ABC Radio's All In the Mind hosted a couple of interesting podcasts on the morals of robots, particularly with the young, the old and in war:
Do you read me HAL? Robot wars, moral machines and silicon that cares - Part 1 and
Part 2. But no mention of Frank Herbet's "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." :-)

Village Secrets

I know the internet has been referred to as a Global Village almost since it was conceived, and social networking sites are making this more true than ever before. Living in a small village means that everybody knows what you have done, i.e. you need to be on your best behaviour all the time because there aren't any secrets. Moving to a large city meant that you could be anonymous, and past indiscretions were less likely to be found out. Choosing to participate in social networking on the internet today means going back to being part of a community where none of your online activity, and to varying degrees your offline activity, is secret.

Update 31 July 2010: Toby Stevens makes the same observation, but provides more insight on implications for privacy. Thanks to Tom for the link.

Biometrics, Property Rights and Securty

David Bradley posted a thought provoking article in Very Personal Data Rights on whether to treat biometric information as "personal property" or "intellectual property". It reminded me about the common security flaw associated with biometrics - namely that to assume that your biometric information is private, once you've handed it over to a third party to use for security purposes, is flawed.