Read it all. (For more information on Father Kimel, please see this previous post about his decision last year to join the Orthodox Church).

Some cyberattacks over the past decade have briefly affected state strategic plans, but none has resulted in death or lasting damage. For example, the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by Russia shut down networks and government websites and disrupted commerce for a few days, but things swiftly went back to normal. The majority of cyberattacks worldwide have been minor: easily corrected annoyances such as website defacements or basic data theft — basically the least a state can do when challenged diplomatically.

Our research shows that although warnings about cyberwarfare have become more severe, the actual magnitude and pace of attacks do not match popular perception. Only 20 of 124 active rivals — defined as the most conflict-prone pairs of states in the system — engaged in cyberconflict between 2001 and 2011. And there were only 95 total cyberattacks among these 20 rivals. The number of observed attacks pales in comparison to other ongoing threats: a state is 600 times more likely to be the target of a terrorist attack than a cyberattack. We used a severity score ranging from five, which is minimal damage, to one, where death occurs as a direct result from cyberwarfare. Of all 95 cyberattacks in our analysis, the highest score — that of Stuxnet and Flame — was only a three.

To be sure, states should defend themselves against cyberwarfare, but throwing vast amounts of money toward a low-level threat does not make sense.

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Twitter’s message limit of 140 text characters is ideally suited to the brief attention spans of these relentlessly distracted times. But an 85-year-old man will soon re-confirm another trend: This social media craze is no longer limited to the young.

Pope Benedict XVI will start posting tweets on Wednesday under “the handle” @pontifex, a term that means “bridge builder” in Latin.

That Monday announcement from the Vatican reveals another modernizing attempt by a generally old-school pontiff, born in 1927, to reach 2012 audiences. The pope plans to accept questions about matters of faith via the hashtag #askpontifex. Presumably, he’ll offer uplifting insights designed to bring souls who have strayed back into the fold.

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Britain’s senior Anglican bishops will be tweeting their Christmas Day sermons for the first time this year.

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the archbishop-designate, as well as clergy and congregations around the UK, will be celebrating the birth of Jesus in a campaign making use of social media.

Worshippers in the Church’s 16,000 parishes are being encouraged to tweet on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

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Police forces with strong social media presences have better relationships with the citizens they are policing, researchers claim.

Their study involved several European countries.

They found that in countries where the police social media presence was less strong, “unofficial” pages were popular.

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As you read these words, does it make a difference if they are in print or online?

Yes, if you accept one conclusion of an official inquiry on the British press released last Thursday.
The report’s author, Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, offers many recommendations on how to restore the integrity of British newspapers after recent scandals, which included hacking of personal cellphones, even one belonging to a deceased girl. His main proposals to Parliament are to pass a new law and use a government regulator to help hold newspapers to account for lapses of their own ethical codes.

While he is optimistic that traditional newspapers can be reformed ”“ although his peculiar solutions may be a slippery slope to censorship ”“ Sir Brian is strangely pessimistic that news consumers can ever trust much of what they read in the new digital media.

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The question of who rules the Internet and how is being debated at a 12-day conference in Dubai.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications, which started Monday, aims to draft a new treaty to underpin international telecommunications regulations. The current rules were put in place in 1988. The conference is sponsored by the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations agency for information and communication technologies.

The bid to change the rule book has unleashed fears of a grab for centralized control of the Internet by the U.N. The process has also come under criticism for its lack of transparency, with documents unpublished and proposals up for debate kept secret.

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The Vatican unveiled Pope Benedict XVI’s Twitter account on Monday (Dec. 3) as it announced a series of new initiatives aimed at raising the church’s online profile.

The pope’s account, @Pontifex, drew nearly 200,000 followers in the hours after the announcement even though Benedict will not officially start tweeting until Dec. 12. That’s when the pope plans to answer questions about faith submitted to him via Twitter through a special hashtag, #askpontifex, set up by the Vatican.

At least initially, the pope’s tweets will be related to his official speeches and activities but their scope might be extended in the future, for example in response to natural disasters.

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[I know that]…Christian participation in the media circus is a dilemma. But it is not a new dilemma, it is basically the dilemma of the Incarnation: God himself becoming vulnerable in the world of fall and sin. A dilemma which challenges us to be realistic and not fool ourselves: I know that the IT world does not create a better life; I know that the aggressive stream of pictures and words and music is like an epidemic that can attack my soul. But I also know that without the salt and light of the Gospel the world will perish, without the involvement of Christian professionals at all levels the world will be a wasteland and the media will become reflected images and caricatures of ghosts and goblins. Only Christ-followers have what it takes to fight the ghosts. It is our mandate to find room for the God-dimension and, by the same token, the human dimension in the orbit of satellites and the chat room of social media. Without our presence as authentic and credible role models, the world shall definitely amuse itself to death (as John Naisbitt said).

I am not blind to the problems facing us as Christians in the media ”“ the struggle to reinvent ”˜relevance’ in the midst of a church that often has drowned in irrelevance, the challenge to overcome our own secular nature because so many of us have ceased to think ”˜Christianly’, and the urgent need to avoid a process by which the media transform the Gospel into entertainment (a la the electronic church and some ”˜Christian’ talk shows)…The Lord of the dance requires the best ”“ and gives his gifts to his people accordingly.

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As you sat across the Thanksgiving table basking in the warmth of family and the aroma of chestnut stuffing, most likely you did not remember the vicious comment your Aunt Jennifer made about you a few years back. You didn’t dwell on Uncle Julio’s unkind reference to your drinking last Christmas or what cousin Duwan said about your girlfriend during that dreadful vacation at the shore. At family holidays, we tend to embrace our relatives even after months or years of not having seen one another, regardless of the quarrels we have had in the past.

We may chalk up our generous forgiveness to the festive spirit of the holiday, but the real reason has nothing to do with Thanksgiving; it is because of how we humans remember ”” and forget. Cognitive experts tell us that forgetting is fundamental to how we make sense of the world. Forgetting helps us survive, by making sure we don’t dwell in the past.

In the digital age, that mechanism of our humanity is under threat.

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The holiday season is officially upon us. There are gifts to buy, recipes to perfect, and cards to be addressed. And while we may all spend the next frenzied weeks trying really, really hard not to let what’s important get lost in the shuffle, sometimes things slip through the cracks.

We intend to give back. We intend to get involved. But there are many options to choose from ”” and before we know it, we’re celebrating the New Year.

I want to make it easy for you. I want to show you how a holiday gift through World Vision can transform lives

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Teaching Introduction to Sociology is almost second nature to Mitchell Duneier, a professor at Princeton: he has taught it 30 times, and a textbook he co-wrote is in its eighth edition. But last summer, as he transformed the class into a free online course, he had to grapple with some brand-new questions: Where should he focus his gaze while a camera recorded the lectures? How could the 40,000 students who enrolled online share their ideas? And how would he know what they were learning?

In many ways, the arc of Professor Duneier’s evolution, from professor in a lecture hall to online instructor of tens of thousands, reflects a larger movement, one with the potential to transform higher education. Already, a handful of companies are offering elite college-level instruction ”” once available to only a select few, on campus, at great cost ”” free, to anyone with an Internet connection.

Moreover, these massive open online courses, or MOOCs, harness the power of their huge enrollments to teach in new ways, applying crowd-sourcing technology to discussion forums and grading and enabling professors to use online lectures and reserve on-campus class time for interaction with students.

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You can be sold in seconds.

No, wait: make that milliseconds.

The odds are that access to you ”” or at least the online you ”” is being bought and sold in less than the blink of an eye. On the Web, powerful algorithms are sizing you up, based on myriad data points: what you Google, the sites you visit, the ads you click. Then, in real time, the chance to show you an ad is auctioned to the highest bidder.

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There have been many relevant articles and pieces of information related to the situation here in the diocese of South Carolina in recent days. I have waited until today to post them since I did not want them lost on Veterans/Remembrance Day yesterday. Please note that I post material here which is in circulation but which is, in some cases, factually false, and in others, embarrassingly biased against the diocese. I trust readers to read and sift things carefully and make their own judgments. If you have questions, ask–KSH.

Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second ”” and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.

Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.

And yet we dare not lose it. Because listening tunes our brain to the patterns of our environment faster than any other sense, and paying attention to the nonvisual parts of our world feeds into everything from our intellectual sharpness to our dance skills.

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…I can’t resist saying just this. I hope you will take with you the memory of our northern saints as you learn what it means to inhabit this office. In Durham, you are the direct successor of Aidan, founder of our diocese, and of Cuthbert in whose shrine in the Cathedral you have often prayed. In a blog earlier this year I compared Rowan Williams with Cuthbert as ”˜off-beat’ bishops. I wanted to say that a Christian leader needs to be a bit elusive, not always saying or doing the expected thing, not afraid of being surprising and keeping people guessing.

Already the public wants to pigeon-hole you: evangelical rather than catholic, pro this and against that. You are bigger than that, as anyone who knows you will confirm. You know that it needs great self-awareness to resist these easy either-ors. It also takes resilience and courage to be your own man in leadership. It depends on keeping the spiritual garden watered by long and regular spells of solitariness, meditation and prayer. I know how important this is to you, to go to the heart of faith and keep it alive and fresh. I hope the pressures of high office drive you more and more in the contemplative direction which is the source of wisdom. I believe they will because your personal authenticity is so important to you. And I believe that you will surprise, inspire and delight us too.

When Donald Coggan was installed as archbishop, his secretary mis-typed ”˜enthronement as ”˜enthornment’….

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Share your voting experience – how long did you wait? Any interesting observations or conversations? Where and with whom are you watching election returns tonight?
Whatever thoughts you chose to share. Please if at all possible real names and locations highly preferred. The more specific you can be the better–remember you are writing comments for people in other locales that include other countries, etc.

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Faced with falling congregations, the Church of England is finding digital engagement via Twitter, Facebook and blogging sites a powerful and important part of its ministry and mission.

Sister Elizabeth Pio based in Southsea, Portsmouth, is the Anglican nun behind @bethanysister -which has attracted a followership of over 1300. She uses the site as an electronic notice board, sharing spiritual insights and prayers as well as her take on current affairs and even football matches.

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Writing is hard. All by itself with no bells and whistles, when it’s just your thoughts pulsing through your mind, filtered through your heart, and fighting to get out of your fingers as articulately as possible ”“ it’s hard.

But we, we are living in the age of bells and whistles. In a day and time when being published, being read, is easier than ever ”“ the task itself has become harder.

The responsibilities of writing have been weighed down with drudgery. Writers aren’t simply creatives anymore. We are publicists, agents, assistants, marketers, back-scratchers, promoters, tech gurus, networkers, platform-builders .

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State officials say someone hacked into the Department of Revenue, exposing about 3.6 million South Carolina tax returns.

Gov. Nikki Haley said Friday about 387,000 credit and debit card numbers were also exposed, and 16,000 of those were unencrypted. State officials are urging anyone who has filed a state tax return since 1998 to call a toll-free number to determine whether their information is affected.

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It is with sadness that the Anglican Church of Canada and Augsburg Fortress Canada announce that the Anglican Book Centre at 80 Hayden Street will close on Jan. 18, 2013. Canadian Anglicans will still be able to order resources online and by phone through Augsburg Fortress Canada.

“Religious book and gift stores across Canada have faced significant challenges resulting in the closure of over 120 stores in the past 10 years,” said Andy Seal, Director of Augsburg Fortress Canada/Anglican Book Centre.

“Sales at our Hayden St. store have decreased each year since 2009. By 2011 Toronto sales were 28% below the break-even level. In spite of hard work and innovation, the trend has continued in 2012.”

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Children are getting “unrealistic” expectations about sex as a result of watching online pornography, a study indicates.
The survey conducted by Plymouth University discovered that youngsters are regularly watching porn from the age of 11 and some are “addicted” to it before they are sexually active.
It found that watching the material gives them expectations that are impossible to fulfil and can cause problems in later life once they are in a relationship.

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The man often credited as being the father of internet defense says it’s still unclear where a recent wave of hacking attacks targeting the U.S. financial industry are coming from.

Gil Shwed is the co-founder and CEO of Check Point Software Technologies. Many recognize him and the company’s other co-founder, Marius Nacht, as the world’s pioneers in cyber-security. Shwed developed his expertise designing systems for an elite technology unit in the Israel Defense Forces years before the internet became a daily part of our lives.

Shwed said today “Iran is definitely capable of launching these kinds of attacks but so is just about any other developed country….”

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“Companies are having to retool their thinking, saying, ”˜What is it that our customers are doing through the mobile channel that is quite distinct from what we are delivering them through our traditional Web channel?’ ” said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research, the technology research firm.

He added, “It’s hilarious to talk about traditional Web business like it’s been going on for centuries, but it’s last century.”

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Check them out.

A generation of children risks growing up with obsessive personalities, poor self-control, short attention spans and little empathy because of an addiction to social networking websites such as Twitter, a leading neuroscientist has warned.

Young people’s brains are failing to develop properly after being overexposed to the cyber world at an early age, it was claimed.

Baroness Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, said a decline in physical human contact meant children struggled to formulate basic social skills and emotional reactions.

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Newsweek, the 80-year-old US current affairs magazine, is to become an online-only publication.

The last print edition will be on 31 December, reflecting the trend for newspapers and magazines to move online as traditional advertising declines.

Newsweek merged with the internet news group the Daily Beast two years ago.

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