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Cloud Computing Hauled Over The Coals By Greenpeace

With the growth of developing economies and the vast amounts of energy needed for cloud computing, publicity-conscious Greenpeace has criticised the ICT industry’s data centers, where utility power comes primarily from coal.   By some quirk of fate and timing and imagination, cloud computing, based on an infrastructure whereby data is delivered to devices directly from the internet in real time, has all of a sudden been impacted by the shadowy voice of Greenpeace. A study, “SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age”, highlights the significant and rapidly-growing footprint of the ICT industry and predicts that, because of the rapid economic expansion in places like India and China, demand for ICT services will quadruple by 2020. The report finds that by then PC ownership will quadruple to four billion devices – with laptops becoming the main source of global ICT emissions – and that mobile ownership will almost double to nearly five billion over the same period. As the world’s demand for content is delivered in real time, this growth comes with an increasing demand for energy, with virtual mountains needing to house this swelling data deluge. Alarming and environmentally damaging according to Greenpeace, individual contributions including five-second snatchments of the banal, need not only to be available for instantaneous access by others and will need infinite data dumps to do so – the home of the data center. Greenpeace says that data center builders must become “part of the solution to the climate change challenge, rather than part of the problem” and urge operators to “power their data centers using renewable energy”

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Cloud Computing Hauled Over The Coals By Greenpeace

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UK is Europe’s top online spender

British consumers have been identified as Europe’s top online spenders, with almost one third of the continent’s internet sales in 2009 originating in the UK. This research was carried out by price comparison website Kelkoo for the Centre for Retail Research, and revealed that consumers in the UK spent an estimated

france

UK is Europe’s top online spender

British consumers have been identified as Europe’s top online spenders, with almost one third of the continent’s internet sales in 2009 originating in the UK. This research was carried out by price comparison website Kelkoo for the Centre for Retail Research, and revealed that consumers in the UK spent an estimated

france

UK is Europe’s top online spender

British consumers have been identified as Europe’s top online spenders, with almost one third of the continent’s internet sales in 2009 originating in the UK. This research was carried out by price comparison website Kelkoo for the Centre for Retail Research, and revealed that consumers in the UK spent an estimated

france

UK is Europe’s top online spender

British consumers have been identified as Europe’s top online spenders, with almost one third of the continent’s internet sales in 2009 originating in the UK.

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UK is Europe’s top online spender

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French President Sarkozy plans to tax Google

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has asked authorities to explore whether international search engines could be taxed in France, due to the dominant position held by companies such as Google in online advertising.

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French President Sarkozy plans to tax Google

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Google ’scam’ suggestion condemned by high court

A Paris court of appeal has ruled against Google in a defamation case lodged by the Centre National Privé de Formation a Distance (CNFDI) in a suit which claimed the search engine’s ‘Suggest’ feature linked the organisation to the word ’scam’. The Mountain View giant has been ordered to take necessary measures to remove this suggestion from its search functions, according to French legal site Legalis.net.

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Google ’scam’ suggestion condemned by high court

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French president Sarkozy says no to Google book scanning

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has lashed out at US search agency Google over its plans to digitise the world’s classic literature, announcing that the French component of this collection is not to be included amongst other famous titles for the profit of an American company. According to the Irish Times, Sarkozy spoke at a public meeting in Alsace and told delegates that France would increase financial support for its own book digitisation project rather than let the Mountain View agency go ahead with its mission to scan out-of-copyright literature in order to present it online in a searchable form. He said: “We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” delivering a striking blow to the US corporation

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French president Sarkozy says no to Google book scanning

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Firefox does downloads again… and again

Reminiscent of the great Firefox Download Day of last year, where Mozilla Firefox version 3 hit a million downloads in record time, the latest update to one of the world’s favourite browsers has seen a similar reaction to its release, with over a million downloads occurring within just hours. And, just like last time, Mozilla hasn’t been lazy when it comes to tracking just how excited about its wares fans have been getting.

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Firefox does downloads again… and again