Just finished William Gibson's "The Peripheral"

[__marcelo]

Mini-review to follow at some point, as usual (note to self: the jackpot is a very interesting concept). Just wanted to leave myself a reminder of that peculiar feeling when you're reading a book across many days, different things getting in the way, so you can never advance much, until you cross some sort of combined threshold of frustration and

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[__marcelo]

I assume Amazon et al have good ways for you to "subscribe" to your favorite authors; for some reason I have never used those, and rely on the usual online word-of-mouth, which isn't always as reliable as it should be.

Shifting gears is generally difficult (except when it's helpful). The more I grow old and relatively asocial, the more I envy Doc Savage's Fortress of Solitude, and his consistent use of it.

It has to be tricky, picking somebody powerful enough to want to keep something under wraps, rich enough to be able to pay you, and tame enough to prefer to do it over the long term rather than having you physically persuaded to be discreet. Who knows, maybe we have found a business model for end-to-end anonymous microtransactions!

0) Search social networks for names and pictures of people whose posts, location, etc, suggest a certain level of disposable income (e.g., overseas holidays).

1) Apply facial recognition algorithms to crawl as many pictures of them (or people looking close enough) as possible. Ideally, use something like Google's image tagger to match things like "couples trying to be discreet captured by luck in the background of a picture".

2) Request payment to withhold the picture.

3) If not paid, send the picture to close links in their social network. If paid, don't. In either case, update the image selection algorithm.