Charles Leadbeater has written a characteristically thoughtful pamphlet on Cloud Culture: the global future of cultural relations for Counterpoint, the British Council’s thinktank. It is being published next Monday (February 8) but he’s summarised the argument in this blog post.

The Internet, our relationship with it and our culture are about to undergo a change as profound and unsettling as the development of web 2.0 in the last decade, which made social media and search – Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – mass, global phenomena. The rise of “cloud computing” will trigger a battle for control over a digital landscape that is only just coming into view. As Hillary Clinton’s announcement to release funding for the protection of the net – a day after Google’s announcement to stop self-censoring its service in China – indicates, the battle lines are already being drawn.

The internet we have grown up with is a decentralised network of separate computers, with their own software and data. Cloud computing may look like an extension of this network-centric logic but, in fact, it is quite different.

As cloud computing comes of age, our links to one another will be increasingly routed through a vast shared “cloud” of data and software. These clouds, supported by huge server farms all over the world, will allow us to access data from many devices, not just computers; to use programs only when we need them and to share expensive resources such as servers more efficiently. Instead of linking to one another through a dumb, decentralised network, we will all be linking to and through shared clouds.

Which raises the question: whose clouds will these be?

It’s interesting how these issues are gradually coming to the fore. Sometimes it takes events like the launch of the iPhone or (now) the iPad to provide a peg for thinking about what all this stuff means and where is it taking us. In my darker moments I have a terrible feeling that we’re sleepwalking into a dystopian nightmare — that our great-great-grandchildren will one day look back on this period in history and ask “what were they thinking when they skipped happily into the clutches of Apple, Google & Co?”

Well, what are we thinking?

LATER: Bill Thompson reminded me of a column he wrote way back in October 2008, in which he wrote about cloud computing as “a generational shift as significant as that from the mainframe to the desktop computer is happening as we watch”. But, he wondered,

what does this do for the companies that sell cloud-based services rather than operating systems, routers or hardware? What happens when Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and IBM are actually running programs and storing data on behalf of their customers? We may criticise Google for censoring search results in China, but what happens when Microsoft data centres are being used to store data on political prisoners or transcripts of torture sessions?

There is already a lively debate about the dangers of having the US government trawl through a company’s confidential records using the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, taking advantage of the fact that the main cloud platforms are run by US companies.

But the other side of the equation matters too. Should Amazon feel happy that its elastic compute cloud could easily stretch to support human rights abuses that would still be considered unacceptable in most of the world? And if so, what should we do about it?

Click here. Then stand back (and make sure the volume has been turned down. Otherwise your colleagues may give you funny looks).

Thanks, Quentin.

In a recent post I mentioned Mark Anderson’s criticisms of China which were posted on his Bright Fire blog.

Here’s an update:

I want to thank all of our posters on “What is China?” for their postings. I will note that our servers were attacked and brought down for a few minutes today, Friday, and that our tech team had the servers back up and running within minutes. Why do I mention this? Yesterday, an LA law firm which had filed a $2.2B suit against China for stealing the IP of a California company also found their servers attacked, just a day or so after the suit was filed.

Is this how we do business now?

I think it is very important, and enlightening for the rest of the world, that those who suffer cyber attacks after crticizing China, should go public IMMEDIATELY.

Like Google, and like SNS, the effect of this should be obvious: depriving China of the cyberattack tool it has recently deployed. Google claims that 34 other corporations were also hacked.

OK, CEOs of these corporations, it is time for you to step forward. We already have a human rights student from Stanford willing to stand up and say NO. Are you CEOs more afraid than she is?

David Pogue of the New York Times recently panned the Barnes & Noble e-Reader, the Nook. But in his review he missed something.

Barnes & Noble has been claiming that the Nook weighs less than it really does.

OK, not by much. The company says the thing weighs 11.2 ounces. In fact, it weighs 12.1 ounces. (I discovered this when my daughter set it on a home postal scale. Later, I confirmed it with a fancier scale at the actual post office.)

That’s right: Barnes & Noble conveniently shaved 7.4 percent off of the Nook’s weight, and hoped nobody would notice.

Well, OK. What’s 7.4 percent? I mean, we’re talking about an understatement of one ounce here. Who cares?

First of all, you might care if you have to hold this hard plastic slab in your hands for hours, as you must when you actually read books on it. (USA Today’s Ed Baig almost uncovered the secret when he wrote in his review: “Nook weighs 11.2 ounces compared with 10.2 ounces for the Kindle. I felt the extra ounce.” No, Ed–you actually felt the extra TWO ounces.)

The really interesting part of the saga begins when he contacts B&N for their reaction. They claimed it was all the result of an innocent mistake:

“Given the higher than anticipated demand for Nooks last year, Barnes & Noble made some minor variances in the manufacturing process to get units to customers more quickly,” says spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating. “Those minor changes resulted in a marginal weight difference from the pre-production specs, making Nook 12.1 ounces. We are in the process of updating all references to the weight.”

Mr Pogue isn’t taken in.

No “oops,” no “we apologize for the error?” Nope; nothing but a cheesy attempt to spin this gaffe into a marketing message. The company blames the error on “the higher than anticipated demand.” …

And by the way — isn’t it funny that Barnes & Noble knew about the error, but never bothered to correct it until today, when I caught them and let them know I’d be publicizing it?

The moral he draws from the story is that if B&N faked something so simple that it could be checked with a simple postal scale, then reviewers will now have to be sceptical about all the tech specifications of devices they are given to test. For example, what about all those ludicrous claims of laptop battery life? How come no actual user ever seems to be able to get anywhere near the claimed usage time out of his/her machine?

For me, though, the more acute lesson comes from the way B&N tried to spin the story (“higher than anticipated demand”) when they were caught out. Why does nobody — well, almost nobody — ever admit a mistake any more?

How about this — from Porchester Junior school.

If you’ve got an iPhone, or an iPod touch, then you need to get the Porchester App. Yes, that’s right, we have our very own App, designed and created by Mr. Widdowson, available for free from the App store that brings you the latest website articles, videos and audio from school.

We’re [sic] think it’s brilliant, and we’re not sure but…we might just be the first school to have our own App.

Eat your heart out, Eton!

Hey! Bill has signed up for Twitter. Last time I looked he had accumulated 241,614 Followers. He also has a new website, portentously titled The Gates Notes.