I knew Cory Doctorow from the now-ancient early net lists the Cypherpunks and the Extropians - he was just a teenager then - the early days of teh net, most of you folks will never appreciate what you missed.

Cory has been releasing his books Creative Commons for a while now. I buy some paper copies of his works, and get others as ebooks for free - he is always a pleasure to read. Little Brother was great, a young adult novel with bite and usability, heck, all his stuff is great.

He's released his latest book, a collection of short stories - some excellent stuff!

Oh yeah - you can also get tthese stories as mp3 audiobooks - pop them right into your player!

http://craphound.com/

http://craphound.com/?cat=5

http://craphound.com/walh/e-book/browse-all-versions

http://craphound.com/walh/Cory_Doctorow_-_With_a_Little_Help.pdf

Here's a snippet:

He had to tell her the rest, of course. You couldn't understand the Order unless you understood
the rest. “I'm a screwup, Posy. Or at least, I was. We all were. Smart and motivated
and promising, but just a wretched person to be around. Angry, bitter, all those smarts
turned on biting the heads off of the people who were dumb enough to care about me or
employ me. And so smart that I could talk myself into believing that it was all everyone
else's fault, the idiots. It took instrumentation, empiricism, to get me to understand the
patterns of my own life, to master my life, to become the person I wanted to be.”

“Well, you seem like a perfectly nice young man now,” Posy said.

That was clearly his cue to go, and he'd changed into a fresh set of trousers, but he couldn't
go, not until he picked apart something she'd said earlier. “Why did you think I was a
snitch?”

“I think you know that very well, Lawrence,” she said. “I can't imagine someone who's so
into measuring and understanding the world could possibly have missed it.”

Now he knew what she was talking about. “We just do contract work for the Securitat.
It's just one of the ways the Order sustains itself.” The founders had gone into business
refilling toner cartridges, which was like the 21st century equivalent of keeping bees or
brewing dark, thick beer. They'd branched out into remote IT administration, then into
data-mining and security, which was a natural for people with Order training. “But it's all
anonymized. We don't snitch on people. We report on anomalous events. We do it for lots
of different companies, too -- not just the Securitat.”

Posy walked over to the window behind her small dining room table, rolling away a couple
of handsome old chairs on castors to reach it. She looked down over the billion lights of
Manhattan, stretching all the way downtown to Brooklyn. She motioned to him to come
over, and he squeezed in beside her. They were on the twenty-third floor, and it had been
many years since he'd stood this high and looked down. The world is different from high
up.

“There,” she said, pointing at an apartment building across the way. “There, you see it?
With the broken windows?” He saw it, the windows covered in cardboard. “They took them
away last week. I don't know why. You never know why. You become a person of interest
and they take you away and then later, they always find a reason to keep you away.”
Lawrence's hackles were coming up. He found stuff that didn't belong in the data -- he
didn't arrest people. “So if they always find a reason to keep you away, doesn't that mean
--”

She looked like she wanted to slap him and he took a step back. “We're all guilty of
something, Lawrence. That's how the game is rigged. Look closely at anyone's life and
you'll find, what, a little black-marketeering, a copyright infringement, some cash economy
business with unreported income, something obscene in your Internet use, something in
your bloodstream that shouldn't be there. I bought that sofa from a cop, Lawrence, bought
it ten years ago when he was leaving the building. He didn't give me a receipt and didn't
collect tax, and technically that makes us offenders.” She slapped the radiator. “I overrode
the governor on this ten minutes after they installed it. Everyone does it. They make it
easy -- you just stick a penny between two contacts and hey presto, the city can't turn your
heat down anymore. They wouldn't make it so easy if they didn't expect everyone to do it
-- and once everyone's done it, we're all guilty.

“The people across the street, they were Pakistani or maybe Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi. I'd
see the wife at the service laundry. Nice professional lady, always lugging around a couple
kids on their way to or from day-care. She --” Posy broke off and stared again. “I once saw
her reach for her change and her sleeve rode up and there was a number tattooed there,
there on her wrist.” Posy shuddered. “When they took her and her husband and their kids,
she stood at the window and pounded at it and screamed for help. You could hear her
from here.”

“That's terrible,” Lawrence said. “But what does it have to do with the Order?”

She sat back down. “For someone who is supposed to know himself, you're not very good
at connecting the dots.”

Lawrence stood up. He felt an obscure need to apologize. Instead, he thanked her and
put his glass in the sink. She shook his hand solemnly.

“Take care out there,” she said. “Good luck finding your escapee.”