5 Energy-Saving Tips for Your Office

Environmental consciousness and convenience don't have to be opposites. Use these tips to green up your home.

(NEWSER) - So you're not ready to give up your car for a bicycle to help the Earth. LiveScience suggests 10 baby steps to going green that won't even cramp your style.

1. Use compact fluorescent light bulbs.
2. Purchase Energy Star-rated appliances, electronics, and lighting.
3. Instead of plastic bags, shop with a reusable tote bag.

Study miscalculates how people use computers: Kaplan

(NEWSER) - A recent study that equates spam’s carbon footprint to that of a whopping 2.4 million homes is fascinating, but completely wrong, Jeremy Kaplan writes in PC Magazine. The researchers traced most of the energy usage to the end user’s computer, but that energy-waster would probably be left on even if no one was manually filtering spam, he points out. More»

New York Times offers tips on cutting computer energy use

(NEWSER) - You’ve got the Prius and the reusable shopping bags, but did you know a PC and monitor perpetually left on use more than twice the kilowatt-hours per year consumed by a fridge? The New York Times reports what you can do to slow your computer’s energy drain:

• Turn it off after your workday. Have it set to sleep when unused, and dump the screensaver.

Watch out evil polluters! These hot new devices are mean, lean and very, very green

(NEWSER) - Companies are zeroing in on the emerging eco-market with painfully cool items like a battery-powered scooter from Vectrix, wind-powered tiki torches from Demakersvan, and speakers made from recycled whiskey barrels by Pioneer Electronics. Popular Science's photo montage of the latest in green technology shows that hip and hippie need no longer be at odds. More»

Small but significant number of cases vulnerable

(NEWSER) - Oops. Now that millions of people have downloaded encrypted information like credit card and bank account numbers onto the Internet, a team of mathematicians and cryptographers have located a crucial flaw in online encryption. The flaw concerns the way the system generates random numbers to create a code critical to protecting digital information. In the system, randomly-generated prime numbers are used to create a public "key," which is used in a formula to encrypt information. The original, randomly generated numbers are kept secret. But in a small but significant number of cases, the random-number key generation system failed to work properly. The researchers found in certain cases that numbers were not truly random, making it possible to determine the secret keys used to generate the public key. The problem can only be fixed by software and Internet operations, not consumers. More»