Next time you watch as a group of terrorists bomb a building in Second Life, you may just be watching a practice run of a real terrorist act. According to an article by Natalie O’Brien, there are three jihadi terrorists and two elite jihadist terrorist groups registered on Second Life.

Rohan Gunaratna, author of “Inside al-Qaeda”, says “They are rehearsing their operations in Second Life because they don’t have the opportunity to rehearse in the real world.”

Working with authorities, Second Life officials are asking members to report suspicious or inappropriate behavior in the game, just as in the real world. But then again, shouldn’t anyone that spends hours a day in a virtual world of “make-believe” be considered suspicious?

In a recent Associated Press article, AP writer Gary Robertson wrote that MySpace.com has found more than 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles on their Web site, up from 7,000 profiles they reported in May.

MySpace declined to comment on the numbers reported but instead focused only on the fact that the profiles had been removed. Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer, said in a prepared statement, “We’re pleased that we’ve successfully identified and removed registered sex offenders from our site and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead.”

The question is what lead is he referring to? Allowing children to create profiles without parental permission or age verification? Or is it allowing users of any age to interact with each other? Hmmn, is it any surprise that the number of offenders found on MySpace more than quadrupled since May?

I am like many people and use Wikipedia as a source for all things trivial. However, I have been noticing a disturbing trend that more and more listings I encounter are filled with erroneous information. I understand that the entire premise behind Wikipedia is that pages are written by human editors, be it a PhD scholar who has years of experience on the subject or a high school dropout who likes to edit pages between beer chugs.

Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, showed last year how easy it is to create his own “Wikiality” when he modified various pages during a taping of his show. He also encouraged his listeners to modify entries on elephants to state that their population had tripled in the last six months. This public demonstration of the site’s main flaw, caused Wikipedia to lock pages and terminate various accounts.

But, as Colbert might ask, what is the “Truthiness” of Wikipedia? Is a reality of facts and logic, or the reality of only those with too much free time on their hands with nothing better to do? If you are a regular user of Wikipedia, you must ask yourself, are you taking the red or the blue pill?

I am a regular listener of a variety of Internet radio stations. However the Copyright Royalty Board may soon make it much more difficult for these stations to continue broadcasting because of propose royalty rate changes. Last Tuesday, several online radio stations protested the proposed rate changes that could spell the end of the industry. The rates are expected to become effective July 15th and be retroactive to January 1, 2006.

Yahoo Music’s Ian C. Rogers wrote “… the new royalty rates are higher than the revenues anyone can hope to make from related advertising. In other words, we all lose money on Internet radio starting July 15th. Yahoo! has no intention of operating LAUNCHcast radio as a loss-leader. This senseless rate hike needs to be changed, or our business will have to.”

Several other webcasters have voiced similar concern. If the proposed rates are not changed, Internet radio may become a thing of the past.