Today’s links Petard, Part III: The Termite Mound is revealed as the Roach Motel. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Petard, Part III (permalink) Last week, Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/ Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/ I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments: https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278 https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292 https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293 https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04 And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts. Here’s part one: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one Here’s part two: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two And now, onto part three: One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they’d gotten their start as…Pluralistic: Petard, Part III (01 Feb 2025)