Tech Brief
• From the "I hope this is a parody" department comes news that staid and sober security firm Symantec has teamed up with rapper Snoop Dogg on a cybercrime rap contest. To enter, create a video of yourself rapping to a computer security theme and submit it to a website called, brace yourself, before 30 September. .
"The exercise has the laudable aim of raising awareness about cybercrime but we can't help fearing the musical results are likely to be dire. When corporate giants team with musical stars to appear "down with the kids" the results are seldom edifying. Unfortunately early entries to the HackIsWack contest, which launched on Monday, fully vindicate these fears."
• In perhaps another ill-judged corporate marketing wheeze, Microsoft has signed up - he of the oft-viewed YouTube video catching his to a double-rainbow - to push its WIndows Live Photo Galery. .
"When I first showed the Windows Live team the famous "Double Rainbow" video back in July they thought it was hilarious. But when I said I wanted him to come and do a video with us, they looked at me as if I had been seeing rainbows all day...they thought I was kidding. I e-mailed Bear that night and sure enough, he responded, and with great enthusiasm."
• As the man who coined the term "cyberspace" William Gibson is a good guide to how his defining conception is evolving. .
"Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world."
He wonders what that change is bringing about.
"In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We're citizens, but without rights."
• Perhaps one hint about the future this means for us all is revealed by the response to a video of a girl throwing puppies in a river. The girl's actions found widespread condemnation and spurred many to try to find out who she was. .
"Some on the Web are beginning to appreciate just how much power they possess in threatening the lives of those who might be guilty--or just might not be. The Web makes it so easy to accuse and so hard to retract. And the definition of a crime becomes 'anything of which I don't approve.'"
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