Techcordance

Gore

Gore

Al Gore has come in from the cold — writing an Op-Ed for the New York Times just two days after FoxNews.com noted the former vice president’s seeming unwillingness to comment on the Climate-gate scandal.Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his film, An Inconvenient Truth,which explored the topic of climate change and argued that man is one of the main causes for it. But in the last three months, as global warming has gone from a scientific certitude to the subject of satire, Gore — the public face of global warming — had been silent on the topic.Despite an attention-grabbing appearance at an Apple shareholders meeting last week and a speech at a private IBM conference in Las Vegas, the politician-turned-Earth-advocate had been uncharacteristically silent on the topic of global warming. Meanwhile, Climate-gate has besmirched the science, scientists and politicians who back the theory of manmade climate change.

Bloom Box

The blogosphere is abuzz over the disclosure by startup Bloom Energy that it has come up with a fuel cell technology that can replace conventional energy sources.But can it really? The devil, as they say, is in the details — and few of those were made public in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program Sunday.The Silicon Valley company’s CEO, K.R. Sridhar, showed off a refrigerator-sized Bloom Box filled with fuel cells and designed to make electricity through a chemical process. The boxes can make energy anywhere, he said, and do so without giving off any emissions.Already, a number of high-profile American corporations have begun testing the technology. A “60 Minutes” reporter visited facilities of eBay, which has installed a number of Bloom Boxes; the e-commerce company put savings from the technology so far at $100,000. Others reported to have installed units include Google and Federal Express.

Buzz

by Jennifer Leggio
By even writing this post I am breaking a promise to my friend Mack Collier. Earlier today I publicly promised to him on Twitter that I was going to wait a while before posting any opinions on Google Buzz until I got a firm grasp on how to use it. Yet, after only toying with it on and off for a handful of hours, there are a couple of issues I can’t help but call out now, primarily around the intrusiveness of the way this thing works. Mack, I am sorry.
If you haven’t tried it yet, Google Buzz integrates with your Gmail account (and other Google services) and turns it into a social experience. A “buzz” is a threaded conversation not unlike what FriendFeed tried to be (with pictures and video and blog links and more) and you can either post publicly (which shows up on your main Google profile) or selectively choose who in your friends list sees your buzz.

Moon No Go

(CNN) — American astronauts will not return to the moon as planned if Congress passes President Obama’s proposed budget.
Obama’s budget — which aims to tighten the nation’s purse strings in certain areas while increasing money used to create jobs — would cancel NASA’s Constellation Program, which had sought to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020.
Constellation also intended to study the idea of establishing a moon colony. The program was set to follow the U.S. space agency’s shuttle missions, which are due to end in September.
On its Web site, the White House Budget Office says the program to send astronauts to the moon is behind schedule, over budget and overall less important than other space investments.

Apple

Will the iPad flourish or fail? On the eve of the tablet’s release, consider Apple’s fallen fruit before making up your mind.  See the slide show…

Big Melt?

The world’s most famous climate change expert is at the center of a massive controversy as the leading environmental science institute he heads scrambled to explain its assertion that the Himalayan glaciers will melt completely in 25 years.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Dehli, India, said this week that the U.N. body was studying how its 2007 report to the United Nations derived information that led to its famous conclusion: that the glaciers will melt by 2035.
Today, the IPCC issued a statement offering regret for the poorly vetted statements. “The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures,” the statement says, though it goes short of issuing a full retraction or reprinting the report.
Pachauri told Reuters on Monday that the group was looking into the issue, and planned to “take a position on it in the next two or three days.”

Linux more secure

Is security a sword of Damocles hanging over Linux, just waiting for its popularity to reach critical mass? That’s one persistent argument in the Linux vs. Windows debates, but it’s just wrong, according to those who know Linux well. For reasons both technological and behavioral, they say, Linux really is more secure. “If the anti-malware industry has anything to offer GNU/Linux,” challenges blogger Robert Pogson, “let them step up.”Among all the reasons geeks choose Linux, security is often near the top of the list.And no wonder — personal preferences aside on all the other many relevant issues, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest our favorite operating system really is more impervious.A study published in The Register a few years back, for example, not only concluded that Linux security then was even better than had been thought compared to Windows security, but also went on to label as “myths” and “logical errors” many of the most common arguments to the contrary — most notably, the oft-repeated idea that Linux suffers fewer attacks simply because it has fewer users than Windows does.Yet when news came out last month that an attack by the “NULL Pointer” bug could exploit even a fully patched Linux kernel, a new cloud of dust was kicked up. Those on both sides of the operating system fence struggled to understand what it meant. “The headlines for this Linux security hole read like the apocalypse,” Slashdot blogger yagu told LinuxInsider. “The reality is much less severe.”First and foremost, “to fully take advantage of the exploit, a user must have physical access,” he explained. “By definition, physical access is already a compromised system. Any security issues past that point is simply splitting semantic hairs.”Linux is far more secure than Windows, yagu asserted.

Iphone Manuf.

HONG KONG (Reuters) -
One week after the apparent suicide of a Chinese factory worker accused of stealing a carefully guarded Apple iPhone prototype, one question remains unanswered: what happened to the missing phone?
Sun Danyong, the 25-year-old suicide victim who worked at contract cellphone maker Foxconn International’s massive gray and white factory complex in Dongguan, had 16 prototypes of Apple’s new fourth-generation iPhone in his possession, according to the Taiwanese company.
When one went missing, Foxconn’s security guards raided his apartment, according to a report in the People’s Daily. The phone didn’t turn up.
A likely answer, according to security experts, is that the device ended up in the hands of Shenzhen’s notoriously entrepreneurial counterfeiters.
“The copying of prototypes certainly happens a lot in the electronics and IT industries,” said Dane Chamorro, a regional general manager with Control Risks, a corporate investigations consulting firm. “You don’t have to steal them, you just have to borrow one for a day.”

Layoffs

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US computer networking giant Cisco Systems has laid off between 600 and 700 employees at its headquarters in San Jose, California, in a bid to reduce costs amid slow sales, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.The company has also cut jobs at other branches in the United States, although the total number was not immediately clear, the business daily said, citing a person familiar with the matter.”We are doing everything possible to minimize the impact on employees affected by the limited restructuring,” a Cisco spokesman told the Journal.In February, the group had said it would likely eliminate between 1,500 to 2,000 employees, or three percent of its workforce. In late April, the company had some 66,550 employees.

Tremors

LOS ANGELES — Scientists have detected a spike in underground rumblings on a section of California’s San Andreas Fault that produced a magnitude-7.8 earthquake in 1857.What these mysterious vibrations say about future earthquakes is far from certain. But some think the deep tremors suggest underground stress may be building up faster than expected and may indicate an increased risk of a major temblor.Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, monitored seismic activity on the fault’s central section between July 2001 and February 2009 and recorded more than 2,000 tremors. The tremors lasted mere minutes to nearly half an hour.