This day in history

2004, 2009, 2019, 2023.

Cory Doctorow
2 min readMay 12, 2024

Next Tuesday (May 14), I’m on a livecast about AI and enshittification with Tim O’Reilly; on Wednesday (May 15), I’m in North Hollywood with Harry Shearer for a screening of Stephanie Kelton’s Finding the Money; on Friday (May 17) I’m in San Francisco at the Internet Archive to keynote the tenth anniversary of the Authors Alliance.

#20yrsago Internet Archive’s Petabox: a 1,000 terabyte array https://archive.org/web/petabox.php

#15yrsago Pinkwater’s Neddiad: awesome YA novel with ghosts, fat alien cops, shamans, circus animals, triplanes, swordfighting, etc https://memex.craphound.com/2009/05/11/pinkwaters-neddiad-awesome-ya-novel-with-ghosts-fat-alien-cops-shamans-circus-animals-triplanes-swordfighting-etc/

#15yrsago Selling fiber broadband by inviting users to dig their own trenches https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/norwegian-isp-dig-your-own-fiber-trench-save-400/

#15yrsago Free ebooks’ effects on book-sales https://web.archive.org/web/20090515095615/http://bloggasm.com/did-random-houses-free-online-book-releases-affect-sales

#15yrsago Pirate Bay founder proposes to pay his fine with tiny, expensive-to-receive payments https://web.archive.org/web/20090514014403/http://www.blogpirate.org/2009/05/10/pirate-bay-founder-crafts-distributed-denial-of-dollars-attack/

#15yrsago Canadian MPs don’t want Parliament videos in the hands of citizens https://web.archive.org/web/20090512225709/http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/632164

#15yrsago Cornell says no to restrictions on public domain materials https://web.archive.org/web/20090515100044/http://news.library.cornell.edu/com/news/PressReleases/Cornell-University-Library-Removes-All-Restrictions-on-Use-of-Public-Domain-Reproductions.cfm

#5yrsago Bipartisan groups call on Congress to reinstate the Office of Technology Assessment, which Gingrich killed in 1995 https://www.techdirt.com/2019/05/10/broad-coalition-tells-congress-to-bring-back-office-technology-assessment/

#5yrsago Beto O’Rourke just hired a “senior advisor” who used to lobby for Keystone XL, Seaworld and private prisons https://theintercept.com/2019/05/11/beto-orourke-campaign-staff-lobbyist-keystone-xl/

#5yrsago Facebook’s “celebration” and “memories” algorithms are auto-generating best-of-terror-recruiting pages for extremist groups https://www.securityweek.com/whistleblower-says-facebook-generating-terror-content/

#5yrsago Chelsea Manning’s statement on the occasion of her release https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDZGRRk4MnM

#1yrago ‘We buy ugly houses’ is code for ‘we steal vulnerable peoples’ homes’ https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor

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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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