Cory Doctorow
More info
- Occupation
- Author, activist
- Organisation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Books
- Little Brother (2008)
Canadian-British author and EFF activist who argues that DRM and locked-down devices are a security problem, not merely a copyright one.
Doctorow spent years as an editor at Boing Boing and works with the EFF. His young-adult novel Little Brother (2008), about teenagers turning encryption and Tor-style tools against a surveillance state, became a gateway into security for a whole generation.
At 28C3 in 2011 he gave "The Coming War on General-Purpose Computation": since DRM only works if owners can't control their own computers, lawmakers will try to outlaw computers that obey their owners, and reporting vulnerabilities in them becomes illegal along the way. In 2022 he coined "enshittification" for platforms that first serve users, then advertisers, and finally only themselves.