Despite what you may have heard, cops have a relatively safe job. Cops are injured and killed with less frequency than roofers, truckers, fishermen, and pizza-delivery people. Cops are basically armed bureaucrats and their primary role is to file reports about crimes, not intervene in dangerous situations.

https://scapimag.com/2021/01/08/the-thin-bread-line-why-being-a-delivery-driver-is-more-dangerous-than-being-a-cop/

Now, you…

The Obama administration’s most consequential decision was to address the Great Financial Crisis by bailing out the finance sector, rather than borrowers. It was an unforced error, directed by Goldman-Sachs bankers elevated to the ranks of finance regulators, and we are still living with its consequences.

The choice to enact…

Here’s a supreme irony: the Creative Commons licenses were invented to enable a culture of legally safe sharing, spurred by the legal terror campaign waged by the entertainment industry, led by a literal criminal predator who is now in prison for sex crimes.

But because of a small oversight in…

Science fiction has a longstanding love-hate relationship with the tech tycoon. The literature is full of billionaire inventors, sometimes painted as system-bucking heroes, at other times as megalomanical supervillains.

From time to time, we even manage to portray one of these people in a way that hews most closely to…

Note: This is Part III in a series; Part I is here, Part II is here.

Even today, I can’t tell if the entertainment execs and their tech collaborators that I sparred with in the DRM wars were brilliant schemers or overconfident fools.

When these men — almost all men…

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature,” an essay about the historically unsupportable libel that turned “Luddite” into a slur.

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Far from rejecting technology out of some reactionary fear, the Luddites instead demanded a renegotiation of the social…

It’s hard not to freak out, watching Biden get punked by Joe Manchin over Build Back Better. Manchin’s transparent ruse — splitting the infrastructure bill from BBB — was obviously a prelude to a betrayal.

Thanks to Dem leadership’s foolish error, the party that holds the House, the Senate and…

#20yrsago Norwegian cops arrest DVD Jon https://www.wired.com/2002/01/norway-cracks-down-on-dvd-hacker/

#15yrsago Printcrime on Escape Pod https://escapepod.org/2007/01/09/ep-flash-printcrime/

#15yrsago RIP, Yvonne De Carlo https://web.archive.org/web/20070112102858/https://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/10/obit.decarlo.ap/index.html

#15yrsago Spa offers “Blackberry Thumb” massages https://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/26034/index.html

#10yrsago Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/…