Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues Is Out Now
Red Team Blues, the latest novel from my old friend Cory Doctorow, is out today, the first in his new series of near-future techno-thrillers. The protagonist, Martin Hench, is a 67-year-old forensic accountant on the verge of retirement, doing one last big job for an old friend.
Hench spent his career on the red team, in the cybersecurity meaning of the word, identifying vulnerabilities and exploiting weaknesses to track down crooks and cheats hiding and laundering their money. But when the job goes sideways, he’s forced to switch to the blue team, going on the defense and thinking like his attackers to stay alive.
I just finished the advance copy Cory sent me this morning and it’s a wild ride. It reminds me of some of my favorite detective noir, from The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown, but in a near-future setting grounded in real technology.
The plot centers around a critical piece of digital information: the signing keys for the secure enclaves on mobile devices, which are used in the book to verify transactions on a fictional cryptocurrency ledger. This approach to trustless computing is a risky idea for reasons that quickly become clear, and explained well in cryptographer Matthew Green’s book review.
Cory’s syndicated the first chapter in five parts on Pluralistic, and you can buy it today. (It’s also available in audiobook form read by Wil Wheaton, crowdfunded without DRM, naturally.)
If you’re in the Portland area, Cory and I will be talking about the book at Powell’s at Cedar Hills on Tuesday, May 2. If you’re not in Portland, his book tour kicks off today in San Diego, with dates across the U.S. and Canada. Hope to see you there!
Four-Byte Burger
— Ahoy’s Stuart Brown painstakingly recreates a piece of 1985 pixel art from a printed photo of an Amiga screen #Imgur is banning porn and purging old anonymous uploads on May 15
— the default image host for Reddit’s early years, this will damage the archives like the yfrog/tinypic shutdowns did to Twitter #Buzzfeed News is shutting down, laying off 15% of staff
— this is a big loss, they did some amazing journalism in an unlikely place #WaPo analysis of websites in Google’s C4 dataset, used by several LLMs
— a massive swath of the web derived from Common Crawl data, including my own site, ranked 169,716th via Simon Willison #This Mom Didn’t Know She Was In A $250K Candy Crush Tournament, But She’s Killing It
— the 48-year-old Columbus, Ohio mother of three is “one of the most successful esports athletes in the entire country” #AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google
— must-read Nilay Patel post about the copyright conflict between Google’s AI efforts and YouTube’s relationships with publishers #Where In the USA Is This?
— guess the spot where five different photos were taken in The Pudding’s new daily guessing game via @kottke #The Internet Is Suddenly Full Of AI-Generated Hip-Hop
— Chris Stokel-Walker on so-vits-svc, the singing voice conversion AI model behind Ghostwriter, the “lost” Oasis album, and many more #Aaron A. Reed on The Gostak
— a fascinating 2001 interactive fiction game where you slowly learn an invented language #Ghostwriter’s AI-voiced Drake/The Weeknd song is going viral
— hiding their identity is a good idea, makes it harder for labels to serve the subpoena #Montana House votes to completely ban TikTok in the state
— the first U.S. state to pass legislation banning TikTok on all personal devices #Doogie Typer
— like Hacker Typer, but for Doogie Howser’s journal entries; don’t miss the settings via b3ta #Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar
— “When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar.” #Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages
— fine-tuning LLaMa’s privacy-friendly uncensored model on messages stored in iMessage’s SQLite db via Simon Willison #The Ringer interviews Paul Dochney, the Los Angeles writer behind Twitter legend Dril
— his first interview not in character #Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee, creator of the Fold-In, dies at 102
— from April 1964 to April 2013, only one issue of Mad was published without new material from the comics legend #Last Squeak Tonight
— John Oliver’s web-only episode about the seedy underbelly of Chuck E. Cheese via MetaFilter #Garbage Day on the rise of TikTok bait videos
— satirical or not, it’s staged content optimized to annoy people into engaging with it to game the algorithm #Pentagon’s Ukraine war plans leaked on Minecraft Discord before Telegram and Twitter
— related: classified military documents have repeatedly leaked on the War Thunder forums #Big Tech’s big downgrade
— Google, Meta, and Amazon are focused on chasing trends to appease Wall Street, while letting their core products wither #The history of Easter eggs in software
— the earliest known is an anti-war message in a text editor for the PDP-6, hidden in 1968 but only discovered in 2021 #Restoring the original Wilhelm Scream recording session
— audio preservationist Craig Smith had to bake the Ampex tapes in an oven to make them stable enough to transfer via @wildtrax1 #“There was no up, there was no down, there was no side to side”
— a little poem about the universe before the Big Bang; don’t miss the remix #Chasing rainbows
— for The Verge, I wrote about my personal experience being colorblind and they did a beautiful job on the design #Twitter cuts off Cheap Bots Done Quick, Substack, Feedbin, Thread Reader, and others from API
— CBDQ was responsible for over 58,000 joyfully weird Twitter bots during its eight year run #Dan Gillmor on why (and how) journalists should leave Twitter for Mastodon
— Elon Musk despises journalists, as his recent targeting of the NYT and NPR demonstrates, but the inertia is real #ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment lawsuit about a real law professor
— the tendency for LLMs to generate fake facts, and fake sources to back it up, can have devastating real-world consequences #Clarence Thomas secretly accepted luxury trips from major GOP donor
— ProPublica exposes his clear violations of disclosure laws, but Supreme Court justices can only be removed by impeachment #The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in Every Modern Copy of macOS
While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.
I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version, Ventura (13.3), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier. Update: As confirmed by 9to5Mac, it was removed in macOS Ventura 13.4 beta 3.
See for Yourself
If you’re on a Mac, open a Terminal and type the following command:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
If you’re on macOS 10.14 or later, the Bitcoin PDF should immediately open in Preview.