Quinn Norton (born 1973) is a Washington DC-based journalist, photographer and blogger covering hacker culture, intellectual property and copyright issues, and the Internet. Up until early 2009, she lived and worked in San Francisco, where she was married to journalist Danny O'Brien. Her work has appeared in Wired News, The Guardian, and O'Reilly Media publications such as Make magazine. She has also been a long-time fixture at O'Reilly's Foo Camp. She has recently became a columnist for Maximum PC magazine, primarily on the subject of copyright.
Norton has given a number of talks at technology conferences on the topic of body augmentation, usually under the title "Body Hacking". As part of her research, she had a magnet implanted in the tip of her ring finger, enabling her to sense magnetic fields. The magnet eventually shattered and the pieces were later removed.
Quinn has continued her experimentation with additional senses by helping to test Adam Skory's and Eric Boyd's North Paw device which is based on the feelSpace project. The Northpaw anklet is wholly electronic in nature as opposed to her experiment with an implanted rare earth magnet. It's a series of vibrating motors fashioned into a band with an electronic compass which continuously activates the northernmost buzzer. It doesn't convey the same electromagnetic sense as her original implant. (Skory and Boyd have made the Northpaw device available as a kit.)
Quinn's Symphonic Conundrum is a conceptual prank involving writing and executing a computer program that would output all possible melodies, and then copyrighting the resulting score. Any music made afterwards would, depending on licensing terms, therefore be a copyright violation. One possibility is that the completed work would be licensed under a noncommercial license, thereby providing that people could make music, but never again be able to sell it.