What do you do when the promise of eternal salvation isn’t enough to sucker kids into attending church? Set up free Halo.

Tomorrow’s New York Times is running a great article about how leaders at Protestant churches, including those from evangelical branches who’ve actively opposed video games, are using ‘Halo nights’ to induce kids to come to church.
I suppose the pastors, “desperate to reach young congregants,” have come to the realization that the mind-numbing and immoral 2000 [...]

Chinese attacks in cyberspace

Today’s Financial Times contains two (here and here) very interesting articles on the People’s Liberation Army’s increasingly frequent attacks on US government networks. One attack in June successfully breached a system connected to Defense Secretary Robert Gates computer.
According to the articles, because of their unprecedented sophistication, these attacks are beginning to seriously worry government officials.
I [...]

CCP drops plan that would force netizens to use real names online

According to Mure Dickie at The Financial Times, “China has put aside proposals to force internet users to use their real names when signing up for blogging services – and will now merely encourage them to do so.”
Xinhua reports that decision was made due to objections from blog-hosting companies who were
worried that many users [...]

Computer crashed

My Powerbook G4 crashed this morning while I was in the middle of writing the final paper for my journalism class, which was due today. That caused a bit of a panic.
Luckily, I remembered that I’d sent an earlier draft of the paper to my professor using Gmail, so I recovered that document and got [...]

Use of E-mail by Terrorists and Chinese Dissidents.

I attended a lunch seminar run by Professor Jason Lyall about how political scientists approach the study of terrorism. When talking about how terrorists use the Internet to recruit followers and disseminate information, Prof. Lyall said, “we” have software that picks up on key words, phrases, and files, which, when detected, allows us to [...]

Applications that’re new to me.

I have a rather large hunch that two applications I started using today are old hat to many of you. However, I’m so overjoyed at how cool these things are that I’ve gotta write a post.
First: Google Reader.
I’m embarrassed to say that today was my first day ever using an RSS feed subscription reader. Really [...]