This day in history

2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023.

Cory Doctorow
2 min readOct 26, 2024

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

#20yrago Printer cartridges aren’t copyrighted works https://web.archive.org/web/20041102085343/http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2004/10/static_control_.html

#15yrsago Italian politician sues 4000+ YouTube commenters https://web.archive.org/web/20091030044651/http://www.antoniodipietro.com/en/2009/10/we_will_defend_you_all_from_cu.html

#15yrago Terrified London cops spending millions gathering useless intelligence on peaceful protestors https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/26/police-protest-data-protection

#10yrsago Edward Snowden interviewed by Lawrence Lessig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE

#10yrsago CHP officer who stole and shared nude photos of traffic-stop victim claims “it’s a game” https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/east-bay-chp-officer-accused-of-stealing-nude-photos-says-its-game-for-police-california-highway-patrol-sean-harrington/

#5yrsago “Affordances”: a new science fiction story that climbs the terrible technology adoption curve https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/affordances-cory-doctorow-sf-story-algorithmic-bias-facial-recognition.html

#5yrsago Nearly all Americans’ taxes will go down under Medicare for All https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/25/medicare-for-all-taxes-saez-zucman

#5yrsago Researchers’ budget blown when a migrating eagle’s tracker chip connects to an Iranian cellular tower and sends expensive SMSes https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50180781

#5yrsago New Hampshire state Rep John Potucek kills Right to Repair bill: “cellphones are throwaways…just get a new one” https://www.vice.com/en/article/lawmaker-kills-repair-bill-because-cellphones-are-throwaways/

#1yrago Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

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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