Yorick Wilks

As the euro staggers, it may seem bad taste to examine the possibilities for yet another created or artificial currency. But the bitcoin* is worth a quick look because it makes us think again about the nature of currency and what value consists in. We all know the value of a currency is artificial and [...]

A new area in which the Internet may disrupt established social practices and rituals is the British jury system. Juries have always been sequestered to some degree, not normally in the US sense of isolation in hotels for long periods away from television and newspapers, but as the recipients of stern instructions from judges to [...]

The news that the new (compulsory) German ID card will be RFID equipped (International Business Times 21 August: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/44536/20100821/identity-cards-with-rfid-chip-on-track-in-germany.htm) is a step change towards John McCarthy of Stanford’s remark 40 years ago that the solution to the problem of crime was the Government knowing where each of us at any time. It is not compulsory [...]

The Prime Minister today announced (http://www.number10.gov.uk/) a new Web Science Institute with a commitment of £30m of Government money, and headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt of the OII Advisory Board. This presumably means TBL is beginning a pilgrimage home? The site was not mentioned but a large south coast city would presumably [...]

As a professional technophile, I have always dismissed outbursts of anti-technology feeling as agreeably retro but harmless, like the effusions of those who still write real letters on paper and tell us all so. I have begun to question my stance only recently when thinking a little about Jared Lanier’s new book “You are not [...]

In many jurisdictions, such as the UK, you are free to kill yourself (without prosecution if you survive unexpectedly!) but not to help others commit suicide. This may well be a wise position, and the distinction seems to be reemerging on the social web. You can, laboriously, defriend everyone you know on Facebook or you [...]

At the Web Science Trust meeting in Boston last week—a trust in which he OII is a partner site—the Chinese site (at ShenZen) described an interesting novel phenomenon on the Internet they are investigating that might call a Flash Posse (as opposed to a Flash Mob): where a good chunk of the citizenry collaborate on [...]

Facebook has decided to treat the dead differently at last, so breaking through the old problem that, just as on the web you couldnt tell someone was a dog–as in the famous New Yorker cartoon–similarly you couldnt tell they were dead. Facebook now proposes to “freeze” and “memorialise” he sites of those who someone officially [...]

Bill Dutton talking to the Forum’s news unit is at

Today’s papers report a new method being trialed from the US to get news into countries with heavily censored Internet access such as China and Iran. (see: http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/01/using-email-tricks-to-get-news-into-countries-that-censor-it/) The method is called FOE (Feed Over Email) and is essentially a method for sending encrypted email as an RSS feed to any email address that requests [...]