The cyborg, or cybernetic organism–part human, part machine–is a staple of science fiction, from “Star Trek” to “The Six Million Dollar Man” to “RoboCop” to “The Terminator.” These pop culture cyborgs usually involve robotic machinery to enhance physical capabilities rather than mental ones because that’s more visual, more entertaining and easier for the general public to understand.

And, of course, such physically enhanced cyborgs exist in real life. Oscar Pistorius, a runner with two artificial legs, was disqualified from competing in last year’s Olympics because his man-made limbs gave him an unfair advantage.

Current research in prosthetic limbs is aiming for artificial arms, hands and legs that are directly controlled by the wearer’s thoughts.

But the term cyborg, coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, originally envisioned either the human mind enhanced by machines, or the use of human minds to control or direct machines.

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Basketball fans, beware.

Hackers are taking advantage of bracket-related Web surfing and initiating some madness of their own, with tactics as sneaky as spreading malicious software through March Madness blog posts.

Online security company Websense discovered two March Madness-related malware scams earlier this week, one in the form of URLs posted in blog comments that took users to a phony anti-virus scanning site, and another as a search engine optimization scam that infected basketball-related terms and pushed them to the top in Google (GOOG).

It’s a clever and common tactic, particularly for an event like the NCAA tournament, which has fans checking sports sites, blogs and mobile devices for updates on their favorite teams. Websense’s chief technology officer, Dan Hubbard, says that hackers try to capitalize on popular events or stories on the Internet, whether it’s a major athletic event such as the Olympics, the recent presidential election, or a celebrity breakup that drives Web traffic. Users need to be wary of links to fake anti-virus scanners that urge installation. “Just because something comes up on your screen and tells you to install it doesn’t mean you have to actually do it,” he says. “That’s a really hard message to get across to the consumers.”

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Having spent eight days in India in August, I found the recent tragic events in Mumbai of particular interest, as I have both business colleagues as well as friends in three of the largest cities in India. While the world watched the events play out to their terrible conclusion, I was reminded of one of the most seminal events in television history, that of watching Jim McKay’s harrowing updates during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. It’s interesting to compare the two events, 36 years apart.

Unlike today, in 1972 we were dependent almost entirely on one main source: ABC Sports, which had cameras trained on the compound where the hostages were being held. Eventually, through a video pooling process, other networks had access to footage, but that came a bit later. It is difficult to state the impact that Sept. 5, 1972 had on the world of live television and on the viewing audience that was watching throughout the world.

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Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Ji this morning cut his rating on Sina (SINA) to Equal Weight from Overweight. He also cut estimates: for 2008, he now sees $1.38, down from $1.41, and for 2009 he now expects $1.41, down from $1.69. For 2010, his forecast is $1.67, down from $2.11.

Ji is concerned about softening of China’s advertising market, and he thinks Sina is more exposed to the slowdown than other China Internet portals. He notes that the company generates about 70 percent of its revenue from online ads, versus 40 percent-plus for Sohu and mid-teens for Tencent and NetEase. He also notes that the company had created an Olympics channel, generating extra inventory; but that (for obvious reasons) that channel has ceased to exist.

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NBC seems to be having a change of heart this week. The network recently wrapped up its streaming of the Olympics using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. However, if you tuned in for this week’s NFL season opener, NBC was using Adobe’s Flash technology instead of Silverlight–a fact that made some do a double take. Here’s a look at why NBC left Silverlight in a flash (pun intended).

As we stated, NBC took a chance on Silverlight to stream the Olympic ceremonies for online and mobile viewers. While this was a great opportunity for Microsoft to promote its Silverlight platform, it wasn’t enough for NBC.

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For the last few weeks, I’ve been staying up late glued to my screen, and frankly it has been wreaking havoc on my sleep patterns. No, not watching the Olympics or the nonstop political gabfest on 24/7 news channels.

I have been obsessively logging in to iTunes.

It’s not about the songs, audio books, TV shows or movies. It’s all about the apps.

As an early adopter of the iPhone–yeah, I paid full price last year; what of it?–the one thing I really missed in retiring my Palm PDA was having all the many applications that entertained and aided me in living my life. Apple didn’t let developers create programs for the iPhone when it launched (only its Web browser, which is a huge difference), so I couldn’t track my expenses, calculate my calories and get my game on as I could through the programs I had downloaded for my Palm.

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If you haven’t read, ESPN has said that they will be aggressively bidding for the retransmission rights for the 2016 Olympics. Notice that I didn’t say TV rights. The battle for the Olympics rights will be in spreadsheet projections done by ESPN, NBC and probably DirecTV that will take into account what revenues can be generated by TV advertising (traditional and interactive), cable/satellite subscription revenues, an ever-increasing market size for mobile video and advertising, and of course audio/video and text advertising of all types.

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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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There seems to be some grassroots support for the idea of an emergency broadcast system on the micro-messaging service Twitter, at least from people who have emergencies to broadcast. The latest cry for help: A Chinese journalist nabbed by security forces during the Olympics and forced to go to a village far from the event.

You can see Zhou “Zuola” Shuguang’s Twitter stream here, but it won’t do you much good if you can’t read Chinese. A translation of his Tweets is on Global Voices Online. According to the article, Zuola–a childless 27-year-old–was ordered to meet with police over accusations of having two children, one more than the local limit. On meeting the police, he was placed in a car, driven to a mining town, and placed under house arrest.

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For Internet television, the Beijing Olympics represent a milestone. NBC has created a site with an unprecedented 2,200 hours of live Webcasts of Olympic events. But the Olympics are also a powerful illustration of the current battle line between the big business of network television and the emerging medium of Web video. NBC’s broadcast and cable networks will air 700 hours of live events that will not be Webcast. And even more frustrating to some, another 700 hours of the contests will be taped and shown hours later on television, with no legal way for people in the United States to watch them before the broadcast.

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How is your Olympics-watching experience going?

You may have caught some of the Olympic Games over the weekend, most likely in front of your television set and not online. NBC Universal, which owns the U.S. broadcast rights, said it attracted 114 million TV viewers, which was itself an Olympic record. The Web-viewing audience was a fraction of that, although a lot better than during the last Olympics.

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NBC actually showed Michael Phelps live on the East Coast last night as he shattered his own world record in the 400 individual medley. We watched–and, suddenly, the Olympics were as awesome as, well, the Olympics. If you live on the West Coast, of course, thanks to another absurd decision by NBC, you only got to watch the race after reading about Phelps’s victory online, when it was about as exciting as 1970s Super Bowls.

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Internet censorship is practically synonymous with China these days. The Chinese government is often used as the poster child for restrictive governments that restrict the free flow of information to its residents. That could be why the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is getting antsy, as Beijing is bound by contract as this year’s Olympic host city to allow the press to report as usual during the games. And reporting as usual means unrestricted Internet access.

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Many foreigners who come to China for the Olympics will use the Internet to tell people back home what they have seen and to check what else has happened in the world. The first thing they’ll probably notice is that China’s Internet seems slow. Partly this is because of congestion in China’s internal networks, which affects domestic and international transmissions alike. Partly it is because even electrons take a detectable period of time to travel beneath the Pacific Ocean to servers in America and back again; the trip to and from Europe is even longer, because that goes through America, too. And partly it is because of the delaying cycles imposed by China’s system that monitors what people are looking for on the Internet, especially when they’re looking overseas. That’s what foreigners have heard about.

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