You've heard of peak oil? Get ready for peak phosphorus:

Researchers in Australia, Europe and the United States have given warning that the element, which is essential to all living things, is at the heart of modern farming and has no synthetic alternative, is being mined, used and wasted as never before.

Massive inefficiencies in the "farm-to-fork" processing of food and the soaring appetite for meat and dairy produce across Asia is stoking demand for phosphorus faster and further than anyone had predicted. "Peak phosphorus," say scientists, could hit the world in just 30 years. Crop-based biofuels, whose production methods and usage suck phosphorus out of the agricultural system in unprecedented volumes, have, researchers in Brazil say, made the problem many times worse. Already, India is running low on matches as factories run short of phosphorus; the Brazilian Government has spoken of a need to nationalise privately held mines that supply the fertiliser industry and Swedish scientists are busily redesigning toilets to separate and collect urine in an attempt to conserve the precious element.

This just might be the coolest vending machine of all time:

Michael Keferl of CScoutJapan reports:

Pushing the button on the vendor won’t exactly pop out a car, but it does dispense a branded tube containing pamphlets on the new models, dealer information, and a sheet of Smart Car stickers featuring the available colors.

Not quite as cool as an actual car vending machine, but ingenious nonetheless. I'm still waiting for MIT's Media Lab to roll out its long-hyped stackable cars, though.

(Hat tip: TreeHugger)

Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images

July 11 could not come fast enough for a few million folks dying to get their hands on the new faster, sleeker, cheaper iPhone 3G. (Count me in.) But what I found most interesting about Steve Jobs's big announcement yesterday is Apple's abandonment of its iPhone business model so far: exclusive carrier agreements.

In the six countries where you can officially get an iPhone, Apple has signed deals with mobile carriers (such as AT&T here in the United States) that give Apple a cut of the revenue from the carriers' service plans. But within weeks of the iPhone's launch last year, a massive global gray market in hacked iPhones emerged -- much to Apple's surprise. The company still made money on iPhone handsets, but it was missing out on millions of dollars in revenue it could have gotten from its partners, since more than a million new iPhone users were using hacked phones on different carriers. So, instead of pursuing what was clearly an untenable course, Apple yesterday switched gears, dropping plans for exclusivity agreements in new markets. In other words, they learned from the gray market that their business model simply wasn't the best way to go:

We've changed our business model, from getting a cut of the future revenues to just a more traditional model," Mr. Jobs said in an interview on Monday. "That’s enabled us to roll out around the world much faster."

As for the new business agreement in the States, Apple and AT&T will no longer share revenues as of yesterday. But it still sounds like AT&T will be the exclusive carrier through the end of its multi-year contract, believed to be five years. At the very least, it will be harder to gripe about AT&T's slow download speeds on the new 3G network.

The LA Times recently picked up on an interesting trend. With the dollar plumbing record depths, game manufacturer Nintendo has been shipping more units of its popular, scarce Wii Fit to Europe:

[Nintendo] also is shrewdly maximizing its profit by sending four times as many units to Europe, reaping the benefits of the strong euro, said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. Pachter estimated that Nintendo shipped just 500,000 copies of the game in North America but as many as 2 million units to Europe. "The shortage demonstrates one consequence of the weak dollar. We're seeing companies ignore their largest market simply because they can make a greater profit elsewhere," Pachter said.

With the iPhone going global today, this Nintendo story leads me to wonder if we aren't eventually going to be seeing a similar calculus from Apple. Why keep your inventories high in the United States if you can bank more cash elsewhere? (The potential difference, of course, being that Nintendo is a Japanese company and Apple is American.)

(Hat tip: Slashdot)

Shane Harris makes some explosive allegations in a new article for the National Journal. Experts, citing U.S. officials, believe that China's People's Liberation Army may have shut down power grids in Florida and the northeastern United States, Harris reports:

Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. The intelligence officials said that forensic analysis had confirmed the source, Bennett said. “They said that, with confidence, it had been traced back to the PLA.” These officials believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A 9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected.

If the allegations are true, was this act intentional? Perhaps not, another source tells Harris:

A second information-security expert independently corroborated Bennett’s account of the Florida blackout. According to this individual, who cited sources with direct knowledge of the investigation, a Chinese PLA hacker attempting to map Florida Power & Light’s computer infrastructure apparently made a mistake. “The hacker was probably supposed to be mapping the system for his bosses and just got carried away and had a ‘what happens if I pull on this’ moment.” The hacker triggered a cascade effect, shutting down large portions of the Florida power grid, the security expert said. “I suspect, as the system went down, the PLA hacker said something like, ‘Oops, my bad,’ in Chinese.”

I wonder if Richard Clarke still believes that the real threat from Chinese hackers is industrial espionage.

Already bored with Google Earth? Is Google Transit just too mundane? Then it's high time to go the way of the Phoenix and check out Google Mars:

Google Mars

In collaboration with NASA researchers at Arizona State University, Google Maps has created an interactive map of our neighboring planet, complete with "elevation," "visible," and "infrared" view options, as well as markers indicating space craft landings, dunes, craters, and ridges.

While Google Mars is a pretty cool concept, and its mapping has certainly come a long way from those of the 19th century astronomer Percival Lowell, it appears Mars as a planet doesn't offer quite the diversity of satellite images provided by Earth's mountains, oceans, deserts, and plains.

Google actually admits that without color alteration, "Mars pretty much looks like butterscotch." And according to the principal investigator for the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, images sent back from the spacecraft, which landed on Mars's toffee-like surface this weekend, show a "barren landscape that is kind of lumpy."

Apparently the lumpiness, which orbiting space crafts detected back in 2002, is a sign of underground water ice. But now NASA's Phoenix lander is back to explore the next big question: "But does the ice melt?"

If the answer is yes, then at least we're not alone.

State gifts have a long history of goofiness, (300 lbs of lamb?) but I have to hand it to Bill Gates. His recent gift of a traditional mother of pearl-inlaid X-Box 360 to South Korean president Lee Myung-bak is both beautiful and functional. Plus, it helps boost Microsoft's numbers against Sony for dominance of the South Korean gaming market.

The decoration is the handiwork of Kim Young-jun [pictured above], the head of a manufacturing company called Gookbo. "I got a call from Microsoft Korea last month," Kim said. "They told me something about an Xbox, but I had no idea what that was. I thought they were talking about some kind of black box."

I wonder if Lee will get a free X-Box Live membership as well. It's time to go pwn some noobs. If you're ever on "Call of Duty 4" Lee, my gamertag is "tcd004." See you online!

The full extent extent of the damage caused by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that hit China's Sichuan Province on Monday afternoon is just starting to become clear. It is estimated that about 9,000 people were killed. The quake was felt in Beijing and Shanghai, and in places as far reaching as Taipei, Hanoi and Bangkok.

In order to reassure people and to squelch false rumors, the Chinese government is using SMS text messaging (translated) to mobile phones as well as internet postings to inform people that the areas where they live are not in the seismic zone. Over a million such messages were sent in nearby Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Guizhou Province.

The government plans to use text messaging not only for emergencies, but for various situations relating to the public interest. The plan is part of the government's new openness in information regulations which it says will promote "openness as principle, being closed off as the exception" in an effort to provide timely and accurate information to the public.

The hand of the government doesn't seem so far away when it's reaching you through a device clutched in yours.

Graphic: DARPA

The latest issue of IEEE Spectrum has a fascinating article about the possibility that cylons Chinese or Russian bad guys might build a "backdoor" or a "kill switch" on chips exported to the United States:

Three years ago, the prestigious Defense Science Board, which advises the DOD on science and technology developments, warned in a report that the continuing shift to overseas chip fabrication would expose the Pentagon's most mission-critical integrated circuits to sabotage. The board was especially alarmed that no existing tests could detect such compromised chips, which led to the formation of the DARPA Trust in IC program.

Where might such an attack originate? U.S. officials invariably mention China and Russia. Kenneth Flamm, a technology expert at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration who is now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wouldn't get that specific but did offer some clues. Each year, secure government computer networks weather thousands of attacks over the Internet. "Some of that probing has come from places where a lot of our electronics are being manufactured," Flamm says. "And if you're a responsible defense person, you would be stupid not to look at some of the stuff they're assembling, to see how else they might try to enter the network."

John Randall, a semiconductor expert at Zyvex Corp., in Richardson, Texas, elaborates that any malefactor who can penetrate government security can find out what chips are being ordered by the Defense Department and then target them for sabotage. "If they can access the chip designs and add the modifications," Randall says, "then the chips could be manufactured correctly anywhere and still contain the unwanted circuitry."

How real is this threat? DARPA thinks the U.S. military could be vulnerable:

Dean Collins, deputy director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office and program manager for the Trust in IC initiative... notes that many defense contractors rely heavily on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)—a kind of generic chip that can be customized through software... "If you make a mistake on an FPGA, hey, you just reprogram it," says Collins. "That's the good news. The bad news is that if you put the FPGA in a military system, someone else can reprogram it."

Almost all FPGAs are now made at foundries outside the United States, about 80 percent of them in Taiwan. Defense contractors have no good way of guaranteeing that these economical chips haven't been tampered with. Building a kill switch into an FPGA could mean embedding as few as 1000 transistors within its many hundreds of millions. "You could do a lot of very interesting things with those extra transistors," Collins says.

Steve Jobs's shop recently announced the $278 million purchase of a small computer-chip maker named P.A. Semi—a takeover that most analysts assumed was designed to shore up efficient chip technology for future versions of the iPhone.

But it turns out some of P.A. Semi's best customers are defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and they're not at all comfortable with the company's new latte-drinking, yoga-practicing, peacenik boss. Rumors are flying that Apple will shut down production of a key processor used in "more than 10" different defense systems.

EE Times reports: 

Apple Inc. may have to face the ire of the U.S. Department of Defense following its planned acquisition of P.A. Semi Inc. The startup's PWRficient processor is designed into DoD programs in every major branch of the armed services, said one P.A. Semi customer who expects Apple will end production of the parts.

"We've had customers saying they are going to the DoD on this one," said a source in one of the several companies making embedded computer boards with the processor.

Lends new meaning to the term "iPod Killer," doesn't it?

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

A piece in the USA Today this week highlights the use of open-source information in the U.S. intelligence community. As more information is available on the Web, it is becoming an increasingly important piece of the intel pie -- even making the President's morning briefing. There's a clash since some in the intelligence community feel that the classified sources are the most reliable, but others argue you can learn about your enemy by what he or she says in sources available for all to read. Robert David Steele, ex-CIA and Marine officer, advocates a flip-flop of spending in favor of open-source over more hush-hush sources:

I'm not a librarian saying open sources are cool and we can do this...I'm a very good former spy saying open sources are cool and we can do this."

Though it's always a battle to tell fact from fiction online, it's sure easier than getting access to classified material. Given that 19,000 FBI personnel are still waiting for desktop Internet access, it seems reasonable to devote some more resources to this type of intelligence.

In his piece "The Next Generation of Terror" for the current issue of FP, Marc Sageman describes the new reality of "leaderless jihad," in which extremist ideology and terrorist tactics spread through online social networks rather than hierarchical organizations. In light of this, it's encouraging to see some intelligence professionals shifting their focus to the dangers in plain view.

Last month, pro-Palestinians, who hope Jerusalem will be the capital of a future Palestinian state, were angered when the board game Monopoly listed "Jerusalem, Israel," as a candidate city for its world edition. Recently, though, the controversy went the other way around at Facebook, the social-networking site.

Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank, in places such as Maale Adumin and Ariel, were angered when Facebook automatically listed their hometowns as being located in Palestine. Facebook heard their outcry, however, and now residents in Israeli West Bank settlements can choose between with Israel and Palestine.

Of course, opposing Facebook groups are now looking for members. The group "ITS [sic] NOT 'PALESTINE'- IT'S 'ISRAEL'" has nearly 14,000 members, while the group "If Palestine is removed from Facebook... Im [sic] closing my account." has around 4,600 members.

It all goes to show that on the Web, nobody has a monopoly on outrage.

The Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, launched a blog yesterday in continued efforts to shed some of its secrecy and boost recruitment among high-tech professionals. Reviews are mixed at best so far, as people feel the content is a little mundane. Since 2006, the Shin Bet has stepped up public ad campaigns to attract talent from the private sector. According to the Associated Press, "the bloggers work on the technological side of the Shin Bet's operations rather than in the field." I think the public is saying they want to hear from some real field officers, not the techies. After all, would you rather read a blog by James Bond or Q?

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

In recent weeks, the Taliban have threatened to burn down cellular towers throughout Afghanistan unless the main wireless companies shut down service between 5 p.m. and 3 a.m. each night. Why? Taliban commanders are convinced that coalition forces are using the cell networks to track their fighters. (They don't seem to understand that while coalition forces might use the Afghan mobile networks for some intel, they certainly aren't dependent on them. Thank you, spy satellites.)

And now they've made good on their threat. In a country that is nearly wholly reliant on wireless communications (for lack of any land-line infrastructure), the main mobile networks (all privately run) have begun switching off service at night after attacks on 10 cell towers, the latest on Tuesday night. Score this round for the Taliban.

I can only hope that the frustration of not being able to make calls past dusk will inspire public condemnation of the men who forced the blackout. But then again, the government vowed to help the private sector stand up to Taliban pressure. And that unsuccessful stand hardly inspires confidence.