book
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow: Book Review
TL;DR – Book is free, great, and worth your time. Get it here.
Finished the book and was blown away. My eyes are open. Devoured the book in two days. Funny how books relate to real life. Fiction is relatable. This book will force you to think seriously about privacy, cyber security, and your rights.
Parts I Liked:
… The afterword for this book has lots of resources for increasing your online freedom, blocking the snoops and evading the censorware blocks.
… Web of trust is one of those cool crypto things that I’d read about but never tried. It was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you could talk to the people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in
… This is called the man-in-the-middle attack and if you think about it, it’s pretty scary. Someone who man-in-the-middles your communications can trick you in any of a thousand ways.
… I wrote this, and no one else. No one could have tampered with it or changed it.
Thoughts
Read the entire book through once. Go back over it and start implementing security protocols as needed. Determine your threat model. Learn more about privacy and security. It’s fun.
Next Up
Homeland by Cory Doctorow
Show Your Work by Austin Kleon – Book Review
Just finished reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Not an affiliate link). Overall, great book. Filled with advice, actionable knowledge, and funny insights.
Here’s what Amazon says: Show Your Work! is about why generosity trumps genius. It’s about getting findable, about using the network instead of wasting time “networking.” It’s not self-promotion, it’s self-discovery―let others into your process, then let them steal from you. Filled with illustrations, quotes, stories, and examples,Show Your Work! offers ten transformative rules for being open, generous, brave, productive.
Bookmarked Pages:
Think Process, Not Product
Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities
Tell Good Stories
Teach What You Know
Parts I liked:
… have built sharing into their routine.
Become a documentarian of what you do.
Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal –
Focus on days.
What are you working on?
Don’t show your lunch or your latte; show your work. (emphasis mine)
“… draw people’s attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.”
Attribution is about putting little museum labels next to the stuff you share.
You get a great idea, you go through the hard work of executing the idea, and then you release the idea out into the world, coming to a win, lose, or draw.
pitches. They’re stories with the endings chopped off.
Choose You Own Adventure book … turn your listener into the hero …
Tell the truth and tell it with dignity and self-respect.
Strike all adjectives from your bio. Just state the facts.
“Make people better at something they want to be better at.”
If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community.
“the continual projection of interest.”
Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.
Put out a lot of work.
They give away great stuff on their sites, they collect emails, and then when they have something remarkable to share or sell, they send an email. (emphasis mine)
They all have been able to persevere, regardless of success or failure.
Recommendation:
Buy Now! Read it from front to back. Bookmark, write in the margins, and implement the strategies. I am.
- https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076117897X/wwwaustinkleo-20/ref=nosim/ (Not an affiliate link)