• Bill Thompson on Lord Stephen Carter’s interim Digital Britain report, and why peer review beats Peer dictatorship every time.
• Peter Wilby’s cover piece for this week’s New Statesman on the financialisation of British society.

Can you “persuade others of the benefits of proposals or the value of a particular interpretation”? Then perhaps the recently advertised position of senior information officer at the Home Office’s new Intercept Modernisation Programme (IMP) is for you.

According to the description of the £45,000-a-year job (removed from the Home Office website, but, at the time of going to press, still available in Google’s cache), the IMP has been set up to “maintain the UK’s capability to obtain and exploit Lawful Intercept (LI) product and Communications Data (CD)”, using “a range of new technologies”. You and I will know IMP better as the nutty plans that have been making headlines all summer, plans to log details about every web page we visit, every SMS message we text and every email we send. And not only that, but to store all this “communications traffic” information in a central database.

Read the rest here.

Last night, I enjoyed watching Mischief: Your Identity for Sale on BBC3. This style of documentary (very Michael Moore) always leaves me wondering how much the film-makers massaged the facts to sensationalise the story. But being somewhat of an expert in these matters, thanks to my work with ORG, I know they’ve got it right on the money here. Michael Wills MP (who is in charge of Data Protection) and David Smith, Deputy Information Commissioner, come off particularly badly. Find out more about the programme here, and watch it for the next 7 days here.

(Snooper’s Paradise is an excellent permanent flea market in the North Laine in Brighton. I love it. The picture above is taken from their store front.)

“That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently: a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant tales, and a novel called Middlemarch, as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast . . .”

There’s something about receiving a parcel from Amazon that takes me back to 19th-century New York. Breaking the seal on a bulk order of books (I’m a sucker for super-saver delivery) makes me feel like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, ready to retire from society to my oak-panelled study with only a smoking jacket and a box of cigars for company. So it was last week, when I unpacked The Best of 2600: a Hacker Odyssey (John Wiley & Sons, £21.99).

You can read the rest here. James has kindly made an RSS feed for Reboot (the NS don’t provide one) for those who want to stay up to date.

Watching Amy Winehouse lash out at Glastonbury this year (YouTube brings out the worst in me), I was surprised by the number of cameraphones the star had thrust in her face by the front row of the Pyramid Stage crowd. When your fans start treating you as badly as the paparazzi do, is it any wonder you crack?

This column has written a lot about surveillance, but in a world of cheap, portable technology, there is also sousveillance.

Sousveillance, or “watching from underneath”, counters the unblinking eye in the sky with millions of tiny blinking ones belonging to each one of us. In the surveillance society, or so the theory goes, sousveillance is the tool of the surveilled, keeping a watchful eye on the watchers.

Read the rest here.

Here’s this week’s column, on touching up your holiday snaps (see one such touched up snap, right):

My youth is captured for posterity by a series of blurred close-ups depicting me and my best friend in various locations in northern France, squinting into the sun as we attempt to point a Boots disposable camera at ourselves in the style of Thelma and Louise.

Inevitably, half of one of our faces is always out of shot. But things have come a long way since then. With digital photography, long gone are the days of walking into people as you left the chemist’s, flicking through the 30 overexposed, or pitch-black, photos in order to locate the six half-decent album candidates.

Read the rest here.

I’m posting this from Brighton today, where I’m enjoying a four day break, most of which I’ll be spending here.

Egypt is planning to pass a law that would exact royalty payments from anyone found making copies of the country’s ancient monuments or museum pieces, including the pyramids.

Although the story is clearly barmy, it’s fun to imagine a bunch of developing world delegates getting together during a comfort break at WIPO and asking themselves the question: why is copyright term roughly the same length of time as the history of the Hollywood film industry?

Some people are so quick to judge. At the beginning of August, the national treasure that is Sir Elton John was reported, albeit by that other great national treasure, the Sun newspaper, as calling for a complete closure of the internet. Apparently, Reg was advocating an experimental halt to all internet traffic in order to see whether, as he believed it might, such a return to our creative roots would stem the tide of mediocrity in popular music. As part of his Luddite rant, Elton chastised Sun readers, telling them to “get out there – communicate”, which prompted one of my more sardonic email pals to quip: “You can see he’s really got the whole internet thing, can’t you?”

Read the rest here.

The day after I wrote it, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee released an altogether more sensible critique of personal security online. It’s well worth a read, just for the amazing expert evidence their Lordships collected.

It is a well-known fact that, despite the oft-lauded opportunities for self-development through digital creativity offered by the online virtual world Second Life, many people still use it exclusively to explore the more adventurous side of their sexuality. Although I’m not a regular S’Lifer myself (my excuse is that my laptop does not have the appropriate graphics card) it came as no surprise to me when, dining with a Second Life enthusiast last year, I was informed of the competitive market for penises in-world.

Apparently, the creative ingenuity of the businesses supplying avatar add-ons is so great that models intended to attract admiration become obsolete within months. If nothing else, this conversation resulted in the coining of what I still consider would make the world’s best band name: Last Month’s Penis.

On 27 July, the BBC is to launch its controversial iPlayer…

Read the rest here.

Read the real story here.

Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of these fees were also received in Japan and the United Kingdom.

These fees are the payments made by someone who wants to use an idea, invention or artistic creation that legally belongs to someone else. To receive these fees a copyright or patent is needed, which may remain active for years after the initial invention…

Read the rest here.