This day in history

2008, 2013, 2018, 2022.

Cory Doctorow
3 min readDec 5, 2023

Next Tuesday (Dec 5), I’m at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org’s Bill McKibben called “The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful.”

#15yrsago Berlin hacker con will use RFID badges to simulate life in a totalitarian panopticon https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/wiki/OpenBeacon_with_OpenAMD/

#15yrsago RIP, Forrest J Ackerman https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ackerman6-2008dec06-story.html

#15yrsago Googling Security: book that opens your eyes to how much you disclose to Google https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/05/googling-security-book-that-opens-your-eyes-to-how-much-you-disclose-to-google/

#10yrsago 75% of American silent feature films lost https://variety.com/2013/film/news/library-of-congress-only-14-of-u-s-silent-films-survive-1200915020/

#10yrsago NSA collecting unimaginable quantities of mobile phone location data for guilt-by-association data-mining https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html

#10yrsago Democratic lawmakers share a squalorous house in DC https://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/04/politics/real-alpha-house/index.html

#10yrsago Rob Ford police document: allegations of heroin use and more https://torontolife.com/category/city/toronto-politics/2013/12/04/new-bombshells-from-police-documents-suggest-rob-ford-may-have-tried-heroin-been-blackmailed/

#10yrsago NYPD shoot at unarmed man, hit bystanders, charge man for making them shoot https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/nyregion/unarmed-man-is-charged-with-wounding-bystanders-shot-by-police-near-times-square.html?smid=pl-share

#10yrsago Orange UK plumbs the depths of insulting, stupid marketing, finds a new low https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/05/orange-uk-plumbs-the-depths-of-insulting-stupid-marketing-finds-a-new-low/

#5yrsago What it’s like to be a woman reporter on a cryptocurrency cruise where nearly all the other women are sex-workers https://web.archive.org/web/20181205144647/https://breakermag.com/trapped-at-sea-with-cryptos-nouveau-riche/

#5yrsago See you in court: amid protests, shameless Wisconsin GOP neuters the incoming governor in an all-night, lame-duck session https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/1205/Wisconsin-GOP-pass-slew-of-measures-during-lameduck-session

#5yrsago British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf

#5yrsago The longest-serving Congressman in US history proposes a four fixes for American democracy https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/john-dingell-how-restore-faith-government/577222/

#5yrsago RIP, George HW Bush: a mass-murderer and war-criminal https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/george-h-w-bush-1924-2018-american-war-criminal/

#5yrsago Trump cybersecurity advisor Rudy Giuliani has no idea how the internet works https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/rudy-giuliani-doesnt-seem-to-know-how-the-internet-works.html

#5yrsago Not just breaches: Never, ever use Quora https://waxy.org/2018/12/why-you-should-never-ever-use-quora/

#5yrsago Obamacare study: 25% decline in home delinquencies among newly insured poor people https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-04/how-access-to-obamacare-cuts-late-housing-payments

#5yrsago Poland rejects the EU’s copyright censorship plans, calls it #ACTA2 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/poland-saved-europe-acta-can-they-save-us-acta2

#1yrago Monopoly’s event-horizon: The true capitalist singularity https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/05/eldritch-physics/#wouldnt-start-from-here

It’s EFF’s Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I’ve worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been — and remain — a major donor, because I’ve seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!

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