To follow on neatly from Jamais’ latest column on mutual surveillance, a judge has just ruled that the FBI can use your mobile phone as a ‘roving bug’ – provided they get a warrant first, of course. How long before the hacking communities get parity with this latest development? And how long before it gets misused, by either side?

The media and the blogosphere (myself included) have been so busy looking at the cultural impact of Second Life that we’ve neglected to ask some rather more important questions. For example: given the vast amount of server space that it takes to run the synthetic world, and that servers chew through a fair amount of electricity, is SL ecologically sustainable if you compare the power consumption of an avatar to a meatspace human?

While hogging the headlines here in the UK for entirely different reasons, Russia is making news in the space community. Not only are they planning a kind of space elevator that runs between spacecraft (rather than from a planet into orbit), they are also helping South Korea take their first steps on the space exploration ladder by launching the little nation’s first astronaut.

NASA’s Michael Griffin has been closeted with the new UK Minister for Science and Innovation, and they have been discussing collaborations between the two nations on future projects, such as Lunar landings. We Brits have supplied plenty of satellites and so forth – it’d be nice if we could supply a few astronauts for a change. If a volunteer is required, drop me an email so I can get training early…