Next time you log on to Google Earth, pay a visit to the village of Dalia, Sudan. If you paid attention during primary school geography lessons, you will expect to see a harsh desert landscape dotted with some very hardy scrub. What you might not anticipate is a real-time view of how much more impossible life has become in this already hostile world. Dalia is deserted. All that remains are the pockmarks of burnt out gottia, the traditional dwellings of the people who once lived there, clustered desperately on the red banks of a dry river bed.

See all this and more on Google Earth's Global Awareness layer.
The story has an absurd twist. Ogleearth.com reports that Google Earth, due to US export controls and economic sanctions, has prevented Google Earth from being downloaded in Sudan. The rest of the world can see the destruction from the air, but if you're Sudanese, you must be content with living in it, bearing the brunt of a genocidal regime that is no doubt thankful  for the embargo on information.

Because I do not have a Paypal account I was suspicious, but what really exposed the sender's intentions was bad grammar. The first line read: "It has come to our attention that your billing information are out of order. If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records..." It went on about how I would have my non-existent service suspended if I did not divulge all my personal details immediately (either for the purposes of identity theft or so that my computer could be abducted and used as a zombie phishing machine).

As a rule, spammers do not pay too much attention to the finer points of grammar, syntax and spelling.
Hackers are even less refined.

In 2004 'blog' was declared Word of the Year. The word, which is actually short for 'weblog', gained this status largely because it outed Republican Trent Lott as an inveterate racist for remarks that he made at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. Although the event was a public one attended by mainstream media, it was only the bloggers that picked up on the incendiary comments that were made. What followed was an explosion of media interest in Lott's political career at the invitation of bloggers who unearthed priceless info  nuggets, including a 1984 interview with Lott in The Southern Partisan exposing his segregationist views.

It culminated in Lott's resignation as Senator and a demand from Bush for a public apology. Wired magazine's report on the 2002 incident  remarked that Trent Lott probably didn't know what a blog was before he "flushed his reputation down the toilet". Does anyone really know?

In Cracking Contraptions, a series of Wallace and Gromit animation shorts,  our hapless plasticine heroes showcase a number of ridiculous devices designed by irrepressible inventor Wallace to "save Gromit's legs" (Gromit is Wallace's multitasking dog responsible for the running of the household) or make their lives more entertaining.
Creator Nick Park parodies the world of Verimark devices with phrases like: "All the goals, none of the fuss", Wallace's description of his Soccamatic, which lobs footballs mercilessly at goalie Gromit. Other inventions include the Snoozatron, which has Gromit masquerading as a sheep to aid insomniac cheese-chomping Wallace's sleep, a burglar deterrent called the Bully Proof Vest and Mission 13, one of Wallace's guided shoppers big enough to accommodate a very large ball of Edam, Wallace's favourite cheese.

In 1971, an uncommonly insightful ratbag ('strine' or Australian for "contagious eccentric to be shunned") wrote a book that, because of its unabashed attack on the welfare state, labelled him a troublesome figure best forced into intellectual exile.
Ivan Illich was, according to the obituary written for him in The Guardian when he died in 2002, an "archaeologist of ideas" rather than idealogue, who plumbed the historic depths of institutionalism to cast light on our current enslavement to modern institutions. The book that caused all the trouble is Deschooling Society, in which he uses education as a paradigm to explore alternatives to universally accepted norms of schooling, media, politics, health care, church, security and media.
He went as far as to dismantle his own organisation Centro Intercultural de Documentación because "the soul of this free, independent and powerless thinkery would have been squashed by its rising influence... [a positive] atmosphere invites the institutionalisation which will corrupt it.”

Article 252

There is a feeding frenzy on the web. The most unlikely organisations are using the month-long window of opportunity afforded by this year's World Cup to make their mark as the fervour of football fans approaches fever pitch.

I found an ad on one website called "Jesus and the World Cup". The ad is subtitled "Find Lasting Peace in Jesus No Matter who wins the World Cup". They may have a point. Especially about the Peace.
Fears of terror attacks make this year's event a paranoic's paradise.

FrontPage magazine is calling the tournament "The World Cup of Terror" as contingency plans as grand as those made in preparation for an imminent hurricane are being hatched in Germany.

In a Radio Five discussion on Friday morning, Mark Gillman put this question to his listeners: "Who are the true South African celebrities?" True celebrity, it was argued, should be much more than being a continuity person on television. A real star should be a three-dimensional person that exists beyond the flat plains of the electronic media, but in a world dominated by virtual experiences, the screen has unfortunately become our primary point of reference in recognising excellence.
The scramble to colonise technology's greatest contribution to multimedia, the internet, means having to make your presence known in a world where just about everyone can stake their claim.

Cyberpunk, cyber-terrorism, cybersex, cyber-crime, cyberculture, cyberspace, cyber-activism: all neoligisms attempting to make sense of our awe at what our world has become. It could be argued that we are undergoing a process of transhumanism, transforming ourselves into cyborgs, or cybernetic organisms.
'Cybernetic'  is defined in the Free Dictionary as "the theoretical study of communication and control processes in biological, mechanical, and electronic systems, especially the comparison of these processes in biological and artificial systems" and is derived from the Greek word for governor.
The "cyber-" words that are a part of our modern lexicon define our complex  relationships with the technologies of the Information Age.

In his 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte describes a transition from the digital age to an age of individualism, where machines might understand our individual idiosyncrasies with the same degree of subtlety as we would expect from another human being.
Traditionally, market researchers have attempted to decode our psychological makeup by assembling an inventory of our individual preferences and statistics: age, marital status, drinking habits, without heeding the information that lends us our uniqueness: why we might always choose to wear blue stripes on a rainy day.
Negroponte concludes that this intimacy with our machines is attained over time, until we are so well-acquainted that our machines can pre-empt our behaviour.

What a wonderfully humane invention the snooze button is! Whichever benevolent soul it was who felt that it was necessary to take the edge off being woken up by a machine, I salute you.
Humanity's neediness, our common  frailties, have inspired inventions that rock our world – cars to get us further quicker, telephones to speed our voices around the world, artificial body parts, cameras to record our existence. Surely we are on the brink of cheating even the ever-present spectre of death. That is if we don't first blot out the sun and unceremoniously choke on our own exhaust.