Does your carbon footprint leave big mark on environment?
The travel site Dopplr has created a tool that lets people know the carbon impact of their trips. Using a set of data developed by a neutral energy firm (AMEE), the calculator can be found at www.dopplr.com/traveller/ me/carbon.
The data is calculated in kilograms of CO2 burned during a trip. One can keep track of total trip consumption by month or over the year.
Our first impression: nice, but not easy to use. If you have a combo trip that includes plane ride and a car trip, we didn’t find a way to combine those into one carbon calculation.
•SnagIt 9.0. How often do you need to capture a screenshot of some Web page you’re using? There’s always the Printscreen key, but that’s not the best choice if you need just some section of the screen or want to combine that image with others.
TechSmith, the company that also produces the smart screencast software package Camtasia, upgraded its SnagIt tool to a version that is state-of-the-art. Another added feature in version 9 is the Web Output option. By adding that feature, a user can quickly send any screen capture to a variety of Web tools, including Skype, WordPress blogs, LiveJournal blogs, and many others.
CLIPPINGS
Court says text messages are private: Workers can expect their text messages to remain private even when they use devices paid for by their employers, a U.S. court has ruled.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said police officers in Ontario, Calif., should, in their case, have the right to keep text messages private from their employer. In this suit, brought against the police department by several police officers, police administration noticed the officers had exceeded monthly data caps, causing excess charges for the phones.
Police officials wondered if the excess charges came from personal use. They called the text-service provider, Arch Wireless, and obtained transcripts of the messages, many of which were personal and included sexual references.
The court ruled that Arch was subject to a federal law prohibiting providers from handing over communication records without the consent of the end user. It also noted the department had a policy of not auditing messages and allowing the officers to pay for overages.
Cyber-threats need to be addressed, says Congressman: Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., is calling for stronger measures to protect vital government computer networks from cyber-attacks and Net threats. Wolf, a critic of Chinese human rights violations, revealed recently that computers in his office had been targeted in recent years by hackers believed to be based in the People’s Republic of China.
Wolf said at a news conference authorities investigated the attacks on four of his office computers in August 2006 and traced them to a computer in China.
The hackers did gain access to sensitive information about identities and locations of some Chinese dissidents and refugees Wolf has been in contact with over the past decade.