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Shredded confidential police documents discovered in Macy's parade confetti

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:03:08 +0000

Students from Tufts University who attended this year's Macy's Parade were showered with confetti made from shredded, confidential Nassau County police files. The shreds revealed the identities of undercover officers, including their SSNs and bank details.

"It landed on her shoulder," Finkelstein said, "and it says 'SSN' and it's written like a Social Security number, and we're like, 'That's really bizarre.'"
Finkelstein, a Tufts University freshman, said he and his friends were concerned and picked up more confetti that had fallen around them.
"There are phone numbers, addresses, more Social Security numbers, license plate numbers and then we find all these incident reports from police."
The documents were apparently from the Nassau County Police Department.

Police documents found in parade confetti [UPI] (via /.)

(Image: IMG_2528.JPG, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from supa_pedro's photostream)

Oatmeal fundraiser for Tesla museum is a triumph

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 17:00:59 +0000

The Oatmeal's campaign to raise funds to preserve and develop the 16 acre plot in Wardenclyffe, Long Island where Nikola Tesla's lab once stood has concluded successfully. The fundraiser aimed to raise $850,000 and ended up with $1.4 million, with donations from over 100 countries. The money was given to a group called The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, and was used to buy the land from the Agfa Corporation, its erstwhile owner.

With The Oatmeal's help, nonprofit buys property to build a Tesla Museum

(Image: Tesla Science Center)

Video from the Stross and Doctorow show at MakerBot in Brooklyn

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 23:03:29 +0000

Joly MacFie captured video of Charlie Stross's and my tour-stop at Brooklyn's MakerBot this week. We were there in support of our new novel Rapture of the Nerds, and did a talk, reading and Q&A that touched on the Singularity, its precedents, its discontents, and its inherent comedy -- all while 3D printers chattered in the background. And afterwards everyone got 3D printed miniatures of our heads!

We're making our final stops of tour tomorrow -- Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! -- in Rochester, NY, at RIT. Tell your friends!

Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross - The Rapture of the Nerds (Thanks, Joly!)

See you in Rochester on Sunday!

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 12:37:08 +0000

Charlie Stross and I conclude our whirlwind transhumanist comedy two-act on Sunday to support our new novel Rapture of the Nerds with appearances at RIT in Rochester, and the IEEE International Games Innovation Conference 2012. Be there or be consigned to the scrapheap of history!

Charlie Stross and Cory in Brookline, MA tonight

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 13:51:17 +0000

Charlie Stross and I will be at the Brookline Booksmith tonight at 7PM! It's the second-to-last stop on our quick tour for Rapture of the Nerds -- the last stop is this weekend in Rochester, NY. Be there or be pre-posthuman!

Delta refuses boarding to Poop Strong man for flying while brown and wearing the security theater shirt I designed

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 22:00:23 +0000

Back in 2007, I designed a shirt for Woot! that featured a screaming eagle clutching an unlaced shoe and a crushed water bottle, surrounded by the motto MOISTURE BOMBS ZOMG TERRORISTS ZOMG GONNA KILL US ALL ZOMG ZOMG ALERT LEVEL BLOODRED RUN RUN TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES. Among the lucky owners of this garment is Arijit "Poop Strong" Guha, who proudly wore it this week as he headed for a Delta flight from Buffalo-Niagara International Airport to his home in Phoenix.

But it was not to be. First, the ~~TSA~~ Delta agents questioned him closely about the shirt, and made him agree to change it, submit to a secondary screening and board last. He complied with these rules, but then he was pulled aside by multiple Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority cops, more TSA, and a Delta official and searched again. No one found anything untoward, but --

The Delta official told Arijit he wouldn't be allowed to board, and neither would his wife. Period.

When Arijit complained about this, the Niagara Transport cops got "aggressive," questioning him further and noting in their discussions that "he looks foreign." Now Arijit understood that the problem was Flying While Brown. The Niagara Transport cops had lots of dumb questions, like why Arijit's wife hadn't taken his last name, why he had opted out of the pornoscanner, and then they sicced the drug-seeking dogs on him.

Delta rebooked them for a flight the next day, but didn't offer Arijit and his wife a hotel room overnight -- and when they turned up at the airport, they discovered that their "confirmed" seats weren't confirmed, and unless eight passengers on the oversold flight agreed to fly later, they wouldn't be getting on that plane, either.

It turns out that Delta has a pattern of removing brown people from its airplanes when its pilots and passengers evince thinly veiled (or obvious) racist fears, too.

Having been booted from our flight, the transit police now began to aggressively question us. At one point, I was asked where my brother lives (he was the one who gifted me the shirt). A bit surprised by the irrelevant question, I paused for a moment before answering.
“You had to think about that one. How come?,” she asked. I explained he recently moved. “Where'd he move from?” “Michigan,” I respond. “Michigan, what's that?,” she says. At this point, the main TSA agent who'd questioned me earlier interjected: “He said ‘Michigan’.” Unable to withhold my snark, I responded with an eye-rolling sneer: “You've never heard of Michigan?”
This response did not please her partner, a transit cop named Mark. Mark grabbed his walkie-talkie and alerted his supervisor and proceeded to request that he be granted permission to question me further in a private room. His justification?: “First he hesitated, then he gave a stupid answer.” Michigan, my friends, is a stupid answer.
And then, he decided to drop any façade of fair treatment: the veil was lifted, this was about who I was and how I looked: “And he looks foreign.”
Well, Buffalo is pretty close to Canada, so maybe he thought I looked Canadian. What does a Canadian look like anyway? Whatever it is, I’m sure that’s precisely what he was thinking. Certainly he wasn’t implying that dark-skinned people are not real Americans and that white people are the only true Americans. (I wonder what those who settled this land well before the arrival of Europeans would have to say about that.)

Arijit Vs. Delta

Stross and Doctorow on the road: the Rapture of the Nerds tour in Lexington, Brooklyn, Brookline, Rochester

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:48:13 +0000

Charlie Stross and I are hitting the road this September 5-9 for a mini, post-Burning Man, post-WorldCon book-tour for our collaborative comic novel of the Singularity called Rapture of the Nerds. We're coming to Lexington, KY; Brooklyn, NY (a stop at MakerBot's BotCave, where there will be a very special surprise!), Brookline, MA, and Rochester, NY. I've never been to Lexington or Brookline, so this is doubly exciting to me!

And tonight, of course, I'm appearing (solo) at a Long Now talk in San Francisco.

Announcing the Tour for Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’s The Rapture of the Nerds

XKCD wedding cake

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 28 May 2012 19:02:27 +0000

Mike sez, "Photographed a wedding reception in upstate NY this weekend -- the cake was awesome! The couple are both geeks and have three geeky teenaged daughters who helped design it.... Take a look at the cell phone video!"

Cameraphone MP4 video
(Thanks, Mike!

Kodak set us up the bomb: kept a nuclear reactor in the basement

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:24 +0000

As Kodak stumbles through its bankruptcy, all sorts of weird facts are surfacing, like the news that the company had its own nuclear reactor, producing weapons-grade isotopes. It was installed for neutron imaging experiments in 1974, and while the feds were duly notified, it doesn't look like there was ever a public announcement -- nor was there any notice given to the local firefighters who'd have turned up if anything ever went wrong. If only I'd known about this when writing Makers (which concerns itself with hedge fundies who buy up and strip down Kodak and Duracell), think of the subplots I could have written!

From the Democrat and Chronicle piece by Steve Orr:

Company spokesman Christopher Veronda said he could find no record that Kodak ever made a public announcement of the facility. He also wasn’t sure whether the company had ever notified local police, fire or hazardous-materials officials.
Current city of Rochester officials, whose personnel might have been summoned to Building 82 had an untoward incident occurred, said they were in the dark. Monroe County officials did not provide comment despite several requests.
The Democrat and Chronicle learned of the facility when an employee happened to mention it to a reporter a few months ago.
The recent silence was by design. Detailed information about nuclear power plants and other entities with radioactive material has been restricted since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Did you know? Kodak Park had a nuclear reactor

(Image: Nuclear Regulatory Commission)