The Worms - new short story

I have a new short story up at Dogmatika. It's called "The Worms" and, the first time I opened the page, Google had helpfully added an advert for vet services for dogs, hence allaying my fears about the awesome artificial intelligence they are building. Anyway, have a read, enjoy or fail to enjoy, complain vociferously abut the minutes of your life I have wasted. That alone should make it worth your time...

More Phorm

Spooky. Within 45 minutes of posting about "Black Monday" Lamont and his new chums on the board of Phorm, someone from a Phorm-registered IP address checked out what I'd written. Which just goes to show, never fuck with the deep packet miners. They may not know where you live, but you can be pretty sure they know how you live...

Phorm and Content - Norman Lamont wants your Deep Packets

A couple of interesting pieces on Bad Idea's blog about the internet advertising company Phorm. The first focusses on the addition of Norman Lamont to their board of directors and the second on the simultaneous appointment of Kip Meek, one of the founders of Ofcom, apparently... The MD of Phorm, incidentally, is called Kent Ertugrul, which makes me wonder if Thomas Pynchon is now in charge of naming business executives...

Techno Techno Techno Techno

Techno-paranoia story of last week goes to the Grauniad's Technology section for more stuff about How Fucked Up And Evil Google Are (Or Potentially Could Be, Fella). Seth Finkelstein used his rather excellent column to point out the various ways in which we perhaps don't want Google predicting flu trends, because, hey, once they get into that shit, what will they data-mine on us all next...? Feel that shiver run up your spine...

I still think they're only collecting data to feed into the giant, God-like A.I. they are intending to build in a few years, which could be a good thing, if you are to believe recent reports in the Telegraph about how the US are developing robot soldiers because they are less likely to rape, pillage, torture and maim than good old Johnny Human. Despite the Today programme taking a Daily Mail line this morning about mad, rampaging robots, this is more Isaac Asimov than the Terminator, or so the experts claim.

If you're interested in this kind of thing (although I have to say that I think in this day and age we're less moved by ideas of Good machines than by Very Very Bad machines) then there's a new book out called "Moral Machines" and the authors blog here.

Smile Please...

Excellent report on the growth of the surveillance society, launched by Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, yesterday. Great to hear that Britain remains a world leader in something even if it is installing CCTV cameras...

Stranger Than (Cliche)

The problem with trying to write books about life now is that they're usually out of date before they come out. Which is why I'm both satisfied and horrified to hear that Mr Blair has announced that we should all be queuing up to become part of his national DNA database. But you'll have to wait a year and half to find out why I should care... That is, if you care...

Google A.I.

"We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
Interesting piece about just why Google is planning to scan as many books as it possibly can and add them to the web. And it's nothing to do with breaking copyright or becoming an e-publisher...

Database Nation...

Interesting article in The Guardian on Monday about the databases of information held on us:
"Amazon is hoping to patent ways of interrogating a database that would record not just what its 59 million customers have bought - which it already knows - or what they would like to buy (which, with their wish lists, they tell the world) but their income, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. The company, of course, already knows who we are and where we live."