For a generation growing up with digital media, the written word printed on paper has little appeal ”” even if it’s the word of God. It’s for them that an Orlando, Fla., company has come up with the multimedia digital Glo Bible.

“You have entire generations of people that don’t engage with paper very well,” says Nelson Saba, founder of Immersion Digital. “If you look at Bible literacy among younger generations, it’s dismal.” The Glo Bible “is designed to be a digital alternative to the paper Bible.”

A Gallup poll in 2000 found that about one-quarter of people ages 18 through 29 read the Bible weekly ”” about half the rate of those 65 or older. Part of that, Saba contends, is the younger generation’s aversion to the printed word.

“There is nothing wrong with paper. I have lots of paper Bibles, but it’s just not the media they engage,” he says.

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Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

“Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks,” said another.

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Facebook has become one of the biggest influences on the lives of girls, according to a survey.

A study of eight to 15-year-olds for National Family Week found 40% of girls identified Facebook as one of the most important things in their lives – compared with 6% of boys.

Parents were found to underestimate the significance of technology.

The role of social networking was particularly important in families with a single mother as parent.

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When blogger Isaac Mao recently announced online an upcoming talk by a Beijing writer whose work is banned by the government, police showed up at his door at night to “convince” him to cancel the event, which he eventually agreed to do. But just to be sure, authorities turned off the electricity at the planned meeting space and barred the doors.

Chinese officials say such actions are aimed at creating “social harmony.” In the sarcastic lexicon of Chinese netizens, Mao was “harmonized” that April evening.

“They won’t arrest you to stop you, but they pressure you,” said Mao, whose website is blocked by the government. “They pressured the owners of this space and they threatened to close it down. Many people worry about losing their jobs. That’s why many people self-censor themselves.”

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It’s easy to lose your temper on the Internet. Anyone who reads ”” or writes ”” comments on blogs and news sites knows that the conversation can quickly stray from civil discourse to scathing personal attacks. For years, many websites just let users go at it, and free speech reigned. But now editors are rethinking just how open their sites should be.

Many people who want to participate in online discussions are quickly turned off by the nastiness. Miki Hsu Leavey, a resident of Napa, Calif., wrote a heartfelt, thankful letter to her local paper, The Napa Valley Register, after the health care bill passed. In the letter, she described her own struggle with lupus, her son’s difficulties getting insurance owing to his pre-existing heart condition, and her husband’s liver cancer diagnosis.

“My thank you note was really about the relief I had mentally,” says Leavey.

When Leavey looked at the site the morning her letter was published, she was shocked at many of the comments.

Read or listen to it all and, yes, let it serve as a salutary reminder about the comments here–KSH.

Responding to mounting pressure from users and privacy groups, Facebook introduced a new, simplified version of its privacy controls on Wednesday.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, said the revised settings would make it easier for users to understand how much of their personal information was publicly accessible on the Web.

“The settings have gotten complex, and it has become hard for people to use them to effectively control their settings,” said Mr. Zuckerberg at a press event at Facebook headquarters. “We wanted to make it really easy to change privacy in just a couple of clicks.” Facebook said it would give its users a simple control to determine whether their information was visible to only friends, friends of friends or everyone on the Internet. Those settings will be applied retroactively to everything users have published on Facebook in the past.

In addition, Facebook said it was changing its directory of users to show only minimal information when people search for others, like the name, profile picture and gender. It had earlier required users to make more of their information public.

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Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook will officially log its 500 millionth active citizen. If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world’s third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S. More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not only have a Facebook account but have returned to the site within the past 30 days.

Just six years after Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg helped found Facebook in his dorm room as a way for Ivy League students to keep tabs on one another, the company has joined the ranks of the Web’s great superpowers. Microsoft made computers easy for everyone to use. Google helps us search out data. YouTube keeps us entertained. But Facebook has a huge advantage over those other sites: the emotional investment of its users. Facebook makes us smile, shudder, squeeze into photographs so we can see ourselves online later, fret when no one responds to our witty remarks, snicker over who got fat after high school, pause during weddings to update our relationship status to Married or codify a breakup by setting our status back to Single. (I’m glad we can still be friends, Elise.)

Getting to the point where so many of us are comfortable living so much of our life on Facebook represents a tremendous cultural shift, particularly since 28% of the site’s users are older than 34, Facebook’s fastest-growing demographic. Facebook has changed our social DNA, making us more accustomed to openness. But the site is premised on a contradiction: Facebook is rich in intimate opportunities ”” you can celebrate your niece’s first steps there and mourn the death of a close friend ”” but the company is making money because you are, on some level, broadcasting those moments online. The feelings you experience on Facebook are heartfelt; the data you’re providing feeds a bottom line.

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The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare ”“ despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace.

The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon’s ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world’s computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland.

The creation of America’s most senior cyber warrior comes just days after the US air force disclosed that some 30,000 of its troops had been re-assigned from technical support “to the frontlines of cyber warfare”.

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A graduate student at DePaul University, atheist activist Hemant Mehta avoided being a church hater by becoming a church rater.

Enlisted four years ago on a lark to attend about a dozen Chicago-area churches and honestly rate his experience, Mehta’s beliefs did not change, but his attitude toward organized religion did.

His journey inspired an interreligious group of entrepreneurs to recently launch ChurchRater, a new approach to church shopping modeled after Yelp, a popular website where users rate local businesses. By inviting ordinary worshipers to post reviews from the pews, the website aims to help Christians navigate the more than 330,000 churches across the U.S. to find where they fit on Sunday morning.

The Rev. Jim Henderson, an evangelical pastor from Seattle and one of the site’s founders, insists that Sunday morning worship is when most churches choose to open their doors to the public, and hence invite critique. Churches should welcome the evaluations at churchrater.com, he added. While Henderson and his staff work to filter unnecessarily vile material to keep reviews useful, he said hard truths can hurt and help.

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ERIN ROY: One day I came home from class, walked in my house, and my housemates were huddled around the computer, and they said that they had heard of and found this Web site. So I went over, checked it out and just saw terrible, terrible things written. Initially it definitely affected a lot of girls I know. I think they were just devastated, embarrassed, upset. Marist is a very small school, so one person hears something, and it spreads like wildfire even if it holds no truth.

[BETTY] ROLLIN: The Web site that was spreading the malicious gossip at Marist and 500 other colleges and universities was called JuicyCampus. Incredibly, the students had no way to stop it since the messages were all anonymously written, and the Web site was under no legal obligation to remove it.

ROY: Some of them definitely, probably were written by men who maybe left off on the wrong foot with a girl. Maybe something happened, and you know he didn’t think of her in the highest regards, and for girls””jealousy. They know this site is anonymous, so they are just so willing to jump on their computer and write comments about people, because they know they will never be caught….

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Follow up: There is more on this important subject there.

Pakistan blocked access to YouTube today because of “growing sacrilegious content” on the video-sharing website. It is the latest twist in an escalating international row over Islam and freedom of speech online.

The move came a day after the Pakistani Government responded to a court order by temporarily blocking Facebook over a page advertising a contest to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The Everyone Draw Muhammad Day page and several spin-offs invite users to send in caricatures of the Prophet today ”“ infuriating many Muslims who regard any image of him as blasphemous.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority did not say specifically which material on YouTube was deemed sacrilegious, but there are several clips relating to Everyone Draw Muhammad Day.

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It was not the Christmas present that Julie Babikan had been hoping for. In December 2008, soon after buying a house, she was abruptly fired from her job as a graphic designer at an accounting firm in Chicago. “I had no clue that my position was about to be eliminated,” she recalls. Desperate to find work as the economy tipped into chaos, Ms Babikan scoured job ads to no avail. Eventually she decided to advertise for work on a service called Elance, which allows freelancers to bid for corporate piecework. She has since built up a healthy stream of online projects and reckons she will soon be earning more than she did in her previous job.

Like Ms Babikan, millions of workers are embracing freelancing as an alternative to full-time employment or because they cannot find salaried jobs. According to IDC, a market-research firm, there were around 12m full-time, home-based freelancers and independent contractors in America alone at the end of last year and there will be 14m by 2015. Experts reckon this number will keep rising for several reasons, including a sluggish jobs market and workers’ growing desire for the flexibility to be able to look after parents or children.

Technology is also driving the trend. Over the past few years a host of fast-growing firms such as Elance, oDesk and LiveOps have begun to take advantage of “the cloud”””tech-speak for the combination of ubiquitous fast internet connections and cheap, plentiful web-based computing power””to deliver sophisticated software that makes it easier to monitor and manage remote workers. Maynard Webb, the boss of LiveOps, which runs virtual call centres with an army of over 20,000 home workers in America, says the company’s revenue exceeded $125m in 2009. He is confidently expecting a sixth year of double-digit growth this year.

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Some tech pundits think Facebook is in trouble, but the data tells a different story: growth hasn’t slowed a bit.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Facebook has a backlash on its hands. Many news outlets are reporting it, after all. Tech pundit Leo Laporte and Engadget co-founder Peter Rojas killed their profiles. U.S. Senators have sent the company a letter and so have a group of European Union data advisors. And in a flashy poker metaphor, blogger Jason Calcanis accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of overplaying his hand.

The data tells a different story: Facebook has had a net gain of 10 million active users since it announced a series of new features at f8, the company’s April 21st developer conference. A few high profile tech bloggers may have quit the site, but not many other people have. The number of deactivations, according to a Facebook spokesperson, is about the same as it’s been all along.

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Google Inc. said an internal investigation has discovered that the roving vans the company uses to create its online mapping services were mistakenly collecting data about websites people were visiting over wireless networks.

The Internet giant said it would stop collecting Wi-Fi data from its StreetView vans, which workers drive to capture street images and to locate Wi-Fi networks. The company said it would dispose of the data it had accidentally collected.

Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research for Google, wrote in a blog post that the company uncovered the mistake while responding to a German data-protection agency’s request for it to audit the Wi-Fi data, amid mounting concerns that Google’s practices violated users’ privacy.

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The seemingly empathetic nurse struck up conversations over the Internet with people who were pondering suicide. She told them what methods worked best. She told some that it was all right to let go, that they would be better in heaven, and entered into suicide pacts with others.

But the police say the nurse, who sometimes called herself Cami and described herself as a young woman, was actually William F. Melchert-Dinkel, a 47-year-old husband and father from Faribault, Minn., who now stands charged with two counts of aiding suicide.

Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, whose lawyer declined an interview request on his behalf, told investigators that his interest in “death and suicide could be considered an obsession,” court documents say, and that he sought the “thrill of the chase.” While the charges stem from two deaths ”” one in Britain in 2005 and one in Canada in 2008 ”” Mr. Melchert-Dinkel, who was indeed a licensed practical nurse, told investigators that he had most likely encouraged dozens of people to kill themselves, court documents said. He said he could not be sure how many had succeeded.

The case, chilling and ghoulish, raises thorny issues in the Internet age, both legal and otherwise. For instance, many states have laws barring assisting suicide, but rarely have cases involved people not in the same room (much less the same country) or the sharing of only words (not guns or pills).

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Facebook claims it has 400 million users. But are they well-protected from prying eyes, scammers and unwanted marketers?

Not according to Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online.

She says your privacy may be at far greater risk of being violated than you know when you log onto Facebook, due to security gaffes or marketing efforts by the company.

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Carolyn Schapper was an Army sergeant who served in Iraq with a military intelligence unit north of Baghdad. Today, several years out of uniform, she keeps up with veterans online ”” on Facebook, blogs and chat groups.

Schapper taps on her computer at her kitchen table and pulls up a community on the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America site.

“They’ve got 11 people online now doing a chat,” she says of the nonprofit group. “So there are about seven different groups that didn’t exist three years ago that you can start communicating with people online.”

She says that veterans of today don’t go to American Legion halls or the VFW for a drink and a game of pool. They’ve created a virtual community.

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Twitter has fixed a major bug that saw many users of the service appear to lose all of their followers and friends.

The problem began when a flaw was uncovered that allowed people to force others to “follow” them on the site.

People who typed “accept” followed by a person’s Twitter name forced the user to be added to their list of followers.

The hack was quickly passed around the social network with many people using it to force celebrities to follow them.

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Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago ”” mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.

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It is the online version of the bathroom wall in school, the place to scrawl raw, anonymous gossip.

Formspring.me, a relatively new social networking site, has become a magnet for comments, many of them nasty and sexual, among the Facebook generation.

While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.

By setting up a free Formspring account and linking it to their Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook accounts, young people invite their hundreds of online friends to ask questions or post comments, without having to identify themselves.

In part, Formspring is just the latest place to hang out and exchange gossip, as teenagers have always done. But because of the anonymity, the banter is unvarnished.

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“We’ve still barely hit the tip of the iceberg for people who could play [the] games but don’t think they can,” says David Roberts, the CEO of PopCap, the company that created Bejeweled.

“With Bejeweled, 70 percent of our customers are women, and that astounds almost everybody,” he says….

Roberts says people were wrong in assuming that games on Facebook would appeal to a more traditional audience of younger males.

“What you find is a lot of women who are both working and raising children just have no time for relationships,” says Misiek Piskorski, who teaches about online social networking at the Harvard Business School. “But it’s not like they wouldn’t want to spend more time having these relationships. It’s just really, really hard. And this allows them to basically sustain these relationships.”

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In a move that will stoke a battle over the future of the Internet, the federal government plans to propose regulating broadband lines under decades-old rules designed for traditional phone networks.

The decision, by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, is likely to trigger a vigorous lobbying battle, arraying big phone and cable companies and their allies on Capitol Hill against Silicon Valley giants and consumer advocates.

Breaking a deadlock within his agency, Mr. Genachowski is expected Thursday to outline his plan for regulating broadband lines. He wants to adopt “net neutrality” rules that require Internet providers like Comcast Corp. and AT&T Inc. to treat all traffic equally, and not to slow or block access to websites.

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As he sat in Church last Sunday afternoon, Guillaume Humblot found himself troubled by the declining number of Catholic priests in France, and asked himself if he was ready to join the cloth.

“There are almost none left,” the 31-year-old Humblot said.

On Facebook, Humblot discovered a forum dedicated to people who, like him, are considering the priesthood. The page was part of a campaign, launched by the Catholic Church this month, to attract young people to the priesthood following decades of dwindling ordainments ”” and amid waves of sexual abuse allegations that have darkened the reputation of the Catholic priest.

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Earlier this month, Facebook sought to increase its reach by connecting with other sites across the Web. The Open Graph Protocol, announced at Facebook’s f8 Developers Conference, makes it easier for outside sites to share information with Facebook when visitors want to recommend a page. But Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny for making users’ data more public and available to search engines and for making changes to the terms of its privacy policy, which some users have been unaware of.

Few have been as vocal about Facebook’s actions as Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England. More generally, she has called for Web companies to take more responsibility for how they handle users’ personal information. Technology Review’s assistant editor, Erica Naone, recently talked with Boyd about how to think about Facebook’s latest moves….

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For journalists who care about life on the Godbeat, the list of the dead and the missing in action has turned into a grim litany.

Some religion-beat jobs have been killed, while others have been downsized, out-sourced, frozen or chopped up and given to reluctant general-assignment reporters.

Gentle readers, please rise for a moment of silence.

The Orlando Sentinel. The Dallas Morning News. Time. The Chicago Sun-Times. The Rocky Mountain News. U.S. News & World Report. The list goes on, especially if you include smaller newsrooms that have always struggled to support Godbeat jobs.

At least 16 major news outlets abandoned or reduced commitment to religion news as a specialty beat in recent years, according to the Religion Newswriters Association. Two of those empty desks ”” at the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe ”” were recently filled.

“In the 1990s and early 2000s, the largest papers often had multiple religion reporters. That has disappeared, for sure. That is where the biggest cut for religion has occurred,” said RNA director Debra Mason, who teaches at the University of Missouri.

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Students applying to colleges are advised to do a lot: Make good grades; get good recommendations; play a sport; edit the yearbook; invent a simple, hand-held device that would run on solar energy and would provide a simple solution to climate change.

But those students are also being advised not to do one important thing: Leave a cyber trail that admissions offices can follow directly to their Facebook pages.

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Check it out.

For 2,000 years, Christian missionaries have traveled to foreign lands to spread the Gospel.

Today, there are thousands of missionaries preaching around the world without leaving home. Sometimes even while wearing pajamas.

Global Media Outreach, a branch of Campus Crusade for Christ, held a Webinar, or online seminar, this week to raise awareness and to motivate people to participate in online missions.

With tomorrow being designated Internet Evangelism Day (by the Internet Evangelism Coalition), Michelle Diedrich of GMO said she wants “to change the way we think” about the Internet.

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Pope Benedict XVI isn’t the world’s most prolific celebrity blogger. In fact, he’s not on Twitter and his Facebook profile is more empty than St. Peter’s Basilica on a Monday. But His Holiness isn’t as out of the Internet loop as you might think (The Vatican does have its own YouTube channel). On Saturday, the Pope took to the airwaves to discuss the spiritual advantages (and shortcomings) of the Internet, and to inspire Internet users to be more conscious of how we connect.

It’s our responsibility to preserve the “quality of human contact, guaranteeing attention to people,” Pope Benedict said at “Digital Witness,” a panel organized by the Italian Episcopal Community.

“The dangers of homologation and control, of intellectual and moral relativism are also increasing, as already recognizable in the decline of critical spirit, in truth reduced to a game of opinions, in the many forms of degradation and humiliation of the intimacy of the person.”

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One of the newest medical ethics dilemmas is the collision between the Internet and the traditionally strict boundaries between patients and doctors. Caregivers, especially psychiatrists and therapists, have historically disclosed personal information only when it might benefit a patient ”” as when a patient is struggling with the loss of a child and the therapist discloses that he, too, has experienced such a loss.

Likewise, patients have typically disclosed personal details in their own time, as therapy continues and trust develops. The Web challenges that model head-on.

Facebook, founded in February 2004, now has more than 400 million active users. MySpace, founded a month earlier, has 100 million. Google.com, the search engine founded in 1998, currently handles 100 billion searches per day.

There’s no question that Internet searches can be an important tool for healthcare consumers. “Patients should Google their doctors, to check on credentials, training, scholarly articles and the like,” says Dr. Daniel Sands, the senior medical director of clinical informatics for the Internet Business Solutions Group at networking giant Cisco Systems.

But what about the reverse ”” doctors searching patients? “Why would they ever want to?” asks Sands, also a physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

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