School kids in the United Kingdom were able to sidestep British legal restrictions on importing and exporting weapons for use in torture with “a letterhead, a mobile phone, an email address, and a little money.” What’s most interesting about this story from my perspective is not the merit of the law itself, but how it demonstrates the power of communications technology to route around government.

South Korea’s Ministry of Information and Communication has predicted (possibly rather rashly) that every household in the country will have a robot servitor by 2020, or sooner if the real enthusiasts have their way. Looks pretty blue-sky at first glance, but this is a country which has achieved connecting 72% of its homes to broadband in just the last five years.

I don’t see the privacy risks of replacing manned flights with UAVs for law enforcement in the United States. When one operator can fly multiple UAVs, then the privacy concerns are a lot more obvious.

Charles Simonyi, a leading programmer with Microsoft who worked on the MS Office suite, has signed a contract with the Russian Space Agency for a mission in space in 2007. Insert your own joke about ‘launch windows’ here.

iMomus riffs on the drawbacks of traditional in-person brainstorming in a connected world where we can change personalities like clothes.