Two stories from the BBC, and one from the Guardian again. (Two Grauniad stories in one day - I'm not keeping up my resolve to appear online-literate by tendentiously seeking a wide array of sources... my Guardian-dependency is exposed!)

Aaanyway: Andy Evans, one of my supervisors and the Java tutor guy, posted this BBC news technology article about the use of Java to help medical professionals working in the third world monitor disease, as well as get vital info back, via their mobiles. (Since Java is multi-platform, running on virtual machines on whatever device you happen to be using.) Global position is part of the data transmitted, and so a picture of infection rates can quickly and cheaply emerge.

It's a heartening example of the coming together of free (as in beer) software doing good work. (Let's hope Sun Systems don't get bought out by anyone evil...) To compare, what else is the world working on? Tagging systems like RFID which, as this Wikipedia entry shows, has a whole treasure chest full of dubious applications. Smart Dust and distributed wireless computing: again, could either be for monitoring seismic activity or spraying into a city as the first wave of a shackle-tight techno-lockdown on an 'insurgent' city.

A friend of a housemate last night told a story of a partner who'd run away with the kid, threatening kidnap: the police knew where he was as soon as they checked on the location of his mobile. Gosh - if I were working for the intelligence services (they were recruiting at the careers fair at Leeds yesterday - 'terrorists don't discrimate, and neither do we'... oh dear) I'd be really excited about the prospect of matching threat statuses of people to geo-location data ping'd from their phones to produce a lovely, spangly over-graphicked map of where all the subsersives were, including bad semi-American female computer voice-over. I do hope they've spent good money on that; surely its what being in the secret service is all about.

Then there's this story on internet addiction in the US. But how would I know if I was? Like having lots of heavy drinker friends - is everyone an alcoholic? How would you tell? Equally, us knowledge workers are compelled to spend hours every day manipulating these machines. What are the tell-tale signs? Oh yeah, compulsively checking e-mail and news sources for the slightest change. Hmm.

Thirdly, another 'oh shit oh shit we're all going to die' story about climate change. Again I'm forced to think: nah, we got a gnat's chance in, um... a place really very inhospital to gnats. Like Croydon.

Then there's lots of nuclear things going on (North Korea, of course, and a resurgence of CND, as well as Threads, which I have yet to see, but by all accounts is disturbing enough to instill in one the urge to drink strong drinks.

Anyway, it all ties together in a Libby Purvis sort of way (which is to say, only in my mind) because I get all techno-utopian in response to the dystopic-ness of it all. And those mobiles being used in the third world - a ray of distributed, open-systems hope! Maybe! If it can be done there, then maybe we need a future of mutual surveillance, where any worker can quickly let the world know if they're being abused, no factory can get away with pouring shit into the atmosphere, every weapons manufacturer can look forward to the world seeing clear as day via any computer screen just where it was used and how many people it killed, every state monitors every other state as we slowly de-escalate the new arms race, every child is RFID'd at birth, automatically reporting its genes to a vast central database to make sure its not going to be another George W. Bush, and we all get school milk from geo-located cows allowed to wander freely, even if we're thirty two. I'll be milk monitor.

Nah. We're screwed. For computer utopias, visualise a robot, having leapt boldly (or boldy leapt...) off a cliff, slowly being caught again by gravity and plummetting to its thoroughly-scattered doom. (Replacing gravity, in this case, with running out of materials, energy inputs and industrial complexes for making microchips. Er, not the most elegant metaphor in the world, now I come to it...)