Open Buddha

I’m a big fan of Cory Doctorow, the science fiction author, DRM activist, BoingBoing editor, and former EFF evangelist.

Cory has a book coming out next spring, Little Brother, which is about a gang of hacker kids unjustly targeted by the Department of Homeland Security. In this book, Cory details a number of ways that the kids fight back with their mad skillz using real technology, as he has related it, but quite a few of the things that he has them do are real. He has mentioned on a couple of occasions that he has worked out a deal with Instructables to do a series of projects related to the things the kids do in the book to show how they could be done.

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast Cory has up of a discussion with Patrick Nielsen about the book from the Tor Books podcast. As a brief aside, Cory mentions that as part of the promotion of the book, a “Little Brother” theme is going to be made available for Firefox. He then mentions including Tor, that I’ve blogged about before, in it. (This means it isn’t just a theme but, hey…). He’s also talk about doing key signing for crypto keys at his book signings to help create a web of trust amongst book readers. I find it interesting that he would center on using Firefox to promote his book and then use these as a means to promote Tor and crypto in general. This is all the more interesting when you realize that this is a “YA” or “Young Adult” book, targeted towards kids, even if adults read it. Good times!

The book will be available online for free under a Creative Commons license, like all of Cory’s books.

I’ve included the podcast below. The Little Brother conversation starts at the fifteen minute mark if you wish to listen to it.

 

 Cory Doctorow on Facing the Digital Reality [16:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download