Last month (BBC News 19-11-10 “Top judge says Internet could kill jury system”) the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, raised the issue of jury members’ use of the Internet: he drew attention to a case where jurors were using the Internet to research a rape case—-in defiance of the rule that only information presented in court should be considered by a jury. A more interesting example is a Manchester case earlier this year where the judge dismissed the jury and restarted a trial after a juror had been to her Facebook page and asked her friends “Did he do it?” Lord Judge seems to have had Twitter more in his sights, arguing that a juror might see tweets sent out to bombard anyone getting them about the guilt or innocence of an defendant.

The LCJ said “We cannot stop people tweeting, but if jurors look at such material, the risks to the fairness of the trial will be very serious, and ultimately the openness of the trial process on which we all rely, would be damaged.” And he added “We cannot accept that the use of the internet, or rather its misuse, should be acknowledged and treated as an ineradicable fact of life, or that a Nelsonian blind eye should be turned to it or the possibility that it is happening.”

Technically, it would be hard to target such a campaign on Twitter, since the juror would need to have known about and subscribed to a specific defendant’s campaign. There are, of course, Facebook sites devoted long-term to proving the innocence of a particular, usually convicted and jailed, defendant, but these tend not to relate to current trials.

The LCJ’s argument is that a juror should not be exposed to any source of evidence that is not presented in court because there is then no possibility of the defendant denying it or presenting counter evidence. He went on the argue for stronger warnings to juries, notices in jury rooms and even the consideration of taking measures to ban all internet use and text messages from jury rooms, on pain of imprisonment for contempt..

One consideration here that might be the now much discussed (e.g. by the Economist) notion of the “the wisdom of crowds”: the idea that large-scale information input from huge numbers of people tends to be right. One sees that in the high accuracy of crowd-sourced Internet entities like Wikipedia; audience voting on questions in “Who wants to be a millionaire?” which is normally correct when individuals are not sure. The wisdom of crowds notion had its source in 19C fairground “guessing a cake’s weight” stalls where it was known even then that the average of a crowd’s guesses was normally closer to the truth than any individual guess.

All that being the case, one might ask in a subversive way whether the crowd sourcing of a verdict might not be a better judgment than that or 12 individuals, in which case the delinquent juror may simply have been ahead of her time? The obvious problem to democratizing jury decisions in this way would be how to ensure that the “wider internet jury” had all the relevant information before voting, along with responses from the defendant. But that is just a technical issue: some juries in Athens in classical times were 6000 strong and they did not tarnish the city’s reputation merely on grounds of their size. If there were ever to be very large internet juries to be polled (like political referenda) there are perfectly reasonable methods for getting the relevant “court presented” information to them, including the possibility of cross-examination of a defendant by large numbers of people on line.

The original article quoted the BBC’s Legal Affairs Analyst, Clive Coleman as saying: “This is the strongest and most detailed judicial consideration of the threat to the criminal justice system posed by jurors using modern technology. It raises major questions of how to police and stop internet use.” One expects no radical thoughts from the legal establishment in the near future, but one may legitimately wonder whether it will always be possible to hold back the use of technological aids like the Internet when their use has spread to the whole population?

His fear is a very old one: the mob. In his words: “I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.” The mob is an old political player, especially in British politics where it traditionally functioned as a substitute for anything like a real revolution. In 1768, John Wilkes—to whom we owe many of our liberties—– was in the Kings Bench prison while the mob surrounded it for days, demanding his release. Wilkes was a great orchestrator of the mob, which would stone judges’ houses till he was released yet again to continue his campaigns. The mob is not only a negative phenomenon in politics therefore, but what it always does is to terrify authorities that it might “get out of hand”.

In the classic Marxist analysis of the Reformation, the hero is not Luther but Muenzer, who stirred up mobs against rulers to a point where Luther, terrified of what reform had unleashed, said that princes were right to massacre the rioters, thus exposing himself, so the analysis went, as no more than a tool of the ruling class. Lanier is suggesting that some aspects of the internet are bringing back a new form of the mob, not in the streets but in cyberspace, hounding and destroying not only authorities but helpless individuals against whom they arbitrarily gang up.

I saw something of what he meant in the recent UK case of the junior school headmistress who sent her school’s pet lamb to a butchers and had it brought back to serve as food, all so as to teach the children the realities behind their everyday meals. Her action was backed by the school governors, the parents, and even enough of the children, but a world-wide campaign of hate email and blogging was let loose on her, and she gave up her job to the school’s distress and loss. It all seems absurd and hateful but will be no surprise to anyone who has observed a chatroom and the way in which they routinely degenerate into obscentity and hatred, all anonymous of course. I have only anecdotal evidence but I am sure the percentage of postings removed by moderators from the major newspaper blogs following opinion articles is rising.

Lanier is pointing to a real phenomenon: not just our newly discovered “wisdom of crowds” —-itself a rediscovery of the marxist’s positive sponteneity of the masses —-but also their madness, a concept long known to Adorno, Le Bon (“The Crowd”) and Canetti (“Crowds and Power”). Lanier is thus in a great tradition when he writes: “It’s amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It’s time to think about that power on a moral basis”. Perhaps his originality is just that he is the first of the technorati to say it.

Facebook is consulting their learned friends about new sites like suicidemachine.org which actively encourage users to leave all their social networks and to post on that very network how many friends they are cutting off by leaving the internet and giving their own last words on the web. Facebook’s spokesman said severely:

“Users rely on us to protect their data and enforce the privacy decisions they’ve made,” said Simon Axten, the company’s policy and security officer. “We take this trust seriously and work aggressively to protect it.”

There are many paradoxes and ironies here: former users of the social web advertising their own web suicide ON A WEB SITE; Facebook wanting to stop an organized but consenting deletion of data by claiming to be protecting that very data. Protecting the data for whom? Not presumably the would-be suicide? For the friends who cannot bear to lose you, for the Government, for advertisers who will be able to find you under Facebook’s new relaxation of privacy conventions?

In case you think this last is paranoia, check this blog from a tea-party-sort-of-person:

“shane farmer wrote:
All you little people sat at home typing to each other instead of meeting up for a night out, i know its not always possible but you type instead of. My wife thinks that the goverment loves the fact they know were most peopole are all the time, ie sat at home watching TV or typing bull to each other, while paying a mortgage on a hen hutch they can’t afford, its called house arrest in our new world communist country.”

This blog followed the Times article on the suicidemachine site: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999245.ece
and has the authentic and widespread sentiments that are pulling down Obama’s ratings.

A much stranger competitor to suicide machine is Seppukoo.com, which not only cuts you off from the web but gives you scores depending on how many of your friends you have persuaded to commit suicide themselves; it explicitly lists those of your friends who have left and those who are still on the social web, see:

http://www.seppukoo.com/how-it-works

and
“Top 100 suicidal users
Open your mind to a new meaning of popularity: with Seppukoo it’s not important how many friends you have, but how much you may influence them. A friend who follows you in Seppukoo Experience is a friend you can absolutely trust!”

Seppukoo is more a suicide cult, where you get to design an elaborate memorial site for your self and, strangest of all, encourages you to add to memorial sites it has set up for famous real world suicides (i.e. not web suicides) from Virginia Woolf to Jim Morrisson. Here the circle is complete: you are encouraged to leave the social web and bring your friends with you, but then to set up an alternative “afterlife” website where you and your (old? new?) friends add shrine-like comments —of the kind even Facebook now allows for the really dead—–congratulating you and celebrating their new afterlife. Or is it Purgatory? Or is it a very subtle recruiting ploy to undermine existing social sites but start all over again? As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages: “A triumph of hope over experience”.

This could cause hairs to stand up on the back of one’s neck, as images of the state’s enemies come to mind, but how different is it from what we do—with wanted posters and TV programs that feature suspects on the run and unsolved crimes—and how unpopular would such an Internet method be in our cosy countries if it were the search for a serial killer or rapist? And, to slip back a couple of generations in the US, would not Senator McCarthy have found this a perfectly acceptable form of mass action to root out communists in society and would not the majority of his compatriots have agreed with him? So perhaps no society can be smug about these new possibilities.

By coincidence the current issue of Wired Magazine carries a sort of Flash Posse
Experiment (http://www.wired.com/vanish/) In which a correspondent for the magazine tries to vanish and stay “on the run” leaving no Internet traces (except deceptive ones) while public compete (fro a prize) and collaborate on evidence so as to find him. It’s all good fun but gives some nice technical hints for public enemies at the same time.

The Facebook proposal is that only friends you have accepted before death will be able to find your “frozen” site, see it and add tributes to it. That seems a bit strong: after all, many others might care to jojn in a tribute after your death who didnt happen to have been your friend on Facebook in life–perhaps you relatives or children? Is there any more reason to fear malicious postings by those who know you already, as opposed to those who dont? In any case, it wouldnt be hard to have a truster “executor” or “Facebook filterer” who removed any malicious postings—such people could be appointed in wills in the future, as literary executors are now. The tricky bit will be using “defriend” to rid yourself of a growing list of dead friends—–but the huge mass of young users dont need to think about that just yet.

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 it from an external mail provider such as hotmail or gmail. There are many such providers and it is hard for any state system to block all of them.

When decrypted the news appears in mail as HTML rather than text, rather like the adverts you get now from Amazon and British Airways. It all looks interesting and the wonder is why you need to request it at all: it could be sent as government-originated spam to any address they can find in a target country, just lie real spam! This would lower the likelihood of Government agencies at the target end later finding ways of locating those who had requested the feed. Companies in Western countries have not been slow to sell relevant software to the Iranian Government for Internet censorship, so why would they not take the next step and sell what is needed to find the FOE requestors? (see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html)

As with all good ideas there are down sides: there are now HTML mailers available to anyone that send you not text but an image you cannot copy/paste or save; these give the sender the ability to delete email received by you from them, or alter it later as they wish; they own their own email, not you the receiver. Worse, it lets the sender know exactly when you read their email and where, and you can avoid it only by turning off the receipt of all HTML emails.

This tool, in the hands of the “target” Government’s, would be a powerful antidote to Western Government-backed “spam” emails. It’s all a question of who is moving quicker, the cat or the mouse. The hidden paradox is the use by Western Governments for virtuous purposes of all kinds of tools, from anonymizers to spam, that they deplore when used on them!

Behind the games are very serious issues, some of them technical, most not. Even among those who agree that the NHS IT policy over the years has been an unmitigated disaster, some think Britain should now stick with the long term database plan because of the investment made and that it will eventually be delivered, however late and however much over budget. It is good to remember here that the NHS took decades to provide email to staff, because a special NHS-relevant email system had to be designed and implemented, even though off-the-shelf email from any supplier could have been provided to the whole system within weeks or months, as it was to virtually all companies. Who could possibly have believed there was special NHS email? I personally gave up on NHS administration when I heard they had simply failed to claim the Microsoft discount, for quantity of installations, of £50 million to which they were entitled! These failings are not casual but endemic, as everyone can now see after the huge fall in NHS productivity since Gordon Brown doubled its tax-take.

All that health records require is:

* reasonable levels of reliability and confidentiality
* access by the “owner” of the records and some recourse in case of error
* ease of updating the records by those entitled to do so
* access anywhere to the records, preferably world-wide

If this list has a certain familiarity, it is because many kinds of big companies now offer this kind of service to anyone and compete for their custom: banks are the obvious case. Your access to your financial records can be from an ATM anywhere in the world, is up to date, pretty reliable and you more or less trust the bank to keep your records safe and confidential, probably more than you trust civil servants who leave data sticks regularly in taxis. Vodafone, which is British like most of the banks, also offers customers large scale mail storage, which is not really different in kind from medical records, so if the UK were to go along this route there are plenty of competing British providers; patriotism need not be an issue, though competition certainly is—if one did not like one’s health record Guardian one could always go elsewhere, just as banks must now transfer your standing orders intact to a new bank within days, whether they want to or not.

Most Internet usage surveys show the public trust companies more than the Government these days, on data as much as anything else. Google has the advantage that they have, in the last years, been transferring masses of printed material into digital form-the Google books project. This is relevant because one of the great scandals in the NHS is the shameful rate of the move to digitised patient records: in some hospitals consultants still have a fat folder of written notes for each patient, but the fifteen minutes allowed each one does not permit reading such a mass of material, so each consultation starts from scratch, usually with the patient describing their own condition! Digitised records could be summarised and absorbed in minutes.

The arguments for Cameron’s suggestion go way beyond cost saving and avoiding another giant state database of the kind so dear to Old and New Labour: they offer choice to the citizen, access to one’s own content with some control over it and, above all, deployment of a proven technology that would not need to be much specialised to the NHS at all, but just piggy-backed on years of competent management of vast data bases. The good news is that many kinds of companies have this experience, not just Google.

This has always been a fundamental difference between us (and most English speaking countries) and countries like France where you have a legal name which you must use. In a country where Harold MacMillan would suddenly start calling himself “Stockton” (after his ennoblement) and bishops sign their letters “+John Oxon” it is obviously a very necessary liberty. The key case was some 25 years ago when a man who had opened more than a dozen post office savings bank accounts in as many names, and was prosecuted by the GPO, was acquitted on the ground that if no fraud was involved, there was no offence in calling yourself as many things as you liked, and that this was not tantmount to impersonation (as the traditional offence now called “identity theft” or “identity fraud” used to be called).

The reaction of the I+P Agency, even if overruled, shows change is in the air—I do not believe this has yet been clarified by the Bill introducing identity cards, but it is not hard to guess that this Government will want to abolish this age-old common law right; another good reason for NO2ID.

+——————————————————————–+
| Hundreds of Thousands of Chinese Black-Hats                        |
|   from the defending-against-gnats dept.                           |
|   posted by kdawson on Friday April 24, @09:33 (Security)          |
|   http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/24/1311216           |
+——————————————————————–+

An anonymous reader sends us to Popular Science for a long article on the
[0]loose, uncoordinated bands of patriotic Chinese hackers that seem to
be responsible for much of the cyber-trouble emerging from that nation.
QUoting: “For years, the U.S. intelligence community worried that China’s
government was attacking our cyber-infrastructure. Now one man has
discovered it’s more than that: it’s hundreds of thousands of everyday
Chinese civilians. … Jack Linchuan Qiu, a communications professor at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong [says:] ‘Chinese hackerism is not the
American “hacktivism” that wants social change. It’s actually very close
to the state. The Chinese distinction between the private and public
domains is very small.’ … According to [James Andrew Lewis, a senior
fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies], ‘The
government at a minimum tolerates them. Sometimes it encourages them. And
sometimes it tasks them and controls them.’ In the end, he says, ‘it’s
easy for the government to turn on and hard to turn off.’”

Discuss this story at:
   http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=09/04/24/1311216

Links:
   0. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-04/hackers-china-syndrome

Assuming this story is true, does it make this “patriotic activity” harder to condemn since it is not government originated? Given, too, that (a) the US invented hackers, (b) is a wildly patriotic country with many perceived enemies and (c) admires private enterprise, is it not odd that we have not seen, or had reported, much private international hackerdom from the US so far—Harrison Fords at the keyboard?

One can see the role here of a long-term computer companion, designed to spend years in conversation with its owner, building up a structured life of memories, gleaned from conversation, photographs, texts, ideally to be put in some semi-autobiographical form that surviving relatives will inherit, either as a full, frank intimate account of a whole life, probably with details and memories not known to the surviving spouses and children or, in the more extreme case, as a companion on a screen, say, looking and sounding like the former “owner” and able to discuss life from beyond the grave. Those who find this far fetched should look at Emily fromManchester:http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece and imagine her as a long-lost daughter.

One could also think of the Companion of a living user as some kind of informal guarantor of identity: a Companion would know very soon if it was talking to its owner or not—not in the sense of voice recognition, which is just one more biometric open to faking—–but in the sense of how you normally talk, what things you know about “yourself” and so on, much like a vast structured form of “What was your first pet called?”, except these need not be questions that had been pre-planned but more along the lines of “when were you last in Venice and what did you go to see?”, “Where were you in 1986?”. The potentially nasty slip here would be that this function of the Companion might be ostensibly in the interest of the authority demanding the identity verification, rather than of the owner, given that most people would find a Companion-world acceptable only if the Companion was the servant only of its owner, and not its manufacturer or the State. There need be no dilemma here if anyone can say “Let my Companion identify me as YW” and a central registry can always know (as with a car) that Companion xyz is registered to YW and can identify him and only him. All this is another argument for treating Companions nicely of course, just in case…….

The facts are these: on the main website of a large American Airline I purchased a ticket for £206 for my son to fly in two months from New York to Nevada. I entered the details of my American Express credit card, as I have in the course of many similar purchases. A screen came back saying “Ticket purchased” plus small print to say my electronic ticket and confirmation would follow shortly. On most previous occasions that had come by email within minutes from the company’s computers. Three days later it has not come, and I grew anxious and phoned the airline, because I know the online market is moving at great speed as Christmas approaches and, if I lose this ticket for any reason, I might get a worse bargain. I also know I might do better, as I had seen the same route available for £50 less with US Airways. But I am not very anxious, because I have been a loyal multimillion-mile customer with the large American Airline for 20 years and never had any problem of this sort.

My anxiety increased slightly on phoning because I was told a blatant lie: that the delay in ticketing is because I have a foreign-billed credit card and these must be checked by hand; I am in a queue and the ticket will follow in “ a coupe of days”. This rings all kinds of alarm bells because ticketing is normally instantaneous. It is made clear to me when I ask, and this is approaching the nub of this blog, that although the ticket is PURCHASED it is not TICKETED, and no I cannot cancel the whole transaction. The credit card checking excuse is absurd, because the same card for the same son had been instantly accepted by other US airline websites in the same week, and had I called and made this booking on the phone (for $10 surcharge!) my card would have been accepted instantly. The card-and-manual queue argument is a transparent falsehood.

None of this might matter were it not for another and quite separate experience with the same airline a day earlier, booking a flight for 5 people in the same December period. In that case, I again got the “Ticket Purchased” web page back and thought no more about it. But on returning to check the timings I realised the confirmation and E-ticket had again not come but on phoning I was informed my purchase had been cancelled. It had been cancelled, I was told in rough tones, because I had made two reservations for the same group to two different cities in the US in that period, in Nevada and Texas. I said, as one would, yes but so what: they were both 24 hour options that would automatically expire at no harm to the airline. This is normal practice by consumers; but I had actually purchased one of the reservations with my credit card. Why, I wailed, had they cancelled the one I had purchased and not the other one where I did nothing to follow it up.

I was told that when the computer detected double booking it cancelled all but one reservation “at random”. Now, it cannot be the case that a multi-billion airline is unable to write software for the Internet to cancel an unpurchased reservation in preference to a purchased one. Yet my own naivety and company loyalty sent me back again at this point to the web to buy a new ticket for each of the 5 at £100 more a head. The glitch and the cancellation had just given the American Airline £500 more for absolutely no benefit to me.

It was this earlier experience that has fully roused my suspicions in the case of the second ticket, for the son and still unresolved, that something systematic might be happening here and, whatever it is, fraud or something else, it is unlikely to be mere incompetence on the part of the airline. Consider the issue in market terms: I as a consumer have been trapped now for three days, unable to cancel my “purchased ticket” and buy elsewhere. The American Airline, as I saw with the earlier group of 5 tickets, can cancel that purchase at any time and not even tell me, which could have allowed the group to turn up at an airport at Christmas believing they had Electronic tickets while actually having nothing! By luck I spotted that one in time. This imbalance of power is extraordinary: a consumer trapped and unable to shift options for an indefinite period and a company that may or may not honour the purchase, when it chooses. Its computers could clearly be seeking to sell that same seat to a higher bidder—if that were the case everything we have been taught to believe about internet purchases of such tickets is unreliable. Certainly in the case of the 5 tickets, the Airline reneged on its “tickets purchased” claim and sold them back to me, in effect, for £500 more because I was nervous, loyal ands acting semi-irrationally for fear of having family with no travel at Christmas,

If these practices are being driven by design rather than incompetence the Internet ticket market for major airlines is a far worse bargain for consumers than has generally been thought—and much much better for the airlines—-and the option of buying by phone for $10 more is the best bargain of all.

What does the Internet compute?

Surely not a mathematical function . . .
Moral: We need a theory of the dynamics of informatic processes, of interaction, and in-
formation flow, as a basis for answering such fundamental questions as :
• What is computed?
• What is a process?
• What are the analogues to Turing-completeness and universality when we are concerned
with processes and their behaviours, rather than the functions which they compute?

[Im not certain I understand the question, but it seems a nice one to ask anyway! YW]

If, in the future, to be is to be in cyberspace, then an area ripe for development is email, where there are huge commercial opportunities for postmortem email that are well within technical reach, given the advances in computer processing of natural language in recent years. With only simple electronics, we are all familiar now with goodbye videos from the deceased at their own funerals, and some modern gravestones, known in America as Vidstones, have, instead of a simple memorial picture built into the stone, a small video of the deceased, solar-powered, that can be activated by a switch.

But email has been subjected to a wide range of analysis techniques to understand its content, at some acceptable level, most notoriously by companies and national security agencies: but such analysis can also decide whether the email content is positive or negative, whether it is asking for something or announcing a lecture, and so on. These and many other kinds of email content can now be extracted by reasonably intelligent programs, and it would be a very small move to have them automatically replied to as well, a service that could continue without a living correspondent. This would require not only the special software but a stable host server, such as a university or perhaps, in the future, a foundation specifically set up for the purpose of repling to emails to the dead. That would keep someone in cyberspace, as it were, for a fixed period for a fee, just as medieval chantries would pray for your soul for so many years for the appropriate donation. Even now graves are rented only for a fixed period.

One’s email could move seamlessly into an after-life mode: academics, for example, are used to accepting and declining invitations to lecture by email, and sending out their publications as offprints as attachments in the same way. It is perfectly straightforward to extend the standard Unix “Vacation program” which normally replies to email by saying you are on holiday and when you are coming back, so as to say:

I am sorry I cannot take up your invitation to lecture at your University because I died on September 1st 2008. I would have loved to come and see you all again; thank you so much for asking me

And so on. Sending out a requested offprint electronically would be straightforward, as would the provision of bibliographic or autobiographical information with the standard search technologies Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.

A recent Internet development relevant to all this is Second Life (https://secondlife.com/), a virtual world where some two million people have taken up a form of residence using avatars: artificial appearances or simulations of themselves who meet others, including the avatars of people not currently on line (at the time of writing only eleven thousand of the two million subscribers are actually on line). Second life has obvious resonances of “after-life” as well as “parallel life”, which is the one its creators intended. The expansion of Second Life is extraordinary, with, at the time of writing, sixty thousand acres “sold”, a space which is (virtually) expanding by 8% a month. The sales are in “Linden dollars” inside Second Life but they can be bought and sold for real money elsewhere on the web, which has given the virtual economy aspects of a real one.

Famous singers are now releasing songs within Second Life which the buyer can get and play there. I had a perfectly serious conversation last month trying to convince the British Library—which sometimes doubts the quality of its “outreach’ in a demotic age—that it could buy land in Second Life and erect at least a large hoarding on it, saying “LIBRARY HERE SOON”.

But what has this to do with the Internet? Well, life as an avatar, after one’s own death, would certainly be a form of life, even in a virtual world. Your avatar on the other side could continue to function and appear to meet people, talking as it had been programmed to, visiting places and living a full if rather thin second life. It would not be you, of course, and at best rather like the schoolmen saw the lives of angels, as all form but no substance.

Other possibilities arise from the opportunity we will have very soon of putting every possible fact, memory and datum about our lives onto the Internet itself. Last week the British library hosted a meeting on Memories for Life ((http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/connected/2006/12/13/nlife13.xml), a topic generated as a challenge for modern computing a few years ago and funded since then as a university research network (www.memories-for-life.org). The core idea is that computer storage is now so large and cheap that it becomes feasible to envisage recordings of everything we say, hear, write, see, eat or meet in eighty years of life, along with all our medical readings, as being stored on the Internet in some moderate and quite available space (known to the technically minded as 28 terabytes, according to an estimate by Alan Dix of Lancaster University). This is a huge amount of space but, at the present rate of progress, will be quite cheap to buy with a year or two, and could be stored on something no bigger than a sugar lump. The real problem is how we could possibly search all those memories and facts, even if we had them available; how we could begin to make sense of them, in the way a biographer makes sense of a subject’s life by careful editing and selection.

The notion of all life on the Internet may be fanciful, but it is plain that huge chunks of our lives are going to be put there, not only the emails and the documents we write, but all our photographs and videos, which we are being encouraged to show to everyone in the world on sites like flicr (flicr.com) and YouTube (youtube.com). A possibility discussed at the British Library was that people may be able in the future to organise their lives and memories and data on the Internet with the aid of special automated assistants that can talk and converse in a normal way. This is the same motive as that behind all the recent offers by Google, Vodafone and others to offer free storage space to the public for their life data; but in return, the companies will get access to people’s memories, tastes and records and, under certain safeguards, will know what adverts to send personally to them.

Something slightly more academic and benign is the notion of a computer Companion: a conversational agent that stays with one for a long period, appears to learn one’s tastes and habits, and helps to organize and select all this personal material for its “owner”. One can think of a Companion as best suited to the elderly, living alone and in need of company, needing to be reminded when to take pills and of the soap opera plots if they have been forgotten. Concretely, the Companion could be a mobile phone, or a computer screen, but more likely something like a furry handbag that sits on one’s lap and talks, light to carry about and definitely not a robot. The Japanese have already gone some way in this direction: the BBC website carris a story of an elderly Japanese lady, Akino, who has a commercial companion called, Primo Puel, whose Japanese is primitive but Akino is reported as being comforted by it, liking to “hear it chatting away to itself in the other room”. Akino added that she found more comfort in it than talking to her late husband’s shrine in the corner. Readers will remember Japanese toys without any language like Tamagochi that had no language at all but aroused powerful emotions of care towards them in their owners.

Primo Puel has no language but natural computer conversation has come a long way even if it has not yet the everyday success of machine translation, which can now give a reasonable if basic translation of any web page on demand. The Loeber website (www.loebner-competition,org) shows the year by year increasing capacity of programs that take part in its annual computer conversation competition. There is now a major European initiative to build a computer Companion using these much stronger methods for deriving computer conversation: it is called Companions (www.nlp.shef.ac.uk/companions) and I coordinate it at the University of Sheffield, where it will run for four years with fifteen EU and US partners at a cost to tax payers of some €13 million.

It is said that the elderly in care homes spend much of their time shuffling their memories in the form of photographs; soon these will be digital images, of course, and the EU Companion will start there, discussing with its elderly owner who is in each picture, where it was taken and what its importance is. The idea, which may or may not succeed, is to use conversation with the elderly to build up coherent narratives, stories of parts of the owner’s life, the stories which the images tell. Normally only those with talent, resources and leisure write autobiographies, but, if the Companions project succeeds, everyone could assemble some form of autobiography for their children, and undergo, with the Companion’s help, some form of debriefing of their whole life. Many learn little of the early life of their own parents and then, suddenly, it is too late to ask, unless one has been bold and persuaded them to talk into a tape recorder and reveal their memories.

Companions is a futuristic project, but the Japanese have shown there is a market for anything plausible of this sort, if it reaches an acceptable level of voice and tone and a realistic level of chat. If it does so, then another interesting possibility arises, one close to our original theme of the Internet and life after death. The technical basis of the Companion is a technical matter called machine learning, or what some call data mining: the ability of a computer to learn, within limits, things it did not know before. An obvious successful example is learning to understand or imitate a voice: anyone who buys an IBM typewriter that takes dictation automatically has to train its computer to understand the owner’s voice, so as to minimise typing errors.

The same process would allow a computer to imitate its owner’s voice: Stephen Hawking’s insistence on keeping his twenty year-old electronic voice has had the effect of masking the great advances that have been made. The Companion, after years of debriefing the same owner’s life could also, with today’s technology, produce a reasonable approximation to their voice. It would also have an organised set of images, emails and documents that tell its owner’s life story. So the important question would become: what would to happen to it when the owner died?

Many might prefer to destroy the Companion of a loved one at that point, as some used to put down an aged parent’s dogs and others, like ancient Egyptians, killed the wives of rulers at their deaths. But most would not now do that, but would retain the Companion, with its now familiar voice, its memories and detailed knowledge of the loved one, as a powerful and moving memorial, and almost a potted form of the departed.

This is not a very red-blooded life after death on the Internet, but it is something many will find attractive in the future, for themselves, their parents and for their own children. It is no more, perhaps, that a computerised and updated form of the Vidstone or, in a more literary vein, the view of Jules Romains in his prewar novel La Mort de Quelqu’un, that one had some form of existence so long as one was remembered by someone alive and no longer; it is a view not far from much modern rational common-sense.

Ray Kurzweil, the computer pioneer who built the first dictation-typewriter, is said to be devoting his old age entirely to health products so he can stay alive long enough to benefit from what he believes will be the next great technical advance: the reproduction of every human brain cell in a computer, or in silico, as he puts it. The Companion that simulated a dead person, as described above, would be much less radical than that: it might imitate behaviour but would have no tie to any structure in the departed’s body or brain. But alas, even Kurtzweil’s surviving in silico twin will not be he himself, and will deliver him no more of the traditional afterlife promise than would the survival of his identical twin brother.