Islamic terrorist groups are taking to the web in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of the younger generations.
A report shows that Islamic terrorist groups are sending out at least 90 messages on Twitter every minute.
The study by the Saudi Arabian based Sakina shows that terror groups like Syrian Islamic Liberation Front, Al-Nusra Front and ISIS are not only sending out messages to promote their view of Islam but also recruiting potential terrorist fighters.
The head of the group says that governments need to watch social media to control the messages being sent to youth. But he also said that the public has a responsibility as well.
“The responsibility of protecting the general public from terrorist activities does not only lie with the official directorates. It is also the responsibility of the media, mosques and educational institutes,” Abdulmunim Al-Mushawah said. “Public awareness and guidance are the campaign’s top priorities because it is important to teach people how to face one problem without creating another.”
In a move that has critics split on whether it’s good marketing for churches or a way to segregate Christians online, the .church domain is now available for purchase.
The domain was first made available last week and many churches have been snapping up the domains.
“I saw this as an opportunity to take advantage of important geographic branding opportunities domains that immediately and easily identify my church with the Brookhaven and greater Atlanta area have long been taken,” said Pastor Wesley Sanders of Brookhaven United Methodist. “I had been planning on doing a redesign of our church’s website for a while, and the release of the new dot church domain names gave me a good opportunity to implement a new online presence.”
The domain is part of what is called “generic top-level domains” or gTLDs. As of Monday, Hover.com says .church is number 8 on the top 20 list of gTLDs.
Experts at Hover.com say it’s too early to tell if the new domain is a success. They say you will need to wait at least a year to see the number of .church domains in use before saying they were a success.
The domains are available from all domain registrars.
The video of Islamic terrorist group ISIS beheading a second American is much harder to find on the internet thanks to a secret coalition of the biggest social media and streaming video outlets.
An anonymous source revealed to the Times of Israel that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others agreed to work together to keep the video from being uploaded and spread throughout the world on their systems. Copies of the video uploaded to YouTube were deleted within seconds of their upload so other sites could not link them.
“It’s been very interesting, with this second beheading, how very little of those images have been passed around,” said Family Online Safety Institute CEO Stephen Balkam, who serves on Facebook’s safety advisory board. “It’s very difficult to find them unless you know of some darker places on the web.”
The Times of Israel also reported that after the first beheading video the social outlets decided to take a stand against the terrorists spreading their hate online.
The networks involved refused to give media interviews although YouTube released a statement saying they have clear policies to remove videos aimed at inciting violence.
Online privacy advocates said the censoring of the video could be a very dangerous precedent although most would endorse a way to keep the video from the internet if the discussion of the incident could continue to freely flow.
Pope Francis spoke to a group of 50,000 German alter servers and gave them a surprising message. Instead of speaking of the Scriptures or some deep theological lesson, the Pope told the youths to get off the internet.
“Many young people waste too many hours on futile things,” the Pope said in a short speech to the altar servers. “Our life is made up of time, and time is a gift from God, so it is important that it be used in good and fruitful actions.”
The Pope also listed activities as watching TV soap operas, smartphones and other similar items as things that could pull them away from serving others and making a difference in their families and community.
Pope Francis also told the youths that it is very easy to lose track of time when you are working with electronic devices and before you realize it hours have passed with nothing constructive being done. He said that the time wasted on the internet and with electronics could be spent connecting to the Lord through prayer, meditation and study.
He called on the youths to create “a network not of wires, but of people.”
A high school student was researching gun control for a debate in his law class and discovered that his school was blocking conservative and Christian websites.
Andrew Lampart, 18, who attended Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, Connecticut was using the school’s internet service because he wanted facts on both sides of the issue. Then something happened when he tried to access the National Rifle Association website.
“Their website was blocked,” Lampart told Fox News.
Lampart when on to find other sites for pro-second amendment blocked. Then while Democratic party sites were permitted, Republican ones were blocked. Then the real shocker arrived for Lampart.
Christian websites were blocked. The lockdown of websites that showed the gospel of Christ was so complete that even websites connected to the Vatican were shut down. Even the official website of Pope Francis was blocked by the school. However, websites linked to radical Muslim extremism were permitted as well as other religions.
When the student gathered his evidence and contacted the school, nothing was done by school administrators. He had to approach the School Board who said they were surprised by the problem.
The school’s superintendent told FoxNews that there appeared to be a problem with Dell SonicWall, the filtering service used by the school. She claimed that the school district did not filter individual websites but categories of websites.
As of this article, the Christian websites are still blocked by the school.
The crowd-funding site Kickstarter is being accused of censoring a group of filmmakers who are planning a movie about the abortion house of horrors controlled by convicted murder Kermit Gosnell.
The filmmakers say that Kickstarter told them describing the acts committed by Gosnell in the movie’s description were a violation of the site’s terms of service.
“We ask that the phrase ‘1000s of babies stabbed to death’ and similar language be modified or removed from the project,” wrote a Kickstarter representative in one of their communications with the group.
Phelim McAleer, one of the producers of the film, said that while Kickstarter objected to their references to abortion, the site allowed 16 projects that involve stabbings, 5 projects about incest, 44 about rape and 28 that have the F-word in the title.
Kickstarter told the National Review on Friday that they had approved the project as submitted despite the e-mails shown by the filmmakers that show they were told to censor their wording.
A new organization wants you to be able to check your e-mail in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest or the deserts of Africa.
A group calling themselves the Media Development Investment Fund is creating something called Outernet, which involves hundreds of mini-satellites that would orbit earth and provide Wi-Fi to the entire planet.
The MDIF says that the new technology would allow free press and information to flow into countries that block internet access to citizens like China and North Korea. Currently about 60% of the planet has access to the internet mostly because poor areas of the world lack the infrastructure necessary to sustain signal.
The company plans to ask NASA to run tests of their service from the International Space Station in September 2014. If the tests from the ISS are successful, the company believes they can begin Outernet by June 2015.
The service will not be like traditional internet service in that the user can go to any website but the service will be much like satellite TV in that it will provide a menu of websites for users visit.
A new study has shown that parents who pay little attention to their children are more likely to have children who become internet addicts.
A study of young adults showed the parents labeled as tough or demanding along with showing little affection were also those most connected to children with personality traits that made it difficult for them to interact with other humans.
“In short, good parenting, including parental warmth and affection, that is caring and protective parents, has been associated with lower risk for Internet addiction,” Argyroula E. Kalaitzaki of the Technological Education Institute (TEI) of Crete in Heraklion told Yahoo news, “whereas bad parenting, including parental control and intrusion, that is authoritarian and neglectful parents, has been associated with higher risk for addiction.”
Internet addiction is still considered a fairly new psychological diagnosis and scientists have not fully agreed on a definition for addiction.
“Parents that identify their children to have some symptoms of addiction, like excessive time spent online or need to spend increasingly longer periods online, inadequate sleep and fatigue, apathy, nervousness, or irritability when offline, impairments in relationships and schoolwork or employment, should contact a health care professional as soon as possible,” Kalaitzaki said.
Today’s release from fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden says that the NSA was spying on users through the cookies that web browsers save to customize commercial space on sites like Google.
According to an internal presentation slide showed that when companies follow internet consumers to better serve advertising it opens the door for government tracking. The slides suggest the NSA was already using the tracking to follow targets.
Online privacy advocates had been claiming for years the tracking tools called “cookies” left open the possibility for violations of web user privacy.
Cookies can allow the NSA to track a single individual’s communications among all internet transactions. Cookies are not just reserved for browsers on desktop or laptop computers. Smartphone apps that run on iPhones and Android devices, even the Apple and Google operating systems, track the location of each device sometimes without alerting the device’s owner.
The slides did not say how the NSA obtained access to Google’s tracking system.