The Public Service of New Hampshire used Twitter to keep customers informed during a treacherous winter storm

In the midst of a Dec. 11 ice storm unprecedented in its destruction, Martin Murray, senior corporate news representative for the Public Service of New Hampshire, reached beyond the typical telephone customer service lines, Web updates and press conferences.

In doing so, he found the most effective way to provide news to customers was to bypass the media and give it to them directly — 140 characters at a time. (Ragan News)

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

The challenges that the major search engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a long way toward explaining why they still can’t provide satisfying answers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to London next Thursday?” The answers are readily available — if only the search engines knew how to find them.

Now a new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend the reach of search engines into the Web’s hidden corners. When that happens, it will do more than just improve the quality of search results — it may ultimately reshape the way many companies do business online. (NY Times)

Among their arsenal of weapons are bags of almonds and BlackBerry mobile phones – almonds to keep their energy up, and the mobile internet connections to stay one step ahead of police and the military.

They are the new breed of terrorist – using everyday technology as a weapon of war.

Well-trained, focused and armed to the teeth, the small group of young but hardened Islamic militants slipped into India’s financial capital undetected last week to unleash a wave of carnage. (News.com.au)

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of. (Houston Chronicle)

The Army has created a video game unit and will invest $50 million over five years on games and gaming systems designed to prepare soldiers for combat.

Lt. Col. Gary Stephens, product manager for air and ground tactical trainers at Project Executive Office — Simulation Training and Instrumentation said Thursday that the $50 million has been approved for a “games for training” program starting in 2010.  (Stars and Stripes)

Steven Aftergood, the Federation of the American Scientists analyst who’s been following the intelligence community for years, wonders how realistic these sorts of scenarios are, really. “This concern is out there. But it has to be viewed in context. It’s the job of intelligence agencies to anticipate threats and counter them. With that orientation, they’re always going to give more weight to a particular scenario than an objective analysis would allow,” he tells Danger Room. “Could terrorists use Second Life? Sure, they can use anything. But is it a significant augmentation? That’s not obvious. It’s a scenario that an intelligence officer is duty-bound to consider. That’s all.” (Wired)

Chief Jon Greiner recently expanded his staff of crime analysts from one to 11 without hiring a single new officer at the Ogden Police Department in Utah.

Instead, Greiner equipped his existing force of eight lieutenants and two assistant chiefs with new, easy-to-use, Web-based business intelligence tools that enable the police veterans to combine and manipulate data from arrest records, court documents, probation logs, jurisdictional maps and other sources to identify patterns and pinpoint hot spots so they can stop crimes before they happen. (Computer World)

Last week we broke the story of the Army’s attempt to design a “first-person thinker” video game for training future generals. Now one senior Army game-designer tells DANGER ROOM that the ground combat service wants to go one step further … and build a “Massive Multiplayer Online Game” (MMOG) where a wide range of Army training could take place. (Wired)

Do you trade music with your pals? Use Facebook to keep in touch with far-away friends? Play World of Warcraft as a girl, when you’re really a boy? Check your e-mail a little too often?

Well, then, you may not be trustworthy enough to become a spy.  [Wired]

The University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science just announced that it’s been awarded a $7.5 million grant to work in this fast emerging field of network science, which melds everything from mathematics to sociology.

Network science is increasingly the “hot” area for Pentagon research. Why? Because the Pentagon hopes that if it can understand complex networks, then it can understand terrorist networks, and even predict who will join such a network. (Wired)

They might not build $150-million F-22 stealth fighters, but in other ways insurgents and terrorists are amazingly tech savvy. For one, they’re hip to using grungy, bare-bones websites to spread tactics and ideology across the planet on the cheap, transforming once-isolated local and regional conflicts into genuine threats to global stability. Author John Robb calls this “open-source warfare,” and believes it’s the most important force shaping the 21st century.

If so, we’re screwed. Seven years after the launch of Wikipedia — the user-edited online encyclopedia that brought the “open source” concept to the masses — the U.S. Army is still playing catch-up. The Army’s idea of harnessing the ‘net is to launch isolated websites, put generals in charge and lock everything behind passwords, while banning popular open-source civilian websites. Colonel James Galvin, head of the Army’s “Battle Command Knowledge System,” openly admits that when it comes to the collaborative internet, the bad guys have a “niche advantage.” (Wired)