Want to know how much your consumption habits are contributing to global warming? Climate Counts, a new nonprofit organization, now lets you see how companies rank in the fight against climate change before you go shopping.

On its recently launched website, Climate Counts scores 56 companies from 0 to 100 based on how they measure their greenhouse gas emissions, their plans to reduce them, their stance on legislation, and how fully they disclose these activities. The methodology focuses heavily on public disclosure of activities and policies, so the emphasis is on which companies talk the climate change talk, but not necessarily on which ones follow words with actions.

Canon comes out on top with a score of 77, while Amazon.com, Wendy's, Burger King and CBS find themselves at the very bottom of the climate-friendly ladder. The New York Times reports that Climate Counts gave Amazon.com a zero because researchers could not find relevant data about its role in climate change. Amazon's response? Climate Counts just didn't look very hard. 

I'm not sure what kind of impact the group thinks it can have on consumption patterns, but I highly doubt it'll be convincing die-hard Pepsi fans (score: 26) to switch to Coke (score: 57) anytime soon. At best, these endeavors are good for the embarrassment factor they create. Maybe now, companies at the bottom will feel a need to step up their efforts—or at least make their policies easier to find.

Back in April, Christine flagged the effort by Google and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to map the atrocities committed in Darfur using images from Google Earth. That undertaking is now joined by the Eyes on Darfur project, which allows Web surfers to view before-and-after high-resolution satellite images of destroyed villages in Darfur and eastern Chad, as well as monitor a dozen villages currently at risk. Launched this month by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Amnesty International, the project aims to add images from commercial satellites to the online database every few days in order to monitor vulnerable areas and create a record of abuses committed. 

Of course, Sudanese President Omar Bashir probably doesn't even care that the world is watching. This is, after all, the same guy who appointed Ahmed Harun in charge of dealing with the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Harun, formerly Sudan's minister of the interior, was indicted in April by the ICC for allegedly coordinating murders and rapes of civilians in Darfur through funding and inciting janjaweed militias over the past several years. It's a gross irony that he's now in charge of helping and protecting the same people he's been accused of terrorizing. But then, that's just business as usual in Khartoum these days.

Yet U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon seems cautiously optimistic that his new agreement with Bashir on a peacekeeping force will finally put a stop to the violence. With Eyes on Darfur, we'll be able to see for ourselves just how well that deal is working.

Last month, Passport blogged about an online newspaper in Pasadena, California, that hired two journalists in India to cover the meetings of the Pasadena City Council, which are broadcast over the Internet. Many U.S. reporters are understandably outraged. They believe that important nuances will be neglected if Indian reporters don't understand the local culture and institutions, and aren't physically present to report the news. Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten has even written a humorous article in which he attempts to cover a meeting of the legislature of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, after viewing a webcast, to show how ridiculous it must be to report from a hemisphere away. 

But just how well are the two Indian journalists—one of whom is a journalism graduate from the University of California, Berkeley—actually doing? I visited the website of the newspaper and found a couple of decently written articles by Nisha Ramakrishnan, whom I confirmed was one of the Indian journalists. They were nothing like the joke of an article that Weingarten wrote. Perhaps an Indian journalist can write better about city government in the United States than a top U.S. journalist can write about state government in India?

Still, the offshoring of journalism can only go so far. When it comes to politics, much of the juicy news comes from the informal discussion that happens before and after official meetings, when the webcam isn't recording. If someone says something confusing or shocking at a meeting, it's important to be able to chase the person down right afterward and ask for a clarification. And how in the world would you be able to write about a local fire? For these reasons, American journalism won't die. I say let the experiment with offshored journalism continue.

Yesterday, McAfee Site Advisor released its yearly report on "The State of Search Engine Safety." Perhaps inspired by the Department of Homeland Security, the study provides a colorful graph illustrating the level of risk associated with the most popular keywords: Red means "high danger," yellow "medium danger," and green is for the secure stuff.

You would think that porn sites are the biggest magnets of spyware and viruses, but it's actually innocent-looking words like "BearShare" and "screensaver" that are most likely to cause you trouble.  Also, beware of "mp3" or "ipod nano," as the con men of the web find file-sharing software and technological gadgets to be potent honey for gullible flies.

Gossip lovers are another frequent target: The combination "Brad Pitt + Jennifer Aniston," for example, often leads to dangerous web ambushes. The work of overeager Jolie fans, perhaps?

Mark Ralston/AFP

Has China's Communist Party reversed its position on Internet cafes? Beijing has been notoriously suspicious of the country's 120,000 Internet cafes for years, and has staged high profile crackdowns on many. Just two months ago, the government announced a moratorium on the opening of new Internet cafes for one year.

Today, however, a party official seemed to signal that the current policy is hopeless. Zhang Xiaoliang, chief of the Communist Youth League Central Committee's rights protection division, said that access to the Internet is—wait for it—a right. Well, sort of. Here's what Zhang said today:

A healthy environment and healthy online content should be offered to all kids [...] You can't stop kids using Internet cafes just because they are poorly managed."

Of course, it has to be the right kind of Internet, which is, presumably, a highly censored Internet. Still, beginning Friday, China's Law on the Protection of Minors will declare:

Nonprofit Internet service infrastructures within communities shall be free or offered at a discounted price, as well as provide a safe and healthy online service for minors."

So all kids should not only have access to the Internet, but it should be free or at least very inexpensive. I guess it's a start.

One of the essays in FP's 21 Solutions to Save the World package that has attracted the most attention online is Mikko Hyppönen's solution for preventing the growing problem of online banking fraud, specifically the "phishing" technique of luring trusting users to fake bank websites and then stealing their information. Hyppönen proposes to create a special Web domain just for banks, and make securing such a domain so costly and difficult that only genuine banks would be able to obtain one. I asked Hyppönen, who is chief research officer at F-Secure, to respond to critics of his idea. Here is his response.

Hyppönen: We've been pushing for an initiative to get a secure top-level domain (like ".bank" or ".safe") for some time now. We've received lots of questions and just plain criticism over the whole idea—most notably, from Larry Seltzer in his prominent blog.

So let me collect the most typical challenges to the idea, and answer them in turn. (below the jump)

What do you do if you are a struggling website peddling local Pasadena, Ca., news, but can't afford to hire more U.S. reporters? Outsource the job of covering all things Pasadena to Bangalore. That's exactly what James Macpherson, publisher of Pasadena Now, has done, offering to pay two India-based journalists he found on Bangalore's craigslist site a combined $20,800 annual salary in order to watch Pasadena City Council meetings on the Internet and cover the local government beat. It's a strategy Reuters has also adopted, hiring Indian journalists to write Wall Street stories based on wire reports and news releases.

Macpherson defends his offshoring move by telling the Associated Press, "Whether you're at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you're still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview." He's got a point; a lot of journalism is done from a desk, thanks to technologies that put more information than you'll ever need at your fingertips, and the world's an email or phone call away. But he overlooks a crucial hurdle: simple time differences. I'll be impressed if his new Indian reporters successfully pull off local investigative pieces, as Macpherson intends, from 12.5 hours away. Not impossible, obviously, but harder for fast-moving news stories. But perhaps the news cycle in Pasadena isn't so rushed.

Since the 2004 campaign, more and more U.S. politicians have latched on to YouTube as a way to "go viral" and reach the increasingly powerful "netroots". Witness Democratic presidential long shot Bill Richardson's clever new job interview ad, which has already been viewed over 50,000 times since Tuesday. And as Kevin Drum cynically observed yesterday, the real prize for the attention-starved New Mexico governor will be when the New York Times writes "another thumbsucker about the power of new media, complete with chin scratching quotes from [new media gurus] Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis."

Well, here's something altogether new for the gurus to ponder: politicians who wish to be journalists. Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey recently debuted his own YouTube channel, where he has so far advertised not himself, but ... YouTube. Here's Markey's interview with YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley:

Outlook just quarantined the following message in my in box, which came from a spoofed worldbank.org email address:

Urge Wolfowitz to resign!

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz's girlfriend, Shaha Riza, for whom Wolfowitz arranged not only jobs, incredible pay raises, automatic "outstanding" ratings in performance reviews, but also -- apparently -- a security clearance, ...

Attachment is Shaha Riza's salary account. It's unbelievable!

Attached was a highly suspicious file named account.mdb, a Microsoft Access document that likely contains some nasty macros. On the one hand, it's somewhat impressive that spammers are following current events and targeting people likely to be following them. On the other, this virus would probably have been much more effective back in April when the story first broke and everyone wanted to know more details about Riza's salary package.

Pop psychologists and canine aficionados theorize that you can tell a lot about a person by the kind of dog they own. And there's a corollary to this theorem: that people with similar taste in dogs make great couples.

Now, it just got easier for dog owners to meet and, perhaps, to fall in love. The aptly-named SNIF Labs—Social Networking in Fur, that is—is finally set to begin beta-testing a hotly anticipated new product that turns dogs into walking personal ads.

The technology, which was developed at MIT, sounds very cool indeed:

When two dogs wearing [SNIF's special radio-enabled] tags come within range of each other, the tags start to swap dog and even owner information. Once owners are back home and using the company's social-networking service, they can trade information about their dogs and themselves online.

"Social networking" is the concept that powers smash website successes like MySpace and Facebook.  (There's even one called Dogster.) But this new tool strikes me as having a far greater potential for abuse if it isn't implemented very carefully. The company says it has enacted numerous technological safeguards in order to allay privacy fears, such as that SNIF tags would enable stalkers or identity thieves. But, of course, it won't be long before unscrupulous spammers figure out a way to exploit this new technology for their own ends. It'll be interesting to see how they do it.

PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP

It seemed like a good idea at the time, no doubt. Ian Proud, the head of the political section at the British Embassy in Thailand, agreed to guest-blog for The Nation, an English-language daily in Bangkok.

He got more than he bargained for, though. It's since been taken down, but Proud's picture was initially published on the blog. That set off a string of comments from Web surfers alleging they had seen him in Bangkok's notorious red-light districts:

Simon Peltier wrote, "I saw him walking arm-in-arm with a girl that could only be described as '2 dollar whore.' I bet that girl got a visa no problem."

Other postings claimed to be authored by the diplomat, but weren't, Proud said in a telephone interview Wednesday, noting one in particular that said: "Yes, I did go with prostitutes during my tenure here with the Briyish [sic] Embassy, but that does not make me a bad person."

"My syntax is a lot better than that for a start," Proud said, not denying familiarity with the red-light districts but insisting he did not patronize them on "a regular basis."

"I'm not going to complain that I've never been there. But at the same time, the suggestion that I'm some sort of upholder of the sex trade in Bangkok ..." he trailed off. "It's pathetic, frankly."

Well okay then.

David Silverman/Getty Images

Tono, a rural village in Japan that lacks an obstetrician, has adopted a creative strategy for helping pregnant women: using cellphones to transmit real-time data to doctors some 40 miles away. When the doctors determine that the woman is ready to deliver, the woman leaves for the nearest city with a maternity ward. But cellphones aren't just helping high-tech Japan with its critical shortage of obstetricians, they're also set to fundamentally transform medical access in the developing world.

In February, the U.S. government and a number of companies in the mobile phone industry launched Phones-for-Health, a $10 million initiative to improve health systems in the developing world. The public-private partnership aims to harness the impressive cellphone penetration rates in developing countries to bolster health initiatives. Health workers in the field will carry cellphones containing an application that lets them enter health data on patients, which they then send to a central database. There, it can be analyzed and mapped by the system and made immediately available to health officials on the Internet. As Paul Meyer, chairman of Voxiva, the company that has designed the underlying software, explains,

Health workers will also be able to use the system to order medicine, send alerts, download treatment guidelines, training materials and access other appropriate information ... Managers at the regional and national level can access information in real-time via a Web-based database."

Eventually, cellphones could even be used to store individuals' medical records, including x-rays and 3-D medical scan graphics. This technology is just coming to the United States, but hopefully it will only be a matter of time before people in poorer areas can use it to access, record and clarify their own medical histories where hospitals and clinics do not.

There's an emerging economy that's growing fast right now. But it's neither China nor India. In fact, it's not even a real economy. It's the virtual economy of the QQ coin.

The QQ coin is virtual play money that was created by the Chinese Internet business Tencent Holdings. (QQ is the name of Tencent's mascot, a penguin.) Originally, the QQ coins—which cost one yuan each—were intended to be used to buy virtual products, such as magical swords for online games and virtual flowers for Internet pals. Skilled video-gamers could also win QQ coins for their top scores.

Now, though, websites are using QQ coins as payment for real-world items such as CDs and makeup. For the Chinese, it's a practical way to make purchases since credit cards aren't very common in China yet.

But as the QQ coin makes the leap into the real world, it's creating all sorts of real-world concerns. Successful gamers can make real money by winning online assets and then selling them for cash to poorly performing gamers. (Imagine if top basketball teams could sell their winning points!) Additionally, traders can make real money off virtual currency speculation by selling QQ coins for cash at discount prices that vary based on supply and demand. Recently, one former Chinese executive got sent to prison for virtual embezzlement.

One bigger concern is that when virtual currency gets linked to real currency through an exchange rate, it could potentially cause a real-world monetary crisis. The Chinese government has tried placing capital controls on QQ coins, but that has just led to scarcity, driving up their real-world value by 70 percent in recent weeks.

All this makes me wonder, is it possible for a real-world poor person to become a virtual millionaire, or better yet, become a real-world millionaire by selling virtual money?

So I was fiddling around on Google Maps, inspired by an entry I saw on kottke.org, which linked to driving directions from New York to Dublin: "Step 23: Swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3,462 mi." That would put you at Le Havre, France, from which you'd presumably drive in the Chunnel to Dover, England.  From there, you drive to Holyhead, Wales, hop a ferry to Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, and then drive up to Dublin.

I wondered what would happen if  I asked for directions from, say, Washington, DC to Helsinki? Again: "Step 21: Swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3,462 mi.," again landing in Le Havre, then driving through Belgium, the Netherlands, northern Germany, Denmark, crossing a bridge to Sweden, and hopping a ferry to Helsinki. I started trying out other combinations: Miami to Berlin, Atlanta to Bucharest,  Denver to Rome. They all direct you to drive to Boston, then swim 3,462 miles across the Atlantic to Le Havre. Google estimates it will take you 32 days and 7 hours to get from San Francisco to Athens.

I started testing out directions using destinations outside Europe. Los Angeles to Beijing, Dallas to Mexico City, Chicago to Casablanca. No cigar ... no directions available. So it looks like Google points us only to select countries in Europe. And to get anywhere else on the continent, all roads first lead to France!