Barbara Hernandez

Google plans to become carbon neutral at the same time promote green energy by entering into a 20-year agreement to buy power from an Iowa wind farm. The farm, part of NextEra Energy Resources in Story and Hardin counties, will sell Google 114 megawatts of renewable power. Google says that the energy it will buy is enough to power several of its data centers.

Google reported on its blog that it has long been trying to promote green energy and has pledged to become carbon neutral. In reality, Google will not directly power its server farms with NextEra Energy. The move is a bid to boost renewable energy and secure NextEra Energy's future by helping it grow, Google says. The wind energy Google buys, it explains, will be sold back to the regional grid. That in turn reduces -- by 114 megawatts -- the amount of non-renewable energy created to maintain the regional power grid.

MySpace is showing off today its new, polished look, which is a far cry from the hodge-podge of textboxes featuring strippers and porn star "friends." The "clean new profile" was announced by CEO Sean Percival who revealed his profile page in stark black and white (although won't we kind of miss that passionate purple?)

Like competitor Facebook, MySpace has put the profile on the left and created a MySpace Stream, similar to Facebook's newsfeed, and uploads Twitter status updates.

By the minute things are getting worse for Apple when it comes to the iPhone 4. Steve Jobs is now being directly implicated in iPhone 4 antenna-gate and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) has penned a letter asking Jobs to personally solve the problem. Schumer is calling Apple's current software fix "insufficient."

A new survey reports 73 percent of iPhone owners are "very satisfied" with their purchase - nearly double the satisfaction level of its nearest competitor's phones from HTC. The study was conducted by ChangeWave Research between June 14 to 24 - before the iPhone 4 Death Grip issue became headline news. The iPhone 4 debuted June 24.

It's fair to say when ChangeWave Research was wrapping up its survey an Apple iPhone love fest was peaking. If the survey was taken just a few weeks later it could have led to a completely different outcome.

Search engine Google lost a little ground in search engine traffic in June to both Yahoo and Microsoft sites, but the tech behemoth has nowhere to go but down.

Google has a market share of 62.6 percent, down from 63.7 in May, according to Comscore. Both Yahoo and Microsoft's sites including its flagship search tool, Bing, saw gains, each increasing their numbers from 18.3 to 18.9 percent and 12.1 to 12.7 percent, respectively, from May to June. Yet all three search engines experienced growth year over year, with Bing leading the pack at 77 percent volume growth last year. Google grew 12.7 percent.

File PhotoMicrosoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Monday a bevy of tablets and "smart device" were on their way from the company in the next "several months." Ballmer made the announcement during his keynote speech at the open day of the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C.

NTP, still sailing on a tide of confidence after a $612.5 million patent infringement lawsuit victory over , has now set its sights on the rest of the mobile phone industry: Apple, Google, HTC Corp., LG Electronics Corp., Microsoft and Motorola. The company filed lawsuits against all six mobile phone and tech giants today in federal court in Richmond, Va., for using its email technology patent without permission.

"Use of NTP's intellectual property without a license is just plain unfair to NTP and its licensees," company co-founder Donald E. Stout said in the Wall Street Journal. "We took the necessary action to protect our intellectual property."

Google is paying for research to shut down spammers on . . . Twitter and Facebook?

Graphic: Diego AguirreBy using dozens of Twitter accounts, researchers at Texas A&M University are creating "honeypots," or fake accounts that are supposed to lure spammers, who are eager to spread malware or phish for information, to social networks. And their work is being partially supported by a research grant from an unlikely source -- one of Twitter's online competitors, Google. From the Technology Review:

Artwork: Chip TaylorGoogle has been accused of drive-by spying on members of Congress, including those involved with homeland security, by uploading e-mail or Website viewing information while mapping for its Google Street View. According to a government watchdog group several members of Congress have unsecured wireless networks, including Rep. Jane Harman, D-CA, who heads the intelligence subcommittee for the House Homeland Security committee, and whose home was discovered to house unsecured networks named "harmanmbr" and "harmantheater."

While the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project stated that wireless usage is up in almost all categories, some groups are trending differently than others.

(Editor's Note: The company TracFone contacted PCWorld after this blog posted and offered a rebuttle to points made by Hernandez. TracFone's response to this blog can be found at the bottom of the post.)

Use Pirate Bay to find or swap files? If so, about 4 million of you have just had your accounts hacked and user names, e-mail and Internet addresses compiled by a 23-year-old Argentinian (and two pals) exploiting the site's SQL vulnerabilities. The lead hacker, identified as CH Russo, said he didn't hack for profit or malice, but awareness, which is somewhat suspect. Russo said no accounts, including those of several The Pirate Bay site administrators and moderators, were changed or modified during the hack.

Facebook released a point-by-point rebuttal to an open letter about privacy from consumer watchdog groups this week, saying that it already created measures to protect user privacy and that its instant personalization pilot program has been greatly misunderstood.