Top all-time · #123
Cory Doctorow
Personal blog · craphound.comwritingpoliticsculture
Cory Doctorow's personal blog at craphound.com covers writing, politics and culture. Since 2007, 304 different Hacker News readers have linked it 414 times, most often “Spamsolutions.txt”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link craphound.com for the spamsolutions.txt checklist, usually as a joke, and for Doctorow's essays on DRM and email. His novels Little Brother and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom are also suggested.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Little Brother, Scroogled, Down and Out and spamsolutions praised as fun, worth reading, great or classic.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Spamsolutions.txt65 people · 85 mentions · first linked 2013-08-15
- Spam Solutions28 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2008-06-20
- When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth – Cory Doctorow11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-01-02
- Little Brother10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2010-09-28
- Cory Doctorow: Microsoft Research DRM talk (2004)9 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2008-09-13
- When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (2007)9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2009-06-29
- “Printcrime” by Cory Doctorow8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2009-07-09
- Download Little Brother for Free – Cory Doctorow's Craphound.com7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-03-21
- /scroogled.html6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-05-28
- Scroogled6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-05-27
What Hacker News says?
Moxie's post reminds me that perhaps we need a Your post advocates a [crypto] approach to decentralization of the web. Your idea will not work adlibs akin to, https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Comment linking /spamsolutions.txt
on “My First Impressions of Web3”Submitted Mark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags as a story · 417 points
HN discussionPeople who are not fooled by the ideology of DRM are fully aware that DRM is a legal strategy, not a technology. That doesn't change the technological harm of DRM. Putting a DRM-shaped hole in web standards makes browsers less secure, less stable, and less maintainable. iTunes copy protection used to be broken in a few hours, Blu Ray is long since cracked. DRM is neither secure nor cryptographically sound ( http://c…
Comment linking /msftdrm.txt
on “W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns”Submitted “Printcrime” by Cory Doctorow as a story · 135 points
HN discussionThat seems uncharacteristic of Doctorow. He used(still does?) publish his books free of DRM and free to download under CC license. https://craphound.com/overclocked/download/ It would be strange for an author of Printcrime (fantastic short read from 20 years ago) to support DRM.
Comment linking /overclocked/download/
on “I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me”Submitted When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (2007) as a story · 102 points
HN discussionIt's time to trot out Cory Doctorow's talk on DRM to Microsoft (2004): https://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt > "Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the record player that can play everyone's records." I remember when Apple's M.O. was to build insanely great hardware, and make money selling that hardware. It was the Other Guys who would do shady things like bundle browsers with OSes and do things exp…
Comment linking /msftdrm.txt
on “Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair”Submitted Little Brother as a story · 81 points
HN discussion> "You might be an anti-spam kook" does need to be updated to also include cryptocurrency solutions I was scanning this thread to see if someone would post that old copypasta email solution checklist form again. Here's one version: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Comment linking /spamsolutions.txt
on “After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel”Submitted For the Win, Cory Doctrow's new novel about economics and gaming blackmarket as a story · 70 points
HN discussionProbably worth reading Doctorow's "Scroogled": https://craphound.com/scroogled.html Centralization of power in unaccountable organizations has always been a recipe for disaster. I could suggest some slogans: "Apple. Not even once." "Friends don't let friends use Apple." But I think this is a problem that merits more than slogans.
Comment linking /scroogled.html
on “Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help”Submitted All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (2005) as a story · 49 points
HN discussionHa, yeah, I based it on Cory Doctorow's anti-spam form: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Comment linking /spamsolutions.txt
on “Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge”Submitted Cory Doctorow – With a Little Help as a story · 21 points
HN discussionWhen Danny O'Brien started researching what he called "life hacks" around 2004, the giant decades-long text file was the key practice shared by most of his interviewees. But not just for to-do lists; also for research notes, ideas, and so on. https://craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt It's too bad things didn't work out for him to get the book on it finished, but the important thing is that Danny's still with us.
Comment linking /lifehacks2.txt
on “My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file”Submitted Launch of Makers, Cory Doctorow's novel on Hardware Hackers. as a story · 14 points
HN discussionWell said, we’ve come to the point where if you want the latest silicon, a very good build quality and the most hyped technology, you’ll have to give away some of your privacy. Extra points for mentioning Cory Doctorow, who is providing most of his (prophetic I dare say) books for free over at https://craphound.com (you can also buy them and support him ;-) )
Comment linking /
on “Your Computer Isn't Yours”Submitted Cory Doctorow's new book: Makers as a story · 9 points
HN discussionObligatory: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Comment linking /spamsolutions.txt
on “I just lost my wallet on the way home from work”Submitted Printcrime (2006) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHistorical note: getting hold of these scripts by chatting to various developers was the motivation for the original 2004 "lifehacks" talk[1][2]. If you ever get into an online argument over what is a "life hack" and what isn't, feel free to use short scripts like these as the canonical example. Otherwise, I am happy to be pulled into your discussion, Marshall McLuhan style[3] to adjudicate, for a very reasonable fe…
Comment linking /lifehacksetcon04.txt
on “Scripts I wrote that I use all the time”Submitted Canada shouldn't retaliate with U.S. tariffs–build a Canadian app store instead as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWhere do you find Cory Doctorow's books for free? Because here it requires me to pay: https://craphound.com/shop/ Are you sure they are free?
Comment linking /shop/
on “Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data”Submitted When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth – Cory Doctorow as a story · 4 points
HN discussionTry this one http://craphound.com/scroogled.html by Doctorow.
Comment linking /scroogled.html
on “Don’t Mess with The Google”Submitted When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSo many knee-jerk “obvious” solutions in comments here, some with gratuitous violent fantasies to boot. Might I suggest that you look at how your proposed solution compares to other, older, suggestion on how the then-new email spam problem used to be suggested to be fixed: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt Also, this is a mostly exclusively a U.S. problem. In Europe, we basically just don’t ever get “robocalls…
Comment linking /spamsolutions.txt
on “The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790”Submitted Printcrime as a story · 3 points
HN discussionLittle Brother is one of Cory Doctorow's books: https://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/ I read it and it was as fun as it was chilling.
Comment linking /littlebrother/about/
on “I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information”Submitted Download Little Brother for Free – Cory Doctorow's Craphound.com as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
