The Wrong Kind of Attention

This is something a lot of writers must wonder about from time to time, particularly those who write crime, thrillers, horror, dystopian science fiction or other variously dark, violent, paranoid or unpleasant stories. I am always a little curious, when doing one of my many online searches, about what kinds of flags I’m raising in the hypersensitive, communications-monitoring headquarters…

Read More

The End of Internet Privacy

If you do anything online, this issue needs your immediate attention. Right now, the US is poised to pass a new law that would permit US intelligence services to spy on almost everything we do online. It’s called the ‘Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act‘. This may be a US law, but it effects everyone else, because companies that…

Read More

Saving Faces

When it comes to technology, I often think companies with powerful new applications can fail to see the difference between ‘Can we?’ and ‘Should we?’. As private companies develop increasingly bottomless resources for storing our most personal information, we, their customers, should constantly be asking how much of this is really necessary, and how much we are giving away…

Read More

Fingerprinting Kids

My Weird-Wide News posts are normally aimed at my younger readers. So I’m going to try and keep this simple, even though it is one of the weirdest posts I’ve done. But it is real. And yet it’s hardly made the normal news at all. I got it from the UK newspaper, ‘The Telegraph’. Britain has a much better…

Read More