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The internet is weak, yet we keep ignoring this fact. So we see the same thing over and over again, whether it’s because of natural disasters like hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, wars like Syria and Bosnia, deliberate attempts by the government to shut down the internet (most recently in Egypt and Iran), or NSA surveillance.
After Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines last month, several towns were cut off from humanitarian relief because delivering that aid depends on having a reliable communication network. In a country where over 90 percent of the population has access to mobile phones, the implementation of an emergency “mesh” network could have saved lives.
Compared to the “normal” internet — which is based on a few centralized access points or internet service providers (ISPs) — mesh networks have many benefits, from architectural to political. Yet they haven’t really taken off, even though they have been around for some time. I believe it’s time to reconsider their potential, and make mesh networking a reality. Not just because of its obvious benefits, but also because it provides an internet-native model for building community and governance.
But first, the basics: An ad hoc network infrastructure that can be set up by anyone, mesh networks wirelessly connect computers and devices directly to each other without passing through any central authority or centralized organization (like a phone company or an ISP). They can automatically reconfigure themselves according to the availability and proximity of bandwidth, storage, and so on; this is what makes them resistant to disaster and other interference. Dynamic connections between nodes enable packets to use multiple routes to travel through the network, which makes these networks more robust.
Compared to more centralized network architectures, the only way to shut down a mesh network is to shut down every single node in the network.
That’s the vital feature, and what makes it stronger in some ways than the regular internet.
But mesh networks aren’t just for political upheavals or natural disasters. Many have been installed as part of humanitarian programs, aimed at helping poor neighborhoods and underserved areas. For people who can’t afford to pay for an internet connection, or don’t have access to a proper communications infrastructure, mesh networks provide the basic infrastructure for connectivity.
Not only do mesh networks represent a cheap and efficient means for people to connect and communicate to a broader community, but they provide us with a choice for what kind of internet we want to have.
For these concerned about the erosion of online privacy and anonymity, mesh networking represents a way to preserve the confidentiality of online communications. Given the lack of a central regulating authority, it’s extremely difficult for anyone to assess the real identity of users connected to these networks. And because mesh networks are generally invisible to the internet, the only way to monitor mesh traffic is to be locally and directly connected to them.
Click headline to read more--
My previous blog post expressed outrage that the EPA chose to step away from enforcing the law when drinking water was unsafe in Texas, even when nearby natural gas operations were identified as the most probably cause.
Our concerns haven't changed but, in a different case, we applaud EPA for taking action to hold an oil and gas company responsible for damaging 27 streams and wetlands in West Virginia (including 16 fracking sites). Under a settlement agreement, Chesapeake Energy's subsidiary will spend an estimated $6.5 million to restore these 27 sites and to implement a comprehensive plan to comply with federal and state water protection laws at the company’s natural gas extraction sites in West Virginia. In addition, the company will pay a fine of $3.2 million, half of which will go to the State of West Virginia.
The settlement requires that the company fully restore the wetlands and streams wherever feasible, monitor the restored sites for up to ten years to assure the success of the restoration, and implement a comprehensive compliance program to ensure future compliance with the Clean Water Act and applicable state law. The company will also perform "compensatory mitigation" to try to offset impacts from its damage--this could include purchasing credits from a wetland mitigation bank located in a local watershed.
Click headline to read more--
The evidence for climate change only got stronger this year, with a major climate report finding 95 percent confidence in manmade global warming and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hitting a record 400 parts per million. Climate doubters, in turn, became increasingly desperate, citing everything from a verified scam artist to the "Ouija board of weather."
We've compiled the 13 dumbest things media said about climate change in '13 -- you might be surprised to find which mainstream media outlets made the list.
Click hadline to read more and watch video clips--
When a crossroads doesn’t lie in the woods or the fields but in our minds, we seldom know it’s there or that we’ve made the choice to take one path and not the other until it’s long past. Sometimes, the best you can do is look for the tiniest clues as to where we’re really heading.
When it comes to climate change, you can pile up the nightmares -- Super-Typhoon Haiyan, possibly the strongest such storm ever to hit land (with the usual prominent caveats about how we can never quite know whether an individual event of this sort was global-warming-induced or not); Australia, which only recently elected a climate-change denialist as prime minister and is experiencing its hottest year on record; the rest of the planet, which is living through the seventh warmest year on record; and so on.
And yet, every now and then, set against the overwhelming, you can sense change in the tiniest of things. Here, for instance, may be a little sign when it comes to global warming: on November 1st, the New York Times featured a piece prominently placed on its front page about how climate change might affect global food production (badly). The story was based on a leaked draft of an upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The piece wasn't itself particularly striking, but given that paper’s treatment of climate change over the years, its placement was.
Just over two weeks later, after the devastation of parts of the Philippines and with a U.N. climate meeting underway in Poland that normally might hardly have been noticed, it front-paged a far more striking report whose title caught the mood of the moment: "Growing Clamor About Inequities of Climate Change." Recorded was the growing anger and frustration particularly of island nations that had, in greenhouse gas terms, contributed little to climate change and were feeling the brunt of it anyway. Like many other mainstream publications, theTimes hasn't exactly been stellar in the placement and attention it’s given to what almost certainly is the single most important issue of our era. So consider this a (rising) sea change, an indication that, for the paper of record, global warming has just jumped somewhere nearer the front of the line.
And here’s another little surprise and possible sign of changing times. In case no one noticed, Red State America (RSA), the land of climate deniers, has in recent years been hit hard by record droughts, heat, wildfires, floods, and storms, by what our news likes to call “extreme weather” (with little or no reference to climate change).
So how has that everyday reality been absorbed, if at all? The British Guardian recently reported new polling research by a Stanford social psychologist, who has long been taking the American pulse on the subject, indicating that the inhabitants of RSA -- we’re talking about Texas and Oklahoma, among other states -- now overwhelmingly believe climate change is a reality, and that a significant majority of them want the government to work on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Click headline to read more--
Over the past year copyright holders have worked hard to stop The Pirate Bay from operating, but without success. Despite several domain changes and ISP blockades in various countries the resilient torrent site keeps on growing. This growth is reflected in the number of uploaded torrents, which increased by 50% over the past year. The Pirate Bay now lists over 2.8 million files, with video being the most shared content.
2013 has been an eventful year for The Pirate Bay, to say the least. The site celebrated its tenth anniversary, but with pressure from copyright holders mounting, it had to switch domain names no less than six times.
In addition, the site continues to be censored by courts all around the world, which have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site.
The idea behind these anti-piracy efforts is that people will eventually stop using The Pirate Bay. Thus far, however, traffic to the infamous torrent site continues to grow, and so is the number of torrents being uploaded.
Over the past year the number of new torrents added to The Pirate Bay went up 50%, and the uploads doubled compared to two years ago.
Click headline to read more and view chart--
While cellphone networks have managed to cover large swaths of the six most-populated continents, making a call from Antarctica isn’t so easy.
Now, though, researchers in parts of Antarctica have a mobile communication option that goes beyond pricey satellite phones. A new system from Range Networks allows researchers to use ordinary cellphones to connect with one another, and even to the rest of the world, thanks to a satellite connection located at the base station.
The system replaces what essentially were walkie-talkies that were used by researchers when away from their desks. And, unlike a satellite-only approach, the Range Networks system keeps the researchers connected to one another, regardless of whether there is a satellite signal.
“If there is any loss of connectivity to the outside world, the group can still talk to one another,” said Jacob Winkler, who heads sales and business development for Range Networks.
The system, which can handle 400 mobile phones (along with 800 desktop-based IP phones), is also designed to handle data traffic from various sensors.
Click headline to read more--
Recently at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, a number of climate researchers and communications specialists sounded off about the problems involved in conveying climate science information to the public. Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard science historian, noted one of the many challenges: There's a huge gap between how grave the climate issue actually is, and how clinical and detached climate scientists seem to sound when they discuss it.
"Our tone doesn't match our words," Oreskes said. As a result, climate communications often lack emotional authenticity.
But not every scientist fails to communicate effectively (or, seems to emulate Spock when doing so). And now one climate expert, Gregory C. Johnson, has done something truly innovative when it comes to sharing global warming information in an understandable, and even moving, way.
Sightline.org has published 19 illustrated haiku by Johnson (see one example above) that attempt to distill the message of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent Summary for Policymakers. The "SPM," as it's known, is a highly technical and difficult document; Johnson, as a lead author, understands it far better than most mortals. However, he has replaced its wonkery with a series of brief poems, each accompanied by a watercolor illustration.
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Main roads to the Argentine capital Buenos Aires have been blocked by people protesting against power cuts.
They are demanding government action on shortages that have been affecting many parts of the city.
Residents set fire to rubbish bags and tyres on the roads, causing long traffic jams as many left the capital for the New Year festivities.
The authorities are blaming the energy crisis on Buenos Aires' worst heatwave in decades, with temperatures over 38C.
Some neighbourhoods have been without power for two weeks, with a marked increase in the use of air conditioning.
But the opposition accuses the government of mismanaging the crisis.
Buenos Aires mayor, Mauricio Macri, says President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner should change the time zone in the east of Argentina - where Buenos Aires is - to save energy.
Mr Macri, a former ally of Ms Fernandez, said the private energy suppliers cannot take all the blame for the crisis.
"Private companies are also responsible, but the main responsibility is with the federal government," he said.
"The government must control to make sure there is an investment programme, which has not happened in the last decade. And now we are regretting the consequences of that," Mr Macri added.
Argentina's ageing power grid has been struggling to keep up with demand.
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Bottlenose dolphins in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay have lung damage and adrenal hormone abnormalities not previously seen in other dolphin populations, according to a new peer-reviewed study published Dec. 18, 2013 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The Deepwater Horizon spill heavily oiled Barataria Bay. The study was conducted in August 2011 as part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) by a team of government, academic and non-governmental researchers. In the NRDA process, federal and state trustee agencies working cooperatively with BP identify potential injuries to natural resources and lost public uses resulting from the spill, along with restoration projects to ensure that the public is fully compensated for its loss.
The publication details the first evidence that dolphins in heavily oiled areas are exhibiting injuries consistent with toxic effects observed in laboratory studies of mammals exposed to petroleum hydrocarbons. The dolphin health study concludes that the health effects seen in the Barataria Bay dolphins are significant and likely will lead to reduced survival and ability to reproduce.
Twenty-nine of the total 32 dolphins sampled in Barataria Bay received comprehensive physical examinations, including ultrasound examinations to assess lung condition. The researchers assigned almost half (48 percent) of the dolphins a guarded or worse prognosis. In fact, they classified 17 percent as being in poor or grave condition, meaning the dolphins were not expected to survive.
These findings are in contrast to dolphins sampled in Sarasota Bay, Florida, an area not oiled by the Deepwater Horizon spill. For Dr. Lori Schwacke, the study’s lead author and veteran of a number of similar dolphin health studies across the southeast, the findings are troubling: “I’ve never seen such a high prevalence of very sick animals — and with unusual conditions such as the adrenal hormone abnormalities.”
Click headline to read more--
The warnings were there from the very beginning. Installing any sort of internet filtering is doomed to fail. First, it's often easily circumvented. Second, it's never as accurate as its proponents claim it will be. Filtering overblocks, sealing off access to legitimate sites while simultaneously allowing targeted material to leak in around the edges.
The UK's national porn filter is already a failure, even before the mandatory 2014 implementation deadline. A single coder has created a Chrome extension that allows the blocked to circumvent the filter with ease by automating proxy access. The filter has also blocked off access to legitimate sex education sites as well as sites offering help to victims of rape and sexual abuse.
But the most fitting collateral damage has finally occurred. Tim Worstall at Forbes points out (via the Independent) that the overenthusiastic filter is sealing off access to the very people and entities who pushed so hard to make this catastrophe a reality.
Click headline to read more--
On Christmas Day, Russian state-owned gas company Soyuzneftegaz inked a $90 million, 25-year deal with Damascus to start exploring for the first time some of Syria's offshore energy resources. On the surface, it represents another show of support from Russia for the beleaguered regime of Bashar al Assad. But the deal also fits into a larger pattern of Russian energy adventurism in one of the world's newest frontiers for oil and gas development. If the investments there work out as planned, they could help cement Russia's eroding hold over Europe's energy supply -- and help boost Moscow's standing as a global power on the rise.
At a time when the whole post-war architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean is crumbling, from the breakdown of Egypt's relations with Israel to tensions in the U.S.-Turkish relationship, Moscow seems to spy an opportunity to reassert itself in a region where it once loomed large, get a grip on a potentially big alternative to Russian energy, and make it easier to flex its military muscles.
"They can kill two birds with one stone," Jeff Mankoff, Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of the Russians. "They want to be in the Eastern Mediterranean, and if they can get the added bonus of bolstering this relationship with Syria, that's two for the price of one."
Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, and now Syria are all agog over the seemingly vast reserves of natural gas discovered offshore; the U.S. geological survey estimates there could be as much as 120 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Levant basin, bigger than any single gas play in the U.S.
Click headline to read more--
As China's smog levels crept past record highs in early December, the phone lines at pollution-busting kit maker Broad Group lit up with Chinese customers worried about hazardous pollution levels that have gripped China this year.
China's government is struggling to meet pollution reduction targets and has pledged to spend over 3 trillion yuan (299 billion pounds) to tackle the problem, creating a growing market for companies that can help boost energy efficiency and lower emissions.
"Recently, we haven't been able to make products fast enough to keep up with demand," said Hu Jie, a general manager at Broad Group, which makes pollution-related products ranging from hand-held monitors to eco-friendly buildings. Sales roughly doubled this year from 2012, Hu said, without giving details.
Pollution problems in China, the world's second-biggest economy, are by no means new. But heightened public anger - and a growing political will to deal with the issue - has created opportunities for firms with sustainable know-how to earn a slice of China's clean-technology market, which is set to triple to $555 billion (336 billion pounds) by 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Companies like U.S. clean-energy expert Fuel Tech Inc , design engineer WS Atkins Plc and others have seized the opening by boosting staff numbers and clinching contracts.
"China has reached a saturation level which people can no longer tolerate," said Feng An, president and executive director of the U.S.-China Clean Tech Center, which takes U.S. clean technology companies to China to meet potential partners.
"Five years ago people could pollute and get away with it. Now they can't. This year you can really see the difference."
Click headline to read more--
The new iteration of Silk Road, a popular online black-market bazaar for drugs and other contraband, returned from a scheduled week of holiday downtime Saturday — but without its former leader.
Silk Road's operator, who goes by the alias "Dread Pirate Roberts" or "DPR," has been noticeably absent from the site's forums since three of his top lieutenants were arrested in a global sting on Dec. 20. A new administrator "Defcon" has assumed temporary control of the site, and confirmed that Dread Pirate Roberts has taken an indefinite leave of absence.
"This past week, our ship suffered major damage," Defcon wrote in a Silk Road forum post Saturday night. "Three of our crew were lost, and our Captain was forced into exile."
The relaunched Silk Road, often referred to as "Silk Road 2.0" or "SR 2," opened for business on Nov. 6, about a month after the FBI seized the original Silk Road, and arrested its alleged owner Ross William Ulbricht, who is believed to be the original Dread Pirate Roberts.
In the weeks leading up to the launch of Silk Road 2.0, the new DPR granted Mashable an exclusive interview, during which he or she was ambitious that his or her site would surpass the original Silk Road's two-and-a-half-year run.
The new Dread Pirate Roberts has only posted on Silk Road's forums once since three of the site's top moderators were arrested for their roles as employees of the original Silk Road. In the post, the new DPR addressed a rumor that the FBI had access to the new Silk Road's servers.
"Silk Road has not been compromised even if the allegations are true," the new DPR wrote on Dec. 20. "I will make an announcement later to address the concerns this has raised."
Click headline to read more--
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Amidst the continuing debates about the merits of Malcolm Turnbull’s national broadband network relative to Stephen Conroy’s, it doesn’t appear to have been appreciated that there may yet be significant changes to the nature of the rollout and the context within which NBN Co will operate in future.
When Turnbull’s strategic review of the NBN was released on December 12 it might have appeared that the NBN’s course had been set: it would be a $41 billion network, using a mix of technologies including copper and HFC cable, which would deliver download speeds of at least 50 Mbps to 90 per cent of Australians by 2019. By contrast, the review concluded that the Conroy fibre-to-the-premises network would have cost $73 billion and taken until 2024 to complete.
While the review made a compelling case for the Turnbull NBN – Conroy’s, already two years behind schedule three years into the rollout, would deliver its 100 Mbps to only 57 per cent of premises by 2019 and require an increase in average broadband bills of up to 80 per cent to generate its promised returns – the review’s findings aren’t the last word on the NBN.
On the day of the review’s release Turnbull also announced a panel of experts which will conduct an economic and social cost-benefit analysis of broadband, including an assessment of the different properties of the available technologies. Conroy and Kevin Rudd have been criticised for not undertaking such a review before they committed to the original version of the NBN.
There are, of course, those who criticise Turnbull for not being forward-looking enough and for not ‘future-proofing’ the NBN by building the ubiquitous fibre-to-the-premises network envisaged by Conroy.
The panel, however, has been tasked with considering the benefits of bringing forward improvements in broadband speed and the respective benefits of alternative or potential technologies.
It will also consider the extent to which market-pricing mechanisms might capture the value of benefits from the network, and whether there should be infrastructure-based competition to the NBN, among other things.
Click headline to read more--
Since 1999, millions of people have donated time on their personal computers for the SETI@home project, which analyzes radio signals to look for intelligent life in outer space.
An entrepreneur now wants people to donate time on their mobile phones for a less high-minded pursuit. Lookout, a San Francisco maker of security software for mobile phones, has published a warning about a free app for Android devices called Bazuc, which pays people $0.001 for each text message they allow partner companies to send from users' mobile phones.
The app, which targets people with unlimited text-messaging plans, comes with a major hitch: Using it violates the terms of service for many mobile providers, and some people's phones have been cut off. One feature of Bazuc's service is it helps companies evade spam filters by sending messages through multiple user accounts.
Lookout said the app has been downloaded around the world — including detections in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Israel, Thailand, and Venezuela — and that many of Bazuc's customers appear to be legitimate businesses. U.S. and African banks have used Bazuc to send customer-service messages, such as account changes and notification of money transfers, while spammers and other illicit users have also engaged the service, according to Lookout.
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A community company is celebrating the rollout of an innovative and ambitious project to provide fast, affordable and reliable wireless broadband to over 300 homes and businesses scattered over the rural areas around the shores of Loch Eil in Lochaber.
Locheilnet was established in October 2012 and is a not-for-profit community interest company run by local people, many of whom are volunteers.
In a bid to tackle the problem of poor broadband speeds in rural areas, Loch Eil-side residents came together in partnership with local businesses and the public sector to design the wireless network scheme.
Through substantial initial funding from Marine Harvest Scotland, the Ardgour Area Fund, Foundation Scotland, Highland Council Discretionary Fund, Rotary Club of Lochaber and Corpach Boat Building, Locheilnet successfully built much of the network’s core infrastructure last summer.
Now, with an additional £91,000 awarded by Community Broadband Scotland (CBS) and invaluable support from local businesses, the project can be finished, made resilient and become sustainable.
The funding enabled Locheilnet to employ local tradesmen to get 80 families and businesses connected in time for Christmas.
Locheilnet’s wireless based network works by linking into a leased line hosted by Marine Harvest offices in Fort William from which it is transmitted to the households via various masts and relay points.
The group is able to offer a service of up to 20Mbps (megabytes per second) to the 300 premises - speeds at least as fast as those available in town in Fort William.
Click headline to read more--
In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.
But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?
I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It's where philosophy and design intersect.
So the conceptualization of possibilities is something that I take very seriously. That's why I, and many people, think it's way past time to take a step back and ask some serious questions about the intellectual viability of things like TED.
So my TED talk is not about my work or my new book – the usual spiel – but about TED itself, what it is and why it doesn't work.
Click headline to read more and watch Benjamin Bratton's TED presentation--
A record two fifths of electricity used in Scotland came from renewables last year, official figures have revealed.
UK government figures showed 40.3% of energy consumption in 2012 was met by the sector - up from 36.3% the previous year and 24.1% in 2010.
Energy minister Fergus Ewing said the figures showed renewables were "going from strength to strength".
Environmental campaigners welcomed the figures but said more needed to be done to meet targets.
The Scottish government said it was on course for half of electricity use to come from renewable sources by 2015, an interim target ahead of the goal of having the sector generate 100% of the country's electricity by 2020.
Scotland continues to produce more energy than it uses, with more than 26% of electricity generated here last year being exported, figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change showed.
Nuclear power provided 34.4% of electricity generated in Scotland in 2012, while 29.8% came from renewables, 24.9% came from coal, 8% from gas and 2.8% from oil and other sources.
The proportion of power in Scotland generated from renewable sources was significantly higher than the rest of the UK.
While 29.8% of electricity generated in Scotland was from renewables, in England the sector produced only 8.2% of electricity, while in Wales and Northern Ireland renewables accounted for 8.7% and 15.9% respectively.
Click headline to read more--
It sounds too preposterous for even James Bond: by placing a mobile phone next to a PC, researchers can "listen" to the faintest sound a CPU makes as it churns away on RSA-encoded content and extract the keys themselves.
Preposterous, except for the fact that Adi Shamir, one of the co-developers of the RSA encryption algorithm, co-wrote the paper that describes how to do it. Daniel Genkin and Eran Tromer were the other two authors.
"The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts," the paper's authors wrote. "We experimentally demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away."
The authors were able to experimentally succeed with their method using either an ungainly, and extremely obvious, parabolic antenna from 4 meters away, or by using a generic mobile phone from just 30 centimeters away. A Naturally, better listening equipment decreased the time to extract the RSA keys.
And it gets even worse: merelyA touching the PC also allowed an attacker to extract the keys by measuring the electric potential of the PC chassis. In this case, users who touched the PC (and surreptitiously measured their electric potential) should be able to extract the keys. And be persuading the victim to plug in either anA innocuous-looking VGA or ethernet cable into his laptop, the attacker could measure the shield potential elsewhere and get the keys as well.
Click headline to read more--
German copyright troll Urmann + Colleagues' (U+C) pain is only just beginning. U+C misrepresented a streaming service as a file-sharing site to a German court in order to obtain subscriber info on thousands of German RedTube users. U+C then used this fraudulently-obtained data to send out collection letters to over 10,000 users, demanding a payment of $345 for copyright infringement.
Red flags were raised by a handful of German lawyers who noted that almost everything about U+C's actions bordered on illegal. At the very least, U+C couldn't demand payment for activity not considered to be infringement by the German courts. The backlash began there.
Click headline to read more--
IBM inventors have received a patent for a breakthrough data encryption technique that is expected to further data privacy and strengthen cloud computing security.
The patented breakthrough, called "fully homomorphic encryption," could enable deep and unrestricted analysis of encrypted information — intentionally scrambled data — without surrendering confidentiality. IBM's solution has the potential to advance cloud computing privacy and security by enabling vendors to perform computations on client data, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing or revealing the original data.
IBM's homomorphic encryption technique solves a daunting mathematical puzzle that confounded scientists since the invention of public-key encryption over 30 years ago.
Click headline to read more--
Ikea is not only furnishing people’s bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. The company’s French unit has also been conducting surveillance of employees and even customers who complained about items that were not delivered. It’s not just that Ikea has a record of what color of couch or size bookshelves that you prefer. Ikea has been able to access personal records including bank account information, driving records, vehicle registrations and property records. It has used these in vetting job applicants and in building cases against employees accused of wrongdoing.
Ikea operates in 42 countries, but the reports about surveillance have only surfaced in France. A regional court in Versailles outside of Paris is currently investigating whether officials in Ikea’s French unit illegally ordered personal investigations of hundreds of people.
Click headline to read more--
How do you build a wind farm offshore without using the specialized boats required to do so?
That's the dilemma facing the American offshore wind industry, thanks to a 1920 federal law.
The Jones Act, passed to protect maritime merchants, requires vessels transporting cargo or equipment between two U.S. points to be American flagged and manufactured.
Because the offshore wind industry has not yet taken off in the States, the only vessels capable of helping it along are manufactured in Europe.
That could leave Massachusetts stuck in a Catch-22: Manufacturers don't want to build vessels for an industry that doesn't exist yet. But state officials say they are banking on the unique engineering of South Terminal in New Bedford to circumvent the problem.
The Jones Act restricts commerce to U.S. vessels between American "points," not ports, said Washington, D.C., maritime and admiralty lawyer Charlie Papavizas. He said the word "points" could have made its way into the law to address concerns that people could "pick up cargo somewhere that wasn't technically a port and get around the law."
Originally, the law applied only to areas within 3 nautical miles of the coastline, but that changed with the Outer Continental Shelf Land Act of 1953, which extended U.S. law, including the Jones Act, to the Outer Continental Shelf.
"Basically, anything attached to the seabed, either permanently or temporarily, is a point," Papavizas said. "As soon as someone drives a pile into the seabed, it counts as a new one."
That leaves the American offshore wind industry in a bind, because you have to drive a pile, or place a foundation, before putting the turbine on top of it.
Offshore wind turbines are extremely heavy and extremely tall, meaning not just any boat can be used to put them in the seabed.
In Europe, where the offshore wind industry is well-established, special barges have been manufactured that jack up above the water level for stability while they drive piles into bedrock. They also have 300-foot-tall cranes to help lift the turbines and racks to hold turbine blades.
But because they were not made in America, those barges cannot be used to transport a wind turbine from port to pile here.
So what's the solution for a state like Massachusetts, which is hoping to become a hub for offshore wind?
Click headline to read more--
The government is planning to give state-level coordination committees (SLCCs) the power to regulate companies running collective investment schemes, a move aimed at checking illegal deposit taking and Ponzi schemes. An SLCC coordinates between a state government and financial institutions to ensure development of credit-based programmes in the state. It has representation from banks, departments of the state government, key intelligence agencies and the local chapters of the financial sector regulators. SLCC meetings are convened by the Reserve Bank of India.
The proposal to empower SLCCs was made by an inter-ministerial group set up by the finance ministry after it failed to secure a consensus on setting up of a central coordinating agency to share information between regulators, central and state governments.
"There were structural and functional issues of setting up such an agency," a finance official said on condition of anonymity. "Besides, the idea is to gather information and take corrective action against unincorporated bodies and unauthorised entities collecting deposits, which can be done through such a platform." A parliamentary panel headed by former finance minister and Bharatiya Janata Pary leader Yashwant Sinha had also suggested single regulator to oversee the functioning of investment schemes promising unreasonable returns. The official quoted earlier said the Department of Information Technology will also be roped in to help regulate online deposit collection schemes floated by foreign-based entities. Click headline to read more--
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