Watch it all and follow the link to get your own street tour access.

Behind the ephemeral “cloud” of cloud computing, the network we use for everything from checking our email to streamlining our health care system, there lies a very tangible and very big computer infrastructure.

But besides a glimpse at some of the hardware in 2009, there has been little information about Google’s data centers, the warehoused collections of servers that have given the company the foundation for its vast Internet operations.

Today, the company is throwing open the gates to the world ”” digitally, of course. It has released a site featuring photos of facilities from Belgium to Finland to Iowa and launched a guided Street View tour of one in Lenoir, N.C.

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Among the words they are looking at–FAQ, Disco, and Bellini….

Read it all and visit over here as well.

The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.

–From Nate Silver of the New York Times 538 blog on the day in September where one poll had President Obama 14 ahead in Wisconsin, and another had Romney ahead by 3 in New Hampshire.

Detective Doug Galluccio hadn’t finished unpacking his new desk when he got his first call from a school resource officer about a sexting incident.

A seventh-grader at C.E. Williams Middle School had taken nude photos of herself and sent them by cellphone to five male classmates. Those ended up posted online.

That was in 2010 when Galluccio became Charleston’s first full-time police officer dedicated to the Internet Crimes Against Children task force. It was his job to help investigate the incident….

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When Facebook Inc. (FB) filed its proposal Feb. 1 to go public, it touted the effectiveness of ads linked to customers’ friends, citing research from Nielsen, the audience-counting company.

arbara Jacobs, an assistant director for corporation finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was skeptical, as she and her staff vetted the filing to ensure Facebook had disclosed all material information to investors. The claim appeared to be drawn from marketing materials, not a Nielsen study, she wrote to Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, 42.

She gave him an ultimatum: Produce the study and provide Nielsen’s consent for use of the data — or don’t use it, she wrote to Ebersman on Feb. 28. Facebook dropped the reference after initial resistance.

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The Pentagon says cyberspace is an operational domain on par with land, sea, air and outer space, and there is little doubt that a global cyberarms race is getting underway. The United States is already well engaged in this race, as evidenced by reports of the computer worm Stuxnet, used to attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment equipment. But so far these efforts have largely been kept secret and conducted as intelligence operations.

DARPA’s workshop points again to the need for more transparency. The United States still has no open, overarching doctrine to govern a cyberweapons program. A good place to start would be a declaratory policy that would lay out when and under what circumstances offensive weapons such as Stuxnet might be used. After that, an open discussion is needed about rules of engagement for this complex new field, along with additional study of such issues as how and whether the military should protect non-military assets in government and the private sector.

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Orient and Occident online magazine seeks to promote not just coexistence but cooperation with Muslims.
It was Egyptian media that brought the appalling “Innocence of Muslims” trailer to the wider attention of Muslims around the world. The consequences have been tragic to watch.
The country has also seen all-too-regular violent clashes between local Muslim and Christian communities, that have got no better since Egypt’s revolution.
In this difficult atmosphere, the Diocese of Egypt, under the leadership of Bishop Mouneer Hanna Anis, has relaunched a magazine online that was first started by two pioneering CMS missionaries more than 100 years ago.

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Here’s a quiz: Google received more than 1,900 requests from governments worldwide to remove content from its various services last year. Which country led the planet in this dubious category, with 418 such demands?

China? Iran? Syria?

No. It was democratic, pluralistic, economically vibrant Brazil.

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“Keep Calm and Carry On?” Sorry, that was 2009.

Ever since the wartime British propaganda poster bearing those soothing words went viral a few years ago, ending up on iPhone cases and coffee mugs, design types have been searching for the next great hyperlinked homily.

Lately, the leading candidates are popping up in the most unlikely of places: Pinterest. The explosively popular image-sharing site has fallen under the spell of words ”” that is, quotes from the great minds that offer lessons to live by.

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It has never been easier to become a cybercriminal, Foreign Secretary William Hague is to warn an international conference in Budapest.

He will tell delegates that cybercrime is “one of the greatest global and strategic challenges of our time.”

Mr Hague is highlighting the UK’s determination to be a world leader in cyber security – it is spending £2m setting up a cybercrime centre.

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All are invited to visit and interact with a new website www.churchgrowthresearch.org.uk built to support the work of the Church Growth Research Programme – the national 18-month academic research project exploring the factors related to spiritual and in particular numerical church growth of the Church of England. The research is being funded through funding set aside by the Church Commissioners and Archbishops’ Council for research and development. This project is being undertaken in partnership with the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex; Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, Durham and the Oxford Centre for Ecclesiology and Practical Theology, Ripon College, Cuddesdon.

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To speculate endlessly over twitter; social-media navel gazing.

–Adam Feuerstein

Read it all; interesting choices in terms of who and what.

When I think back to the Summer of ’92, for example, I picture meandering around the town square with my best friend. The hostess at the corner cafe got used to seeing us, and would sometimes catch our attention to motion us in for free glasses of freshly-squeezed lemonade. We’d see familiar cars rolling down the street and wave at them when they passed by. We’d say hi to the owner of the clothing boutique as she swept off the entryway of her building, and gaze at the new titles on display at the used books store nextdoor. Each of these small moments is like a brush stroke on a canvass, and together they form a richly colored picture that will remain with me for the rest of my life…but I was only able to experience them because I was fully present to the world around me.

I compared that to a memory of a recent event that I attended. I had some childcare issues come up, and ended up moving to a back corner of the room so that I could send text messages to my mother and husband to get the situation worked out. I made every effort to pay attention to the event, and was genuinely interested in it, but I don’t remember it well. I had one foot in the physical world around me, and another in the virtual world inside of my phone. My memories of that summer 20 years ago are far more vivid than my memories of this event two months ago.

It says something about the ultimate hollowness of virtual activities that they’d don’t leave us with memories. With rare exceptions, nobody remembers what texts they sent last month, or the status updates they read and posted last year.

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Anger over a film trailer mocking a sanctified Muslim religious figure has sparked violent protests across the Middle East that have taken the lives of dozens of people. Now, the strife is manifesting itself in the form of cyber war waged against America at home.

Over the course of this week, three major U.S. financial institutions have seen their web infrastructure targeted in technical attacks. On at least two occasions, groups or individuals claiming to be aligned with Muslims said the attacks were a reprisal for the ”˜Innocence of Muslims’ trailer that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad.

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An Italian startup is launching a web advertising platform that aims to provide Catholic websites with Catholic-approved advertisements.

The platform, called AdEthic, will be presented on Thursday (Sept. 20) at a press conference in Rome, as part of a wider Catholic project to engage in social media.

According to Andrea Salvati, a manager at Google Italy who will take the role of CEO at AdEthic in October, the platform wants to tap into the vast Catholic online market that has so far been unable or unwilling to use advertisements.

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Over two-thirds of teens are trying to cover their Internet tracks from their parents, and over a third of parents do not monitor their child’s Internet activity at all. These statistics should highlight the importance of Internet accountability in the home.

John Mangelaars of Microsoft EMEA said parents know their teens are tech-savvy, but this often leads parents to believe their kids don’t need ongoing advice or guidance. “It is incredibly important parents stay actively involved, talking regularly with their kids and using the parental technology tools that are available to them.”

Internet accountability is about setting this expectation of openness and honesty in the home.

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On this week’s podcast, we’re joined by Trevin Wax, who’s packed a lot into his relatively short life: missionary to Romania (where he also met his wife), Southern Baptist associate pastor, Gospel Coalition blogger, and now Managing Editor of The Gospel Project. We take a quick run through Trevin’s bio before settling down to talk about the exciting work he’s been doing in preparing Gospel-centered curriculum for the whole church. We asked Trevin to “sell us” on the package and he did a pretty good job. He also answered some of the criticisms that a project of this nature inevitably attracts.

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It had actually been online since July, but nobody had paid attention to its crude libels against the Prophet Mohammed until Mr Abdullah’s show broadcast clips from it last weekend, calling for the film-makers to be executed.

Within hours the hardline Salafi Islamists who watch his programme, and who have been growing in strength since last year’s revolution, were demonstrating in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and outside the US embassy, which they stormed on Tuesday, burning the US flag.

Thus came the spark to a week of violent protests against the film, leading to the killing of the US ambassador to Libya on Tuesday evening and assaults on Western embassies across the Middle East, leaving at least nine dead and hundreds injured.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Remember that the more specific you can be, the more the rest of us will get from your comments–KSH.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an intimidating interviewee. It’s not so much the worry about keeping up with the brain that invented the world wide web; it’s that when you Google him (in the circumstances, there seems no shame in this method of research), you soon find he has compiled a list of answers to questions that journalists have asked too many times before.

No, he patiently explains on his website, he did not invent the internet; the web is an application that runs on the internet like a fridge uses the power grid. And no, he states, he does not have mixed emotions about his refusal to “cash in” on his invention ”“ “You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.” Nor will he tell you much about his personal life because “what is on the web on this page and my home page is all there is”.

“I thought once I’d put a question on the web, I’d never have to answer it again. And I thought once I got a photographer to take some darn photos of me and put them on the web, then I’d never have to be photographed again,” he says when we meet at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “Was I wrong!”

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Sweden has topped a new global index evaluating the state of the web in 61 countries, with the US coming second and the UK third.

Compiled by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation, it ranked both the social and political impact of the web.

It found that only one in three people are using the web globally and fewer than one in six in Africa.

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This week, on 6th September, the Government consultation into Parental Internet Controls will officially close.

This is our last chance to put across to Ministers our concerns about the growing amount of inappropriate material on the internet being accessed by children and young people.

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The more specific you can be the more helpful it will be for the rest of us. We are especially interested in material others might not be aware of that you have found moving or interesting. What specifically brought this to mind is an off handed reference in my most recent sermon to my wife and I particularly liking English and Scottish mysteries. I was then asked about by several parishioners which mysteries and how did we get them–KSH?

…look at the pseudo-Qur’an that has become such a mainstay of anti-Islamic activism. Internet activists regularly quote Qur’anic passages to characterize the whole Islamic faith as rooted in hatred, terror and violence, and specifically a brutal anti-Semitism. Far from being the incidental deviations of modern-day traitors to the faith, they suggest, such atrocities are entirely rooted in its most fundamental scripture, in words allegedly delivered by God himself.

The problem, though, is that the texts usually cited are spurious. Either they do not occur at all in the Qur’an, or else they are quoted in a sense radically different from their actual meaning. Just how these pseudo-texts came into being is mysterious. In some cases, activists might have invented them wholesale, while later readers pass them on in the sincere belief that they are authentic. Alternatively, perhaps genuine passages were perverted in the course of transmission. Whatever explanation we choose, there is no reason to suggest that individuals citing the alleged passages are conscious of any kind of deception: they are telling the truth as they understand it. Unintentionally, though, they are peddling harmful misinformation.

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The Saylor Foundation has nearly finished creating a full suite of free, online courses in a dozen popular undergraduate majors. And the foundation is now offering a path to college credit for its offerings by partnering with two nontraditional players in higher education ”“ Excelsior College and StraighterLine.

The project started three years ago, when the foundation began hiring faculty members on a contract basis to build courses within their subject areas. The professors scoured the web for free Open Education Resources (OER), but also created video lectures and tests.

“I was able to develop my own material,” said Kevin Moquin, who created a business law course for Saylor. A former adjunct professor for a technical college and a for-profit institution, Moquin said the foundation gave him the “flexibility to adjust it as I needed.”

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One of the latest contributions to the debate over the pros and cons of the Internet and social networking sites is the book “Networked: The New Social Operation System.”
Authors Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman are respectively the director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, and a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.
Many people are concerned about the effects of the Internet on society, the authors acknowledged. In their opinion, however, it does not have an isolating effect. People are interacting with others, by using these new technologies.

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The only remaining laboratory of one of the greatest American inventors may soon be purchased so that it can be turned into a museum, thanks to an Internet campaign that raised nearly a million dollars in about a week.

The lab was called Wardenclyffe, and it was built by Nikola Tesla, a wizard of electrical engineering whose power systems lit up the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and harnessed the mighty Niagara Falls.

“He is the developer of the alternating current system of electrical transmission that we use throughout the world today,” says Jane Alcorn, president of a nonprofit group called The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, which wants to buy the site and preserve the lab by making it a museum.

Please if you can listen to (but if you can’t read) it all. Consider also following the links if you have time, they are great fun.