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Summary: The composite sketch of a Google glasses consumer isn’t pretty.

Google is reportedly cooking up glasses that will be based on Android and feed information and data to your eyes in real time.

The New York Times’ Nick Bilton writes:

According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones,” or $250 to $600.

Bilton has a bunch of other details, but let’s cut to the chase. These goggles are going to go over just like Google TV did. I can’t help but think of the composite sketch of the person who would buy these things.

That composite sketch is a total dork.

• Do you really need GPS in your glasses? No.
• Do you really need a data connection in your eyes? Nope.
• Are you really going to pay more than $100 for what essentially is a gag gift for nerds? No.
• Do you want Google ads in your glasses (you know they’re coming)?
• Do you want data—not to mention tracking—following you around everywhere? Probably not.

In the end, it’s hard to see how these Google glasses contribute much of anything. Even worse Google glasses threaten to take the life out of what should be a mindful walk in the park. Skip the goggles. Enjoy the walk.

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The Center for Digital Democracy sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission Wednesday asking it to find Google in violation of a 2011 consent order, conduct an investigation and request the search giant postpone the rollout of its new privacy policies.

In the 16-page complaint, the CDD says Google failed to accurately and honestly inform users of the real reason for changes its privacy policy, which go into effect March 1.

The CDD claims the changes are not designed to make a users life easier, as Google has stated, but designed to fuel competition against Facebook, incorporate social media data and to boost Google’s advertising business, specifically to grow its display advertising to a $200 billion business.

See also: Irreparable injury if FTC fails to police Google? | Google fires back at MS privacy claims| Protecting user data in the post-PC era | Congress demands FTC investigate Google’s Safari tracking

“[Google] has sugarcoated its decision in a manner designed to mislead users,” the CDD said. “It should have informed them of cross-platform data integration for targeting and the privacy implications therein.”

The letter was addressed to Donald Clark, secretary of the FTC, and was signed by Jeff Chester, executive director of CDD.

In October 2011, Google was found by the FTC to have used deceptive privacy practices in rolling out its Goggle Buzz social service and the search giant agreed to a consent order and other penalties as part of a settlement.

CDD is joining the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in asking the FTC to enforce the consent order, and a chorus of voices, including the European Commission, in asking Google to delay implementation of its privacy policies.

The CDD’s letter comes a day after EPIC filed a court brief as part of its lawsuit against the FTC. The suit demands the agency enforce the Google consent order.

Google released a statement Tuesday reiterating what it has said previously: “Our updated privacy policy will make our privacy practices easier to understand, and it reflects our desire to create a seamless experience for our signed-in users. We’ve undertaken the most extensive notification effort in Google’s history, and we’re continuing to offer choice and control over how people use our services. Of course we are happy to discuss this approach with regulators globally.”

An FTC spokeswoman said the agency has received the CDD compliant, but cannot comment at this time. The FTC, however, argued last week in its lawsuit with EPIC that the group’s request erodes the flexibility inherent in the FTC’s enforcement authority. The agency also said an action against it would ignore precedent that prevents rulings that compel enforcement.

Google created waves Jan. 24 when it announced it would integrate its myriad of privacy policies into a single one and would combine information about users across all its services.

In its letter, CDD says Google “fails to tell users in its principal privacy change communications how such data collection, profiling, and targeting practices impact – and potentially harm – their privacy.”

CDD claims Google was deceptive in suggesting that the changes will benefit consumers as part of video, blog and other announcements to its millions of users.

The CDD laid out a litany of changes in Google’s user targeting and digital marketing operations as proof that privacy policy changes were designed to align with Google’s business goals and not user privacy. The made reference to a 2010 complaint it sent to the FTC on digital advertising exchanges and its concerns over privacy and consumer protection.

The group said Google failed to make such information available to users as stipulated by the FTC’s consent order.

CDD said Google’s own research, done with Nielsen in October 2011, showed that cross-platform data gathering and targeting capabilities is required to increase advertising effectiveness across TV, PC, smartphone and tablets.

CDD said Google’s privacy policy should explain that strategy to users.

In addition, CDD said the privacy policy should inform users that YouTube tracking aids in creating profiles for user targeting, better explain the use of targeting on its Ad Exchange, and accurately reflect the privacy implications of Google’s “Zero Moment of Truth” initiative that incorporates user location data.

The CDD letter concluded by stating: “the evidence is clear that Google’s business practices, many announced and implemented prior to the January 2012 new privacy plan, are the core reason why it is changing its policy,” and asks for the FTC to investigate, hand out any necessary punishments, and “immediately request Google postpone its planned privacy changes until an investigation is complete.”

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Rays of the winter sun bounce off gleaming mirrors on the tiny lake of Colignola in Italy, where engineers have built a cost-effective prototype for floating, rotating solar panels.

“You are standing on a photovoltaic floating plant which tracks the sun, it’s the first platform of its kind in the world!” said Marco Rosa-Clot, a professor at Florence University, proudly showing off his new project.

Rosa-Clot and his team say they are revolutionising solar power and that their floating flower-petal-like panels soaking up the Tuscan sun have already attracted a lot of interest from international buyers.

Standard solar panels on buildings or in fields have been criticised for taking up valuable agricultural land, being unsightly and losing energy through overheating — issues the floating plants would resolve.

The Floating Tracking Cooling Concentrator (FTCC) system is designed to exploit unused areas of artificial reservoirs or disused quarries.

While the water keeps the panels at low temperatures, reflectors are positioned to maximise solar capture at different times of day, making it more efficient than a traditional installation, Rosa-Clot said.

Marco Rosa-Clot (right) and his team of engineers have built a cost-effective prototype for the floating solar panels
AFP/File – Fabio Muzzi

The head of Scintec, a small family business which produces a variety of renewable energy and industrial devices, Rosa-Clot said the pilot plant set up on the lake near Pisa, Tuscany, was a model of efficiency.

“It’s a small-scale design, 30 kilowatts, which would suffice for a dozen or so families. The standard is set at 3kW per apartment,” he said.

At an estimated price of around 1,600 euros per kW including installation, a plant the size of Colignola could cost some 48,000 euros ($63,000).

Scintec says its system costs 20 percent less than ground-based structures.

The flat panels are winged by reflectors and sit on raft-like structures which are anchored to the lake bed with a pylon.

Decked out in jeans and jacket, the engineer explained the benefit that a place like sun-kissed Sicily with its 75 square kilometres (29 square miles) of artificial reservoirs and lakes could draw from the system.

“If we covered just 10 percent of that area with floating photovoltaic panels, we would have one gigawatt of power installed,” he said — enough to power 10 million 100-watt light bulbs.

Italian engineers pioneer floating solar panels Duration: 02:11
AFPTV

Engineer Raniero Cazzaniga, who works on the project, said that some people think classic solar installations are spoiling the landscape.

“Our system is designed for low-lying quarries. The installation is only about a metre (three feet) high and usually you can’t see it until you get to the water’s edge. It is not at all intrusive,” he said.

Their cost-efficient project has sparked international interest.

Rosa-Clot said: “Reactions from abroad have been very positive. Some Koreans came to Pisa to see us and we signed a three-year contract giving them a license to build this sort of installation in South Korea.”

The Korean company Techwin has built a floating photovoltaic plant using the FTCC technology, and in Italy the Terra Moretti group has installed one on an irrigation reservoir at its winery near Livorno.

Rosa-Clot and his team are in talks with “Germans, French and Italian companies” hoping to stay ahead of the curve on water-based solar energy.

“There is no miraculous solution to the energy problem,” he said. “Our project will make it possible to have a far greater number of photovoltaic installations at an ever lower cost.”

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A global patchwork of conflicting laws and regulations could hobble the growth of the cloud computing market, according to a new study.

The study, commissioned by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), urged governments to move to harmonise the rules to ease the flow of information across borders and allow the full benefit of advances to be realised.

The technology involves storing massive amounts of data and applications on an Internet “cloud” spread globally instead of the traditional method of installing information on users’ machines or company servers.

It enables easy access to and sharing of information anywhere, even while on the move.

But the study, carried out for BSA by IT consulting firm Galexia, said some countries were “placing geographic restrictions on data and considering other limits on outsourcing of work.”

It cited the European Union’s proposed “Data Protection Regulation” which it said “has the potential to undermine its benefits with new, overly prescriptive rules”.

It said the regulations “threaten to undermine the economic advances that a truly global cloud can provide.”

Although developed countries are better prepared individually to support the growth of cloud computing than developing nations, “obstacles remained… due to the lack of alignment in the legal and regulatory environments”, it said.

In China, the country’s Internet filtering schemes “appear to include a strong political element, in that they regularly block sites that expressed political dissent”, the study said.

“Countries that wall themselves off are doing real harm,” BSA president and chief executive Robert Holleyman said in a statement.

“The true benefits of cloud computing come with scale,” he added.

“In a global economy, you should be able to get the technology you need for personal or business use from servers located anywhere in the world. But that requires laws and regulations that let data flow easily across borders,” he said.

“Right now, too many countries have too many different rules standing in the way of the kind of trade in digital services we really need.”

The Washington-based BSA is an industry group that works for copyright protection and counts among its members some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Symantec and Adobe.

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US bookseller Barnes & Noble unveiled a new version of its Nook tablet computer Tuesday, a device with the same $199 price tag as Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

The seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) Nook Tablet also has eight gigabytes of memory like the tablet released by online retail giant Amazon in November.

Apple’s cheapest iPad costs $499. Barnes & Noble released a $249 Nook Tablet with 16 gigabytes of memory in November.

Barnes & Noble also said it was slashing the price of its Nook Color electronic book reader to $169 from the current $199.

The New York-based bookseller also announced its fiscal third-quarter results on Tuesday.

The company said its net profit fell to $52 million in the quarter compared to $60.6 million in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue was up five percent at $2.4 billion in the quarter which ended on January 28.

“Our physical book sales at our stores increased more than four percent over last year,” Barnes & Noble chief executive William Lynch said in a statement.

“Our Nook digital content business continues to grow rapidly,” Lynch added. “According to some of the largest US publishers, we maintained or slightly gained share in the e-book market during the third quarter.”

Barnes & Noble said sales of digital content and Nook tablets and e-readers rose 38 percent during the quarter to $542 million.

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Hacker group Anonymous strongly rejected suggestions on Tuesday that followers could cause a power outage by staging a cyberattack on an electricity grid.

The Anonymous statement came after The Wall Street Journal quoted the head of the US National Security Agency (NSA) as warning that hackers could have the ability within the next year or two to cause a limited power outage.

The newspaper said General Keith Alexander has not publicly expressed such a concern about the power grid but has provided his assessment in meetings at the White House and in other private sessions.

Anonymous, on various Twitter feeds used by the group, accused the NSA director of “alarmist rhetoric & fear-mongering.”

“Why would Anons shut off a power grid? There are ppl on life support/other vital services that rely on it. Try again NSA. #FearMongering,” Anonymous said in a message on @YourAnonNews.

In addition to rejecting the Journal report, Anonymous also organized a spam attack on the newspaper’s Facebook pages on Tuesday, urging supporters to post comments denouncing the article.

The Journal said the “comment flashmob” was apparently started in Germany.

Anonymous last month briefly knocked the FBI and Justice Department websites offline in retaliation for the US shutdown of file-sharing site Megaupload and members of the group targeted the CIA website earlier this month.

In late 2010, Anonymous attacked the websites of Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and others in retaliation for their decisions to stop working with Julian Assange’s anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks.

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