One of the things I've been doing over the past 6 months (while I've left this blog to fend for itself) is watching a couple of TV series (I hardly ever watch TV but I've found lately that good quality TV seems to have eclipsed movies in some ways and being able to download them makes watching them much more convenient) - namely Game of Thrones (like everyone else) and Breaking Bad.

It was good to see the concept of "how much is enough ?" getting some time in series 5 of Breaking Bad - I'm going to miss Walt when the series concludes later this year.

One of my yearly traditions is to go and see the Banff Mountain Film Festival. I found this year's set of movies a little repetitive (much as I like Alex Honnold climbing, Russ Sturges paddling and Danny MacAskill doing tricks on his mountain bike I've seen their stuff plenty of times before) - there were a few interesting films though.

The overall winner was a pair of Australian dudes wandering around Antarctica (less successfully than a random norwegian guy it must be said) - Crossing The Ice.

Aussie adventurers James Castrission and Justin Jones embark upon a perilous 2275km journey across Antarctica in a race to become the first people to man-haul their way from the icy continent's rim to the South Pole and back, completely unassisted. In the past, a handful of hopefuls have attempted the feat, but none have succeeded. Dragging their food and supplies across the unforgiving landscape, in temperatures as low as -40°C, the pair experiences the peaks and troughs of being alone and unsupported in one of the harshest environments on Earth. Their journey heats up when they discover their record attempt is in jeopardy; there's a Norwegian on the ice. He's more experienced, he's tackling same route, and he has a head start.

This dog had me (and most of the audience) laughing out loud - Lily Shreds Trailside.

Every serious mountain-bike rider needs a mascot, and Lily the Jack Russell Terrier is on the road to becoming just that. As the star of this film, Lily leaves only dust behind her as she does what she loves best: chasing bikes. Hot on the tail of a rider carving out new lines in Utah, USA, Lily clears a double jump, attempts a wall ride and ultimately, proves that downhill mountain-bike trails were not only made for wheels; paws can do the trick as well.

And lastly, the landscape at the bottom of the Grand Canyon held a lot of novelty value for me - Last of the great unknown.

One of the last places in the American West left to be explored, the Grand Canyon is an immense landscape filled with sweeping vistas. Almost unfathomable in scale, its vast wilderness is home to a labyrinth of concealed tributaries that hide some of the region's most remarkable formations. Led by Richard Rudow, who has clocked up some 70 first descents in the Grand Canyon, a team of seasoned canyoners ventures deep inside these slots to locations where no humans have set foot before.

The Guardian has an essay arguing (unusually for something printed in a newspaper) that reading news is bad for you - News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier. Up to a point I'd agree - though I'd say it depends where you get your news from and how your interpret it....

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

I'm not entirely sure if the Australian Government's "Clean Energy Future" venture got some inspiration from this blog - nor am I sure if it will last the year out - however it's nice to see a post on ocean energy on their web site - Give us a wave – harnessing the power of our oceans.

As construction begins on a ground-breaking wave energy project in Perth, a report has been released which emphasises the huge untapped energy potential lying off Australia’s coastlines.

According to the Marine Nation 2025 report, released this week, Australia’s oceans could produce billions of dollars’ worth of clean energy in the form of electricity generated by wave power. The report says an initial assessment has identified world-class wave energy resources along the western and southern coastline, and valuable tidal energy resources in the North West of Australia.

Marine Nation 2025 was prepared by the Federal Government’s Oceans Policy Science Advisory Group and highlights the enormous potential of Australia’s oceans, as well as the challenges and opportunities involved with managing our vast maritime resources.

The report comes on the eve of the commencement of the Perth Wave Energy Project, which is due to begin next month. Located at Garden Island, near Perth, the project will start delivering green energy to the grid in 2014. The project will be Australia’s first commercial wave energy project connected to the electricity grid. An associated wave-powered desalination plant will be a world first.

A CSIRO study released last year revealed that ocean waves have the potential to power a city the size of Melbourne by 2050. CSIRO’s Ocean renewable energy: 2015-2050 report said Australia’s ocean waves could supply about 10 per cent of Australia’s electricity by the middle of this century.

The Economist has a report on Greenland's rare earth potential - Why does Greenland’s election have global implications?.

The world may not often be very interested in Greenland but it is fascinated by what lies beneath it. As the country’s ice cap melts, hidden mineral wealth is coming tantalisingly within reach. The country’s riches include “rare earth” metals that are essential in the production of many electronic devices, from electric-car batteries to television screens. Metals such as cerium (used in glass manufacturing) and yttrium (which goes into electronic displays) are among those that are hidden under the ice. Many rare earths are not as scarce as their misleading name suggests, but they are scattered thinly and can be difficult to extract. In Greenland they are often mixed up with uranium, which under the country's current laws is illegal to mine. Most of the precious metals therefore remain underground. ...

Should Ms Hammond’s plans go ahead, and Greenland manage to ramp up its extraction of rare earths, it could deliver a jolt to the market for the valuable metals. At the moment rare-earth supply is dominated by China. In recent years China has restricted its exports of rare earths, citing environmental concerns. Extraction of the metals is dirty and dangerous, and stories of poisoning are common. But some see an ulterior motive in China’s cutbacks: by controlling the supply of high-value materials, China can also control their use in finished products. That could help it in its broader strategy to move from low- to high-value manufacturing. If Greenland becomes a big supplier of those same minerals, China’s grip on the market could loosen, and prices around the world may fall. Polar politics therefore matter to many more than the 57,000 people who live in Greenland.

Ugo at Cassandra's Legacy has a post on a talk by the pessimistic Jorgen Randers (of "Limits To Growth fame) in Rome in April - Jorgen Randers: what the future will be.

Presenting his book, "2052", Jorgen Randers starts with a bold statement: "I will not tell you what the future could be, but what the future will be". You would think that this shows quite a bit of hubris but, if you follow Randers' reasoning, you'll see that he has a point.

Randers is one of the authors of the famous "The Limits to Growth" report to the Club of Rome. Published in 1972, the book caused quite a stir and was widely misinterpreted as a prophecy of doom. It wasn't so and, in his talk, Randers summarizes what he and the others did. They didn't make any prophecy but, rather, they created a 'fan' of 12 different scenarios for the future of the world up to 2100. Some of these scenarios involved decline and collapse of the economy, some involved stabilization and prosperity. Whether one or the other set of scenarios would unfold depended on whether humankind made the right or the wrong choices in dealing with pollution, resource exploitation, and population growth.

One problem with the "The Limits to Growth" was that the authors never specified by what mechanisms humankind could develop the consensus necessary to make the right choices, which all involved some sacrifices in the short term. After 40 years of work, Randers has arrived to a conclusion: there are no such mechanisms. The right choices were not made and never will be.

Today, Randers says, there is no more a fan of good and bad scenarios: there is only one; and it is not pleasant. It can only be the decline of our society, constrained by overpopulation, declining resource availability, and widespread damage caused by pollution and climate change. The start of the decline may come earlier or later; collapse may be faster or slower, but the shape of the future is determined.

Randers maintains that there is a simple way to describe the reasons that are taking us to this unpleasant future: people always make the choice that involves the least costs in the short term. The problem is all there: as long as we always choose the easiest road, we have no control on where we are going.

Imagine you are lost in a forest. Would you think that always choosing the easiest path in front of you could take you home? But this is what we are doing: even though we should know that this is not the way to go where we would like to be. We are unwilling, for instance, to invest in renewable energy as long as fossil fuels are even slightly less expensive and we can neglect their external costs in the form of pollution and climate change. But this choice is based on short term consideration and it will cause us terrible long term damage.

Why are we unable to do better? Here, Randers proposes that "short-termism" is deeply ingrained in people's minds and is reflected in our democratic decisional system. He has been accused to be against democracy, but he maintains that he has nothing against democracy: the problem is that democracy is the result of human short-termism. He makes the example of an enlightened politician who decides to introduce a carbon tax. Soon, voters discover that the carbon tax is making gasoline and electricity more expensive. As a consequence, that politician won't be re-elected. It is simple and it happens all the time.

Of course, you might object that if the public were to be educated about climate change, then people would accept a carbon tax - actually they would clamor for it. Maybe; but Randers is skeptical. He says that he has spent decades of his life training generations of decision-makers in sustainability and ecosystem science. And he has seen those trained generations taking exactly the same wrong decisions that the previous, untrained, generations were taking.

Human nature is difficult to overcome. Randers recounts how he and his colleagues had been discussing about the size of a natural disaster that would wake the public to the reality of ecosystem destruction. Then Hurricane Katrina came and, later on, Sandy. Both where disasters as big as they can be. But they fell flat as wake up calls: the public didn't react. Today, three Americans out of eight still think that global warming is a hoax.

Randers has seen the enemy and the enemy is us.

Stuart at Early Warning has a post pondering if increasing extreme weather events are causing more frequent power outages - Extreme Weather Possibly Increasing Power Outages?.

I'm reading up on the economics of power outages at the moment, and I stumbled across the graph above in this National Wildlife Federation analysis. It shows the number of power outages caused by non-weather related factors, and weather related factors (from 1992-2010 in the US). There has been a material increase in both categories, but much more so in the weather related problems.

EHS News points to an interesting wind map of the US, at the time the Oklahoma tornado occurred recently - A humbling map of real-time wind patterns in... Energy map?.

A humbling map of real-time wind patterns in Tornado Alley

"Wind Map" is a stunning interactive datavisualization that presents wind patterns across the continental U.S. in real time. Picture above is what it looked like last night at 10:59 CDT, in the aftermath of yesterday's devastating Oklahoma tornado."

PhysOrg has an article about a planned resort development powered by OTEC technology (a type of ocean energy) in China - Partnership to build world's largest OTEC plant off China coast.

Hong Kong based Reignwood Group and U.S. aerospace company Lockheed Martin have announced plans to build an Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) electricity generating plant off the coast of China to power a planned resort community. Lockheed Martin is to build the facility and run it, while the Reignwood Group will be building the resort community that is to use the power generated. The new plant is expected to produce 100 percent of the power needs of the community.

OTEC plants generate electricity by taking advantage of the difference in water temperature at different ocean depths—warm surface water is used to boil a fluid (one that has a low boiling temperature such as ammonia) that in turn drives a turbine. Cold water brought up from below cools the liquid causing it to once again liquefy allowing the process to repeat over and over. To date, few such plants have been built due to the large expense involved in transporting cold water up from below. The new plant to be built off the coast of southern China will be a pilot project designed to not only supply electricity to the new resort community, but also to serve as a learning environment, helping lead the way to more efficient, and hopefully cheaper plant designs.

The SMH has a look at an emerging trend in WA to consider floating LNG plants rather than onshore LNG plants - High wages drive LNG projects offshore.

The rising cost of building liquefied natural gas plants in Australia, where energy workers earn the highest salaries in the world, is forcing developers out to sea in search of billions of dollars in savings.

Exxon Mobil plans to use the world's largest ship to turn gas into liquid at an offshore field, eliminating the need for investment in pipelines and port facilities. Woodside Petroleum is studying sea-based technology since ditching plans this month for an onshore plant for its Browse project off Western Australia. After starting work on $175 billion in LNG terminals on land, developers are considering more than $80 billion in floating projects to keep Australia competitive with suppliers in North America and East Africa.

''A lot of people have been saying Australian LNG is now over, it's going to be priced out of the market by US LNG exports and competition from Canada and East Africa,'' said Citigroup analyst Mark Greenwood. ''In our view, we are going to see continued investment in Australia, just a different sort.''

The engineering challenges are massive. Shell's Prelude vessel, vying to be the first floating LNG facility in the world, will be as long as the Empire State Building and six times the weight of the largest aircraft carrier. Exxon proposes a vessel spanning 495 metres, or seven metres longer than the Shell plant.

Australian oil and gas workers earn about $160,000 a year on average, 35 per cent more than employees in the US and almost double the global average, according to a survey this year by recruiting company Hays and Oil and Gas Job Search.

Floating LNG may be almost 20 per cent cheaper than building a project on land for Woodside and its partners in the Browse project, including Shell. Using three offshore vessels to produce the gas would cost an estimated $35 billion, compared with a cost of $43 billion for a new development on land, John Hirjee, an analyst for Deutsche Bank, wrote in an April 12 report. That's a cost of $2.92 billion per million metric tonnes of output for a floating LNG project producing 12 million tonnes a year, compared with a $3.58 billion cost for a conventional plant.

Of the 90 million tonnes a year of new projects that need to be approved globally in the next three years to satisfy LNG demand by the end of the decade, as much as a third may come from proposed floating LNG plants and expansions of onshore developments in Australia, he said.

Delimiter reports that the Australian internet filter may have been implemented in a roundabout way after all - ‘The filter is back’: Blocked site tells its story and ASIC blocked “numerous” sites over 9 months.

If you’ve been following the saga over the decision by Australia’s financial regulator ASIC to unlilaterally order the block of suspected fraud sites over the past week or so, you’re probably aware by now that the whole deal started when a little-known site named Melbourne Free University was mysteriously taken offline back in April. In a lengthy piece on the ABC’s The Drum website this afternoon, the convenors of the site tell their story and argue that the situation is just not good enough.

PandoMonthly has an interesting interview with Elon Musk, one of the few unarguable cleantech success stories over the past decade - Fireside Chat With Elon Musk

Sarah Lacy talked to Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX during PandoMonthly and went into detail on what other entreprenuers should do while raising venture capital, why he isn't going to be doing another Internet startup, his thoughts on CleanTech, the launch of SpaceX, and finally, his plans for the future.

As expected, Tesla Motors, the maker of the luxury Model S electric sedan, announced today that it was profitable for the first time in its ten-year history. During the first quarter of 2013 it had profits of $11 million. Total revenues were $562 million.

The profits came as Tesla cut costs and managed to sell more cars as it ramped up production at its factory in California. According to reports, Tesla’s Model S outsold electric vehicles from both GM and Nissan in the first quarter.

PhysOrg has an article on a paper suggesting high-fructose corn syrup could be a factor in bee colony collapse disorder - Researchers find high-fructose corn syrup may be tied to worldwide collapse of bee colonies.

Since approximately 2006, groups that manage commercial honeybee colonies have been reporting what has become known as colony collapse disorder—whole colonies of bees simply died, of no apparent cause. As time has passed, the disorder has been reported at sites all across the world, even as scientists have been racing to find the cause, and a possible cure. To date, most evidence has implicated pesticides used to kill other insects such as mites. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence to suggest the real culprit might be high-fructose corn syrup, which beekeepers have been feeding bees as their natural staple, honey, has been taken away from them.

Commercial honeybee enterprises began feeding bees high-fructose corn syrup back in the 70's after research was conducted that indicated that doing so was safe. Since that time, new pesticides have been developed and put into use and over time it appears the bees' immunity response to such compounds may have become compromised.

The researchers aren't suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is itself toxic to bees, instead, they say their findings indicate that by eating the replacement food instead of honey, the bees are not being exposed to other chemicals that help the bees fight off toxins, such as those found in pesticides.

Specifically, they found that when bees are exposed to the enzyme p-coumaric, their immune system appears stronger—it turns on detoxification genes. P-coumaric is found in pollen walls, not nectar, and makes its way into honey inadvertently via sticking to the legs of bees as they visit flowers. Similarly, the team discovered other compounds found in poplar sap that appear to do much the same thing. It all together adds up to a diet that helps bees fight off toxins, the researchers report. Taking away the honey to sell it, and feeding the bees high-fructose corn syrup instead, they claim, compromises their immune systems, making them more vulnerable to the toxins that are meant to kill other bugs.

TreeHugger reports that the EU is testing if pesticides are to blame for bee population declines by banning suspected pesticides - Europe votes for 2-year ban on pesticides suspected in bee deaths.

British politicians may have sided with the insecticide lobby, but that hasn't prevented European campaigners from celebrating a major victory in the fight to save bees this week. As reported in the Independent, European politicians have just voted for a two-year precautionary ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides on flowering crops attractive to bees:

Four nations abstained from the moratorium, which will restrict the use of imidacloprid and clothianidin, made by Germany's Bayer, and thiamethoxam, made by the Swiss company, Syngenta. The ban on use on flowering crops will remain in place throughout the EU for two years unless compelling scientific evidence to the contrary becomes available.

More than 30 separate scientific studies have found a link between the neonicotinoids, which attack insects' nerve systems, and falling bee numbers. The proposal by European Commission - the EU's legislative body - to ban the insecticides was based on a study by the European Food Safety Authority, which found in January that the pesticides did pose a risk to bees' health.

As mentioned in the Independent article, the vote comes on the back of several studies linking bee deaths to neonicotinoid seed insecticide exposure, including a number that showed non-lethal doses increasing bees' vulnerability to other health threats like the nosema parasite.

With Bayer CropScience already on a charm offensive in relation to the beekeeping community, and even handing out "free seeds for bees" with its neonicotinoid products, it comes as no surprise that insecticide makers are less than happy about the decision. A spokesperson for Bayer previously slammed the European Commission's proposed ban as "draconian", while Luke Gibbs, Syngenta's head of corporate affairs for North Europe told the Independent that he was concerned it would overshadow the "real" reasons for bee declines, namely disease, viruses and loss of habitat and nutrition.

The proof now, of course, will be in the pudding. Will the EU ban, which is expected to be fully implemented by December, result in a recovery of bee populations or at least a slowing of their losses?

The SMH has a report on advances in solar cell efficiency at UNSW - Breakthrough in solar efficiency by UNSW team ahead of its time.

Australian scientists have found a way of hugely increasing the efficiency of solar panels while substantially reducing their cost. The University of NSW researchers have come up with improvements in photovoltaic panel design that had not been expected for another decade.

The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in silicon cells used in solar panels. As a consequence, poor quality silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers. The process makes cheap silicon "actually better than the best-quality material people are using at the moment", the head of the university's photovoltaics centre of excellence, Professor Stuart Wenham, said. Silicon wafers account for more than half the cost of making a solar cell. "By using lower-quality silicon, you can drastically reduce that cost," he said. "We've been able to figure out what the secret is that enables hydrogen to sometimes work the way people want it to, and sometimes doesn't."

At present, the best commercial solar cells convert between 17 per cent and 19 per cent of the sun's energy into electricity. UNSW's technique, patented this year, should produce efficiencies of between 21 per cent and 23 per cent. ...

The price of solar panels has fallen by about 65 per cent in two years, partly due to a huge rise in production in China. Australians have been taking advantage of lower prices, with the number of homes with solar panels exceeding 1 million. The phenomenal growth has caused some casualties in the industry as companies have taken on massive debt to expand supply, then struggled with falling prices in saturated markets. Notable among them is the recent debt default by Suntech Power, once the world's largest solar-panel maker, founded by former University of NSW researcher Shi Zhengrong.

Panel prices are predicted to fall much further. European producers predict they will be 60 per cent cheaper by 2020. "Based on the technological advances we're making, we think that's certainly achievable," Dr Wenham said.

Eight commercial firms have signed up to be a partner in developing the technology to an industrial scale, including Suntech, which continues to operate from its base in the eastern Chinese city of Wuxi and has a research unit in Sydney.

Bernard Keane at Crikey has an entertaining tribute to cyber-security week - Cybersecurity awareness week: be aware you’re being lied to.

Did you know it’s national cybersecurity awareness week?

Everyone I’ve told has replied “I wasn’t aware of that”, which suggests we need an awareness week for the awareness week. It’s an annual event in which governments and companies work together to, well, “raise awareness” of cybersecurity. Tips will be offered, threats will be warned about and products will be advertised. China will be mentioned a lot.

In the US, they have cybersecurity awareness month. Everything sure is bigger over there.

And, yes, we should take cybersecurity awareness seriously. Because most of the things you are told about cybersecurity are lies. As Crikey has demonstrated many times, the actual threat of cybercrime is grossly exaggerated by governments, the corporate media and cybersecurity companies. They exaggerate it with the goal of lifting sales of security products and justifying increases in state control of the internet.

The Australian Financial Review for some months has run a series of beat-ups on the issue, which all follow the same format: claiming routine common-or-garden efforts to access servers as “attacks”, portraying minor breaches as major hacking successes (one article claimed that an effort to access a publicly available stats database at the ABS website was a successful breach by hackers), invoking the threat of Chinese hackers, and quoting cybersecurity consultants and executives who are only too happy to agree that government agencies should spend more on security.

And, it seems, next week’s Four Corners will be running the same line, with its PR plug for Monday’s edition, titled Hacked! (behold the exclamation mark), claiming “a deafening silence surrounds this issue”. The sort of deafening silence in which governments and the media never shut up about it, presumably.

Anyone pointing out the self-interested nature of commentary from the cybersecurity industry, or the obvious flaws in the corporate media narrative of major security breaches, invariably elicits the reaction that they are pretending there is no cybercrime problem at all. In Crikey’s case, this is exactly the opposite of the truth. Crikey is the only media outlet or company in Australia that has undertaken substantive, independent research into the prevalence of cybercrime and established the scale of the problem, with a costing based on verifiable data.

But, in cybersecurity awareness week, this is not yet another article explaining how cybercrime has been exaggerated. This is an attempt to identify the real threat. While corporate media and governments like our own and that of the US repeatedly (and correctly) blame China for much cyberespionage and online crime, in fact the biggest source of cybercrime on the planet is the US government, aided and abetted by governments like our own.

Yes, we’re not the hapless victims of China in any “cyberwar”, we’re every bit as much the aggressors as any other participant.

The US government is the biggest purchaser and producer of “cyberweapons” on the planet. A recent Reuters report by Joseph Menn contained comprehensive detail about how government agencies like the National Security Agency and the Pentagon are pouring money into “zero-day exploits”, vulnerabilities in commonly used systems and software.

US government agencies aren’t devoting significant resources to purchasing these exploits so that they won’t fall into the hands of criminals — they are purchasing them to use.

Hackers, operating at the behest of, or employed by, the Chinese government, the Chinese security establishment and Chinese companies, are indeed a significant threat to Western companies and governments. But the focus on China obscures the extent to which the US remains the most potent, aggressive state cyberpower.

And there’s a lesson from China that the media might do well to learn. The reason China has such a flourishing culture of cybercrime and hacking is because its government devotes enormous resources to controlling the internet and monitoring citizens’ use of it. Chinese hacking is a direct outgrowth of the fact that it is a surveillance state.

And a surveillance state is exactly what governments and corporations, crying “cybersecurity”, want us to become.

Be aware of that.

The SMH has a report on last year's arctic ice melt - UN sounds alarm on record Arctic ice melt.

The Arctic's sea ice melted at a record pace in 2012, the ninth-hottest year on record, compounding concerns about climate change underscored by extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy, the UN weather agency says. In a report on the situation in 2012, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Thursday that during the August to September melting season, the Arctic's sea ice cover was just 3.4 million square kilometres. That was a full 18 per cent less than the previous record low set in 2007.

WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud dubbed it a "disturbing sign of climate change." "The year 2012 saw many other extremes as well, such as droughts and tropical cyclones. Natural climate variability has always resulted in such extremes, but the physical characteristics of extreme weather and climate events are being increasingly shaped by climate change," he said. "For example, because global sea levels are now about 20 centimetres higher than they were in 1880, storms such as Hurricane Sandy are bringing more coastal flooding than they would have otherwise," he added.

The Atlantic has a look at a new study of historical temperatures - We're Screwed: 11,000 Years' Worth of Climate Data Prove It

Back in 1999 Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann released the climate change movement's most potent symbol: The "hockey stick," a line graph of global temperature over the last 1,500 years that shows an unmistakable, massive uptick in the twentieth century when humans began to dump large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It's among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann's back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists.

Now it's gotten a makeover: A study published in Science reconstructs global temperatures further back than ever before -- a full 11,300 years. The new analysis finds that the only problem with Mann's hockey stick was that its handle was about 9,000 years too short.

CNN has an article by Bruce Schneier on the state of the internet in 2013 - The Internet is a surveillance state.

I'm going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.

And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell's identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your cell phone, there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Technology Review has an article on a new LED light design that mimics the old incandescent bulb - Cree Introduces an LED Bulb Edison Would Love.

If you’ve had any experience with LED light bulbs, you know they can look pretty odd. Cree today introduced a bulb that mimics the traditional incandescent bulb design in every way–except its inefficiency.

The bulb is the first consumer bulb from Cree, which primarily supplies LED semiconductors to other lamp makers. There are three products: a 40-watt equivalent and two 60-watt equivalents with different color light. They’re available from Home Depot online now and will be made available in stores this month priced between $9.97 and $13.97.

What’s most notable is that bulbs have the same glass dome as incandescent lights and there isn’t a large metal heat sink. The first wave of general-purpose LED products have heavy metal fins to wick away heat from the LED light sources, which helps ensure life. The Cree bulb uses the same glass as an incandescent but has a rubber coating to prevent shattering.

In an incandescent bulb, a tungsten filament in the center of the glass glows to give off an even, warm light. Cree designed a “filament tower” that places a series of pin-hole-shaped LEDs in the same location as the traditional filament. I installed one yesterday and the effect is a similar light output as a traditional bulb and even light distribution.

Having a familiar shape is very important to spur more consumers to consider LEDs as a replacement for incandescent bulbs, says Mike Watson, the vice president of corporate marketing. “Consumers actually love that particular (incandescent bulb) product. It’s the shape they’re used to and it gives off a warm glow they expect, but it’s grossly inefficient and has a short lifetime,” he says. Cree’s bulb uses high-power LEDs which means it can work with a smaller heat sink, which appears like a collar around the base of the bulb.

An incandescent bulb lasts about 1,000 hours, while most LED bulbs are rated to last 25,000 hours, which can be 15 or 20 years depending on usage. The Cree bulb has a 10-year warranty.

The NRMA has issued a report on Australia's fuel security - Australia’s Liquid Fuel Security (pdf).

As the world’s ninth-largest energy producer, Australia has abundant renewable and nonrenewable energy resources. Despite these resources, we are heavily dependent on imports of refined petroleum products and crude oil to meet our liquid fuel demand.

This import dependency has increased in recent years.

Our transport systems are wholly oil dependent. The reasons for this dependency may be economically sound due to the relative lower cost of oil but the lack of fuel diversity significantly impacts our resilience if we experience supply interruptions or a reducing availability of affordable oil supplies in the future.

The very small consumption stockholdings of oil and liquid fuels in Australia, combined with what appears to be a narrow assessment of our fuel supply chain vulnerabilities, does not provide much confidence that the strategic risks to our fuel supply chain are well understood and mitigated by our nation’s leaders, the business community or the population at large.

In essence, we have adopted a “she’ll be right” approach to fuel security, relying on the historical performance of global oil and fuel markets to provide in all cases. Unfortunately, as a result of our limited and decreasing refining capacity, small stockholdings and long supply chains, our society is at significant risk if any of the assumptions contained in the vulnerability assessments made to date prove false.