I've got Captain Obvious on the line, and he'd like you to know: the data you store in the cloud isn't private. You might be thinking, "I knew that." But it's news to some, like this guy, who got busted for possession of illegal pornographic images (child porn) , after backing up his computer to a Verizon cloud backup service. Bonus: he was the deacon of a Catholic school in Baltimore county: oops.
Turns out, cloud storage providers routinely sweep stored data, using hashes for known illegal images or media files. If they find one, you're toast.

From Ars Technica:

When Congress passed the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008 mandating that service providers report suspected child pornography in the content that their customers surf and store, the law gave providers an out: if they couldn't check, they wouldn't know, and they wouldn't have to report it. But while checking is still voluntary, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been pushing providers to use image-matching technology to help stop the spread of child pornography.

This isn't breaking news: the articles date back to March. But it's still relevant in the framework of the ongoing discussion of cloud-versus-local and the rights of authorities to revise your computing habits.

It was only a year or two ago when every journalist on earth suddenly went into fits, calling it the new age of tablet/mobile computing and assuring us the desktop would soon be a niche industry for has-beens and old fashioned losers. Lenovo would beg to differ. In fact, they've sold 55 million computers in the year ending March 2014 . They also sold 50 million smartphones and 9 million tablets, so there's no doubt mobile computing is increasingly going to take a huge chunk of the market. From the article:

Looking at the numbers by product line, Lenovo's worldwide laptop PC business increased in the fourth fiscal quarter by 16 percent to $4.8bn, accounting for 51 percent of the company's overall sales. Despite the general market declining, its desktop PC sales for the same period increased 14 percent to $2.7bn, or 29 percent of the company's overall sales worldwide. The company's sales of smartphones and digital home products jumped to $1.3bn, or 13 percent of the company's overall sales, and Lenovo said its worldwide smartphone shipments grew 59.4 percent in the fourth quarter.

But the world's largest PC maker would like you to know the age of the desktop computer has absolutely not come to an end.

The Colorado River Delta is typically a vast expanse of cracked, dry earth. The Colorado River itself comes to its end at the Morelos Dam on the US-Mexico border, and its outflow has been managed (poorly) by both nations ever since the dam was built. That means the river has been providing lots of drinking water and water for irrigated agriculture, but not much for any other reason.

That has suddenly changed, as both nations agreed to permit a flow of 1% of the water to be released for purposes of restoring parts of the ecosystem. From the article:

"We were able to persuade decision-makers in both countries that it was really time to turn the corner in the relationship and really try something different," [Environmental Defense Fund representative Jennifer] Pitt said. "That instead of unilateral actions on either side of the border with no particular concern for impacts on the other side of the border it would be better to have a collaborative approach." In 2012, the Mexican and American governments signed Minute 319, and the pulse flow was one of the provisions it contained. ... "During the months of late March and April, with the snow melt in the upper basin, a lot of water will come in a short period of time," he said. "So the pulse flow is mimicking that on a smaller scale." During the eight-week project, which ended on Sunday, just less than 1 percent of the river's annual average flow was released into the delta. Teams of scientists from environmental groups and universities have been closely monitoring the impact that the restored flow has had on this desiccated region.

[Ed. note: Glad to have some good environmental news for a change.]