Sunshine and puppy time, then - a couple of cool bits of technology have been shown off this week, and they might actually be worth getting excited about, for the first time in ages.

Firstly, there’s Microsoft’s ‘Surface’, which looks like a coffee table and works like an incredibly cool piece of the future, being as it’s all touch-sensitive. And anything you control by touching is instantly cool (unless it’s a laptop touchpad, which are all, without exception, really annoying). The only thing that isn’t very cool is that everyone keeps talking about Minority Report with reference to Surface, which isn’t a movie you’d necessarily want to be associated with, is it?

Tom Cruise aside, Surface looks very, very interesting indeed.

And then there’s that optical media player from Sharp, which plays CDs, DVDs, HD DVDs, Blu-ray discs, uses very little power and is really small. And is supposed to cost under $100 when it goes on sale. Maybe it’s not incredibly revolutionary, though the ability to play all of those formats with one device is quite cool, but the price tag sends it shooting up the cool charts instantly. That’s just crazy cheap for a high-definition player, and all of a sudden my money’s burning a hole in my pocket…

Well, except for the fact that I broke my glasses this week, so I’m completely incapable of appreciating anything visual anyway.

Ho hum. Sunshine, puppies, and let’s all just pretend that fiasco with SixApart/Livejournal deleting 500-odd blogs for having inappropriate keywords in their interests didn’t happen.

I know, I said sunshine and puppies, but I couldn’t resist an update on this ridiculous MySpace story. So, apparently an Attorney General has subpoenaed MySpace, and MySpace has agreed to hand over details entered into profiles linked to registered sex offenders. The Internet is safe again… or is it?

A statement from the Attorney General in question ran as follows: “We cannot sit idly while convicted sex offenders stalk children with confidence that their identities are hidden online.”

It just makes me want to bang my head against the nearest wall. Can you not hear what you’re saying? These people have hidden their identities online. Therefore people won’t know who they are. Does it not therefore follow that you can’t just rattle the MySpace treehouse until they all come running out? Doesn’t something in your brain tell you that you’re talking nonsense?

No, I guess not, because the purpose of this whole exercise has nothing to do with protecting children: it’s all about making the authorities in question look better to people who know no better. It’s about offering a false sense of security — not any real, actual security. This reminds me of John Reid’s suggestion that software be stamped with an anti-paedophile kitemark, to reassure parents that it’ll keep their children safe. It’s just rubbish; grandstanding, people blathering on and using scary words like “sex offenders”, “stalking”, “grooming” and so on and so forth in order to whip the general populace into a state of hysteria that can then be exploited.

The approach being taken by government figures is all wrong. It’s not thought through to the point where any of this could work, it’s just all about public image. And we’re all worse of because of it.

I’d be interested to know whether any of the information MySpace hands over yields anything even remotely useful. More than likely, it’ll just contain some fake pictures, fake addresses, and favourite movies.

Just when you think that issues over copyright and privacy couldn’t get any more convoluted and fraught with pitfalls than they already are, everything goes completely screwy in a whole new way.

Take this week’s news stories about MySpace purging “thousands” of registered sex offenders from its databases. That sounds like good news, doesn’t it? Sex offenders, bad, get rid of them, etc, etc.

Until you start wondering whether MySpace took into account different kinds of offences, when these offences took place, and so on and so forth, and until you start worrying about all the sex offenders who aren’t registered (because there must be far more of them than registered ones, mustn’t there?)

So there’s the slightly sticky issue of, say, human rights, for example. But on the whole, it’s probably less problematic to get rid of all of them than let them all remain, or to try to draw lines, so let’s pretend that one’s a straight win for MySpace.

Next up, though, comes the news that several state attorneys general have asked MySpace to hand over all the info they’ve got on these banished offenders. Again, on one hand, MySpace has the info, and potentially some of it is incriminating. On the other, as soon as you start handing over that kind of info, you end up with newspapers printing it on their front pages, you end up with frenzied mobs mistakenly attacking innocent people (or not-so-innocent people), and you also collide head first into a wall of privacy issues.

Seems MySpace has refused to hand over the information at the moment, citing federal privacy laws, and a need for a subpoena. Attorneys general(s?) are up in arms, claiming MySpace is being disingenuous …

Er, which is where I’m confused. Do they think MySpace really wants to protect potential sexual predators? No. Surely not. It’s more likely this is similar to the way Google refused to hand over information about its users to legal bods; and it would be scarier if Google, MySpace, and everyone else were to happily hand over information. Because it’s that thin-end-of-the-wedge argument, isn’t it?

It’s baffling how completely inadequate the law seems to be as soon as the Internet gets involved.

As an aside: you don’t have to give MySpace much info anyway, do you? So most of what they’ve got is probably nonsense anyway.

As another aside: next time I’m going to write about sunshine and puppies, or maybe something else, but it’ll be decidedly something non-Orwellian, since I’m starting to scare myself.

Not to harp on this Digg thing too much, but… well, you know how we all scoffed at the idea of implementing a code of conduct for bloggers? Sure, it’d be impossible to enforce and everyone would blithely ignore it anyway, but doesn’t this whole fiasco kind of suggest that people don’t really know what they are and aren’t allowed to do online?

Somehow, the issue of the HD DVD key has turned into some imaginary battle for free speech, as blogger protest that it’s only a number, and since you can’t copyright a number, it can’t be illegal to repeat it. But under the US’s Digital Millennium Act, it is illegal to spread around something produced for ‘the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access’ to copyrighted work.

What else might bloggers not realise is illegal to post?

How about anything libellous? Do people generally realise that just sticking the word “allegedly” in there doesn’t get you off the hook? Or that if you’re quoting someone else being libellous, you’re at fault too? Or that even linking to something illegal could land you in hot water?

Maybe a ‘code of conduct’ isn’t quite what we need, but the Internet isn’t a free for all any more. Things you post online could come back to haunt you, and perhaps the blogosphere might do well to figure that out. Sooner, rather than later.

It’s weird how something you know, with your brain, can suddenly seem very much more real when you see it happening with your eyes.

This whole Web 2.0/social networking craze isn’t ‘new’, by any means. I’ve been signed up for more networking services than I could count on one hand, from LiveJournal through Friendster to MySpace and Facebook, del.icio.us and Digg. But it’s somehow easy to forget that actually, behind all this user generated content, there are real people…

I’ve just been Digging some stories and, weirdly, watching other people pick them up and Digg them at the same time. Literally, within minutes, people I’d never heard of were Digging my stories. It’s quite exciting — though obviously there’s that whole scary side to the phenomenon whereby people can stalk and bully you, or just find out way more information than you’d generally be comfortable handing out.

This week there’s been a bit of a shake up at Digg: a story was Digged about the crack for HD DVD encryption. And then the story was removed. And then it was Digged again. And again. And again…

Until, eventually, Digg caved and let the story remain, bowing to the pressure from their users and facing whatever the consequences of ‘publishing’ this kind of information might be.

Again, that’s kind of exciting and scary. On the one hand, Digg might be about to take one hell of a fall, crumbling under its own weight… on the other, score one for the power of the user, right?

Hmm. Exciting, and scary. I’m off to Digg some more of my own stories now, though…