Life after death goes online

December 3, 2010 Last updated at 15: 39 GMT by Dave Lee, BBC World Service the machine Timecard save a Flickr account to keep safe for many years, that the death of a close relative, the elderly often can mean a gloomy weekend or two going through old things, sorting through photos, donating old clothes to charity.

But in an age when so much of our lives online, little thought was given to how to handle digital world of a person when they are no longer with us.

By the time that the "generation Facebook" become old and grey, throughout their lives can be poured with a million updates on Twitter, thousands of photos on Flickr, hours and hours of videos on YouTube and maybe your website too.

As a person dies, their online presence should terminate too? What happens to personal information in all this?

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the main story In the past we might have worried about love letters coming through those physical and when you're going through things of your grandfather and be upset by it. "

End quote Abigail Sellen Microsoft Research Richard banks believes he may have the solution. He is an interaction designer for Microsoft and his team, based in Cambridge, worked on the concept of digital memories-and how, even if a person is no longer with us, their digital car can still be enjoyed.

He told BBC Radio 4 's all in the mind as the death of his grandfather, a few years ago I was thinking about the future of mourning.

"After his death, became the recipient of a suitcase full of photos of his life.

"Inside there was about 200 shots of different periods of his life, all the old analog photos, printed, stored away in envelopes.

"Got me thinking about what would be the difference, now with my photographic practices and the type of things that I could leave for my children."

He created several devices that run independently from any computer or other internet device acts as a traditional box of images and memories.

Rather than physical photos, however, displays the images of this device via an interactive touchscreen.

"If you touch one of those photos at any time, so I am taken to a timeline," explained Mr Banks.

"What is then a whole series of photos spread over time.

"Suddenly is a way of thinking we can begin to exploit the digital quality of some of these content, so that we can begin to make the objects that represent perhaps the life of a person, or perhaps give a sense of their evolution over time, or where they spent time at different points in their lives."

Mr banks hopes that its devices would mean digital memories would be far outlive the technology that were created on-as the old photographs in case of his grandfather.

The cloud

This task is made easier by our increasing dependence on "the cloud" for hosting our information-instead of physical storage such as floppy disks, hard drives.

The boxes are designed to function independently, so don't rely on keeping some hardware

"I think we tend to think of the physical limitations of digital things through objects like floppy disks, DVDs and CDs that we have stored our content on.

"I believe that some of these physical limitations are going to go away as we begin to store more and more content online. We'll put them in places and they will pretty much just stay there ".

This, however, is another matter. There are simply too much data? If these systems Save every utterance, the suitcase of 200 valuable images could become suddenly a huge collection of useless data.

"I think that sense of overwhelming numbers and quantity of content is more difficult to manage," says Mr. Banks.

"I think there are ways to tackle that computationally-always a sense of when the photos were taken or that might be the photo and those kinds of things."

Secrets beyond the Tomb

Our online personas can offer a look Back at life people Candido of giving glimpses into the personality and friendships. But with it comes a risk sharing too.

Abigail Sellen is also part of the team working on the project. She says that we can, while we're still alive, we must consider what might be left behind when we pass away.

"A lot of those materials can be quite sensitive or personal information.

Continue reading the main story exploring the limits and potential of the human is broadcast on mindIt Tuesday to 2100GMT and repeated on Wednesday 1630GMT to "So if you leave all that behind someone who interests you, is that the person will be comfortable going through them all?"

MS Sellen says that finding secrets left behind from a deceased relative is nothing new, but it could be interpreted in the archives of e-mail and other information.

"In the past we might have worried about love letters coming through those physical and when you're going through things of your grandfather and be upset by it.

"At least in this case, you know that they have kept them for a reason, and maybe it was important to them."

In future, it might be that how we write our will and perhaps even burn our secret letters, we may have to also spend time cleaning our lives online, ready to be put on display in those closest to us.

The world after Wikileaks

December 16, 2010 Last updated at 11: 46 GMT Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has caused protests by the Governments of the world, things will be different after Wikileaks, but not in ways that we could wait, says regular commentator Bill Thompson.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange might not be Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2010-the distinction went to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg-but certainly managed to dominate the global conversation the past few weeks.

You feel the reverberations of Wikileaks publishes many documents confidential and secret for many years and he has attracted a large band of supporters, but support for Assange is as much about your personal situation as it is an expression of support for what Wikileaks or proposing to do.

To properly understand the philosophy that underpins its activities or its long-term objectives, people should read interesting analysis by Aaron Bady Assange's policy, as posted on the blog zunguzungu.

Bady uses a narrow reading of an essay by Assange status and terrorist conspiracies that Assange sees modern governance as a conspiracy than those with the power that goes against the interests and wishes of the governed and that Wikileaks exists in order to weaken the ability of Governments to communicate secretly and decrease the power of authoritarian States.

By doing this, he believes, will be opening force and lead to more progressive forms of Government-or, at least, less repressive ones.

Also, inevitably, will lead to a response from the targeted institutions and in recent weeks we have seen what happens when a State feels threatened.

Although it is neither pleasant surprise: Governments, like other complex systems, will act to preserve themselves and try to hurt or neutralize the opposition, and nothing to the United States or other Governments have done so far is exceptional.

NET conflict

In a statement made to his mother, from his prison cell, Assange said "we now know that the Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and others are tools of u.s. foreign policy," referring to the way in which these large companies had decided not to provide the service of Wikileaks.

But anyone who has observed the growth of the internet might have been surprised by this.

Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu wrote about this back in 2006 in their excellent book that rules the Internet, where they stressed that the Government will always go after gatekeeper and choke points in their attempt to regulate the online activities.

In that same year, Visa and Mastercard refused to pass the funds to the .com site allofmp3 download music, even if the site has been legal in Russia, but attracted little attention because it was cheap and not music freedom of expression.

Now we face a different type of conflict, and seems to be that shape the political landscape in the years to come.

The ending of the movie Ghostbusters heroes eponymous founders are obliged to defy God Gozer, but before he looks that are said to be "choose the shape of your destructor."

Gozer, they realize, will result in any form monstrous imagine and Venkman tells others don't display anything. Unfortunately, it's too late-Ray has already thought of "but which could, something that would never hurt me"-to the point that a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow man appears and proceeds to destroy New York City.

Something similar is behind the emergence of Wikileaks. Over the past two decades we have built the internet and the web and completed a process of digitization that has transformed most of the world's operational data in electronic form, from banking to love letters to diplomatic cables.

Status quo

We called away at the age of the network and still practiced in our daily lives as though nothing has really changed.

As a result we made this moment inevitable, even if it was impossible to predict the shape that would take our "destructor".

Wikileaks will inaugurate a new era of control, Bill Thompson wonders

Now it is materialized as a stateless person, formless "new media non-profit international organization that publishes observations of documents otherwise available from anonymous sources and leaks," as Wikipedia describes it.

This organisation is under threat from the outside by some of the world's most powerful States, whose action capacity is enormous. It is also challenged from within, as internal mail and documents, made available online on the website reveal the Cryptome.

But what really matters is that the disruptive power of the internet has been conclusively demonstrated, and the old order has been caused to respond.

This is the Napster of democracy, where the forms of Government that have evolved over 200 years of industrial society eager to demonstrate network, just as the business models of the recording industry were swept away by the ease with which the internet could make perfect digital copies of music file compressed.

Napster was castrated by court action in the United States, but his failure inspired-to-peer services that were much more difficult to control. Sharing of music, now is unstoppable and Wikileaks and organisations that come after will ensure that the same is true of secrets.

Of course we must never underestimate the power of the State, to reinvent itself, as well as modern capitalism and constitutional monarchy seem able to do.

Wikileaks has exposed weaknesses in the way their internal flow of information control of Governments and organizations dedicated to transparency and disclosure will observe the tactics used to shut it down and adapt accordingly. But the State may learn too and have the resources to implement what you learn.

I fear that Wikileaks is likely to usher in an era of more effective control as is to sweep away the authoritarian regimes that opposes Julian Assange.

He can look at a day when the conspiratorial power state has declined, but I think we are more likely to see new forms of governance emerge that take advantage of the features of the network age to ensure that their power is intact.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service Digital Planet. Is currently working with the BBC on its draft archive.

YouTube movie in the works

December 15, 2010 Last updated at 09: 46 GMT from Dave Lee BBC World Service is a paratrooper longipes bare hurtles towards Earth in one of the clips submitted to Life In A Day-a film made by thousands of YouTube users, many of us would be hard to remember what they were doing on the 24th July this year.

But for many YouTube fanatics, amateur films and filmmakers or just those curious a unique experiment of movies, that day was the ability to produce a small part of film history.

Kevin Macdonald, Scottish filmmaker famous for the last King of Scotland and Touching the Void, invited the vast YouTube community to spend a few moments to shooting their day.

Their clips were then collected and are being edited together by a team based in Soho, London.

Approximately 5,000 hours of footage-80,000 individual clips-have been sculpted in an hour and a half of film due to be awarded at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

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the main story it has not been done before, and of course can happen only because of new technology. "

End quote Kevin Macdonald Director if that sounds like a monumental task, which is why is Joe Walker, editor of the film, narrated Snezana Mali Losinj-apartments-rooms-accommodation-vaccation-Croatia-Travel-Curcic of BBC Digital planet the tiresome process.

"In the schedule time that we had, which was basically just a few months from beginning to end, no one could see all of that material.

"So the best thing we can do an Office was set up with 24 researchers. Each of them was very clever, a Director or someone with some behind-the-scenes documentary or fiction ".

The team sifted through the vast amount of video, currency up to approximately 200 hours of the best comments.

Although most clips should be left on the cutting room floor, all submissions will remain on YouTube in their life in the portal of a day.

' Extraordinary ' Material

The film, which is yet to be amended by Macdonald and his team, is trying to be a "one day on Earth".

Mr Macdonald I keep saying that it's like the story of a person, "she says.

"It's just that every time you cut a person's soul that goes with you, but the body remains behind. It almost is telling the story of the world as a person, but a person who keeps mutant form. "

Before the project began, Mr. Macdonald realized that, while it would have been easy getting floods of rich content, tech-savvy youth of the Western world, for the film truly represent the world to achieve enabled less community.

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"Life In a day to be truly representative we felt that we had to then do something about it. We went and bought 400 more cameras.

"Then we sent those cameras to parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America-they were distributed to people in remote parts of the world enough.

"As part of the material is really extraordinary for this reason".

Despite all the clips will probably not have any relationship to each other-except the day of filming-Mr Macdonald has made some attempt to tie them all up as evenly as possible.

"It was a full moon that day.

"So, with the first opening sequence with the Moon in different countries-Malawi, South Africa, Australia.

"So we established, right at the beginning, the idea that this is about the world at the same time. I do not believe that someone has made a film like this. It has not been done before, and of course can happen only because of new technology.

The dark side

These obstacles technology granted extensive headaches Mr Walker, who has been involved with over 60 different frame rate-the speed at which you shot a clip-making the entire production appear seamless.

He says that the film is about much more than just the typical casual YouTube clip.

Continue reading the main story that Digital Planet is the weekly program broadcast by the BBC World technology ServiceIt is broadcast on Tuesday 1232GMT to and 1632GMT repeated, 2032GMT and Wednesday 0032GMT to "this project has given us the opportunity to look a little deeper.

"There's a dark side, as well as the history, we have some very disturbing material that came from the Love Parade in Germany, for example, where the fact that there were so many kids with cell phones and Flipcams means that we had seen a YouTuber of a terrible tragedy taking place step-by-step."

More than 500 people were injured and 20 people were killed during a stampede at the dance festival of the city of Duisburg.

"There are some really shocking clips," adds Mr. Macdonald.

"May, for five minutes, 10 minutes, at the head of someone who has a unique view of how things function. Also there are some clips where you think this person needs help, not a camera. "

Yet, despite some strong, emotional scenes, Mr Macdonald believes that life looking one day will be an uplifting experience.

"It is an optimistic film. Is a film about how it is wonderful to be alive ".