Today's links

VW wouldn't help find kidnapped child because his mother wasn't paying for find-my-car subscription: All the harms of surveillance, none of the benefits.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

A blue vintage VW beetle speeds down a highway; a crying baby is pressed against the back driver's-side window. In the sky overhead is the red glaring eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, emblazoned with the VW logo. The eye is projecting a beam of red light that has enveloped the car.

VW wouldn't help find kidnapped child because his mother wasn't paying for find-my-car subscription (permalink)

The masked car-thieves who stole a Volkswagen SUV in Lake County, IL didn't know that there was a two-year-old child in the back seat – but that's no excuse. A violent car-theft has the potential to hurt or kill people, after all.

Likewise, the VW execs who decided to nonconsensually track the location of every driver and sell that data to shady brokers – but to deny car owners access to that data unless they paid for a "find my car" subscription – didn't foresee that their cheap, bumbling subcontractors would refuse the local sheriff's pleas to locate the car with the kidnapped toddler.

And yet, here we are. Like most (all?) major car makers, Volkswagen has filled its vehicles with surveillance gear, and has a hot side-hustle as a funnel for the data-brokerage industry.

After the masked man jumped out of a stolen BMW and leapt into the VW SUV to steal it, the child's mother – who had been occupied bringing her other child inside her home – tried to save her two year old, who was still in the back seat. The thief "battered" her and drove off. She called 911.

The local sheriff called Volkswagen and begged them to track the car. VW refused, citing the fact that the mother had not paid for the $150 find-my-car subscription after the free trial period expired. Eventually, VW relented and called back with the location data – but not until after the stolen car had been found and the child had been retrieved.

Now that this idiotic story is in the news, VW is appropriately contrite. An anonymous company spokesman blamed the incident on "a serious breach" of company policy and threw their subcontractor under the (micro)bus, blaming it on them.

This is truly the worst of all worlds: Volkswagen is a company that has internal capacity to build innovative IT systems. Once upon a time, they had the in-house tech talent to build the "cheat device" behind Dieselgate, the means by which they turned millions of diesel vehicles into rolling gas-chambers, emitting lethal quantities of NOX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

But on the other hand, VW doesn't have the internal capacity to operate Car-Net, it's unimaginatively-named, $150/year location surveillance system. That gets subbed out to a contractor who can't be relied on to locate a literal kidnapped child.

The IT adventures that car companies get up to give farce a bad name. Ferraris have "anti-tampering" kill-switches that immobilize cars if they suspect a third-party mechanic is working on them. When one of these tripped during a child-seat installation in an underground parking garage, the $500k car locked its transmission and refused to unlock it – and the car was so far underground that its cellular modem couldn't receive the unlock code, permanently stranding it:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#drm

BMW, meanwhile, is eagerly building out "innovations" like subscription steering-wheel heaters:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Big Car has loaded our rides up with so much surveillance gear that they were able to run scare ads opposing Massachusetts's Right to Repair ballot initiative, warning Bay Staters that if third parties could access the data in their cars, it would lead to their literal murders:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

In short: the automotive sector has filled our cars with surveillance gear, but that data is only reliably available to commercial data-brokers and hackers who breach Big Cars' massive data repositories. Big Car has the IT capacity to fill our cars with cheat devices – but not the capacity to operate an efficient surveillance system to use in real emergencies. Big Car says that giving you control over your car will result in your murder – but when a child's life is on the line, they can't give you access to your own car's location.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Upsilon Andromedae, CC BY 2.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Amazon Removes Books From Kindle Unlimited After They Appear on Pirate Sites https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-removes-books-from-kindle-unlimited-after-they-appear-on-pirate-sites-230206/ (h/t Slashdot)
Future Fords Could Repossess Themselves and Drive Away if You Miss Payments https://www.thedrive.com/news/future-fords-could-repossess-themselves-and-drive-away-if-you-miss-payments (h/t Slashdot)

A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Ipsos-Reid sez P2P doesn’t hurt record sales https://web.archive.org/web/20030416231449/http://www.ipsos-na.com/dsp_tempo.cfm

#20yrsago Copyright Office posts anti-circumvention comments https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2003/reply/reply1.html

#20yrsago Weird confluence of Orthodox Judiasm and proprietary software in London https://web.archive.org/web/20030314104647/http://cheerleader.yoz.com/archives/000433.html

#20yrsago Skunk Works: Enron’s spiritual forebears https://www.wired.com/2003/03/silent-but-deadly/

#15yrsago Loony evangelical says he engineered Canadian film tax-credit changes that will doom edgy indie movies https://web.archive.org/web/20080304152637/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080229.wculture29/BNStory/National/home

#15yrsago Record companies don’t share money extorted from file-sharing fans with artists https://nypost.com/2008/02/27/infringement/

#15yrsago Shrine to bragging, deadly Internet “mall ninja” https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/

#15yrsago Clay Shirky’s masterpiece: Here Comes Everybody https://memex.craphound.com/2008/02/28/clay-shirkys-masterpiece-here-comes-everybody/

#10yrsago Bestiary of unimportant envelopes that look important https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2013/envelopes/

#5yrsago My short story about better cities, where networks give us the freedom to schedule our lives to avoid heat-waves and traffic jams https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/the-city-of-coordinated-leisure/554276/

#5yrsago The latest “reflection attack” gooses Denial of Service attacks by a factor of 51,000 https://blog.cloudflare.com/memcrashed-major-amplification-attacks-from-port-11211/

#5yrsago How citizenship-for-sale and statelessness change cities https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/virtual-citizenship-for-sale/553733/

Colophon (permalink)

Currently writing:

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 521 words (110076 words total)
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION
Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION

Latest podcast: Twiddler https://craphound.com/news/2023/02/27/twiddler/

Upcoming appearances:

Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy (Brussels), Mar 2
https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration
Elevate Festival (Graz), Mar 3
https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/
Seize the Means of Computation (TU Wein), Mar 7
https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/news/2373
UT School of Design and Creative Technologies (Austin), Mar 9
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-buckman-center-presents-cory-doctorow-tickets-526627556197
Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture (U Manitoba), Mar 9
https://eventscalendar.umanitoba.ca/site/science/event/ethics-of-emerging-technology-lecture—rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
SXSW Chokepoint Capitalism reading (Austin), Mar 10
https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP1143284

Recent appearances:

ANU/Canberra Times Meet The Author
https://soundcloud.com/experience_anu/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow?si=67bcf6db3c4742bd973152e4b1b4e313
The Gould Standard
https://pod.link/thegouldstandard/episode/8648b67fb7a6ccbf49a7d5406f8582c7
ABC Radio National:
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/chokepoint-capitalism/101973108

Latest books:

"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books:

Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023

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