Taking issue with the argument that, after decentralisation, control is embodied within the protocols of networks, Harry Halpin gives a historical account of the all-too-human actors vying for power over the net. Not technical standards but immaterial aristocrats rule cyberspace and their seats of power are vulnerable to revolutionary attack

Courtesy of the Financial Times, the latest news on the financial sector's most self-allegorizing activity: death hedging.  Or more prosaically, the develpment of 'longevity derivatives' and associated indices, through which fund managers can hedge against the risk that people (not to speak of broker-dealers) might not die soon enough.  In this update, Deutsche Börse has introduced live (so to speak) data feeds from undertakers to find out the age of the bodies they bury.

Death data drive new market

We are standing on the brink of an immense revelation. The revelation of people to states. In the UK – the surveillance workshop of the world – people are becoming increasingly visible through IT projects like the Electronic Patients Record and the National Identity Register, as well as a forthcoming points-based immigration regime premised on the ability to identify subjects and then track and cross-reference their data as never before. Joining-up data, and hence governance, is the name of the game.

Now that environmentalists and government ostensibly have the same interests at heart one might expect a bit of collusion. But the Climate Camp at London's Heathrow Airport last month saw protesters, media and the police co-produce an event of extraordinary restraint, reports Damian Abbott. While the Met made the protesters' lives as difficult as possible, the campers seemed to be doing a pretty good job of this on their own

Challenges to traditional copyright resulting from peer-to-peer applications, free software, filesharing and appropriation art have caused a wide ranging debate on the future of copyright. Dmytri Kleiner brings existing critiques of material property from the left to bear upon the realm of copyleft artistic production and asks how, within the existing copyright regime, can artists earn a living?

It’s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ‘a breathing space from the State’ in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ‘me time’, the production of ‘universal access’, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons

Having come full circle in half a century, today British citizens stand on the brink of having their 'fundamental rights and freedoms' enshrined in the plasticated chip of a compulsory ID card. But what, asks Martin Twomey of the Hackney NO2ID Group, is this card for exactly and whose interests does it serve?

Since the early days of the net, the electronic pastoral has lent itself to all sorts of dubious agendas pushed by science, the military and even libertarian tendencies. In the most recent configuration of this new media - new nature clash Merijn Oudenampsen and Jakob Proyer visited the Natural Habitat exhibition at Montevideo Amsterdam and find amidst the pixelated wilderness a difficult to swallow cocktail of Faustian bargains, hyper-modernism, and pineapple shampoo

Last autumn’s conference, Architecture and Situated Technologies, at the Villard House in New York sought to rescue technologists and architects from their industry controlled and conceptually rigid engagement with each other. With the current euphoria around situated or context specific computing apparently creating new opportunities for dialogue, Ted Byfield asks whether this intersection is really something new, or whether architecture itself is not the ultimate situated technology

From an early interest in recycling ‘obsolete’ computers, James Wallbank’s mission to demystify the black box of technology has grown into a desire to ‘open source’ creativity in general and media in specific. Here he talks to Charlotte Frost about Access Space, a community media space he co-founded and runs in Sheffield, and their travelling Grow Your Own Media Lab project

Interest in the rapidly developing visual programming language Pure Data, the ‘crack cocaine’ of multimedia software, is growing. In this review of bang, the book about Pure Data published as part of the International Pd Convention held in Graz 2005, Andy Farnell momentarily puts down the pipe to focus on the phenomenon and the scene around it