcast, through an audio CD book, to a limited edition hard cover physical book. In my opinion, together with Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow is among the most prolific and visionary science fiction writers of our generation. Amazingly, his prolific writing seems to improve, rather than dilute the quality of his work, and With A Little Help is a good example of that. The book contains 12 previously published short stories, as well as one new one - Epoch, which [...]

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Constitutional Crisis by Cory Doctorow (With A Little Help Chapter 10)

by Cory Doctorow
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A few days ago, Cory Doctorow released his first self-published short story collection titled With A Little Help. Cory has always released his books under the Creative Commons open license, which allows his readers to share and re-mix his books. This time around Doctorow is experimenting in self-publishing the book in a number of different formats from free text and audio podcast, through an audio CD book, to a limited edition hard cover physical book. In my opinion, together with Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow is among the most prolific and visionary science fiction writers of our generation. Amazingly, his prolific writing seems to improve, rather than dilute the quality of his work, and With A Little Help is a good example of that. The book contains 12 previously published short stories, as well as one new one - Epoch, which [...]

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Visit the Sins by Cory Doctorow (With A Little Help Chapter 9)

by Cory Doctorow
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Today I am posting Chapter 9 - Visit the Sins. Visit the Sins was greatly influenced by Cory’s grandfather - Avram Doctorow, who died from the complications of dementia in a senior psychiatric ward in a hospital in Toronto. While Avram was mentally gone pretty much most of the time that he was there, every once-in-a-while he would come back to his senses and realize where he was and what had happened to him. Then, he would start weeping uncontrollably… For Cory, those moments were some of the saddest and most haunting things he had ever seen… (As always, you can stream the podcast or download the mp3 file in full.) Enjoy! Related articles Cory Doctorow’s With A Little Help (full audio book) (singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com) Cory Doctorow’s With A Little Help: The Right Book (Chapter 3) (singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com) Cory Doctorow’s With A [...]

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Power Punctuation by Cory Doctorow (With A Little Help Chapter 8)

by Cory Doctorow
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A few days ago, Cory Doctorow released his first self-published short story collection titled With A Little Help. Cory has always released his books under the Creative Commons open license, which allows his readers to share and re-mix his books. This time around Doctorow is experimenting in self-publishing the book in a number of different formats from free text and audio podcast, through an audio CD book, to a limited edition hard cover physical book. In my opinion, together with Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow is among the most prolific and visionary science fiction writers of our generation. Amazingly, his prolific writing seems to improve, rather than dilute the quality of his work, and With A Little Help is a good example of that. The book contains 12 previously published short stories, as well as one new one - Epoch, which [...]

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