Last night saw the announcement of the jury-selected winner of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, presented for ‘the best science fiction novel of the year’. Often a contentious and controversial award, the Clarke has a history of going to the book least expected to win. However, most of the controversy this year has surrounded which books did or didn’t make it onto the shortlist … but I get the feeling that, with the exception of the inevitable few dissenting voices, hardly anyone is going to argue that M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing isn’t a worthy winner. If you’d like to know more about the shortlist, there’s a bumper round-up of reviews at Torque Control, and you can see Harrison’s reaction to winning on his own blog.

Long gone are the days when being a hacker involved spending years learning complex routines of program code. Nowadays, a would-be 1337 h4Xx0r can just download ready-made programs from the internet – or better yet, just buy a gadget that will do all the hard work for them. Devices like the MacLockPick digital forensics USB key, for example, that can strip all the secret and personal data from a Mac running OSX simply by being plugged into it. Of course, it’s only available for sale to genuine law enforcement officials – or at least this official version is. I’d be surprised if illicit equivalents aren’t already floating around in the digital underworld.

The UK Ministry of Defence is tired of wasting time and money on Freedom-of-Information requests from UFO enthisiastss so it’s taking a leaf from the French copybook, and releasing all of its previously secret files on UFO sightings into the public domain. Which is all well and good, but they’ll probably still be badgered by people who are convinced that they’ve only released this material as a smoke-screen to cover the really interesting stuff …

Take a moment to think about how much of your time – at work and at home – is tied up in arranging things. Organising a meal out with friends, for example – you have to agree on a time everyone can meet, choose a restaurant that has a suitable menu, book the table, book a cab home afterwards … a whole lot of tedious  and interdependent little tasks. Charles Petrie of the Stanford Computer Science Department thinks we will start using ‘wizards’ – quasi-autonomous web-service software – to start doing these sorts of task for us, by enabling machines to negotiate witrh each other on our behalf. Sounds great from where I’m sitting. But what will happen when those programs make mistakes? Who would be legally responsible for unwanted bookings made by software error?

With NASA planning missions to explore the next planet along, they need to make sure they’ve covered every eventuality. Not just the obvious things, like how much fuel they’ll need or how much radiation an astronaut can be exposed to, but those tricky issues that no one ever wants to be first to bring up – like, what do you do if someone dies or becomes mortally ill en route to Mars? Ethical questions are tricky at the best of times, but when you factor in the isolated and resource-short environment of an interplanetary spacecraft, NASA has a whole philosophical minefield to pick their way through.