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While you were sleeping, innovation was buying up domain names, and readying itself for a launch with large retail displays that look like something from Superman’s home planet, Krypton.
1. Around 4 million barrels of oil from the Deepwater Spill has gone missing, according to the Washington Post. As well as having been cleaned up by nature, the unaccounted oil could also be in the air, or even floating in the water like a “toxic fog.” Oceanographer John Kessler thinks that, wherever it is, the oil could remain in the environment from a year up to decades. Meanwhile, Shell has posted its Q2 financial report: profit is $4.39 billion, above analysts’ expectations, while BP’s photoshopping exploits have been added to by readers from Gizmodo and Wired.
2. The Obama administration wants to let the FBI have access to a person’s Internet activity without the need for a court order. Four words, “electronic [...]

Post by Addy Dugdale Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

Image: So Much Pun

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There’s a story going around today that a “white hat” (the good kind, sort of) hacker pulled data from 100 million Facebook profiles and posted them online. The hacker, a “security consultant” by the name of Ron Bowles, collected user IDs, names, URLs, and all kinds of other data from those profiles, and made it all available as one massive torrent file. Sounds bad, right? It isn’t.
The BBC, among others, is painting this as a terrifying hack of Facebook. But the thing is, all of the data that was snatched up by Bowles was publicly available. When you create a Facebook profile, you’re given tons of options as to what is available to the public at large–everything, nothing, or something in between. Many users choose the “nothing” option–and their data was not grabbed by Bowles. But data that was made or left public can be found by anyone. That’s what [...]

Post by Dan Nosowitz Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a really interesting piece up about WikiLeaks’s latest news coup and how it all came to pass. WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, is a famously independent and skittish entity, and has never to my knowledge coordinated with a news organization. So how exactly did three major news publications publish simultaneous in-depth reports using WikiLeaks’s information?
Apparently, it wasn’t Assange’s idea–at least, Assange didn’t spearhead it. Nick Davies, a senior contributor to The Guardian, was intrigued by exposure of Bradley Manning, who claimed to have passed WikiLeaks boatloads of information. Davies took it upon himself to track down Assange, a notoriously transient and mysterious fellow, to see if there might be a news story in all those leaked documents. The two finally met up at a cafe in Brussels to chat about the possibilities of the documents.
It was, however, Assange’s idea to rope in three [...]

Post by Dan Nosowitz Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

Amazon today announced the new Kindle e-book reader, which, in accordance with its past naming traditions, is simply called the Kindle. The name hasn’t changed, and there are no crazy new advances–color e-ink and video are still years off, and may never be worth the trade-offs in price and quality over LCD–but this is definitely the most lust-worthy Kindle yet.
After the (now last-gen) Kindle was mysteriously out of stock yesterday, our own Kit Eaton made some predictions. His third guess was pretty much right on the money, but there’s more to it than that.
The big changes: The new Kindle has a significantly smaller design–21% smaller than the previous generation, to be exact, while still retaining a 6-inch screen. That smaller size really works to the device’s benefit: it simply looks better than before, without the large areas of empty plastic that bordered the screen in the previous version. It’s available [...]

Post by Dan Nosowitz Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

Facebook today announced the launch of a new project called Questions. It’s still in beta, and will only be available to about 1% of Facebook users at first. But it puts Facebook into yet another competitive arena against Google and other companies that are trying to cash-in on the Q&A.
Google’s total dominance over the keyword-based search market has led other companies to try and corner the market on a more direct, Q&A type search. Ask.com recently relaunched with a Q&A strategy, and Google itself bought Aardvark, which handles similar queries. But Facebook is in a unique position to enter the space–and use it effectively.
Any Facebook user can ask a question from a few different venues, including a Question Dashboard, the search bar, and the bar used to update statuses (there’ll be a link to “ask a question” above those multi-purpose bars). Searches can be tagged, and Facebook is probably hoping [...]

Post by Dan Nosowitz Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

The closer marijuana comes to full legalization status in California, the more likely it is that the plant will be treated like any other crop–that is, as an industrial cash cow that often squeezes out small farmers. And the marijuana industrialization process is, in fact, already beginning. Oakland, California, became the first city this week to allow large-scale industrial marijuana cultivation.
As a result of the new policy, four lucky Oakland marijuana entrepreneurs will be allowed to build growing facilities measuring up to 100,000 square feet–as long as they agree to pay a
$5,000 permit fee, a $211,000 regulatory fee, and an 8% gross sales tax.
Locals are already jumping at the opportunity. Jeff Wilcox, one of the 192 applicants for the newly-minted permits, envisions his seven-acre plot of land near the Oakland waterfront transformed into a pot growing powerhouse. Wilcox was one of the biggest proponents for the new legislation, but there [...]

Post by Ariel Schwartz Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s just-released 2009 State of the Climate report bears few surprises for those who follow climate science–the past decade was the warmest on record, and the Earth has slowly been heating up for the past 50 years.
The difference between this and every other climate report, however, is that NOAA gathered research from 300 scientists in 48 countries to produce a compelling document that covers every aspect of our planet’s climate. The report is, according to NOAA, the first to bring together “multiple observational records from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean.”
NOAA’s report uses 10 features to measure global temperature changes. Seven of the features (air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, air temperature
over oceans, sea level, ocean heat, humidity, and tropospheric
temperature in the “active-weather” layer of the atmosphere) are rising significantly, while three (Arctic sea ice, glaciers, and spring [...]

Post by Ariel Schwartz Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

Looks like we released our electric vehicle charger slideshow just a little bit too soon. Autobloggreen reports that a wireless charge station may be released sometime in the next few years courtesy of Evatran, a mysterious startup with the tagline “Energy without limits.”
Evatran’s Plugless Power charging station, unveiled this week at the Plug-In 2010 Conference, consists of a a permanently mounted car adopter along with a fixed parking block and control tower. An adopter-equipped vehicle need only pull up to the parking space, and the parking block automatically begins charging. Evatran explains the technology behind the station:
Plugless Power electric vehicle
supply equipment (EVSE) connects the on-board EV battery charger
inductively to the electrical power source. Simply put, the two halves
of the electric transformer are separated–one installed on the
vehicle and one installed on the floor of a garage or parking space. When the two pieces are
brought together, electrical current flowing in the [...]

Post by Ariel Schwartz Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

It’s long been a staple of citizen journalism, but YouTube has signed a deal with a local news station in San Francisco to enable people to submit their own video reports and photos. It’s a little bit of crowd-sourcing, a little bit of outsourcing, and it probably keeps the station’s costs down. So, win-win.
ABC7 News has called the scheme uReport, and it invites locals to send in videos of anything they think needs fixing, or they’ve got a gripe about. Videos of the Bay Area weather, as well as photos, are all welcomed–even vox pops (current subject: California budget cuts).
The uReport project is one step on from YouTube’s CitizenTube news feed, which is exactly as it sounds, and is also a tie-in with Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Olivia Ma, News Manager of YouTube, calls the project an experiment, but believes that local videos are “most relevant to your life,” [...]

Post by Addy Dugdale Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

Disney sealed a heavy bet on social media yesterday by buying Playdom, Facebook’s third most popular social gaming company, for $563.2 million. The New York Times has more:
As social games becomes a more crowded and difficult field — several hundred new games are introduced on Facebook weekly and most go nowhere — brands that can be used as the basis for titles are becoming more important.
“When deciding how to place a bet we thought we should do it at a significant level and not just take a little shot,” Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, said in an interview. “Too often traditional media companies only put a toe or two in, and they deprive themselves at the opportunity for real growth.” He said Playdom furthered his goal of providing entertainment to “a new generation of fans on the platforms they prefer.”
The purchase continues Disney’s effort to strengthen and [...]

Post by Drea Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.

DoSomething, headed by Fast Company columnist Nancy Lublin, has recognized five young social entrepreneurs with $10,000 grants–and one with a prize of $100,000. Fast Company will profile one of these enterprising youth each day this week. Click here to read the other winners’ stories.
It’s the morning before Will Perez leaves for Haiti. The Providence, Rhode Island, medical student has been busy. For one thing, there’s school. But that’s just the beginning: Perez has also helped set up a Haiti-U.S. study abroad program; organized earthquake-relief efforts for Brown University; and is setting up a range of public-health campaigns in rural Haiti. For all this good work, Perez just won a $10,000 Do Something award—money that will go towards the love of his life: improving medical care in the Caribbean nation that has become his great cause.
Perez was in Haiti long before the earthquake drew thousands of do-gooders to the country—he first [...]

Post by Rachel Arndt Look at the original post. Thanks to E.B.