new.lds.org Now Available!

new.lds.org is now available!

Some new features:

• Great new search (try out the facets!)


• Prophets and Apostles Speak Today


• Church News and Events


• Church Organization


• Temples


• Humanitarian Service


• "Our Heavenly Father's Plan"


• New e-store


• New Ward Calendar (with Google Calendar integration) and Ward Directory


• My Notebook (this is amazing and will sync with your mobile device in about a month or so). To try it out, login and go to scriptures or general conference. When you mouse-over a paragraph, you can tag and mark stuff and type in your own notes.


• And so on, and so on...

The team was up all night against harrowing opposition and went live at 5:00am or so. Conference, magazines and manuals go back to 2002 or so, but we'll be loading more content each day, eventually reaching back to the 1970's. We will have Spanish and German versions available before October conference.

We're finding and fixing bugs so please give us feedback.

Enjoy! (And spread the word...)

New Spice

The BYU Library made a video that parodies  the well-known Old Spice commercial. The video went viral and to date has received almost 2 million views on YouTube.

Go BYU Library!

Green!

Energy cost-cutting begins at home. According to this article, local city administrators in England, Scotland, and Belgium have posted maps that contrast heat escape in homes, offices, and industries. A creative way to pin-point and address rising energy costs. Only time before this comes to the US – may be an extra hot edition of Google or Bing maps.

Data Extortion

Recently somebody hacked into a web site operated by the State of Virginia, deleted the records of over 8 million people and left a note on the homepage, demanding $10M to restore the data.

We're talking about 0's and 1's here.

It's not the first time hackers have used data for extortion. Typically they threaten to release potentially damaging data, whereas this time it's closer to kidnapping where they're offering to return the data for a price.

This event underscores the importance of regular backups and disaster recovery. Granted, the brutes should never have had the opportunity to get into the web site in the first place, but a secure perimeter won't solve the problem if it's an inside job. Appropriate seperation of duties and regular testing of data (and system) restoration is critical for peace of mind when it comes to making sure your data is safely guarded.

Luckily, the state of Virginia apparently had appropriate backup and restoration precedures in place.

Do you?

WolframAlpha=CrazySearch

If you haven't tried WolframAlpha, check it out.

Here is a screencast that explains.

It's a search engine which returns organized data from queries based on normal language. You can ask it math questions, statistics questions, questions about nutritional content, popularity of baby names and so forth.

Notice how often it doesn't understand your question--unlike Google where you almost always get a result, even if it's not what you want. In this case, humans are doing more work behind the magic, trying to predict what people will ask. Though you don't always get a result, when you do get a result it's more satisfying.

Moving Forward

Last week we released a new Beta web site: LDS Maps.This is a web site that people use to locate LDS buildings all over the world. This will eventually (probably July) be the replacement for a tool called Meetinghouse Locator on lds.org and mormon.org.

We'd love for people (members of the Church and non-members alike) to check it out and give us your feedback! This is only a beta so you will probably see some glitches, performance problems, incorrect data or issues with the design. When you do, let us know about them!

For members of the Church, if the meeting times are wrong then please let your ward clerk know. He can change the meeting times in his system (MLS).

If you see any other problems, including incorrect locations for buildings, click on the "Feedback" button in the web page itself and let us know what you think. With your help, we'll get any incorrect information fixed quickly!

Also feel free to give feedback in the comments here.

We are integrating this technology into the next generation of our web sites so that members of the Church can easily find who lives in their ward or branch boundaries and where. We will also be working on Spanish and Portugese versions, as well as versions for mobile devices.

Everybody loves to cha-cha-cha

A young man I was teaching in a Sunday School class today introduced me to ChaCha.

ChaCha is a question answering service for mobile devices. I tried it and it's pretty cool.

You just send a text message with a question to CHACHA (242242). For fun, I typed my first question this afternoon: "How long is a marathon?" I got an answer in just a couple of minutes:

The marathon is a long-distance running event with an official distance of 42.195 kilometers (26 miles 385 yards) road race.

Wow. That was interesting, I figured, but it's still pretty lame because it's a bot (a computer) and therefore can only answer common questions. I asked another common question: "Who is Gordon B. Hinckley?"

Gordon B. Hinckley is the 15th President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The Church is represented. Nice! I can forgive the capitalization error and the missing hyphen. I figured I would ask an uncommon question next: "Who is Joel Dehlin?"

Chief Information Officer for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Huh. At this point, I was starting to wonder if was actually a bot or maybe a human. I tested it: "What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

That depends, is it an African or European swallow? A swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?

I was a little dumb-founded. Either the computer was trained to interpolate Monty Python quotes, they were really good at planning for what stupid questions someone like me might ask or I was texting with a human. Later I found out that ChaCha is, in fact, staffed by humans and you can ask just about anything and get a reasonable answer (directions, movie review, sports scores, restaurant recommendations, etc.). The answer is limited to 160 or so characters of text so you'll want to avoid questions like my friend Eric Denna's favorite: "Define the universe and give three examples." But for simple answers to a surprisingly broad set of questions--basically anything a reasonably smart person can find on the Internet in a few minutes--it's a really neat service I'll be using often.

And it's free--at least for now.

You Have the Right to Remain Visible

How many of you would take your home computer to a public place and leave it running?

Or make a list of every web site you browse (EVERY WEB SITE YOU BROWSE) and publish it in the newspaper?

Would you write your credit card number down on pieces of paper and pass them around large groups of people?

We are engaged in the digital analogs of these things all the time, and most of us don't know it.

How many of you would take your home computer to a public place and leave it?

If you fire up a wireless laptop in my house you'll see four of my neighbors' wireless networks, all but one open to the world. I'm about as technical as the sole of an old shoe, but it would be trivial for me to hack into one of their computers and cause all kinds of problems: peek at pictures, read on-line journals, grab credit card numbers or snag on-line passwords stored in cache. Though I'm harmless, some are not. This type of cyber-tom-foolery happens regularly. Thieves drive around looking for wireless networks, discover them, break into them (usually trivially) and make off with the digital rewards.

Or make a list of every web site you browse (EVERY WEB SITE YOU BROWSE) and publish it in the newspaper?

If you think only you know the web sites you visit, think again. Your computer stores traces of where you go in cyberspace and, depending on the security settings on your browser, other web sites can get access to that data. Even if you're careful on your computer, the ISP you use to connect to the Internet can store that data. Some of them are even starting to sell that data--in a way that is actually pretty ingenious. Let's say you're up on a web site reading a review of the movie "Bourne Ultimatum." You might notice that the next web site you go to has an ad to rent or buy one of Matt Damon's other movies. This is possible because some ISP's are starting to provide data about the last place you browsed to the next place you browse and charging for that information. Read the privacy notice of your ISP carefully and I imagine that in many cases you'll find that you can't prevent it.

Would you write your credit card number down on pieces of paper and pass them around large groups of people?

If you send your credit card number over email or tell someone your credit card over the phone (land-line or cell phone) you might as well be writing it down on little pieces of paper and dropping them off a building roof into a crowd. Technology for "listening" to phone calls and "sniffing" emails on the Internet is basically mainstream. It's easy to rationalize, "Oh, I'll just do it this once," but the first time you find big charges on your credit card that you didn't make, you get serious about protecting yourself.

It's interesting to me that we can be so much more careful about protecting our non-digital assets, when our digital assets can be stolen or undermined so much more quickly.

I'd love to hear what precautions you're taking to protect yourselves.

New Internet Safety Podcast

Dr. Charles Knutson, a computer science professor at BYU, has started a new podcast called Internet Safety Podcast where he talks about safe driving on the Internet. The first few episodes deal with what kinds of things kids are exposed to on the Internet and some techniques for coping.

Check it out.