Articles from Technology Review

For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web. Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. (Read Full Article)

In 1903, as a last-ditch effort to maintain direct current as the standard for distributing electricity around the United States, Thomas Edison presided over a notorious event meant in part to demonstrate the danger of alternating current: the electrocution of Topsy, a circus elephant deemed a threat to humans, by a 6,600-volt AC charge. Edison's stunt was pure fear-mongering (DC being equally dangerous at high voltage), and it failed: our grid today is primarily AC. But a little over a century after Topsy's collapse, it is AC that looks increasingly wobbly. Thanks to growing power consumption by digital devices of all kinds, DC power is making a comeback, this time on its own merits. Anything that uses transistors relies on direct current, the flow of electricity in one direction. That explains why PCs, iPhones, and flat-screen TVs all have converter boxes to turn the alternating current in ...

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Apple is feeling heat from Greenpeace today. The environmental group singled out the image-conscious IT leader for building data centers in regions that rely heavily on coal in its yearly report rankings of cloud computing companies. Apple gets 55 percent of its power from coal, according to Greenpeace, which is about the same as the nation’s overall energy mix, but higher than all other 14 ranked companies. More and more, West Coast tech companies are building their U.S. facilities on the east coast and around Chicago, where coal power is plentiful and cheap. Greenpeace criticized Apple because it has no data center policy that takes clean energy into account. The company got an “F” grade for infrastructure siting as its iCloud data center rises in Maiden, North Carolina, where the local utility Duke Energy relies mostly on coal and nuclear power. Apple, shot back in a statement calling ...

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How much electricity does sharing a photo on Facebook take? How much carbon does it put into the atmosphere? Facebook doesn't reveal how much energy it uses. But overall, the vast computer farms that handle Internet data now use up 1.3 percent of electrical generation globally. Facebook's energy use has been growing particularly fast. It processes more than 250 million photo uploads each day, and some two million likes and comments every minute. Energy is foremost a competitive issue for Facebook. The computers, facilities, personnel, and electricity needed to keep your profile up-to-date, and available anywhere, are the company's largest single expense. That's one reason Facebook began to design and build more energy-efficient server farms from scratch. Its first data center, opened last April in Prineville, Oregon, uses 38 percent less energy to do the same work as other facilities, according to the company.

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Iceland's main exports are aluminum and fish. Now the isolated nation is hoping to offer the world a new commodity: a cheap, guiltless way to store its data. In February, a startup called Verne Global opened a large server farm on an old NATO base near Iceland's main airport and began offering "100% renewable" computing services to the rest of the world. It's one of three data centers in Iceland and part of what Iceland's government hopes will be a new local industry.

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In 2003 Martìn Casado found himself with no small challenge on his hands: he needed to reinvent the technology that underpins the Internet. It had been developed decades earlier and was proving unsuited to an era of cyberwarfare.

Casado, then a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had been approached by a U.S. intelligence agency with a thorny problem. Computer networking technology allowed intelligence agents and other government workers worldwide to stay connected to one another at all times. Field agents could instantly share data seized in a raid with experts anywhere in the world. But the fact that so many computer networks were enmeshed also aided enemy hackers. Once they gained entry to one system, they could hop across networks to search for other treasures. The agency (Casado won't say which one) told him it wanted to keep its large network but reserve the ability to ...

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Inside the huge data centers operated by Internet companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, information is processed at blistering speed, but it still has to be moved between different machines through relatively slow wiring. In theory, this bottleneck could be avoided by adding wired links between racks, but that would be very expensive and, short of a complete architectural redesign, not particularly practical. Transmitting data wirelessly would be simpler, but achieving the required speed would normally require a line-of-sight connection, which is impossible in a packed data center. Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Intel's labs in Oregon have come up with a clever solution: bouncing wireless signals off the ceiling, which they say could boost data transmission speeds by 30 percent. Congestion caused by short bursts of activity inside data centers is a growing problem, says Heather Zheng, an associate professor of computer science at ... (Read Full Article)

Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation. In a hangarlike building where General Electric once assembled steam turbines, a $100 million battery manufacturing facility is being constructed to make products using a chemistry never before commercialized on such a large scale. The sodium–metal halide batteries it will produce have been tested and optimized over the last few years by a team of materials scientists and engineers at GE's sprawling research center just a few miles away. Now some of the same researchers are responsible for reproducing those results in a production facility large enough to hold three and a half football fields. (Read Full Article)

Three years ago, software provider SAP was informed by one of its customers, a large European telecommunications company, that their business relationship would cease unless SAP produced a report detailing its energy use and greenhouse-gas footprint. A growing number of companies headquartered in Europe, as SAP is, were producing such documents along with their traditional annual reports. "It went from a nice-to-have to a must-have," says Rami Branitzky, the managing director of SAP Labs North America. (Read Full Article)

An Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity price fluctuations could save data-hungry companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon millions of dollars each year in electricity costs. A study from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the networking company Akamai suggests that such Internet businesses could reduce their energy use by as much as 40 percent by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day. (Read Full Article)