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Since the Kenyan army has gone into Somalia in October (during my trip to Kenya), the main Islamist group Al-Shabaab has used Twitter in its propaganda war against the Kenyan government.

It's latest tweets, posted yesterday on @hsmpress, include photos and descriptions of two Kenyan government officials they've kidnapped, Fredrick Irungu Wainaina and Mule Edward.

The knee-jerk reaction to yesterday's news that the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok had used Twitter to quickly spread information about a terrorist threat appear to have been blown out of proportion.

While there is no denying that Facebook, Twitter and other social networks help spread critical information when emergencies strike, they can still be problematic and ineffective when compared to other forms of communication. Even the Bangkok terror alert was met with initial skepticism, and while the embassy has close to 40,000 Twitter followers, many of those were not in the area of the threat.

After a cyber-attack by a hacker claiming to be Saudi, Israel has vowed a strong response.

"(Such an attack is) a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation and must be treated as such," Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in a speech quoted by BBC . "Israel has active capabilities for striking at those who are trying to harm it, and no agency or hacker will be immune from retaliatory action."

Lawyers say Twitter will likely weather legal challenges from an Israel-based group that tries to combat terrorism through litigation, which is claiming the San Francisco-based company is violating U.S. law by allowing groups like Hezbollah and al Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab to use its microblogging service.

In a letter sent to Twitter last week, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, threatened legal action and said Twitter and its officers could also face criminal charges if the accounts in question are not taken down.

Matt Graves, a spokesperson for Twitter, declined comment.

The New York Times is reporting that U.S. officials are considering legal actions to shut down the Twitter account of the Shabab militant group of Somalia.

Noted for its brutality, the Islamic group is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. The group has been using its Twitter account to taunt the Kenyan military, which was dispatched to Somalia in October to combat the Shabab.

Any such move to pressure Twitter to close the account, however, would pit free speech concerns against anti-terrorism efforts. "I was kind of shocked by the statement that story was making - I honestly thought it was a joke when I first saw it," said Joshua King, general counsel at Avvo.com. "There's really no legal authority they can use in this instance."

The Taliban, the ultra-conservative Islamist group that ran Afghanistan while it acted as a host to Osama Bin Laden, have a Twitter feed. Called @alemarahweb (Mostafa Ahmedi), the website attached to it is described as belonging to the "islamic emirat of afghanistan" (sic).

The Taliban have usually been described, rather euphemistically, as "medieval" in outlook and they have not had a public relationship to communications technology, unlike the late Bin Laden. However, the group has been tweeting since December 19 of last year. In that time, they have posted 773 tweets. They have 2,970 followers but only follow 12. So not exactly a robust back-and-forth there.

Yesterday the Oregon state treasurer's office announced that it has seen power consumption in its data center drop 25% in the first month since it adopted a virtualized infrastructure.

That kind of example makes it seem like cloud computing and virtualization are viable options for leaders at the state and federal levels of government. It's a correct assumption. But the reality is all together different.

This week the Obama administration ordered a stop in upgrades to 30 major information technology projects, a decision that, according to The Washington Post, impacts about $20 billion in government spending. The projects were designed to upgrade computer systems that manage financial information and transactions for federal agencies.

For some, the term "dark web" simply means all the online data that search engine spiders can't reach, crawl, or index, but for the University of Arizona's AI Lab, the "Dark Web" refers to a research project where the social phenomena of terrorism is studied via various techniques including social network analysis, content analysis, link analysis, web metrics, video analysis, data and text mining, sentiment and affect analysis, and authorship analysis. Through the use of sophisticated, mathematical tools, the project aims to collect all web content generated by international terrorist groups, including content found on web sites, forums, chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites, videos, virtual worlds, and more.