The big news of the moment is the Great May 1st Mutiny on Digg. The hoo-ha kicked off because a few stories were posted publicising the HD-DVD crack code, and the code’s rights-holders applied legal pressure to get the infringing material removed; then the users of the site rallied in protest at being censored by the owners and pressured the owners into taking a stand against the take-down notices.

This has interesting implications way beyond the DRM debate (although it’s sure to affect that in some way, too). What it does is highlight the power of user-driven social networks, for better or for worse. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that, as systems, they are inherently open to being gamed, for fun or for profit. But does that mean they’ll be a short-lived phenomenon, or is the power of crowds here to stay?

Gone are the days when computer games involved little more than mowing away descending hordes of pixellated aliens. Now people are beginning to see the potential of games as ways of teaching and learning, not just individually but in groups and, theoretically, as a planet. Hence World Without Oil, an alternate reality game that runs for the next month, with players attempting to imagine plausible solutions to the not-entirely-hypothetical scenario of the world running out of oil yesterday, 30 April 2007. It’s still early days for this sort of project, but I think we can expect to see a lot more of them as time goes by. [Clickable Culture]

I can’t bring myself to be too surprised by the news that, a scant year after the first quantum cryptography network was demonstrated, someone already has a theoretical hack for it. Of course, it’s only theoretical at this stage, but that’s exactly what they said about the DRM on Blu-ray and HD-DVD – and it didn’t take long for them to be crowbarred open, either. Technology is never going to be a foolproof method for hiding secrets, because the hackers will only ever be one step behind – if not ahead. Maybe David Brin is right, and the only solution is for no one to have any secrets to steal. [Engadget]

It may sound like a self-evident truth (at least to me), but now there’s scientific evidence to back it up – native speakers of Russian, a language with no single word for the colour blue, are better able to distinguish between different shades of blue. While that’s not the most useful statistic when taken on its own, the psychological implications are quite impressive – our vocabulary directly effects our perceptions of the world around us. Doubly interesting, when you consider that human vocal languages may well have evolved directly from the gestural languages of apes, rather than from primitive experiments with sound. I wonder if chimps have a gesture for the colour blue?

OK, so accusing DARPA of copying science fictional ideas is hardly news, but this is well worth a look anyway.The latest idea from the Pentagon’s high-tech think-tank is to build a device analogous to those binoculars that Luke Skywalker has in the opening section of the original Star Wars movie. Only they won’t be a stand-alone unit – they’ll be connected by EEG sensors to the brains of the soldiers who use them for enhanced target recognition capability. I wonder what the troops themselves will think – will they be as underwhelmed as they were with the Land Warrior system?