1) What we discovered in 2020 is that governments had been choosing not to exercise their enormous powers so that those whom globalization had enriched could exercise their own.
2) Governments that proclaimed their impecunity whenever called upon to pay for a hospital here or a school there suddenly discovered oodles of cash to pay for furlough wages, nationalize railways, take over airlines, support carmakers, and even prop up gyms and hairdressers.
3) Solvency is a political decision, at least in the rich West.
4) the mountains of concentrated private wealth we observe have very little to do with entrepreneurship
5) science depends on state aid, and its effectiveness is oblivious to its public standing
6) Liberated from competition, colossal platform companies like Amazon did astonishingly well from capitalism’s demise and its replacement by something resembling techno-feudalism.
7) There is no longer any reason why we should accept things as they are

What Mann and his fellow-enthusiasts were doing felt perfectly natural: they were trying to be more productive in a knowledge-work environment that seemed increasingly frenetic and harder to control. What they didn’t realize was that they were reacting to a profound shift in the workplace that had gone largely unnoticed.

the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it.

In 1985, two groundbreaking works of animation could be viewed, sometimes in the same hour, on MTV.
One was “Take On Me,” the A-ha video in which a woman (actress Bunty Bailey) gets yanked out of a café by lead singer Morten Harket and into a black-and-white animated realm where they fall in love and get chased by bad guys. The other was “Money for Nothing,” the Dire Straits MTV diss track that brought the two complaining blue-collar workers from the song to 3-D animated life.
The two videos demonstrate how creative and technologically ambitious videos had become halfway through the decade, a fact reflected the following year at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, where the two were the most nominated videos of the night. “Take On Me” earned 8 nominations and won six awards, while “Money for Nothing” received 11 nominations and won two Moon Men, including the big prize, Video of the Year.

You thought it started with the Intel 4004, but the tale is more complicated

Welcome to the definitive guide to the original theme music for long-running BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, composed in 1963 by Ron Grainer and realised by Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

You may now send email to a dumpster fire, literally, then watch it burn.

1. Send an email to dumpsterfire@hey.com with whatever you want to torch. Use plain text or an image attachment. PG-13 rules apply.
2. Watch on the live feed as your message is created, conveyed, and then dropped into the rolling flames.

You'll get messages on the go – during the honeymoon period, you can even turn on notifications again! – and then need to come back to them later (because you're on the go, and the messages are important).
Then, one of two things happens: either you fall back to email or the IM tool gets CC, BCC, mark unread, search and bulk messaging.
Except that it's shitty email. It's email that's locked inside a social media company's walled garden, with only one client, not federated.

The Attack Surface Lectures were a series of eight panel discussions on the themes in Cory Doctorow's novel Attack Surface, each hosted by a different bookstore and each accompanied by a different pair of guest speakers.
This program is "Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk," hosted by Andersons Books in Napierville, IL with guest-hosts Bruce Sterling and Christopher Brown. It was recorded on October 19, 2020.

There are an estimated 240 billion lines of COBOL out there, and they're the backbone of your financial life — 95% of the time when you swipe your bank card, there's COBOL involved, and every night when the work-day is over, the massive mainframe farms of big banks leap into action, using COBOL to balance the day's books.

I wanted to share my journey from start to finish to restore a 1983 IBM Model F XT mechanical keyboard to it's former glory. It includes the steps, mistakes, and additional hardware required to make it functional with a modern computer. This blog post is dedicated to my dad for teaching me about computers.

Tom Lehrer has released all his works into the public domain. We have til 2024 to download them, however, when it appears his website will go down.

Shadow of the Beast, released in 1989, became a hallmark of outstanding graphics, sound and aesthetic completeness. It wasn't much of a game, but it sold a lot of Commodore Amigas in Europe. So tied was it to that machine's peculiar 16-bit hardware that porting it to other systems became a challenge, a joke, even a form of outsider art. 

We debated the use of facial recognition in cities with the policy makers and law enforcement officials who actually use it. The discussion got to the heart of EDRi’s warnings that biometric surveillance puts limits on everyone’s rights and freedoms, amplifies discrimination, and treats all of us as experimental test subjects. This techno-driven democratic vacuum must be stopped.

I've been writing Laundry Files stories since 1999, and there's now about 1.4 million words in that universe. That's a lot of stuff: a typical novel these days is 100,000 words, but these books trend long, and this count includes 11 novels (of which, #10 comes out later this month) and some shorter work. It occurs to me that while some of you have been following them from the beginning, a lot of people come to them cold in the shape of one story or another.
So below the fold I'm going to explain the Laundry Files time line, the various sub-series that share the setting, and give a running order for the series—including short stories as well as novels.

Paolo Nespoli and Roland Miller have tapped into this collective appetite with their new book, Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station, which is being published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of continuous human life aboard the ISS.

A forthcoming report from sanctions experts at the United Nations warns people not to attend a cryptocurrency conference in North Korea next month, since it might violate sanctions. The news: The confidential report will be submitted to the UN Security Council later this month, according to Reuters. It warns that previous presentations at the same…

Cyberattacks waged against cryptocurrency exchanges are now common, but the theft of just over $7 million from the Singapore-based exchange DragonEx last March stands out for at least three reasons.  First there is the extremely elaborate phishing scheme the attackers used to get in, which involved not only fake websites but also fake crypto-trading bots.…

 In at least 20 countries, the pandemic was cited as a reason to introduce sweeping new restrictions on speech and arrest online critics. In 28, governments blocked websites or forced outlets, users, or platforms to censor information in order to suppress critical reporting, unfavorable health statistics, or other content related to the coronavirus. In at least 45 of the countries studied, people were arrested as a result of their online posts about covid-19.
Many countries are also conducting increasingly sweeping surveillance of their populations, with contact tracing or quarantine compliance apps particularly ripe for abuse in places like Bahrain, India, and Russia. In China, the authorities used high- and low-tech tools not just to manage the outbreak of the coronavirus, but also to stop people from sharing information and challenge the official narrative. 

impact will change Dimorphos’s speed by about one millimeter per second, or one five-hundredth of a mile per hour. Though Dimorphos is not about to collide with Earth, DART is intended to demonstrate the ability to deflect an asteroid like it that is headed our way, should one ever be discovered.