It’s hard to say what, if any, effect Neal Stephenson‘s new start up will have on the future of communication, nanotechnology, or Nazi war gold, seeing as how it doesn’t really have anything to do with those things and its first project is more about the future of publishing and copyright.

From The New York Times:

The company [called Subutai], based in Seattle and San Francisco, has developed what it calls the PULP platform for creating digital novels. The core of the experience is still a text novel, but authors can add additional material like background articles, images, music, and video. There are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers.

Their aforementioned first project launches today, a serialized novel called The Mongoliad, co-written by Stephenson, Greg Bear, and other people.

EVE Online, the space-faring MMORPG that can be affectionately described as the prettiest economic simulation in the world, has set a weird sort of record for itself this week when a couple players became the first to destroy some in-game items that could otherwise have been redeemed for over $1,000 worth of game time.  You see, a month ago, EVE Online allowed an in-game item that can be used to pay your real life EVE subscription fees to be transportable as ship’s cargo.  Anything that is transportable on a ship can be stolen, or destroyed.

Wait, you say, what?  I… uh.  Why?

It’s the future now.  Allow us to explain.

A July report published by a Chinese government-affiliated think tank denounced U.S. and other Western authorities for using social networking sites like Facebook to incite political unrest, and recommended that such sites be investigated more closely.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) cited unnamed U.S. officials who reportedly said that social networks are an “invaluable tool” for overthrowing foreign governments. Yet for all its unnecessary paranoia over covert cyber foreign policy tactics, the report titled “Development of China’s New Media” also made some interesting observations about user privacy and viral marketing that echo many Internet users’ same fears: that the Big Brother of the future may not be our governments, but private corporations.

Read on...

According to a Google update last night, the company will no longer be automatically redirecting search traffic in China from Google.cn to Google’s unfiltered Hong Kong page, Google.com.hk. Chinese officials were displeased, obviously, with Google’s past refusal to comply with censorship on google.cn, and the implication is that if the search engine had continued this tactic to provide uncensored results to Chinese internet users, their Internet Content Provider license would not be renewed on June 30.

Without an ICP license, a commercial site like Google.cn would not be allowed to operate in China. So what is the inevitable compromise?

There’s been a lot of WTF-news making the rounds recently. Try this one on for size: Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), at it again, proposed a bill last week that would effectively bestow the president with the authority to “seize control of or even shut down portions of the Internet,” writes CNET.

Bill S.3480, or the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA), has been dubbed the Internet “kill switch.” According to the legislation, in the case of national emergencies, any private company that relies on the U.S. “information infrastructure” would be forced to comply with any orders (e.g. encrypt data, install a patch, or block web traffic) given by the president via the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC), a proposed agency that would be created under the Department of Homeland Security. I guess American freedom only goes so far!

When life gives you lemons, you clone those lemons, and you make super-lemons. When life gives you an empty eye socket, you design a tiny camera to fit inside it and call yourself Eyeborg.

Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence lost his right eye in a shooting accident, but only recently have he and his collaborators completed a functional prototype of his new prosthesis that is also a camera.

To calm your nerves: the name of the virus was not Snow Crash.

British scientist Dr. Mark Gasson purposely infected the RFID chip in his hand with a computer virus, and successfully proved that such devices can carry malicious programs to other systems, and that those systems in turn could pass on the code to any other chips that came into contact with them.