North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said Tuesday the new figure is nearly double what MySpace officials originally acknowledged last year when detailing who had used their site.

Very sobering. Read it all.

Google has lifted the lid on its first major upgrade to its global mapping software, Google Earth.

Google Ocean expands this map to include large swathes of the ocean floor and abyssal plain.

Users can dive beneath a dynamic water surface to explore the 3D sea floor terrain.

The map also includes 20 content layers, containing information from the world’s leading scientists, researchers, and ocean explorers.

Al Gore was at the launch event in San Francisco which, Google hopes, will take its mapping software a step closer to total coverage of the entire globe.

Read it all and the new Google ocean link is here.

At first glance, perhaps no line item in the nearly $900 billion stimulus program under consideration on Capitol Hill would seem to offer a more perfect way to jump-start the economy than the billions of dollars pegged to expand broadband Internet service to rural and underserved areas.

Proponents say it will create jobs, build crucial infrastructure and begin to fulfill one of President Barack Obama’s major campaign promises: to expand the information superhighway to every corner of the land, giving local businesses an electronic edge and offering residents a dazzling array of services like online health care and virtual college courses.

But experts warn that the rural broadband effort could just as easily become a $9 billion cyberbridge to nowhere, representing the worst kind of mistakes that lawmakers could make in rushing to approve one of the largest spending bills in history without considering unintended results.

Read it all.

An apparent system error left millions of visitors to the site puzzled when links to all search results were flagged with the warning ‘This site may harm your computer’.

It is thought the site had erroneously identified all other websites – and some of its own pages – as containing malicious software or ‘malware’.

The glitch, which prevented internet users from directly clicking through to search results, was fixed within 30 minutes although users of Google’s email service Gmail have since reported finding genuine messages sent mistakenly to spam folders.

The errors prompted panic among web surfers who at first feared the popular search engine had suffered some kind of major failure that could have had serious implications for internet commerce.

I wasn’t active on the net when this occurred but had a number of friends who were. They sent me some very worried messages and now I understand better why they did. Read it all–KSH.

Google is to launch a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection, according to industry reports. But campaigners warn that it would give the online behemoth unprecedented control over individuals’ personal data.

The Google Drive, or “GDrive”, could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user’s personal files and operating system could be stored on Google’s own servers and accessed via the internet.

The long-rumoured GDrive is expected to be launched this year, according to the technology news website TG Daily, which described it as “the most anticipated Google product so far”. It is seen as a paradigm shift away from Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which runs inside most of the world’s computers, in favour of “cloud computing”, where the processing and storage is done thousands of miles away in remote data centres.

Read it all.

Please guess before you look.

He may not be in with the local Emo cult, and you’re unlikely to see him hanging out at a skateboard park. But the Holy Father moved one step closer to cool today when he launched the Vatican’s own YouTube site on Google.

Pope Benedict XVI said he wanted to reach out to “the digital generation”, but in doing so he warned the young against the dangers of “sharing words and images that are degrading of human beings, that promote hatred and intolerance, that debase the goodness and intimacy of human sexuality or that exploit the weak and vulnerable”.

In a message marking World Communications Day, the 81-year-old said new digital technologies were “bringing about fundamental shifts in patterns of communication and human relationships”.

Read it all.

I recently received this:

I wanted to take a minute to say thank you for closing the comments on Bp Robinson…[recently]. I very much enjoy coming to the site to visit and find much of what I read by you and others enlightening, but the current state of affairs is such that passions are inflamed. The vitriol at times is breathtaking and depressing. One of the gifts of being a conservative is a certain amount of reserve when dealing with trying circumstances. That has been lost both in political and now church dialogue.

I thank you for trying to keep things at a level that is respectful but allows for a range of ideas and opinions to be expressed.

Please note that strictly speaking comments were not closed, but they were pre-vetted, which is sometimes necessary on certain topics. In any event respectful and on topic discussion is what we are after–KSH.

Youngsters are shunning books and outdoor games to spend up to six hours a day in front of a screen, a survey has revealed.

Children as young as five are turning their bedrooms into multi-media ‘hubs’ with TVs, computers, games consoles, MP3 players and mobile phones all within easy reach.

The trend triggered warnings that the next generation will struggle to compete in the adult world because they lack reading and writing skills.

Read it all.

The Church of England today launches a new section of its website in celebration of 150 years of the parish magazine.

The Church estimates that the combined readership of its parish magazines exceeds that of several national newspapers, taken together.

Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, says on the new web-site: “A good parish magazine is a wonderful resource that places the local church at the heart of the community it serves.

“We owe our gratitude to all those who labour lovingly to produce this regular shop-window for their church or parish. As a team or solo, with a generous budget or an alarmingly fraying shoestring, this is a ministry we need to recognise and to support.”

Read it all and see what you think of the new site by following the link at the bottom.

In three separate cases, three Pennsylvania county judges have ruled that marriages performed by ministers who do not have houses of worship or congregations are legal, rejecting a contrary 2007 ruling that had sowed statewide confusion.

All three suits were brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which argued that York County Judge Maria Musti Cook was wrong to invalidate a marriage in 2007 because the minister who performed it was ordained online and did not have a physical church or congregation.

Read it all.

I recently asked a client that I care for about his feelings on televised and virtual church services. He watches them often because illness prevents him from attending “real church.” He said he felt “alone” because there were no people physically around him. He felt disconnected.

My own experience of online prayer and worship is also along these lines. For awhile I attended Compline online and felt a sense of desolation.

Read it all.

The first time Jonathan Zittrain gave a speech on the future of computing, he greatly surprised his audience. The year was 1985, and Zittrain was a magazine columnist and the “system operator” of an online forum for users of Texas Instruments computers. As a leading figure in the community, Zittrain was invited to speak at a big convention in Chicago. The surprise was that Zittrain had recently turned fifteen. No one had ever met him in person: when he was appointed system operator, sight unseen, he was thirteen.

Now Zittrain is older and more worried, as is evident from the title of his provocative and engaging book. Zittrain tells us that whatever the Internet’s glorious adolescence, its middle age will be sharply shaped by the problem of computer security. “Today’s viruses and spyware,” he writes, “are not merely annoyances to be ignored.” Zittrain has a graph showing the number of security incidents over the last decade, and it resembles the Dow Jones average over the 1990s. He predicts a coming crisis, grave measures, and, as “security problems worsen and fear spreads,” broad acceptance of “some form of lockdown.”

Read it all.

A encouraging story to start the year with–God bless this man and his efforts on behalf of the troops. Watch it all.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.”

Read it all.

The Internet has surpassed newspapers as the main source for national and international news for Americans, according to a new survey.

Television, however, remains the preferred medium for Americans, according to the survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Read it all.

One of the reasons the debate over network neutrality is so confusing is that the term itself is so slippery. It has an engineering meaning to engineers and an ideological meaning to ideologues while to businesses, it seems to mean””not surprisingly””whatever best serves their interests.

The extent of the confusion became clear today with a story in the Wall Street Journal saying that Google, a leader of the net neutrality charge, “has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content.” What Google hopes to do, as explained in a blog post by the company’s Washington telecom counsel, Richard Whitt, is to speed the delivery of its content by “co-locating” servers within the networks of Internet service providers, such as Verizon or Comcast, a privilege for which it would, of course, have to pay. “Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday’s Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open,” he writes.

Does this violate the principles of net neutrality? It depends on whom you ask.

Read it all.

Curiosity aroused, I contacted the site’s owners to find out what was going on. They told me that, since September, the number of London-based males in the financial sector registering had risen by nearly 300 per cent. It seems the colder the market for jobs, the hotter the market for adultery….

The founders of the website like to argue that, by providing a well-behaved marketplace for adultery, they are actually creating domestic stability. Seventy per cent of Illicit Encounters’ clients claim to be attracted to adultery as an alternative to divorce, not as a precursor to it. This may not be altogether laughable but it seems a little early to draw any conclusion one way or another.

However, it’s not too early to draw three other conclusions from my month on the site. The first is that people who are still in work seem to have an inordinate amount of spare time from nine to five. Second is that everyone lies: they understate their ages and overstate their attractiveness, gym attendance, good humour and so on.

Read it all.

Passing a flirtatious note to get someone’s attention is so yesterday. These days, young people use technology instead.

About a third of young adults 20-26 and 20% of teens say they’ve sent or posted naked or semi-naked photos or videos of themselves, mostly to be “fun or flirtatious,” a survey finds.

A third of teen boys and 40% of young men say they’ve seen nude or semi-nude images sent to someone else; about a quarter of teen girls and young adult women have. And 39% of teens and 59% of those ages 20-26 say they’ve sent suggestive text messages.

Read it all.

Facebook, the Internet’s largest social network, wants to let you take your friends with you as you travel the Web. But having been burned by privacy concerns in the last year, it plans to keep close tabs on those outings.

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

Read it all.

I was very sorry to read this, and I post it for three reasons. First, she was one of my favorite writers on one of my favorite financial blogs. Second, she is an interesting example of why anonymity is sometimes (note, in unusual circumstances) necessary for a blogger, and, thrid, she is but one more example of the further work that needs to be done on ovarian cancer (blog readers may remember my mother died of ovarian cancer in 2007). Read it all–KSH.

How many blogs does the world need? There is already blog gridlock. When the Washington Post editorial page started a blog before this year’s conventions, participants (I was one) were told: Don’t forget that the Post political staff also has a complete set of blogs. It wasn’t clear what we were supposed to do about this, but the implication was that there are only so many aperçus to go around, so don’t be greedy.

The great thing about blogs, in my view, is that they share the voice of e-mail. It’s a genuinely new literary form, which, at its best, combines the immediacy of talking with the reflectiveness of writing. But many readers may be reaching the point with blogs and websites that I reached long ago with the Sunday New York Times Magazine–actively hoping there isn’t anything interesting in there because then I’ll have to take the time to read it.

Read it all.

Let us pray that Steve will be receptive.

On the Web site prayabout.com, Steve’s wife, whose online profile notes that she is a Catholic from St. Charles, Mo., asked other users of the site to submit prayers that her husband will listen to his psychiatrist. She also asked for prayers that the psychiatrist will “see that my husband has major issues that need to be worked on ASAP.”

The post received 19 prayers in response. Jaqueline1712 from India asked Jesus to heal Steve’s broken spirit. A user from Kentucky, whose profile photo shows her hugging a baby, prayed that God would take away Steve’s anger.

“Give this family hope!” wrote Mr.Dan2, of New Mexico.

Read it all.

Reporting from Washington — Senior military leaders took the exceptional step of briefing President Bush this week on a severe and widespread electronic attack on Defense Department computers that may have originated in Russia — an incursion that posed unusual concern among commanders and raised potential implications for national security.

Defense officials would not describe the extent of damage inflicted on military networks. But they said that the attack struck hard at networks within U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and affected computers in combat zones. The attack also penetrated at least one highly protected classified network.

Read it all.

An Anglican Parish Church has joined with speech technology company SpinVox so that as the Rev John Kronenberg, vicar of Hinchley Wood in Surrey, delivers his sermon to the congregation his words will be automatically sent to the inboxes of 100 church members.

Mr Kronenberg said: “There are many reasons why people may not be able to make it to Church on a Sunday. They may have to work, or visit families far away, some may have trouble leaving the house if they are elderly or ill and some families can only get to church a couple of times a month because of other commitments, but they still want to keep in touch.”

Read it all.

Is lying about one’s identity on the Internet now a crime?

The verdict Wednesday in the MySpace cyberbullying case raised a variety of questions about the terms that users agree to when they log on to Web sites.

The defendant in the case, a Missouri woman, was convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles on three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud for having misrepresented herself on the popular social network MySpace. The woman, Lori Drew, posed as a teenage boy in using the account to send first friendly and then menacing messages to Megan Meier, 13, who killed herself shortly after receiving a message in October 2006 that said in part, “The world would be a better place without you.”

MySpace’s terms of service require users to submit “truthful and accurate” registration information. Ms. Drew’s creation of a phony profile amounted to “unauthorized access” to the site, prosecutors said, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which until now has been used almost exclusively to prosecute hacker crimes.

Read it all.

If that headache plaguing you this morning led you first to a Web search and then to the conclusion that you must have a brain tumor, you may instead be suffering from cyberchondria.

On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on popular search engines as well as a survey of the company’s employees.

The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.

Read it all.

Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

The study, conducted from 2005 to last summer, describes new-media usage but does not measure its effects.

“It certainly rings true that new media are inextricably woven into young people’s lives,” said Vicki Rideout, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and director of its program for the study of media and health. “Ethnographic studies like this are good at describing how young people fit social media into their lives. What they can’t do is document effects. This highlights the need for larger, nationally representative studies.”

Read it all.

Watch it all.

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

NEWS Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch is urging Australians to move out of their comfort zones and embrace new technology.

In his second of five Boyer Lectures, The Challenge of Technology, which will be aired on ABC Radio National at 5pm tomorrow, Mr Murdoch says people should stop whingeing about the challenge of new technology and “get out in front of it”.

He says new technology, such as the internet, is destroying business models that have been used for decades, particularly those with a “one size fits all” approach to their customers.

The US television networks are finding their audiences shrinking every day, he says. “People suddenly have a growing multitude of choices — and they are rightly exercising those choices,” Mr Murdoch says.

Read it all..