schwaang writes that while the US continues to hash out concerns over the Real ID Act, which aims to create a national ID by standardizing state driver's licenses, China has already implemented a massive online ID database, which they say will help prevent fraud. From the Xinhua English-language site: "Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country's population information center's website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person's identity card match. If they do match the ID card-holder's picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen's privacy is protected. Completed at the end of 2006, China's population information database, the world's largest, contains personal information on 1.3 billion citizens. Giving public accessing to the database is also designed to correct mistakes if an individual discovers that their name, number and picture don't match."

Roland Piquepaille writes "According to Nature, a European-funded project has been launched to store electricity created from wind in refrigerated warehouses used to store food. As the production of wind energy is variable every day, it cannot easily be accommodated on the electrical grid. So the 'Night Wind' project wants to store wind energy produced at night in refrigerated warehouses and to release this energy during daytime peak hours. The first tests will be done in the Netherlands this year. And as the cold stores exist already, practically no extra cost should be incurred to store as much as 50,000 megawatt-hours of energy. Here are additional details and a picture illustrating this brilliant idea."

An anonymous reader writes with a story on CNet about two teens who were prosecuted under anti-child-porn laws in Florida for having made and emailed racy photos of each other. Both were under 18 years old, so the resulting pictures are clearly illegal; but the teens' intent was not to share the pictures with anyone else. An appeals court majority opinion found that emailing the photos from one of the kids to the other was a careless act that should, it seems, bring down the full weight of the law. A minority opinion argued that the laws were intended to protect children from exploitative adults, not from other children.

marco_marcelli writes with a link to the founder and chairman of MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione, replying to Steve Jobs on DRM and TPM. After laying the groundwork by distinguishing DRM from digital rights protection, Chiariglione suggests we look to GSM as a model of how a fully open and standardized DRM stack enabled rapid worldwide adoption. He gently reminds Jobs (and us) that there exists a reference implementation of such a DRM stack — Chillout — that would be suitable for use in the music business.