Google announces PowerMeter

In today's podcast: Google announces PowerMeter; IDF Taipei cancelled; and IBM and Juniper in the clouds.

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Google is testing a system that tracks a household's electricity consumption, allowing users of the iGoogle personalized homepage service to monitor their consumption in real time and perhaps reduce it by as much as 15 percent. The service, called Google PowerMeter, takes data from so-called "smart meters," or advanced electricity meters and other electricity management devices. Google says the electricity usage data will be stored securely, and no personal information will be exchanged with the power companies providing the data. Google is making a strong push for agreements with utilities on how to standardize the data that's available from smart meters.

A highly disruptive Internet worm has claimed a new victim: the French navy. The worm, known as Conficker, forced the navy to cut network connectivity to stop the worm from spreading on its Intramar network last month. Web browsing and email messaging on the network were disrupted, and some users were forced to rely on more conventional means of communication such as the telephone, fax or postal system, a navy spokesman told the Ouest-France newspaper. Reports indicate that the worm was probably introduced when an infected USB drive was plugged into a computer on the network.

IBM and Juniper on Monday provided a sneak peek at technology that lets enterprise IT managers easily reallocate computing resources between a private and a public cloud. Using cloud management software from IBM's Tivoli division and a Juniper network, the companies demonstrated a drag-and-drop interface for managing a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Cloud computing, along with virtualization, can give IT departments more flexibility by letting them separate applications or data from particular sites and equipment.

Intel's yearly Intel Developer Forum in Taipei is the latest victim of the economic downturn. The company has cancelled the Taipei event, and shortened a similar event in Beijing to just one day. The last time Intel cancelled a developer forum in Asia was in 2003, at the height of the scare over the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS virus.

Personal data belonging to more than 45,000 employees and retirees of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was stolen after hackers broke into a computer server, the agency said Monday. Two of the 48 files on the server contained personal data for those on the agency's employee rolls for the first week of February 2006, the FAA said. The breach didn't affect air traffic control or other operational systems.

And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Peter Sayer in Paris. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.