In the past couple of weeks it's become something of a fad to post about the genre of cyberpunk becoming somewhat passe'. We now live in the twenty-first century, where much of the fiction that my generation grew up reading was ostensibly set. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks. We don't really have food pills, either, but the nutrient and protein shakes that you can buy in the cold case of just about every convenience store these days (or the frankly awful tasting energy drinks that are popular with the younger set) aren't that far off. We do have …

Back in 2002, the desktop security company Symantec bought out Securityfocus, which at the time was one of the biggest clearinghouses of information security related information. Everything from mailing lists to archives of whitepapers can be found there, and for many years it was pretty much the first place to go if you wanted to monitor vulnerability reports and software releases. After Symantec bought them out there was some concern that Securityfocus would decline in quality as time and energy might no longer be spent maintaining and updating the website. That didn't happen, thankfully, but last week the other shoe …

An outfit called In-Q-Tel in Arlington, Virginia, founded in 1999, is known to be a semi-independent but private aspect of the US intelligence community which invests in tech companies that do things deemed strategically useful. Practically all of those things are on the cutting edge of commercial technology for the time. They say as much on their website, in case you're wondering if I've been listening to a little too much Coast to Coast AM lately. Their latest investment project is a most interesting one, a company called Visible Technologies which develop software to monitor social activities on the global …