itwbennett writes "A new data center being built in Helsinki, scheduled to go live at the end of January, will generate energy and deliver hot water for the city. The data center is located in an old bomb shelter and is connected to the Helsinki public energy company's district heating system, which works by pumping boiling water through a system of pipes to households in Helsinki. The recycled heat from the data center, could add about 1 percent to the total energy generated by the energy company's system in the summer." The article doesn't say what the overall efficiency of the heat recovery is. Researchers at MIT are working on a new energy-conversion technology based on quantum dots that they say has already demonstrated 40% of the Carnot efficiency limit — 4 times what is achieved by current commercial thermoelectric devices. The researchers believe they can reach 90% of the Carnot limit.

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The latest version of VirtualBox delivers some compelling new features, including support for live migration and branched snapshots. Migration capabilities reflect VirtualBox's potential for ascending into the enterprise arena.

Seven restaurants have sued the maker of a bank card-processing system for failing to secure the product from a Romanian hacker who breached their systems.

RasputinAXP writes "Verizon has changed their FiOS AUP effective yesterday, and added an interesting new clause to their specific examples that we're all familiar with: "it is a violation of the Agreement and this AUP to ... post off-topic information on message boards, chat rooms or social networking sites.' At this point, every FiOS-based Slashdot user is breaking the new AUP."

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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Jack Dorsey's Square Is (Almost) Open For Business  —  We've been tracking Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's Square since May when we first got the details on the new mobile phone payment service.  —  Today the company unveiled its website for the first time, and they continue to test the product in private beta.

A Princeton researcher finds himself bombarded with demands to pay up after swapping adult movies online—but he didn't do it. It appears to be another case of extremely-lazy IP "enforcement" using bad BitTorrent data collection.

Apple has long been rumored to integrate video conferencing capabilities in the iPhone, and most expected Skype to incorporate such a feature in ...

duguk writes "Microsoft has confirmed that it is investigating a problem described as the 'black screen of death,' which affects Windows 7 — and reports suggest it affects Vista and XP, too. The firm said it was looking into reports that suggest its latest security update, released on Tuesday 25 November, caused the problem. The error means that users of Windows 7 and earlier operating systems see a totally black screen after logging on to the system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes / Hardware 2.0:
XP's usage share down, Win 7, Firefox & IE8 up  —  Data released by web metrics company Net Applications indicates that the release of Windows 7 to the general public has put a significant dent into Windows XP's usage share.  —  For the November period, web usage of XP dropped by 1.45%, while Vista's usage share only dropped by 0.2%.

Digg has poached Keval Desai away from Google as their new Vice President of Product, we’ve confirmed from the company. Desai’s last day at Google is today.