The next cure for a major disease is as likely to be discovered on a computer as on a laboratory bench–and scientists are enlisting ordinary citizens to volunteer to help crunch the data.

Advances in computer science have enabled medical researchers to test how proteins fold, genes interact and pandemics spread in complex digital simulations of natural environments. As these simulations become more intensive and widely used, however, computers at academic institutions and other research facilities can’t keep up with the demand for medical processing power.

Instead, scientists are tapping into a vast network that allows the research to be parceled out in tiny workloads that can be performed on anyone’s household computer when it’s not otherwise being used.

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If the H1N1 swine-flu pandemic arrives this fall, one thing that may break under the strain is the Internet. Emergency planners say that school-age children and telecommuting adults could be accessing the network simultaneously, potentially overloading the public Internet’s capacity.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates absenteeism during a pandemic could peak at 50 percent during a six-week period. Many businesses have created emergency plans that assume that absent employees will be able to work from home. It’s not clear, however, that the Internet will behave in a crisis the way it does during typical days.

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FORTY years ago this month American academics sent the first message over the ARPANET, a military network that was the precursor of today’s internet. A legacy of those efforts is that the American government continues to control the internet’s underlying technology–notably the system of allocating addresses. This is about to change, albeit slightly.

For the past decade America has delegated some of its authority over the internet to a non-profit organisation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—an arrangement other countries have complained about, both because they have little say in it and because ICANN’s management has occasionally proved erratic.

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Back in March, I asked people to quit whining about Facebook’s redesign. It wasn’t that I liked the radical changes the site had made–they were unquestionably terrible. In the past, Facebook would roll all of your friends’ recently added photos, notes, and status updates into a few new posts a day; now the site shows you an ever-changing “stream” of activity, with new stuff from everyone in your network popping up as it happens.

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Last night’s “Charlie Rose” featured an interview with Ivan Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon (VZ), who talked about communications in Iran, the company’s prospects for carrying Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and the recent news that Verizon Wireless will carry a Google (GOOG) Android-powered cellphone.

Mr. Seidenberg called Iranian citizens’ use of technology and wireless communications “a great thing,” saying “for us as a network operator, it’s the network effect. The more people on a network, the more valuable the entire network becomes. There’s no question in my mind that that model will get repeated over and over and over again.”

He also said that efforts to block Internet use in China, Iran and other countries will only work for a short time. “It can’t work long term. The power of the people will override that without any question. And it’ll happen sooner than they think because the technology is just too pervasive.”

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There is something very uplifting about Opera’s vision of a Web that turns every user back into a node on the network, with all the rights and responsibilities that implies (this is the blog post today that explains the idea, and this is an inspirational video.)

The idea behind Opera Unite, in brief: every PC would act as a server on the Web.

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Amazon (AMZN) has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution. Only it doesn’t rely on improved network infrastructure–instead, it relies on the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

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No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.

There are now at least 1.6 billion of us connected via computer and three billion mobile devices that touch the Internet. The rise of “social” technologies–such as wikis, blogs, Twitter, SMS and social networks–means that the barriers to participation across the planet (in terms of the cost, access and skills required) are rapidly approaching zero.

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Those who are deeply disturbed about the rise in location-based applications and services and their impacts on personal privacy can breath a small sigh of relief tonight. Google (GOOG), which recently entered the space with its Latitude location network feature, has agreed to take a stand for user location privacy, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s the second company doing location services after Loopt to adopt the policy, which the EFF summarizes as basically, “come back with a warrant.”

What’s at stake here is actually pretty big. If a company like Google knows your whereabouts at all times because of Latitude, authorities may want the right to demand that information from Google. But Google is saying it will require authorities to provide it with a wiretap order before such information is given out.

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Michael Phelps who? In what is probably the greatest moment in this Olympics, Usain Bolt of Jamaica won gold in the 100-meter dash in 9.69 seconds, a new world record–and he didn’t even have to try after the first half of the race. But you wouldn’t know it if you were here in the U.S.–well, if you were not online actively searching for a video clip of it. NBCOlympics.com has a lame text story online, with a lamer Getty Images-supplied photo slideshow. Not that we were expecting anything different from NBC today, but it does add up to the growing frustration with the “bottled-up” (not my phrase … Jeff Zucker used it in a CNBC interview yesterday) coverage by the network.

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Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff says the U.S. government is working on the equivalent of the “Manhattan Project” to defend federal networks and national-security interests from large-scale cyber attacks. During a keynote presentation at RSA Conference, Chertoff painted a gloomy picture of the government’s readiness for a determined attack on critical communication networks and said the recent creation of a new National Cyber Security Center would be crucial to finding early signs of hacker activity.

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Top Web publishers are planning a revolt. Even as more prominent sites experiment with selling remnant inventory through online ad networks, and in some cases ad exchanges, ESPN.com is saying thanks, but no thanks. The site recently cut ties with Specific Media and several other unnamed ad networks, and is taking the bold stand that ad selling that relies heavily on arbitrage and algorithms is not for them.

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There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Web site with eight games (chess, backgammon, sudoku, dominoes, bingo, spades, hearts and video poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets.

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New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute scandal is all the big news here in New York, but the lesser known tale is how an information system–the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network–played a role in his downfall. On the surface, Spitzer’s downfall is a New York tabloid’s dream. Headlines like “Ho No!” scream on the New York Post. Wall Street is downright gleeful about Spitzer’s downfall. But what really snared Spitzer was a money-laundering investigation that was flagged by SARs (suspicious activity reports) that banks have to file with the Treasury to surface everything from money laundering to terrorist activity.

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Just how personal can advertising from the Web giants get? That’s a question you may be wondering after reading my article in Monday’s New York Times and the related blog post. With big Internet companies, which already have a lot of data about users, moving into the ad network business, is every ad you see on the Internet going to reflect what you have been doing and reading about lately. To get one reading of this, I asked four Web giants–AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo–a simple question: Can they show you an advertisement with your name in it?

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