The federal government is starting to realize the real threats of botnets around the world. U.S. homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff speaking at the RSA conference said that the US government has launched a cyber security "Manhattan Project."

The US is realizing that online attacks can be a form of "devastating warfare", and equivalent in damage to "physical destruction of the worst kind."

Ever wish you could take that long nasty looking URL and make it into something small and compact that can be easily forwarded to email or phone devices.

For those using Microblogging these tools are a necessity. Other useful purposes for small URLs include embedding links with ugly uid's, certificates, or other commonly seen tags when user hover over hyperlinks.

I came across a service called Twitter a few months back. At first I brushed it off thinking it was probably a fad that would slowly fade away. But after looking at it a bit more closely I think that this idea may have legs especially in a society where information overload has caused our attention spans to shrink.

Twitter is in a category called "microblogging". What is Microblogging? Basically it gives you the ability to send very short (less than 140 characters) messages to family, friends, co-workers, or other people in your network.