As we hasten towards the end of the year, and Christmas looms in the horizon, up in the cold dark north of Canada, a group of intrepid Canadians prepare themselves to submit themselves to various forms of torture to raise funds for the Child’s Play charity. In order to raise money these brave people commit themselves to play the most boring game in the world, Desert Bus (http://j.mp/cG-Desert-Bus) for as long as donations make them. In the five years that this trip has been undertaken, more than $500,000 has been raised to bring games to sick children in hospitals around the world. As we go to press, by the time this year’s journey is complete, the team are on track to have raised more than $200,000 this year alone.

The Child’s Play charity is entering its seventh year of operation (see http://www.catholic.geek.nz/Blog/?p=196 for our rundown of the charity last year) and as always it’s a fantastic reminder that geeks have a social conscience too. In 2010, nearly $2,300,000 was raised and already in 2011 the total is approaching the million dollar mark.

If you’d like to participate this year, there is plenty of ways to donate, but for something a little different, consider the Humble Bundle (http://www.humblebundle.com) – by buying a set of games as a gift, you can donate a percentage of the amount you pay to Child’s Play – getting a great gift and supporting a great charity at the same time! The next bundle of games should be available before Christmas.

So, this year, rather than getting caught up in the commercialism of Christmas, the team at Catholic Geek would like you to again think of the children, and consider donating to the Child’s Play charity – giving is child’s play!

It seems like a month doesn’t go by without another story of a website getting compromised and the site’s user passwords being splattered all across the internet. The latest big, publically exposed occurrence was with the Gawker group of websites (Lifehacker, Gizmodo and a number of others) where the entire user database was exposed to the darker side of the internet. Unfortunately, this had a large flow-on effect, as a large number of people who had accounts that were compromised had followed two fundamental flaws when setting their passwords – they had both used easy passwords, and had reused the same password all over the place. This resulted in a far more wide reaching problem then just silly comments being posted on a website with a limited audience.

The lesson to be learnt here is it’s really important to follow good password practice. Here’s some key tips:

a) Use strong passwords – firstly, where possible, use passphrases (sentences) as passwords wherever possible. These have the benefit of both being easy to remember and also being very difficult to break by the bad guts using brute force methods. If your service doesn’t allow this, other useful ideas include taking the first letter of each word in a sentence to create gibberish that also is meaningful to you. See http://bit.ly/GoodPasswords for some more ideas.

b) Use different passwords – the easiest way is to have a good base password and then add something for each site to change that password – for example, add something financial to your internet banking password, something about shopping to your trade me password, etc. With this in place, if the worst happens and one site does get hacked, the bad guys will only manage to get one of your passwords.

Try following some of these suggestions, and help make sure that only you can say who you are online!

The recent tragic earthquake in Christchurch provided many unfortunate opportunities for social media to shrug off the somewhat unfair stereotype of only being useful for people sharing inane information with nobody in particular. On that terrible Tuesday, and the days and weeks following it, Twitter and Facebook in particular moved into a different level of awareness in New Zealand.

In the hours after the quake struck, the first place many people outside of Christchurch turned to see if their friends and family in the garden city were okay was Facebook. This was because people around the country were able to turn to the social network to update hundreds of people at a time as to their status and location. The updates soon became focused more on supporting and caring for each other, however, and continue to show the country connecting as one community affected by this tragedy.

After the quake, as the need for information started to hit fever pitch, Twitter was flooded with second-by-second updates from around New Zealand and the world: everything from enquiries as to the whereabouts of loved ones, to rallying calls to encourage people to donate money to the rescue effort, to news and emergency announcements. The site and its users has become such a valuable window into the collective consciousness of the country, that mainstream news radio and television stations supplementing their official updates with tweets has become commonplace!

I hope that initiatives such as the Library of Congress’ attempts to archive social media content continue, because I would like my children to be able to look back on that day and see the digital evidence of a country united behind helping, supporting and caring for our community, using whatever technologies were available to us. A proud moment arising from a very terrible one.

30 years ago, at the birth of the Internet, a group of engineers got together and defined the standards that are at the core of the internet – the communication protocol, now known as IPv4. Unfortunately, these fine people never imagined that what they were creating would become the backbone of communication the world over. What was well designed for a network aimed at governments and universities doesn’t scale too well for 6 ¾ billion people. In February 2011, the last free pools of IP addresses were allocated to the 5 regional Internet registries. The exhaustion of addresses is now only a matter of time. The good news is that this hasn’t been left completely unresolved – bring on IPv6! IPv6 allows for enough unique numbers, that a trillion people can each be assigned trillions of IP numbers. Realistically this means this should never be an issue again.

So what is to come? The most that will be needed at home, in most situations, will be getting a new router to connect you to the internet – any computer within the last 5 years is already compatible. New Zealand has been working on the migration for some time, and http://www.ipv6.org.nz/ has some good information on how far along we are. However, there’s no need to panic – this doesn’t mean that your internet connection will suddenly stop working. Everything you use today will carry on as before, but any internet services that talk only IPv6 won’t work until your connection is updated

In the coming months, the team at Catholic.Geek will be monitoring this developing situation and keep you abrest of any developments. Finally, if the headline doesn’t make any sense – ::1 is the IPv6 code for talking to your own computer – home!

The traditional portrayal of gamers in the popular press is not a positive one. Gamers are often portrayed as dark, dangerous denziens of this world who are a menace to society. While modern gaming technologies like the Kinect and Wii are making great strides in normalising gaming as a popular pasttime, at the same time groups of gamers are working hard to change the public perception of ‘hardcore’ gamers. An excellent example of this is Child’s Play.

Child’s Play (www.childsplaycharity.org) was started in 2003 by two gamers, Jerry Hoskins and Mike Krahulik, partly in direct response to an article in a Seattle newspaper about how video games were warping a whole generation of children, and to mobilise the gaming community to give something back to their fellow man. Child’s Play facilitates the donation of video games, toys, and movies to children’s hospitals around the globe, including Starship Hospital in Auckland. In its first year, US $200,000 was raised, and in 2009, that amount had risen to $1.78 million with the total raised over the 6 years a staggering $6.8 million dollars.

Money is raised by direct donations to the cause, a large charity auction and dinner held in Seattle every December, and by a number of community organised events – the most successful being Desert Bus for Hope (www.desertbus.org). This is organised by a group of Canadian gamers who play a terribly boring game live on the internet to raise funds. While this sounds rather futile, it’s been remarkably successful – this year in 2010 over $200,000 was raised by this event alone!

So, this year, when thinking of those less fortunate then you, Catholic Geek would like you to consider thinking of the children, and check out the Child’s Play charity – giving is child’s play!

Facebook has been in the news as the paragon of what not to do when it comes to the privacy of your user base. For those who are unaware, when the social network first launched, Facebook was for only those with an .edu address – i.e. those involved in tertiary study in the U.S. Back then, part of the appeal of Facebook was the relatively exclusive nature of the “club”.

Facebook now has expanded to over 400 million users, and the company has been valued at US$15 billion. With the upsurge in popularity, there has also been an upsurge in people sharing their personal and private information…all under the auspices of the original “promise” of Facebook – i.e. that your information is only going to be available to those you have specifically tagged as being your “friends”.

The problem is that many people do not quite understand the actual privacy settings of their Facebook account. This means that they are actually allowing information they thought was private to be shared with people outside their network, or to the publishers of the applications they install on their profile. If you are a Facebook user, we strongly suggest you carefully check your privacy settings today!

While Facebook is working hard to try and undo the damage to their brand of people discovering private information being less private than they imagine, it still serves as a good reminder that it is very hard to control access to anything you post on the internet. An entire generation is discovering that teenage antics laid bare are not helpful when looking for a job for example! So, when using the internet – especially to spread the Good News – stick to this good rule of thumb: don’t put anything on the internet that you wouldn’t want the world to see.

In the past week, there has been an excellent Congress held on digital media in Italy, called "Testimoni digitali. Volti e linguaggi nell’era crossmediale" [Digital Witnesses. Faces and Languages in the Cross-Media Age]. For an insiders view of what the conference was like, check out our favourite priest from the Netherlands – Father Roderick (http://fatherroderick.sqpn.com) However, I’d like to focus this article on the closing address Pope Benedict XVI gave.

In his address, the pope talked about the challenge the world faces with the advent of the internet – the expansion of communication on a global scale and across multiple forms of media comes with the risk of both creating a new divide between those that have access and those that don’t, and also the risk of people becoming lost within the digital world – without a clear moral compass.

The attendees were called by the pope, as we are all called, to bring a human face to these new forms of media to counter the anonymity of the internet – thus helping the men and women of our digital age to sense the Lord’s presence.

To finish, in the words of Pope Benedict:

‘Let us set sail on the digital sea fearlessly, confronting open navigation with the same enthusiasm that has steered the Barque of the Church for 2,000 years. Rather than for technical resources, although these are necessary, let us also qualify ourselves by dwelling in this world with a believing heart that helps to give a soul to the ceaseless flow of communications that makes up the web.

This is our mission, the inalienable mission of the Church.’

Whenever I hear people talk about how the Catholic Church is old-fashioned or out of touch or not moving with the times, I always sigh a little. For you see, while some people like to cling to old, inaccurate stories about guys like Galileo, or refer somewhat foolishly to the average age of the clergy, I tend to focus more on the facts.

Take for example the recent article in the Telegraph newspaper in the U.K. referring to a meeting in November at the Vatican. You might note that that is not anything special by itself; there are hundreds of meetings in the Vatican every year. So what does this have to do with technology and the Church? Well, the meeting was not between heads of state and the clergy, but rather with heads of the internet and some bishops. Specifically, representatives from Facebook, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia were at a four-day conference organised by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

The Vatican, it seems, has fully realised the importance of these new technologies in reaching out to people of all ages and creeds across the world. And, as such, they have invested the time and money in this meeting of the minds in order to better understand how to spread the Good News of Christ in a modern world.

Quite frankly, this is another example of the wider Church being at the forefront of modern technology. Be it papyrus and the written word, or the Gutenberg press, or radio, or TV, or now the Internet – the Catholic Church has always tried to explore new technologies and techniques of reaching people wherever they may be. I applaud this new research by the Vatican, and I hope they continue to explore technology – not afraid, but eager to preach and teach online!

With all the bad publicity that the internet gets, you could be forgiven for wondering if it brings any good at all! How many recent stories have you read (this column excluded) talking about the internet and crime, porn or privacy violations? Conversely, how often do you read about the internet being seen as a blessing, or that it has provided ‘an omni-directional flow of transversal and personal communications’?

Well, probably only once, if at all. The quote above is from a speech by the Rev Federico Lombardi SJ, Director of the Vatican Press Office, Vatican Radio and of the Vatican’s television channel (CTV). Fr Lombardi gave this speech in May as part of a lecture for World Communications Day.

The speech (available in two parts: here and here) talks in depth about the changes the press agencies of the Holy See have had to go through in recent years, and starts to talk about some of the changes they will need to go through in years to come.

Interestingly, Fr Lombardi does not recommend the Church forget traditional media in an effort to be seen as being up-to-date with the young people. He instead talks about the “digital divide” and notes that the Church’s responsibility is to reach everyone – not just those who can afford broadband.

But he has some great insights into the traps and challenges of using the internet to spread a message that is often “against the grain”. However, far from being put off by these challenges, Fr Lombardi finishes by calling for us all to “work even harder, so that every day it will be more and more true to say, and so that we might be able to say with greater and greater conviction: the internet is truly blessed!”

There has been much said about our technologically savvy Pope Benedict XIV – texting the pilgrims at World Youth Day and having an iPod. However, he’s not the only IT-literate one – have you checked out the official Vatican website, http://www.vatican.va? It’s been around a lot longer but is an excellent resource for Catholic doctrine.

If you follow the Saints and Blessed URL you can see all the people John Paul II made Saints during his pontificate which makes for inspirational reading. Following the Resource Library URL takes you to an online Bible (The New American), the Catechism of the Catholic Church (both the full version and the compendium), the Code of Canon Law (covering topics from being a minister of Holy Eucharist to ‘cases to declare the nullity of marriage’) and the documents of the Second Vatican Council. There is a special link for WYD information and one where you can read the letters from our Pope to Chinese Catholics.

To gain access to all the papal documents, follow the Papal Archive URL. This will take you to a menu based on each Papacy. John Paul II was well known for his prolific writing. Here you can read the encyclicals, apostolic letters, homilies, messages, speeches etc that he proclaimed. Among his most popularised writings are the encyclicals Evangelium Vitae and Veritatis Splendor. Probably the most ‘famous’ encyclical is Humanae Vitae which was written by Pope Paul VI 1968 and can also be accessed online – well worth a read! And of course, Benedict XVI is just getting started. So go forth and learn more about your faith!!!

Of course, the Vatican site is just the beginning. Do you have any other sites about our rich faith you’d like to see highlighted? Share them with all @ www.catholic.geek.nz. If there’s anything you’d like to hear more about – feel free to join in and let us know!