Tale of Jailbreaking Disobedient IoT Appliances Shortlisted for the National Canada Reads Prize

In Unauthorized Bread, a novella by EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow published in his 2019 Tor Books collection Radicalized, a refugee named Salima leads a mass jailbreaking of the locked-down Internet of Things appliances in a subsidized housing unit in Boston. With this act, Salima and others risk eviction, felony prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and deportation to the countries they fled in fear of their lives.

Radicalized has just been named a finalist in Canada Reads, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s national book prize. In honor of the occasion, Ars Technica has published Unauthorized Bread in full.

Unauthorized Bread is also in development for TV by Topic, parent company of The Intercept, and is being adapted as a young adult graphic novel by Firstsecond, in collaboration with the comics creator Jennifer Doyle.

Doctorow returned to EFF in 2015 to fight Digital Rights Management, and helped with our suit to overturn the law that restricts removing or tampering with DRM. Unauthorized Bread and Radicalized represent another front in our battle for a free, fair and open tech world: using stories to make urgent but abstract policy questions real and vivid to broad audiences. Congratulations, Cory!