In the Q&A of Blaine’s ATmosphereConf talk someone made a book recommendation of Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.

I grabbed it on Libby.

Here’s the description by the off-camera person who made the recommendation:

I have a science fiction book recommendation, and we’ve already been handing some out — Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Who’s read that? A few handful of people? It was written in 2006 and is set in a future world of ubiquitous computing. Every device has a secure enclave.

Apparently, we get a world government in the future — which is awesome — but it also has back doors into all the secure enclaves, which is… awkward.

A few hacker types have access to hardware in Quito and Paraguay that includes the secure enclave without the back door. Tessa has hinted, and Blaine has hinted — these are things we also need to talk about. It’s something this community should continue to think about as well. It’s part of the extended work, but it’s a lot.

Right now, in Canada, I can’t send a packet from Vancouver to Toronto — never mind the Atlantic provinces — without routing through U.S. networks.

I think we’ll just all sit with these thoughts.

I’m not sure how I want to include books here, so I’m just going to start including them. Not sure what I want to do when a book moves from “to read” to “reading” to “read”. I’ll probably just update this post? If I do that I’ll probably filter them out of the main feed.