I am sure Fr. [Mark] Harris is well aware that the articulation of TEC’s polity in the Bishops’ Statement is hardly novel, but has long been the standard understanding of our governance. See, for example, the widely-used series on “The Church’s Teaching” by Dr. Powel Dawley of GTS, the work by Dr. Daniel Stevick of EDS on Canon Law and the article by Dr. Robert Prichard of VTS, one of TEC’s leading historians, in the current issue of “Anglican and Episcopal History,” who reviews this history and my paper and concludes that my work is “cogent and based on good historical argument.”

Finally and most importantly, none of this should deflect attention from the Bishops’ Statement itself. It is what it is says it is: a statement by fifteen bishops of this Church, including a candidate for Presiding Bishop in 1985 (Bishop Frey), a candidate for Presiding Bishop in 1997 and one of the three Senior Bishops of the Church who exercise canonical responsibilities under Title IV (Bishop Wimberly) and the immediate past president of the Presiding Bishop’s Council of Advice (Bishop MacPherson). I urge Fr. Harris and others to focus on this Statement by fifteen distinguished Bishops rather than discuss obviously confidential emails that should never have been made public in the first place.

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Security professionals are being called on to band together to fight the highly organised cyber criminals of the world.

The call was made at a San Francisco conference organised by security firm RSA – the largest event of its kind.

RSA President Art Coviello said the online fraudsters “are not bound by any rules of law” and “control massive armies of zombie computers”.

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Not everything people see on Twitter is gospel — but some of it is.

In an effort to spread its message in the world of social networking, Trinity Wall Street Episcopal Church married microblogging and social networking with the Gospel Friday when it told the Passion of Christ, the story of the crucifixion, in posts of 140 characters or fewer.

From noon-3 p.m., a church worker posted 18 tweets adapted from the Gospel of Mark. The story was largely told through the eyes of six characters: Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Peter, a serving girl and Pontius Pilate.

One tweet read, ”ServingGirl: is so tired. Caiaphas and the priests have been up all night questioning a man who claims to be the Messiah. And I wait on them.”

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A communications initiative, launched on Ash Wednesday, which provides a new way for Episcopalians to share their connection to and appreciation for the Episcopal Church, was heavily used during Lent.

A special welcoming page on the church’s website, technically called a “microsite” and titled “I am Episcopalian,” was visited more than 500,000 times in the six and a half weeks between Ash Wednesday and Easter, according to Michael Collins, director of digital communication in the Episcopal Church’s Office of Communication.

The microsite contains short video clips of Episcopalians representing the diverse membership of the Episcopal Church.

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I read your blog frequently, and very much enjoy it. God bless you for keeping up on so much in current news with such a smart sense of humor.

The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.

After all, everyone understood there was a practical value in choosing to do the same task in the same way. For example, if we wanted to move a file from one machine to another, and if you were to design the process one way, and I was to design it another, then anyone who wanted to talk to both of us would have to employ two distinct ways of doing the same thing. So there was plenty of natural pressure to avoid such hassles. It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement.

This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web without it. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a way that people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built and tested their ideas. Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have to ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the Internet. Others soon copied them ”” hundreds of thousands of computer users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and technology. That’s the Web.

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In 2006, the world produced 161 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes) of digital data, according to Columbia Journalism Review. Put in perspective, that’s 3 million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By next year, the number is expected to reach 988 exabytes.

The massive explosion of information has made us all a little batty. Just ask the congressional assistants who field frantic phone calls from constituents.

“Everybody’s come unhinged,” one told me recently. “They think we’re going to hell in a handbasket. And maybe we are.”

Who knows?

The unknowableness of current circumstances, combined with a lack of trust in our institutions, may partly be to blame for our apparent info-insatiability. People sense that they need to know more in order to understand an increasingly complex world.

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I understand the frustration of adults who see kids doing things like this with no comprehension of the possible outcomes. That New Jersey teen may have intended those nude photos for her boyfriend (disturbing in and of itself), but she didn’t seem to grasp that once those images were out in cyberspace, there would be no controlling where they went.

This is where the debate over who’s really to blame begins to rage. It’s the kids’ fault for being so stupid. It’s the parents’ fault for not raising them with decent values or knowing what their offspring are up to. It’s the media’s fault for producing an endless flood of sexual imagery selling everything from music to breath mints. It’s the youth culture’s fault for normalizing the public sharing of every private thought and act. It’s the computer geniuses’ fault for building an infinite network that has spawned a viral world of unintended consequences.
There may be some truth in all of these. But teens have been known to foil the best intentions of their parents, and the media techno-genies are out of the bottle and not about to go back in.

Surely there is a better way to impress upon kids the importance of exercising common sense than by threatening to make them pariahs for life. “Re-education” classes are probably a good idea, but not under the threat of prosecution, which tends to create a fair amount of resistance.

Read it all. Interestingly, retired South Carolina Bishop Edward Salmon visited the parish which I serve this past Sunday and raised this very (uncomfrotable) subject during his adult Sunday school class–KSH.

When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.

That staggering growth rate ”” doubling in size in just eight months ”” suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.
Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower ”” most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages.

As Facebook expands, it’s also struggling to match the momentum of hot new start-ups like Twitter, the micro-blogging service, while managing the expectations of young, tech-savvy early adopters, attracting mainstream moms and dads, and justifying its hype-carbonated valuation.

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A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

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Ever since Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt publicly uttered the term “cloud computing” in 2006, a storm has been gathering over Silicon Valley.

Companies across the technology industry are jockeying to associate themselves with clouds. Amazon.com Inc., better known for peddling books online, began selling an Elastic Compute Cloud service in 2006 for programmers to rent Amazon’s giant computers. Juniper Networks Inc., which makes gear for transmitting data, dubbed its latest project Stratus. Yahoo Inc., Intel Corp. and a handful of others recently launched a research program called OpenCirrus.

While almost everybody in the tech industry seems to have a cloud-themed project, few agree on the term’s definition.

“I have no idea what anyone is talking about,” said Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison, when talking about cloud computing at a financial analyst conference in September. “It’s really just complete gibberish. What is it?” He added: “When is this idiocy going to stop?”

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

I think this ever-growing hysteria about the invasion of privacy in Great Britain might be a direct result of the secularisation of our society. As a Roman Catholic, I’ve spent my whole life believing that my every move is being monitored. God, after all, is the ultimate CCTV. There have been many occasions when this sense of being watched has led me to do the right thing rather than the easier or more pleasurable wrong one. We hate those intermittent yellow boxes on modern roads but they do, generally speaking, cause us to drive more safely.

Maybe, now that God doesn’t feature in most people’s lives, society need things like Street View and surveillance cameras to make people behave better. I don’t suppose the citizens whose sins were exposed by Google fear they’ll end up sizzling on Satan’s griddle as a result but all this fuss about images of drunkenness, crime and lust does suggest a certain sense of shame.

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When Joe Christian started planning church services 35 years ago, it meant spending hours flipping through hymnals and copying sheet music.

Today, it’s point, click, worship.

Christian, the music minister at Una Baptist Church in Nashville, is one of more than 12,000 people who have signed up for a new iTunes-like website called LifeWayworship.com. Along with buying recordings of worship songs and hymns, users can create and download sheet music for church bands and choirs. LifeWay officials hope their new site will make life easier for music ministers, while following copyright laws.

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LOL.

College students were the first to hit on the Facebook fast. This year, adults — the fastest-growing Facebook demographic group — have taken on the challenge. Now Italian Roman Catholic bishops are onto it. Sort of. They’re urging believers to take a high-tech fast for Lent by switching off iPods and abstaining from instant text messaging.

Paul Griffith, a professor of Catholic theology at Duke Divinity School, said the church doesn’t have a problem with technology as such — only its overuse.

“The concern is that technology like e-mail and the Internet can substitute for genuine human relationships,” Griffith said.

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Last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, directly violating the judge’s instructions and centuries of legal rules. But when the judge questioned the rest of the jury, he got an even bigger shock.

Eight other jurors had been doing the same thing. The federal judge, William J. Zloch, had no choice but to declare a mistrial, wasting eight weeks of work by federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.

“We were stunned,” said the defense lawyer, Peter Raben, who was told by the jury that he was on the verge of winning the case. “It’s the first time modern technology struck us in that fashion, and it hit us right over the head.”

It might be called a Google mistrial. The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges.

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(ENS) Some bishops remarked about the cold and wet weather at Kanuga. Bishop Stephen Lane of Maine said this in his blog about the gathering: “The spring meeting is always a longer meeting of the House of Bishops because at this meeting we have time for continuing education for all the bishops.

“The past two days we’ve been reflecting on our roles as bishops in this time of recession, when we are very divided politically about what to do. Friday we heard from Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann and from author Bill Bishop about “The Great Sort,” the self-imposed segregation of communities into like-minded cultural ghettos that are coming to dominate our political landscape,” Lane wrote.

“Saturday we heard from Harvard Business School professor Warren McFarlan about the state of the economy, and North Carolina Congressman David Price about the political process of addressing the recession and President Obama’s proposals for our future. Very good stuff and very hard work.”

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The letter released Thursday in which Pope Benedict XVI admitted that the Vatican had made “mistakes” in handling the case of a Holocaust-denying bishop was unprecedented in its directness, its humanity and its acknowledgment of papal fallibility.

But it also contained two sentences unique in the annals of church history.

“I have been told that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on,” Benedict wrote. “I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.”

In other words: “Note to the Roman Curia: try Google.”

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I think we’re beginning to see a time of darkness when, amid a plethora of high tech connectivity, one-quarter of Americans say they have no close confidante, more than double the number twenty years ago. It’s a darkening time when we think togetherness means keeping one eye, hand, or ear on our gadgets, ever ready to tun into another channel of life, when we begin to turn to robots to tend to the sick and the old, when doctors listen to patients on an average for just eighteen seconds before interrupting, and when two-thirds of children under six live in homes that keep the television on half or more of the time, and envoronment linked to attention deficiencies. We should worry when we have the world at our fingertips, but half of Americans age eighteen to twnety-four can’t find New York state on a map and more than 60 percent can’t similarly locate Iraq

–Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008), page 22

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Facebook Inc.’s latest capitulation to offended users offered another reminder of the social network’s power for self-criticism.

The Palo Alto company rescinded a controversial change to its terms of use late Tuesday after thousands of members protested that Facebook was claiming ownership of all photos and other material posted to the site.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said that wasn’t the intention. But Facebook reverted to a previous version of its legal user guidelines that didn’t include the disputed clause. Zuckerberg said the company would work to revise the policies, which Facebook calls its “governing document,” with feedback from its 175 million users.

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Blogs ”” an ugly word, but now unavoidable ”” were born with the internet. As soon as people started to use the technology that would link computers, they started leaving messages. In the 1980s, these were “pinned” on virtual “bulletin boards”. Then, in the early 1990s, online diaries appeared, personal journals to be seen by the entire online world. As internet use spread, people were dazzled by their power to connect and communicate. But they didn’t just want to stare at pages. They wanted, above all, to make their mark on the explosively expanding world of cyberspace. So, in the mid-1990s, the online diary became the web log, or blog.

Blogs let you jot down what you think, feel or know and, at the speed of light, publish it to the world. They now cover everything from quantum theory to politics to low-life celebrity gossip and intimate personal confessions. They can be vast publications written by teams of writers, or fragmented jottings from a student pad. They are the most successful, addictive, potent and radical application of all the new technologies and applications spawned by the personal computer.

The total number of blogs is thought to be approaching 200m, 73m of them in China. I can see no reason why there shouldn’t be hundreds of millions more, because, you see, blogging is like smoking or gambling ”” hard to give up.

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It was the “aha!” moment that Stephanie Rosalia was hoping for.

A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.

Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.

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Check it out.

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

The moment holds a special place in the annals of Vatican history: On the afternoon of Feb. 12, 1931, Pope Pius XI launched Vatican Radio, declaring in an intercontinental transmission: “Listen, O heavens, to that which I say; Listen, O Earth, listen to the words which come from my mouth. … Listen and hear, O peoples of distant lands!”

Technology has aided evangelizing efforts ever since Johannes Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing press, and in the past 30 years the Vatican has added a television station and a Web site. So the Vatican’s recent launch of its own YouTube channel — a site better known for granting web immortality to dancing cats and amateur dance recitals — was not groundbreaking.

“YouTube is a contemporary means of communications, and the church has used whatever means of ommunications are available at the time,” said Monsignor Robert Wister, a church historian at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.

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For all the annoyance of being crammed into an aluminum tube at 35,000 feet with a bunch of strangers, air travel has offered one benefit: the ability to tell bosses and colleagues, “I’ll be on a flight, so you won’t be able to reach me.”

So much for that excuse.

Wireless Internet service is starting to spread among airlines in the United States ”” Delta and American have installed it on more than a dozen planes each, and several other carriers are planning to test it.

For the airlines, always desperate for new sources of revenue, offering the service ”” about $10 for three hours and more for longer flights ”” was an easy call. And many passengers will cheer the development as an end to Web withdrawal.

But this new frill is hardly as benign as a bag of pretzels….

Please note that the title above is the one given in the print edition (the web title is different). I caught this today on the front page of the New York Times while waiting at the dentist’s office. I have to admit that even the possibility of this being used by terrorists never even entered my mind–ugh. Read it all–KSH.

Her husband collapsed and died yesterday.