The energy economy remains reliant on fossil fuels, which is leading to the continued accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. But it may be possible to continue burning fossil fuels without affecting the atmosphere; pilot studies are already underway to evaluate the potential of techniques that extract CO2 from the exhaust stream of power plants. Of course, once the carbon is removed, there's still the issue of what to do with it afterwards. Most plans involve placing it in geological formations that are already known to trap gasses: those that we've extracted natural gas from, to be precise.

Chemically, however, CO2 has very different properties from hydrocarbons, so it's not guaranteed to behave in the same way once we stick it underground. Even a small rate of release, less than one percent annually, would mean that sequestration would simply delay any problems associated with high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. So it's essential that we have some idea of what might happen to underground reservoirs of CO2. A paper that appears in today's issue of Nature takes a big step in that direction by exploring the fate of some naturally occurring CO2 reservoirs.

Is Harvard Law professor Charlie Nesson crazy? As Nesson himself admits, "this does seem to be a question on many people's minds."

In our recent conversation with Nesson, the professor said he hopes to turn the Joel Tenenbaum P2P file-swapping case into a wide-ranging discussion on copyright. But a set of newly published e-mails indicate that Nesson wants to go further than anyone—including the most prominent "free culture" academics—previously suspected. Not content to argue that massive statutory damages are unconstitutional in such cases, Nesson plans to press an audacious claim: noncommercial P2P file-swapping is "fair use" and thus totally legal.

Even as sex crimes against minors decline, a new report from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center released this week found an massive increase in the number of online child predators arrested in undercover sting operations. Despite this, the survey rejects the idea that the Internet is an especially perilous place for minors, and finds that while the nature of online sex crimes against minors changed little between 2000 and 2006, the profile of the offenders has been shifting—and both differ markedly from the popular conception.

One of the biggest challenges of science is figuring out what to do with unexpected results. They can reflect anything from a statistical anomaly to a deep problem that cuts to the heart of our understanding of the universe. There seems to be something unexpected lurking in the cosmic rays that strike the earth, which appear to be comprised of an unusual amount of antimatter.

Our universe is dominated by matter, rather than antimatter. We don't know why one predominates at the expense of the other, or why there were clearly uneven amounts in the early universe—those question will keep PhD students busy for a while—but we have a good sense of the general ratio of matter to antimatter in the current universe. Given that ratio, it's more than a little surprising that a group of measurements, from different sources and using different techniques, are all showing an excess of antiparticles.

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit vendor-neutral organization that coordinates development of the Linux kernel, has responded to the recent news that Microsoft and TomTom have settled their patent dispute. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin wrote a blog entry on Tuesday commenting on the outcome of the conflict.

He contends that Microsoft, which has recently been expressing an affinity for openness and encouraging critics to give it the benefit of the doubt, has demonstrated that it can't be trusted and is not willing to support truly open technologies. He also suggests that product makers should consider the possibility of rejecting Microsoft's legacy FAT filesystem and should instead adopt an unencumbered open source alternative.

Lala, a streaming music service and DRM-free store that keeps your music library in the cloud, has gotten an update that gives it a polished look and some key new features. In addition to these improvements, the company has also hopped on the music discovery bandwagon, boosting its potential as a one-stop shop for almost all of your music needs.

Lala changed the music equation last October by introducing unlimited streaming access to all the songs you already own in addition to providing a cheap DRM-free MP3 store. With this redesign, Lala has greatly improved its Web-based player to provide desktop-like features. Album art is displayed next to each track as it plays, and a snap back button allows you to quickly return to the page where you found the song. New buttons allow for instant access to your queue of upcoming songs and provide the ability to quickly add the currently playing song to any playlist. All this makes for a much more functional, enjoyable player that is accessible from anywhere in the Lala site, no matter where you navigate.

HP, the dominant PC manufacturer, could potentially be preparing to develop a netbook product with Google's Linux-based Android software platform. According to multiple reports, HP has confirmed that it is studying Google's operating system, but has not disclosed specific plans for adoption yet.

When Google opened the source code of Android's Cupcake development branch, the company revealed that it had implemented preliminary support for running the operating system on the x86 architecture, thus opening the door for Android to be used on Atom-based netbooks. Android could also potentially be adopted on next-generation ARM-based netbooks.

The Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News has obtained a declassified version of an interim report on an inquiry into warrantless NSA surveillance issued this past fall, a teaser for a comprehensive report by the intelligence community's inspectors general due this summer. (The declassified version, apparently, is identical to the original submitted two months prior, but for one mysterious sentence.) While it's mostly limited to an account of how the agencies are divvying up the reporting task, even that provides a hint of the the departments' roles in the program itself.

Multisocket enthusiasts and/or anyone itching to upgrade to a new workstation have been waiting for Intel's major new Xeon refresh with bated breath. Santa Clara may have made us wait for dual-socket Nehalem goodness, but benchmarks suggest performance will be worth the delay. Rather than launching a handful of high-end models, as it did with Core i7, Intel is debuting a total of 12 new Xeon processors that span a range of capabilities and core counts.

The European Union this week called out social networking sites and online advertisers, charging them to establish a self-regulatory framework that better respects consumer privacy. The European Commissioner for Consumers, Bulgaria's Meglena Kuneva, says that it's a "last chance" for Internet companies to get their collective act together before the regulators intervene.

What sorts of practices is Kuneva worried about? In a speech given ahead of a major "Consumer Summit" in Brussels, Kuneva refused to name names, but singled out a social network (*cough* Facebook *cough*) that "recently included without warning a clause in their terms and conditions that amounted to users rescinding ownership of all their content in their favor. This is a social network site taking ownership of your personal photo albums. Although regulators did not react, people obviously thought the clause was not fair and the uproar of users and the threat of legal action has led the platform to rethink this clause."

"Playable search" engine SeeqPod has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after being sued by a number of record companies. With the music industry ganging up on the site for copyright infringement and asking for billions of dollars in damages, the filing isn't particularly surprising. It may send a message, however, that other tiny companies can be bullied out of business for the right amount of money.

SeeqPod allows users to scour the Internet for a variety of media (including videos, music, and presentations), turn music tracks into audio streams, and listen right from the browser. It also supports playlist creation and sharing—in fact, SeeqPod's technology was cool enough to be utilized on a number of other sites through its API. The problem, however, is that SeeqPod makes no effort to filter out illicit copyrighted content. Any MP3 it finds on the Web is fair game, regardless of what copyrights the original uploader may be breaking.

Throughout the planet's history, ocean levels and temperatures have had a fairly straightforward relationship: when the earth cools down, ocean levels drop; when it heats up, they rise. The basics of this dynamic are pretty simple. When the climate is warm, land-based ice melts, and much of that water winds up in the oceans. The water in the oceans also occupies more volume, since water expands when it heats up. Cooling the climate reverses both of these processes.

Consistent with the rise registered in global temperatures, various measurements have shown that the oceans have been rising for at least the last century. Yet the steady rise that has been observed covers a fairly complex system, with seasonal variability and changes in the relative contributions of different factors. If we're to provide accurate forecasts of how the ocean levels might respond to further changes in the climate, it will be essential that we understand this complexity. A panel at February's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science tried to tackle the issue.

Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has made impressive market share gains in Europe over the past few years. In the latest marketshare report released by StatCounter, Firefox 3 has finally surpassed Internet Explorer 7 as the most popular browser in Europe in a breakdown by version number.

Firefox 3 holds 35 percent and IE 7 has 34 percent in that region. The recent decline of IE 7 in the past week can largely be attributed to the release of IE 8, Microsoft's new browser. According to StatCounter, IE 8 has grown to 2.3 percent in Europe, with most of those users upgrading from IE 7. This change was enough to put Firefox 3 on top. IE 6, however, still has 11 percent marketshare, which means that all users of Microsoft's browser across all versions still outnumber the total number of Firefox users.

Ars has just one question for PhD student Arvind Narayanan and his advisor Vitaly Shmatikov: why must you continually shatter our illusions? Despite the all-seeing, all-knowing panopticon that is the Internet, some of us like to dream our simple dreams of anonymity and privacy; we choose to believe that our Netflix movie recommendations do not identify us; and we hold on to the belief that we can remain comfortably anonymous behind the veil of our Pumpalumpkin Twitter account.

But like the yapping Toto at the end of the Wizard of Oz, Narayanan and Shmatikov take delight in ripping back the curtain, exposing the great and terrible Oz as nothing more than a scrawny academic.

Their newest paper, "De-anonymizing social networks," is yet another attack on the idea that data can be easily anonymized by stripping out a few bits of personally identifiable information (PII). Much of their work over the last few years is built on the premise that PII extends far beyond names and addresses; in many datasets, the very structure of the data provides all sorts of clues that can be deciphered with only a few bits of information.

Jimmy Wales is best known for his role in founding Wikipedia, but he is also involved in Wikia, a startup focused on fostering online communities that take a wiki-like approach to community-driven content. In that role, he has to balance his commitment to open information against profitability and the potential for growth, a balancing act made more difficult by the current economic downturn. The hard economic realities hit home this week, as Wales announced the termination of a project, Wikia Search, that he has spent several years developing and promoting.

Wikia search was first announced back in 2006; the following year, it purchased a distributed search indexing service called Grub. In keeping with the emphasis on open information, the Grub project was made open source, allowing anyone to look over the algorithms involved in generating search results. After an extended test period, the site finally went live last year.

Charlie Nesson isn't one for small gestures—the Harvard law professor is known as "Billion Dollar Charlie," after all, and he was one of the lead lawyers in the famous industrial dumping case that became the book (and then the movie) A Civil Action. So when he took on the defense of a 25-year old Boston University physics grad student who was accused of sharing copyrighted music online, the case suddenly promised to be more than usually interesting. It has not disappointed so far.

But it has also seemed like a bit of a circus, what with attempts to depose lawyers from the other side, the filing of official apologies, motions on webcasting the trial, threats of judicial sanctions, and Nesson's desire to record everything—including typically-private lawyer-to-lawyer conference calls. Things grew strange enough that even noted RIAA scourge Ray Beckerman wrote, "To you law students and young lawyers out there; please don't think you can learn anything from this case. Just ignore everything you are seeing from both sides. I have seen more bizarre filings from both sides' lawyers than I would imagine possible."

Imaging this. You're a huge company whose name rhymes with Oogle. You release a phone that is sold both locked and unlocked, so that it can theoretically be used with any GSM-compliant carrier. The phone is also used, however unofficially, in many countries where tethering is perfectly permissible. You advertise your platform as open and welcoming.

Now imagine this: some registered developers create a tethering application and submit it to your Oogle marketplace. What do you do? Do you (a) let it be, and trust the customers to use or not use it according to their contracted terms of service? Or do you (b) yank the application from sale and cite a part of the development agreement that says, "These distribution agreements may require the involuntary removal of Products in violation of the Device manufacturer’s or Authorized Carrier’s terms of service"?

Judge Janet Half of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut made history on March 31 when she sentenced Ovidiu-Ionut Nicola-Roman, a 23-year-old native of Romania to 50 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. This is the first time a foreign national has been tried and convicted as a phisher in the United States, which may be why Judge Half chose the sentence that she did. The intended message is quite clear—if we catch you at this, you're going to pay for it.

Of all the expanded investigative powers authorized by Congress since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, few have proved as controversial—or as consistent a source of embarrassment to federal law enforcement—as National Security Letters. Though audits by the Inspector General have uncovered widespread improprieties in the use of the investigative tool which allows the FBI to demand certain telecommunications and financial records without the need for a court order, a 2007 effort to further constrain NSLs stalled in committee.

Now, with a new administration and a sturdier Democratic majority in place, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) on Monday reintroduced the National Security Letters Reform Act. The bill would significantly tighten the rules for NSLs—which can currently be used to obtain records "relevant" to an investigation, whether or not they pertain to someone even suspected of wrongdoing—and the gag orders that typically accompany them.

In recent months, most of the news about Google focused on the cutbacks it has made to both staff and experimental projects. On Monday, however, the search giant announced a major expansion, a venture capital fund with full Google branding: Google Ventures. In contrast to some of the efforts of Google.org, these investments will be all about profit, and the company is taking great pains to ensure potential investees that the money will come with no strings attached. Those assurances, however, come in a message that's fairly mixed.

This is not Google's first foray into investing, but the company's past efforts were placed under its charitable arm, Google.org. These investments were mixed with grants, and had a clear focus on things like alternative energy and emerging diseases. Google Ventures, in contrast, doesn't appear to have any specific goals beyond "making money from the investment." There is the possibility that there will be some overlap—areas of interest highlighted by the announcement include clean tech, biotech, and health care—but those investments will be made alongside those in software, consumer Internet, and other businesses. Google promises that its ventures will borrow "the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms."