My latest Guardian column, “Downloaded BBC programmes should be forever,” talks about how the BBC has sold us out with its failed, DRM-based iPlayer (a reliable source puts the number of active iPlayer users at less than ten thousand and a second reliable source says, “That number sounds high”) and how it and the Trustees should have had the guts to go to rightsholders and say, “Sorry, we can’t accept any deal that doesn’t give the public at least as much freedom as they have with their existing VCRs.”

You might decide, hell, I’m a paid-up licence-payer, why shouldn’t I use iPlayer to store up several months’ worth of the kids’ favorite cartoons for them to watch in an all-day marathon on New Year’s day – while I sleep off New Year’s Eve? You might just reach into the guts of your iPlayer and change the line of code that says, “Delete my shows after 28 days” to “Delete my shows after 28,000 years”.

If you did you’d be part of a grand old tradition of shed-tinkerers. A few years back I attended a DRM meeting in Edinburgh. We were wrangling over a DRM for DVB, the digital video standard that is used throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. It was nearly Christmas, and one engineer slipped off at the break to buy his son an electronics kit at John Lewis. When he showed it around, all the engineers in the room immediately broke into nostalgic recollections of “building crystal sets with grandad in the shed” when they were growing up. These were the formative experiences that made engineers out of these gents, and yet there they were, busily designing a broadcast system that would prohibit user modification.

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My latest Information Week column is “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook” — in which I explain why Facebook and all the other social networking services live in a boom-and-bust cycle because they get crufted up with people you don’t want to add to your friends list, but have to for social reasons.

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

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Two more fan-translations of my story Scroogled (originally published in Radar, about the day Google became evil) have come in this week: Stefan Talpalaru’s Romanian translation and Aleksandar Balalovski’s Macedonian translation. These join eight other translations into Spanish, Russian, Persian, Bulgarian, Dutch and Polish, and I hear there’s an Italian one underway!

Scroogled in Romanian, Scroogled in Macedonian

I’m headed to Vienna this weekend for the annual Roboexotica “cocktail robotics” festival, a maker show for people who build robots that drink, mix cocktails, light cigarettes, make bar conversation amd perform miscellaneous cocktail-related robotic activities. The event is put on by Monochrom and Shifz, two mad and wonderful net-art collectives based in Vienna’s Museumsquartier on Electric Avenue.

I’ll be speaking on Friday night at Taugshow, Monochrom’s not-a-talkshow, and I’ll be around the conference all day on Saturday. Hope to see you!

Ghost in the Machine:

Symposium at Roboexotica 2007

In ancient Greece, thinking was projected outwards into the gods, who vicariously acted out human conflicts. The pre-Socratics were already thinking about nature and its principles. Plato later explained: “All that we can know are phenomena. Behind these appearances are the eternal forms, which embody true being. These are to us in principle unknowable, which means that our thinking is deception.” Thus the dualism of thinking and being was more or less established.

Aristotle disagreed with him, believing that the (divine) forms are found in living beings. Although the soul is moved by another (God is the “unmoved mover”), it also moves itself, and thus possess a certain degree of freedom. To put it bluntly: according to Plato, God was there first and created humans; Aristotle would say: humans were there first and they created their gods. According to the dualistic viewpoint, mind and matter are two different things that are independent of one another. Contrastingly, the monistic view holds that these are only two different aspects of an identical phenomenon. And yet regardless of which worldview one prefers, the question remains: Who was there first? Did the mind create the brain, or is it just a product of neural activity? For the English mind researcher John Eccles it was clear: “The mind plays on the brain as the pianist plays on the piano.”

So, what’s the deal with the mind? What is mind really? A function of the mind or a nonmaterial form of being? How are such questions treated in popular culture? How does technology approach these issues? And what does all of this have to do with robots?

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Internet Evolution’s just posted my latest column for them, on “Internet Immune Systems.” We’re designing more and more automated defenses for the Internet, systems that shut you down or block you if you appear to be doing something naughty, but the problem is that while the defenses are automatic, the appeals process is decidedly manual.

The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago by an anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The outsourced help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can’t even spell “tripwire.” The same goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit card because you got on an airplane to a different part of the world and then had the audacity to spend your money. (I’ve resigned myself to spending $50 on long-distance calls with Citibank every time I cross a border if I want to use my debit card while abroad.)

This problem exists in macro- and microcosm across the whole of our technologically mediated society. The “spamigation bots” run by the Business Software Alliance and the Music and Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) entertainment groups send out tens of thousands of automated copyright takedown notices to ISPs at a cost of pennies, with little or no human oversight. The people who get erroneously fingered as pirates (as Motion Picture Association of America CEO Dan Glickman charmingly puts it, “When you go fishing with a dragnet, sometimes you catch a dolphin.”) spend days or weeks convincing their ISPs that they had the right to post their videos, music, and text-files.

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