As some of you have discovered, Online Security Demigod Bruce Schneier has taken note of my recent appearance before the IAPP. He has some nice things to say about the things I said. Or at least, about the things he thinks I said. The problem is, he gleaned those things not from my reportage, but […]
The Prerequisite for Cuteness
Category: On the Road, public interfaceIt’s been a while since I was in Japan. The last time I posted from Kawasaki, HAL-Con 2014 had not even begun— and in the weeks since elapsed, other, more imminent things have commanded my attention.But when I was there, man. Nothing commanded my attention in Japan more than Japan. There were the public service […]
A Suicide Bomber’s Guide to Online Privacy
Category: public interfaceYou know this place. It’s cozy, it’s out of the way. It’s one of the Internet’s innumerable back alleys, known to but a few except for those brief spikes when I get arrested or nearly die of some exotic disease. So when I go off on one of my rants— say, about Obama’s surveillance state […]
The Man I Am Today.
Category: eulogySo much I was saving up. The conclusion of the Kawasaki Chronicles. Experimental protocols for dealing with AI-equipped toilets. Fiblets from upcoming stories in Tor.com and Neil Clarke’s latest anthology. Even some award that J. Pekka Mäkelä’s translation of Blindsight just won over in Finland. I was saving it all up for my return to […]
The Toilenator
Category: On the Road, public interfaceBefore I forget; they’ve posted my bio over on the IAPP website, so I guess it’s official: I’m one of three (and by far the least qualified) keynote speakers at the International Association of Privacy Professionals’s Canadian symposium next month. Apparently one of the organizers was taken by my panopticon rant of a few weeks […]
BOGzilla
Category: On the Road, public interface, writing newsYou’ll be hearing from me fleetingly if at all over the next few days— I’m off to Kawasaki for HAL-Con 2014, with a mixture of fear and excitement and the profound hope that I’ll be able to find my way home again afterward. One nifty thing the HAL Con folks do is put out […]
The Heinlein Hormone
Category: biology, neuro, sociobiologyYou all remember Starship Troopers, right? That slim little YA contained a number of beer-worthy ideas, but the one that really stuck with me was the idea of earned citizenship— that the only people allowed to vote, or hold public office, were those who’d proven they could put society’s interests ahead of their own. Heinlein’s […]
Tyson in the Ring
Category: ink on art, reviews, sciliticsDidn’t Kill him. Didn’t hug him. I laughed a lot, though. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave the inaugural Dunlap Award lecture over at the University of Toronto on Friday. A couple of tickets dropped into my hands at the last moment, a bit of karma for a minor role I’d played at the recent Toronto Science […]
Rhetorical
Category: ink on art, rantI saw Particle Fever the other night. My movie buddy didn’t like it as much as I did: she thought the music was intrusive, and she didn’t learn anything new about the science. I did— I learned that Supersymmetry and the Multiverse were mutually exclusive theories, which had somehow failed to sink in even after […]
NSA. BSG. AAAS. FOAD.
Category: rant, sciliticsBack in 2003 I attended a talk by David Brin, at Worldcon here in Toronto. Brin had blurbed Starfish; to say I was favorably disposed towards the man would be an understatement. And yet I found myself increasingly skeptical as he spoke out in favor of ubiquitous surveillance: the “Transparent Society”, he called it, and […]