Here in the United States, an office of the Pentagon held an unusual contest earlier this month. Researchers wanted to see how thousands of people around the world could compete and collaborate to solve a problem that was too big for any one individual. The task was to find balloons scattered around the U.S. Competitors posted information and misinformation on Twitter and other social networking sites. Dr. Peter Lee is with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sponsored the contest.

Dr. LEE: On December 5, we, in 10 public but undisclosed locations in the continental U.S., hoisted big red eight-foot wide weather balloons, about 50 to 100 feet in the air. And we challenged the world to find them. And the first person to report the locations – latitude and longitude of all 10 – would win a $40,000 prize.

[ARI] SHAPIRO: What was the point of this?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Dr. LEE: There were several reasons we did this. I think the most fundamental is we wanted to create the conditions that would allow researchers to understand something more about how information flows on the Internet and on social networks. But we also wanted to create an adversarial situation.

Caught this one yesterday via podcast on the morning run–fascinating. Read or listen to it all.

Let’s not fool ourselves. Whatever threat the real Afghanistan poses to U.S. national security, the “Virtual Afghanistan” now poses just as big a threat. The Virtual Afghanistan is the network of hundreds of jihadist Web sites that inspire, train, educate and recruit young Muslims to engage in jihad against America and the West. Whatever surge we do in the real Afghanistan has no chance of being a self-sustaining success, unless there is a parallel surge ”” by Arab and Muslim political and religious leaders ”” against those who promote violent jihadism on the ground in Muslim lands and online in the Virtual Afghanistan.

Last week, five men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan, where they went, they told Pakistani police, to join the jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They first made contact with two extremist organizations in Pakistan by e-mail in August. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday: “ ”˜Online recruiting has exponentially increased, with Facebook, YouTube and the increasing sophistication of people online,’ a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official said. … ”˜Increasingly, recruiters are taking less prominent roles in mosques and community centers because places like that are under scrutiny. So what these guys are doing is turning to the Internet,’ said Evan Kohlmann, a senior analyst with the U.S.-based NEFA Foundation, a private group that monitors extremist Web sites.”

Read the whole thing.

As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Consider that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago; it now has 350 million users and counting.

Between now and 2020, the trend will continue, spreading cutting-edge technologies to every corner of the country and beginning to make innovations once consigned to the realm of science fiction real for millions of Americans. Specifically what can we expect? Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand.

What will drive all this accelerating change is precisely what has driven it this past half-century: the exponential growth in the power of information technology, which approximately doubles for the same cost every year.

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High-speed broadband will become almost as basic a telephone line in the near future, the Anglican Bishop of Manchester has predicted.

Bishop Nigel McCulloch described as “rather too modest” the Government’s target of getting superfast broadband to 90 per cent of homes in the next eight years.

In a debate on the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords, Bishop McCulloch also suggested the “bar has been set too low in terms of universal connection speed”.

The Government is planning to impose a 50p per month tax on phone lines to pay for the role out of broadband in hard-to-reach areas.

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In recent years Google has come under growing scrutiny for a number of controversial moves. Its decision to digitize millions of books ”” scanning and making them part of search options ”” upset authors and publishers, who see the plan as a threat to intellectual property rights and as an invitation to piracy, as the books stored on servers, like online music, might be vulnerable to hackers.

Google has been criticized for complying with Chinese censorship. (In 2006 its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said, “I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning operations and tell that country how to run itself.”) And, as Mr. Auletta observes in these pages, the company’s storage of massive amounts of data about its users raises serious privacy issues, especially when the company acknowledges that it is in the advertising business and seems eager to play matchmaker between consumers and advertisers.

Because Google “enjoys a well-deserved reputation for earning the trust of users,” Mr. Auletta says, it is “hard to imagine an issue that could imperil the trust Google has achieved as quickly as could privacy.” He adds: “One Google executive whispers, ”˜Privacy is an atomic bomb. Our success is based on trust.’ ”

If users, Mr. Auletta writes, “lost trust in Google, believed their private data was being exploited and shared with advertisers (or governments), the company regularly judged one of the world’s most trusted brands would commit suicide.”

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Google Inc. has designed a cellphone it plans to sell directly to consumers as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The phone is called the Nexus One and is being manufactured for Google by HTC Corp., these people said. It runs Android, the operating system for mobile phones that Google developed, they added.

But unlike the more than half-dozen Android phones made by phone manufacturers today, Google designed virtually the entire software experience behind the phone, from the applications that run on it to the look and feel of each screen.

The Internet giant is taking a new, and potentially risky, approach to selling the device. Rather than selling the phone through a wireless carrier””the way the bulk of phones are sold in the U.S. today””Google plans to sell the Nexus One itself online. Users will have to buy cellular service for the device separately.

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Pakistani authorities on Saturday were searching for an insurgent figure believed to have aided five Northern Virginia men who allegedly tried to join al-Qaeda, saying the case could help unravel a growing network of terrorist recruiters who scour the Internet for radicalized young men.

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The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace.

American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race.

In the last two years, Internet-based attacks on government and corporate computer systems have multiplied to thousands a day. Hackers, usually never identified, have compromised Pentagon computers, stolen industrial secrets and temporarily jammed government and corporate Web sites. President Obama ordered a review of the nation’s Internet security in February and is preparing to name an official to coordinate national policy.

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In September, a 13-year-old girl in Florida named Hope Witsell hanged herself. Raised in a rural Florida suburb, she was the only child of a church-going couple who met in the post office where they’re both employed. “She often went fishing with her father in her big, white-framed sunglasses,” according to the excellent reporting in this story in the St. Petersburg Times.

It is painful but you need to read it all.

This speaks volumes, but not in the way its author intends.

A Yale librarian who cast doubt last year on the origins of the Serenity Prayer, adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and reprinted on countless knickknacks, says new evidence has persuaded him to retain the famed Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as the author in the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations.

The provenance of the prayer, which begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” became a subject of controversy last year with the publication of an article by the librarian, Fred R. Shapiro, who is also the editor of the book of quotations. Mr. Shapiro had found archival materials that led him to express doubt that Niebuhr was the author.

But now another researcher trawling the Internet has discovered evidence that attributes the prayer to Niebuhr. The researcher, Stephen Goranson, works in the circulation department at the Duke University library, has a doctorate from Duke in the history of religion and, as a sideline, searches for the origins of words and sayings and publishes his findings in etymology journals. This month he found a Christian student newsletter written in 1937 that cites Niebuhr as the prayer’s author.

The prayer in the newsletter is slightly different from the contemporary one often printed on mugs and wall plaques. It reads, “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”

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Check it out.

This is not how business has been done on the World Wide Web.

Microsoft has been in early discussions with the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, about a pact to pay the News Corporation to remove links to its news content from Google’s search engine and display them exclusively on Bing, from Microsoft, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke anonymously because of the confidential negotiations.

If such an arrangement came to pass, it would be a watershed moment in the history of the Internet, and set off a fierce debate over the future of content online.

The Web’s explosive growth has been driven, in part, by the open playing field it represents for consumers and businesses. These discussions could encourage major technology and media companies to start picking sides ”” essentially applying the cable TV model to the Web.

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What, I wonder, does this say about blogging? For many writers, exploring the genre for the first time, it’s the anonymity of the blogosphere that’s both thrilling and unnerving. Free content and anonymous self-expression is liberating but intrinsically irresponsible. Writers who grew up in the more constrained world of print can find the adaptation difficult, even antipathetic to the nature of their art.

—Robert McCrum

Media experts will join bishops from across Europe to tell them how best to communicate the Catholic Church’s message in the 21st century.

Steeped in history, the Church often struggles to explain its outlook and Pope Benedict XVI has in recent months been mired in controversy over remarks about the role condoms can play in halting the spread of Aids and his decision to rehabilitate a Holocaust-denying British bishop.

During a four-day conference which starts on Thursday, representatives from the social network Facebook, the search engine Google, the YouTube video sharing website and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia will explain the importance of “new media” in the lives of young people.

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So many interesting blogs, so little time. Sigh. Check it out.

The audio here is very entertaining–listen to it all.

The Internet began with a whimper, not a bang. And not everyone agrees on when that whimper occurred.

But 40 years ago Thursday, something called the ARPANET came into existence, and since then, communication hasn’t been the same.

Read or listen to it all but before you do guess the text of the very first message.

In the olden days before social media, if a Trinity United Methodist Church member fell ill, they called the church office. Now, if someone goes to the hospital or needs pastor Sid Hall to pray for them, they usually go online.

“If they post it on Facebook, even if they have the flu or they’re not feeling well, those are things I can see,” Hall said. “I can show up at the hospital if they’re there, or on Sunday morning, I can say, ‘How’s your brother? I saw on Facebook that he’s going through some hard times.’ ”

Hall has used Facebook as a way to connect with his congregation since January, when his wife, Mary Pratt , suggested that it could be a good tool for his church. Other pastors, representatives from large denominations and laypeople across faiths have been using social media to reach out in similar ways.

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Read it all. (Hat tip: Instapundit)

It’s Sunday night at Woodlands Church, and Pastor Kerry Shook tells parishioners to pull out their cell phones.

He has pocketed his own iPhone for now, but tells everyone else to turn theirs on.

“OK guys, you can start the twitters,” he tells the crowd of about 250.

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Abilene Christian University freshmen receive more than the usual campus map and lists of required books when they enter the Texas university.

For the past two years, they’ve also received an iPhone or iPod Touch from the university before they begin classes.

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, a select group of freshmen received Kindles, an online book reader, instead of the textbooks.

And at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, a new $50 million education building has 75 miles of Internet networking cable and 11 miles of phone cable, allowing out-of-town students to link with the classroom.

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The next world war could take place in cyberspace, the UN telecommunications agency chief warned Tuesday as experts called for action to stamp out cyber attacks.

“The next world war could happen in cyberspace and that would be a catastrophe. We have to make sure that all countries understand that in that war, there is no such thing as a superpower,” Hamadoun Toure said.

“Loss of vital networks would quickly cripple any nation, and none is immune to cyberattack,” added the secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union during the ITU’s Telecom World 2009 fair in Geneva.

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Enter the Supreme Court of South Carolina — which decided unanimously (5 – 0) a case in the way I had argued it should be decided. (I do not claim any influence on the decision itself; just that I argued the state courts should follow common sense, and not allow a trust to be created by the Dennis Canon when the owner of the property had not signed a paper consenting to the trust.) Does the Episcoleft regard this decision as a correct decision under the law?

Not on your life. They regard it as an aberration, an anomaly, which is a blot upon the otherwise beautiful façade of the Church as they would have it established. In their vacuum of a blogworld, they cite themselves in endless circles to show how the decision is unworthy of serious consideration.

Since I believe in the concept of proof, let the unadulterated voices of the Episcoleft convict themselves in this affair. As far as I can determine, here is the unaltered history of the reporting of the decision by the Supreme Court of South Carolina in the blog world, with special attention paid to those blogs listed in “Eyes Left”, as well as here…

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Cristen Chinea, a senior at M.I.T., made a confession in her blog on the college Web site.

“There’ve been several times when I felt like I didn’t really fit in at M.I.T.,” she wrote. “I nearly fell asleep during a Star Wars marathon. It wasn’t a result of sleep deprivation. I was bored out of my mind.”

Still, in other ways, Ms. Chinea feels right at home at the institute ”” she loves the anime club, and that her hall has its own wiki Web site and an Internet Relay for real-time messaging. As she wrote on her blog, a hallmate once told her that “M.I.T. is the closest you can get to living in the Internet,” and Ms. Chinea reported, “IT IS SO TRUE. Love. It. So. Much.”

Dozens of colleges ”” including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale ”” are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students.

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For more than 500 years the book has been a remarkably stable entity: a coherent string of connected words, printed on paper and bound between covers.

But in the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.

On Thursday, for instance, Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four “vooks,” which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read ”” and viewed ”” online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

And in early September Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the television series “CSI,” released “Level 26: Dark Origins,” a novel ”” published on paper, as an e-book and in an audio version ”” in which readers are invited to log on to a Web site to watch brief videos that flesh out the plot.

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As the real world grows more tolerant of differences, the virtual world grows with hatred.

Complaints against groups on social networking sites that call for threats, violence and hatred toward people who are Jewish, black, gay or have disabilities are on the rise as Americans celebrate the 19th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the country rallies around its first black president, and gay marriage is legalized in some states.

Read it all and please choose your language online or elsewhere carefully.

The interconnected web of our friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances may dominate our lives more than we know.

They’ve always been there, making up our social support systems. But now, largely thanks to the burgeoning popularity of online social networks like Facebook, researchers are discovering what a powerful influence our connections ”” both online and off ”” really have over our lives.

“Those of us who study social networks believe they matter ”” that things do spread along social networks,” says Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

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A person was able to access Cunningham’s e-mail account and sent the note to nearly everyone on her e-mail list. That’s about 1,200 people, Cunningham estimated.

”It’s been really embarrassing,” Cunningham said. “People have called thinking I’ve been held hostage in England and was forced to send this message. It’s been crazy. I’ve had lots of phone calls and e-mails from people.”

Cunningham, who was first alerted to the e-mail by her daughter, who called her about 6:30 a.m. Thursday, said she was thankful no one seemed to have wired money, like the e-mail requested.

She believes the person was able to access her account when she provided her e-mail login and password to what she thought was a request from Google customer service.

Be careful out there–read it all.