Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
MUSCULAR (DS-200B), located in the United Kingdom, is the name of a surveillance program jointly operated by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that was revealed by documents released by Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. GCHQ is the primary operator of the program. GCHQ and the NSA have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect the data centers of Yahoo! and Google. Substantive information about the program was made public at the end of October 2013.
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.
Hal Ronald Varian is Chief Economist at Google and holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information. Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics.
Little Brother is a novel by Cory Doctorow, published by Tor Books. It was released on April 29, 2008. The novel is about four teenagers in San Francisco who, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and BART system, defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security's attacks on the Bill of Rights. The novel is available for free on the author's website under a Creative Commons license, keeping it accessible and remixable to all.
OS X Mavericks is the 10th major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. OS X Mavericks was announced on June 10, 2013, at WWDC 2013, and was released on October 22, 2013, worldwide.
The Blackphone is a smartphone built to ensure privacy, developed by SGP Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Silent Circle. Originally, SGP Technologies was a joint venture between the makers of GeeksPhone and Silent Circle. Marketing is focused upon business users, stressing that employees often conduct business using private devices and services that are not secure and that the Blackphone service readily provides users with options that ensure confidentiality when needed. Blackphone provides Internet access through VPN. The device runs a modified version of Android called SilentOS that comes with a bundle of security-minded tools.
Reality Labs is a business and research unit of Meta Platforms that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as Quest, and online platforms such as Horizon Worlds. In June 2022, several artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives that were previously a part of Meta AI were transitioned to Reality Labs. This also includes Meta's fundamental AI Research laboratory FAIR which is now part of the Reality Labs - Research (RLR) division.
Ryan Gallagher is a Scottish investigative journalist. He writes about security and civil liberties for Bloomberg News, and previously worked for The Intercept reporting on classified documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. He has previously worked for The Intercept, The Guardian, Slate, and the Financial Times.
HTC Vive is a line of virtual and mixed reality headsets produced by HTC Corporation. The brand currently encompasses headsets designed for use with personal computers as well as standalone headsets such as the Vive Focus line, Vive Flow glasses, and the Vive Elite XR mixed reality headset.
Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google, which also includes Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites and Google Keep. Google Docs is accessible via an internet browser as a web-based application and is also available as a mobile app on Android and iOS and as a desktop application on Google's ChromeOS.
Maciej Cegłowski is a Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic, based in San Francisco, California. He is the owner of the bookmarking service Pinboard, which he calls a social bookmarking site for introverts.
Daydream is a discontinued virtual reality (VR) platform which was developed by Google, primarily for use with a headset into which a smartphone is inserted. It is available for select phones running the Android mobile operating system that meet the platform's software and hardware requirements. Daydream was announced at the Google I/O developer conference in May 2016, and the first headset, the Daydream View, was released on November 10, 2016. To use the platform, users place their phone into the back of a headset, run Daydream-compatible mobile apps, and view content through the viewer's lenses.
Archangel, also written as William Gibson Archangel or William Gibson's Archangel, is a five-issue limited series comic book that was created by William Gibson and Michael St. John Smith, written by William Gibson, illustrated by Butch Guice and story-edited by Michael Benedetto. It is Gibson's first comic book series, which is set in an alternative version of 2016 in which the Vice President of America travels back in time to 1945 to secure power.
The use of stingrays by United States law enforcement is an investigative technique used by both federal and local law enforcement in the United States to obtain information from cell phones by mimicking a cell phone tower. The devices which accomplish this are generically known as IMSI-catchers, but are commonly called stingrays, a brand sold by the Harris Corporation.
The Quest 2 is a virtual reality (VR) headset developed by Reality Labs, a division of Meta Platforms. It was unveiled on September 16, 2020, and released on October 13 as the Oculus Quest 2. It was then rebranded as the Meta Quest 2 in 2022, as part of a company-wide phase-out of the Oculus brand following the rebranding of Facebook, Inc. as Meta.
Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is a type of web tracking. It groups people into "cohorts" based on their browsing history for the purpose of interest-based advertising. FLoC was being developed as a part of Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative, which includes several other advertising-related technologies with bird-themed names. Despite "federated learning" in the name, FLoC does not utilize any federated learning.
Sherwin Siy was an American lawyer and activist who served as the lead public policy manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. He was an adjunct lecturer at George Washington University Law School and an adjunct instructor at American University School of Communication. He previously served as vice-president of legal affairs at the Washington, D.C.-based digital rights group Public Knowledge and as a special counsel for the Federal Communications Commission. He died of natural causes in North Carolina on July 7, 2021.
The Meta Quest Pro is a mixed reality (MR) headset developed by Reality Labs, a division of Meta Platforms.
Moderator Mayhem is a casual web-based video game designed by Engine, Randy Lubin, and Mike Masnick of Techdirt targeted towards policymakers. It was published in May 2023. The game is about the challenges of content moderation of user-generated content on social media.
