This day in history

2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023.

Cory Doctorow
2 min readOct 30, 2024

I’ll be in Tucson, AZ from November 8–10: I’m the Guest of Honor at the TusCon science fiction convention.

#20yrsago William Gibson on ObL tape https://web.archive.org/web/20041016033110/https://williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_10_01_archive.asp#109907889910593617

#20yrsago Apple to iPod owners: “Eat shit and die” https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/30/apple-to-ipod-owners-eat-shit-and-die-updated/

#15yrsago Hallowe’en is safe, your kids are safe, the only scary thing is the warnings https://www.huffpost.com/entry/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163

#15yrsago Homebrew backyard railroad recreates Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20091208070906/http://cptrr.webs.com/

#15yrsago Gang steals phone wires out from under English roads https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/sussex/8333774.stm

#10yrsago Pizzeria asks judge to find rival’s flavor to be trademark-infringing https://www.techdirt.com/2014/10/30/pizzeria-attempts-to-trademark-flavor-pizza-yes-seriously/

#10yrsago 100K Hungarians march against Internet tax https://www.vice.com/en/article/huge-internet-tax-protests-galvanize-government-opposition-in-hungary/

#10yrsago Dissecting the arguments of liberal apologists for Obama’s surveillance and secret war https://nationalinterest.org/feature/big-brother’s-liberal-friends-11515?nopaging=1

#10yrsago Potato-chip surveillance: once you start, you just can’t stop https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/27/stasi-style-outrages-low-spies-stoop-mi5

#5yrsago The Internet Archive’s massive repository of scanned books will help Wikipedia fight the disinformation wars https://web.archive.org/web/20191031041755/https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/29/weaving-books-into-the-web-starting-with-wikipedia/

#5yrsago With “OK boomer,” millennials are killing intergenerational resentment https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/style/ok-boomer.html

#5yrsago Facebook sues notorious spyware company NSO Group for 1,400 attacks on diplomats, journalists, dissidents, and government officials https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cyber-whatsapp-nsogroup/whatsapp-sues-israels-nso-for-allegedly-helping-spies-hack-phones-around-the-world-idUSKBN1X82BE/

#5yrsago The First Scarfolk Annual: a mysterious artifact from a curiously familiar eternal grimdark 1970s https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/30/the-first-scarfolk-annual-a-mysterious-artifact-from-a-curiously-familiar-eternal-grimdark-1970s/

#1yrago Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Tor Books just published two new, free “Little Brother” stories: “Vigilant,” a about creepy surveillance in distance education; and “Spill,” about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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