Google, the world’s biggest online search engine, wants to turbocharge your Internet connection.

The company said Wednesday it is getting into the broadband service business with trials for fiber networks that will deliver Internet access speeds that are 100 times faster than what most Americans are getting today.

With its announcement, the Internet juggernaut added to a fast-growing list of industries it has barreled its way through. Tuesday, it announced a social networking feature directly aimed at Facebook. Late last year, it got into the cellphone business with a smartphone to rival Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. The list goes on: The book, music, video, newspaper and map businesses have all been shaken by Google’s steady march to place its marker on those industries for the Web.

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Iran’s telecommunications agency announced what it described as a permanent suspension of Google Inc.’s email services, saying a national email service for Iranian citizens would soon be rolled out.

It wasn’t clear late Wednesday what effect the order had on Gmail services in Iran, or even if Iran had implemented its new policy. Iranian officials have claimed technological advances in the past that they haven’t been able to execute.

Google didn’t have an immediate comment about the announcement.

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You may find the live audio link here.

It is working fine for me at present. Elaine Storkey is speaking on the BBC motion right now.

From the CNS blog here:

Our standards….are simple: We expect you to comment with Christian charity toward your fellow readers and to those whose causes are mentioned in the blog. This means that we will not permit comments which advocate physical or spiritual harm to an individual (i.e., wishing someone would soon “meet his maker” or burn in hell). Comments that include slanderous or abusive name-calling will be edited or deleted. You can disagree with someone’s point of view, but you cannot ”” to give one recent, extreme submission that got cut ”” call someone “a disobedient, self-willed sociopath.” Even milder forms of name-calling, such as questioning someone’s intelligence, likely will be excised.

And it goes without saying that foul language will not be permitted. Also, hyperlinks to outside Internet sites within a comment will only be allowed when judged to be crucial to the commenter’s point.

How can you meet these standards? Just stick to the issue being discussed and leave out the personalities. Back up your argument, telling why you disagree instead of saying that someone’s suggestion is stupid. Remember, Jesus had strong views, but he didn’t tear us down to illustrate his points or bring us salvation.

A salutary reminder to commenters here I think–KSH.

Pope Benedict XVI recently urged the world’s priests to make better use of new media, but in his own backyard the digital revolution is still seen as a mixed blessing.

The Vatican Web site remains largely a repository of printed texts, displayed on pages designed to look like parchment. And despite more than a decade of discussion about making the site interactive, www.vatican.va continues to provide information in one direction only: from them to you.

Some Vatican agencies have embraced the digital possibilities, notably Vatican Radio, which offers online broadcasts, podcasts and RSS feeds along with photos and print versions of major stories.

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When it comes to Facebook, Jesse Rice sees an immensely popular social networking site that’s great for sharing photos and keeping in touch with friends.

He also sees something that encourages attitudes and behaviors that don’t work as well in real life.

Rice, 37, is the author of “The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community.” A former worship leader an evangelical megachurch in California, he has degrees in organizational communication and counseling/psychology and — just as important to his readers — a sense of humor.

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The call to blog took a lot of people by surprise. After all, the 82-year-old from Bavaria is better known for his conservative doctrine and revival of the Latin Mass than for his computer savvy. At first, the Rev. James Martin was startled as well. Martin is the author of The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything and blogs each day for the Catholic magazine America. Then Martin thought, surely Jesus would blog if he were on the Earth today.

“He didn’t sit around and wait for people to come to him,” Martin observes. “He went out and met people by the Sea of Galilee who were fishing. He went to tax collectors’ booths. He went into synagogues. He went all over the place. And so we need to, figuratively speaking, go out to the ends of the Earth ”” which includes the blogosphere.”

The pope has not announced his own blog. But if he does, he might be wise to listen to the experts.

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These recent events demonstrate how quickly the nation’s escalating cyberbattles have outpaced the rush to find a deterrent, something equivalent to the cold-war-era strategy of threatening nuclear retaliation.

So far, despite millions of dollars spent on studies, that quest has failed. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the most comprehensive effort yet to warn potential adversaries that cyberattacks would not be ignored, drawing on the language of nuclear deterrence.

“States, terrorists and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks,” she declared in a speech on Thursday that drew an angry response from Beijing. “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society.”

But Mrs. Clinton did not say how the United States would respond, beyond suggesting that countries that knowingly permit cyberattacks to be launched from their territories would suffer damage to their reputations, and could be frozen out of the global economy.

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Some surprises started unfolding when a team of Calvin Theological Seminary professors and graduate students recently launched the Post-Reformation Digital Library.

Chief eye-openers included successfully tracking down rare Reformed theologians’ manuscripts once thought lost.

Another revelation: 16th-18th century theologians and philosophers were brutally honest about their doctrinal positions and emotions, including the well-known Reformer John Calvin, who pushed the boundaries of good taste in a sermon about rowdy adolescents.

“We’ve got things coming out of the woodwork that (were) lost for centuries,” said Todd Rester, a doctoral student who served on the project’s six-member editorial board.

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Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained ”” that we can sell around the world ”” we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over” ”” and make that his No. 1 priority. Inspiring, reviving and empowering Start-up America is his moon shot.

And to reignite his youth movement, he should make sure every American kid knows about two programs that he has already endorsed: The first is National Lab Day. Introduced last November by a coalition of educators and science and engineering associations, Lab Day aims to inspire a wave of future innovators, by pairing veteran scientists and engineers with students in grades K-12 to inspire thousands of hands-on science projects around the country.

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A November 2009 Forrester Research report suggests that 80 percent of Americans won’t pay for online newspaper or magazine subscriptions. Your thoughts?
Among the things I’ve seen in the last year, that was the single dumbest analysis I’ve read. First of all it uses the term ‘pay wall,’ which I think is a 2007 term. We don’t use it. It implies you just put a wall up and you lose all your ad revenue. The numbers in that were completely wrong. It’s as if this guy’s living on another planet.

So this idea that only about 20 percent of Americans will pay for some form of online subscriptions seems wrong to you?
That’s the best news I’ve ever heard, because our model says The New York Times and every other publication you can think of will do fabulously if only 10 percent pay. Only 20 percent will pay, that’s like saying, ‘I have an idea to sell BMWs, but unfortunately only 20 percent of Americans will buy one.’ It’s absurd.

Does that mean that in a couple of years you see everyone paying for some online news content?
Yes, steadily more of it.

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Pope Benedict XVI has a new commandment for priests struggling to get their message across: Go forth and blog.

The pope, whose own presence on the Web has heavily grown in recent years, urged priests on Saturday to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel and engage in dialogue with people of other religions and cultures.

And just using e-mail or surfing the Web is often not enough: Priests should use cutting-edge technologies to express themselves and lead their communities, Benedict said in a message released by the Vatican.

“The spread of multimedia communications and its rich ‘menu of options’ might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web,” but priests are “challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources,” he said.

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China has denied any state involvement in alleged cyber attacks on Google and accused the US of double standards.

A Chinese industry ministry spokesman told the state-run Xinhua news agency that claims that Beijing was behind recent cyber attacks were “groundless”.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week asked China to investigate claims by Google that it had been targeted by China-based hackers.

The US search giant has threatened to withdraw from China.

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Google employees may have assisted hackers who launched a cyber-attack from China, prompting the company’s threat to leave the country, it has emerged.

The world’s most popular search engine is believed to be investigating whether one or more of its own workers bases in the Chinese offices helped those attempting to break into the e-mail accounts of human rights activists last month.

Last week, Google said that it may pull out of the country after it was was targeted, along more than 30 other companies, in a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China”. It has now emerged that a number of Chinese journalists may have also seen their e-mail accounts hijacked.

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Google Inc enters a second week of high stakes brinkmanship with China’s government, amid speculation the firm has decided to pull out of the world’s biggest Internet market over cyber-spying concerns.

Google, the world’s most popular search engine, said last week it was thinking about quitting China after suffering a sophisticated cyber-attack on its network that resulted in theft of its intellectual property.

The company has said it is no longer willing to filter content on its Chinese language google.cn engine, and will try to negotiate a legal unfiltered search engine, or exit the market.

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At the elite Tsinghua University here, some students were joking Friday that they had better download all the Internet information they wanted now in case Google left the country.

But to many of the young, well-educated Chinese who are Google’s loyal users here, the company’s threat to leave is in fact no laughing matter. Interviews in Beijing’s downtown and university district indicated that many viewed the possible loss of Google’s maps, translation service, sketching software, access to scholarly papers and search function with real distress.

“How am I going to live without Google?” asked Wang Yuanyuan, a 29-year-old businessman, as he left a convenience store in Beijing’s business district.

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“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

One obvious result is that younger generations are going to have some very peculiar and unique expectations about the world. My friend’s 3-year-old, for example, has become so accustomed to her father’s multitouch iPhone screen that she approaches laptops by swiping her fingers across the screen, expecting a reaction.

And after my 4-year-old niece received the very hot Zhou-Zhou pet hamster for Christmas, I pointed out that the toy was essentially a robot, with some basic obstacle avoidance skills. She replied matter-of-factly: “It’s not a robot. It’s a pet.”

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Mr. Drummond said that an attack originating in China was aimed at its corporate infrastructure.

While the full scope of the attacks on Google and several dozen other companies remains unclear, the events set off immediate alarms in Washington, where the Obama administration has previously expressed concern about international computer security and attacks on Western companies.

Neither the sequence of events leading to Google’s decision nor the company’s ultimate goal in rebuking China is fully understood. But this was not the first time that the company had considered withdrawing from China, according to a former company executive. It had clashed repeatedly with Chinese officials over censorship demands, the executive said.

Google said on Tuesday that that in its investigation of the attacks on corporations, it found that the Gmail accounts of Chinese and Tibetan activists, like Ms. Seldon, had been compromised in separate attacks involving phishing and spyware.

Independent security researchers said that at least 34 corporations had been targets of the attacks originating in China.

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Google threatened late Tuesday to pull out of its operations in China after it said it had uncovered a massive cyber attack on its computers that originated there.

As a result, the company said, it would no longer agree to censor its search engine in China and may exit the country altogether.

Google said that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human right activists, but that the attack also targeted 20 other large companies in the finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.

In a blog posting by David Drummond, the corporate development and chief legal officer, Google said that it had found a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China.”

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Newspaper circulation and magazine subscriptions have been declining for years. Why would I want to read a printed paper or magazine when I can instantly get access to whatever news they provide from thousands of sources on the Web? In fact, on the Web I can tailor my own presentation to see only the news of interest to me.

Ah, there’s the rub! Our under-30 population is self-limiting the information they see to only those things they currently are interested in, be it sports, celebrity news, music or videos. I understand why this is empowering, but at the same time it is enfeebling.

They are eliminating the possibility of ah-ha! moments, when you stumble across some story on page 5 of the paper, or in one of the small sections of a magazine. When you find something you would never search for, because it’s way outside your sphere of interest, or you didn’t know it existed — until you saw a compelling headline and just had to read what followed.

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Blogging on the site FailedMessiah.com, Mr. [Shmaraya] Rosenberg, 51, has transmuted a combination of muckraking reporting and personal grudge into a must-read digest of the actual and alleged misdeeds of the ultra-Orthodox world. He has broken news about sexual misconduct, smear campaigns and dubious business practices conducted by or on behalf of stringently religious Jews.

Operating thousands of miles from the centers of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn and Jerusalem, waking at 3:30 a.m. and working a dozen hours at a stretch in an apartment cluttered with books, Mr. Rosenberg has had his scoops cited by The Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review, PR Week and Gawker. The national Jewish newspaper The Forward listed him among the 50 most influential American Jews, and the hip, cheeky magazine Heeb put him in its top 100.

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The French government is considering levying a tax on the advertising revenues of Google and other internet portals, in the latest sign of a European backlash against the activities of the US internet search group.

President Nicolas Sarkozy instructed his finance ministry to examine the merits of a tax in response to complaints from the French media that Google and other sites are generating advertising income using their news and other content. He also called for an inquiry by French competition authorities into a possible “abuse of dominant position” in the advertising business of big internet sites.

Mr Sarkozy commented after the publication of an independent report for the French culture ministry that proposed a tax on Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other sites, to help fund initiatives for writers, musicians and publishers to make money from the web.

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Spouses forced to work from home in swathes of the country where snow has brought transport to a standstill are flocking online to search for new romances, according to [a] website …

The site, which provides a forum for married people looking to start affairs, says it has gained more than 2,500 new members over the past six days, the majority of whom are registering from the areas worst-hit by the extreme weather.

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There will soon be something new to watch on the living room TV: your relatives and friends in different parts of the world.

On Tuesday, Panasonic and LG Electronics, two of the top television makers, are to announce that they are integrating the free online calling service Skype into their Internet-connected high-definition televisions.

People who buy these TVs, along with an extra Web camera and microphone accessory designed for the living room, can conduct free, live video chats and phone calls from the couch.

I just love Skype–this looks cool. Check it out.

Increasing percentages of the population around us don’t know who we are or why we exist. We need to find new ways of telling the old, old story ”“ ways that are congruent with the joys and challenges of the people and societies around us.

This kind of recontextualizing of the gospel is (and has been) necessary in every age, since the first apostles. The Samaritan woman went home from her water break with Jesus to tell her friends and neighbors about the person she had just encountered (John 4). She didn’t hang around the well waiting for them to show up. She didn’t write a tract and post it next to the bucket. She didn’t even produce a drama to tell the story. She went and found her friends and told her own story.

There is an urgent need for Episcopalians to learn and try new ways of evangelism. Most of them begin by telling our own stories or providing opportunities for others to tell theirs. One of my favorite images of the latter comes from Nelle Morton, which she calls “hearing others into speech” (The Journey is Home, Beacon, 1985). An intrinsic part of our task is to provide opportunities where others can feel safe enough to begin to share their questions and fears and stories about God. Increasingly that’s being done by going out into the community, rather than waiting for people to come to church.

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The Rev. Jay Tenney, pastor of Barnesville (Ga.) First United Methodist Church, said long-lasting relationships must be created in God’s image. The key to a lifetime of happiness, he said, can be found in Galatians, Thessalonians and Ecclesiastes.

* Galatians 5:13: Serve one another in love.
* 1 Thessalonians 5:11: Encourage one another and build each other up.
* Ecclesiastes 4:12: A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

“I think that what we see on TV is definitely playing a factor in the acceptance of infidelity. It sometimes seems that being unfaithful is glamorized, while the costs and consequences of infidelity are minimized. Divorce is often portrayed as a quick and easy option,” Tenney said.

Tenney said he has found many couples want to improve their marriages, but need help finding the right resources.

“I have also found that a lot of people may not seek out counselors or pastors when they need help,” he said. “However, in today’s world many of them are willing to go online. With this in mind, I developed a marriage coaching Web site called ”˜MyMarriageCoach.com.’”

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On the morning of Christmas Eve last week, I arrived at my gym””usually open at 5 a.m.””at 7:40, only to find that the holiday had delayed its opening to 8 a.m. Four of us stood there in a vestibule, listening to a frosty wind blow outdoors. The moment seemed perfect for holiday banter””how virtuous we were to be squeezing in a workout, how virtue would utterly disappear in the festive hours ahead. But one fellow pulled out his BlackBerry, and as if on cue, the rest of us did the same. For 20 minutes we read or sent emails and spoke nary a word to each other.

Of course, the image of the Internet holdout isn’t exactly a wholesome one. “Luddite” is the usual word for him, and the most infamous Luddite in modern times, Ted Kaczynski, was a lonely lunatic who killed and maimed in the name of tradition.

But in truth, little is really known about the offline American, and much is assumed: that he is rural, poor and possibly militant in his opposition to the Internet (although one blessing is that such opponents would have trouble finding each other offline).

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We are going to take a break from the Anglican, Religious, Financial, Cultural, and other news until the morning of December 27th to focus from this evening forward on the great miracle of the Incarnation–KSH.

It’s another Sunday morning at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Southern California. But some congregants are holding more than just the printed page, thanks to their iPhones. That’s because they have access to the entire Bible on the device.

Technology is producing a new form of religious interaction. There are over two dozen Bible apps for smart phones. And beyond Scripture, people are using gadgets for devotional purposes.

Dave and Jackie Brown had been reciting the rosary in their daughter Isabella’s hospital room. But her cancer treatment made her sensitive to light.

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