The whole neighborhood is suddenly pitched into blackness. A major power failure has killed even the street lamps. Thanks to my liking for candles and mobile broadband I still have some connection to the outside world beyond the blackness but it is interesting to see how vulnerable the IT society has become. I have candles [...]

Us Now is a documentary film that explores the ways in which web2.0 technologies are changing the way in which we interact and thus changing the fundamental roots of society. It’s “A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet”. In a world in which information is like air, what happens [...]

In its effort to supply basic education to readers who daily use the internet but may be unaware of its history The Guardian today lists the top 10 laws of the internet. Very nice! Well to be honest I did not know all of them but I have definitely followed most of them. Here is [...]

Since being given permission to hold a course on the Vulnerable IT-Society I have been very busy in trying to market the course. The course was approved far too late for it to be included into the ordinary university course catalog so I have been left to my own devices. Basically I have had two [...]

The formalities are cleared and I will be responsible for a new course at Göteborg University begining after summer. The course “The Vulnerable IT Society” (Det sårbara IT-samhället) will be in Swedish and there is some more information here. Naturally the new course already has a blog http://techrisk.wordpress.com which will focus on the vulnerabilities of [...]

While in Vienna I saw the surprising and nostalgic sight of two tourists helping each other to change a role of film in their camera. The development of film has been superseeded by digital cameras which themselves are losing to mobile phone cameras. Mobile phone cameras are digital cameras but the camera as an artefact [...]

Too much of the Swedish legal education system is all about learning the law as it is. Attempting to develop a social consciousness about the way in which the law should be is almost frowned upon. This is important if the goal of law school is to produce skilled legal workers (in Swedish I would [...]

This has been a busy week for books on Open Access. On Wednesday I blogged about the book Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors by Kylie Pappalardo. Today Open Access News wrote about two more new Open Access books: E. Canessa and M. Zennaro at the Science Dissemination Unit of [...]

IFIP-TC9 HCC8 8th International Conference on Human Choice and Computers on Social Dimensions of ICT Policy University of Pretoria 25-26 September 2008 Thursday 25 September 9:00 – 9:30 Opening session Welcome speeches by conference organizers at the University of Pretoria 9:30 – 10:30 Plenary session: keynote speech Communication, Information and ICT Policy: Towards enabling research [...]

The French have gone and done it! Times Online reports: Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy. “There is no reason that the internet should be a lawless zone,” President Sarkozy told [...]

A new podcast from the University of Bath. This time it’s Professor Allan Kellehear from the Centre for Death & Society at the University of Bath talking about the point of death and organ retention in a lecture called The science of death. From the blurb: The research literature about ‘brain death’ is characterised by [...]