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Google has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to provide a customized job search engine for returning military veterans on the National Resource Directory (NRD) website. Starting today, veterans can use the site to search over 500,000 job openings nationwide.

The site uses Google's custom search engine technology, looking for Schema.org's JobPosting markup across job listing sites to identify jobs committed to veterans. Employers only have to add the JobPosting markup to their site to be crawled and listed in the NRD. Supporting organizations can also add the search box widget to their websites.

At the same time as the U.S. military is preparing to release a policy qualifying cyberattacks as acts of war, the military of the United Kingdom is engaging in a large-scale recruitment drive. Called "Operation Cupcake"

Following from last year's "National Cyber Security Programme," this recruiting initiative will attempt to attract hundreds of computer experts to the British armed forces. Part of a £650,000 cyber-security budget will be devoted to the program.

Cyberattacks are part of the defense landscape and have been for a while. Among the more high-profile instances in the last year are the Stuxnet attack by the U.S. and Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities, the attacks by the Chinese government on Google and even a hack of a Pentagon project.

Now, the Wall Street Journal says a soon-to-be-released Pentagon policy document will announce officially that a cyberattack can be a jus ad bellum, or act of war.

In the U.S., Memorial Day has devolved into a notoriety based mostly on picnicking and fabulous savings at big-box stores. However, it started life as a memorial called Decoration Day, first started by freed slaves in South Carolina to honor the Union soldiers who had died in a war that ended with the abolition of slavery. It was meant as a day of reconciliation and peace in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

Especially to those in the military, or from military family, the day retains some of its original flavor. Even as it honors those who have died in military service, it affirms the desirability of peace and stands as a memento mori for those in uniform. To do our small part in celebrating it, we wish to highlight a few of the stories of technology in military service we have written in the last year.

I wouldn't call the American military "early adopters" but I'm not surprised that they have turned to social media for recruiting, as the New York Times reports.

Back in 2006, when I spoke at a State Department-sponsored conference on social media and democracy, the only group of governmental participants open to social media, and already using it, were the military. They were subscribing to RSS feeds, including search feeds, reading and commenting on blogs and participating on forums. So there is precedence for reaching out on social media sites.

Miami University's Augmented Reality Research Group developed an Android app that helps librarians find mis-shelved books and determine where they should go. It's a simple idea, and one that could save librarians hours of drudgery (or cost many temps their jobs, but that's another story). Sounds a lot more useful than virtual mirrors for trying on sunglasses, doesn't it? As I've written before, I've long been of the mind that AR will be more useful in the workplace than as a consumer technology. And based on this poll, most of you can imagine uses for AR in your workplace. So when will we start seeing more business-focused AR?

On May 17th and 18th, technology thinkers such as Jaron Lanier, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge and Will Wright and many more and will gather at are2011 in Santa Clara, CA to discuss AR's present and future. Workplace AR will be among the topics discussed.

I won't be able to attend the event, but Sterling and Vinge were kind enough to share some thoughts on the future of AR in the workplace with us in advance of the event.

First, the U.S. Army's Captain Jonathan Springer developed the iPhone app, Tactical Nav, for battlefield mapping and artillery sighting. Now, Ft. Bragg has developed an integrated system for many of the same things based on the Android operating system. According to the Army's Web page on the project, the security of the system is paramount.

"The device, known as a Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, is the first developed under an Army effort to devise an Android-based smartphone framework and suite of applications for tactical operations. The government-owned framework, known as Mobile /Handheld Computing Environment, or CE, ensures that regardless of who develops them, applications will be secure and interoperable with existing mission command systems so information flows seamlessly across all echelons of the force."

While countries as disparate as Armenia and Mauritania react to the reality of change in Tunisia and Egypt, China continues its crackdown. After blocking terms like "jasmine" (for the Jasmine Uprising) and even country names like "Egypt" from online searches, it began a campaign of arrests and harassment of protesters, and possible future protesters, in its major cities.

Now, in a material indication of its priorities, China has released its budget expenditures at the start of its new parliamentary session. For the first time, the country's spending on internal security, including online censorship program and tools, has passed the yearly budget for the army and all other defense organization.

How does a technology built for apartment-hunting end up being evaluated by the U.S. Army for use in Afghanistan? Cazoodle is using public data sources like Flickr and OpenStreetMap to build detailed guidebooks for American soldiers. Last week at Strata I sat down with company CTO Govind Kabra to find out how they do it.

Its project for the Army is to build a detailed database of information about places in Afghanistan, using only public sources on the Web. The goal is to describe in detail the towns and cities including everything from names, locations and populations, as well as lists and coordinates for schools, mosques, banks and hotels.

Although attacks by governments against their own people using the Internet get more press, warfare between countries has been spreading online for some time. Most of the instances that have come to light have been viruses designed to stop, or slow down, activities in another country that the attacking country feels threatened by, or spying operations.

The United States, like most governments, has developed teams and tools to wage Web warfare. But not all the tools are what we would normally think of as offensive weapons. The U.S. military, it turns out, can force a country that has disconnected itself from the Internet back online.