Apple is feeling heat from Greenpeace today. The environmental group singled out the image-conscious IT leader for building data centers in regions that rely heavily on coal in its yearly report rankings of cloud computing companies. Apple gets 55 percent of its power from coal, according to Greenpeace, which is about the same as the nation’s overall energy mix, but higher than all other 14 ranked companies.

More and more, West Coast tech companies are building their U.S. facilities on the east coast and around Chicago, where coal power is plentiful and cheap. Greenpeace criticized Apple because it has no data center policy that takes clean energy into account. The company got an “F” grade for infrastructure siting as its iCloud data center rises in Maiden, North Carolina, where the local utility Duke Energy relies mostly on coal and nuclear power. Apple, shot back in a statement calling Greenpeace’s claims exaggerated. It noted its North Carolina center will draw more than 60 percent of its electricity from on-site solar panels and fuel cells and that it is building a 100 percent renewable data center in Oregon.

As more of our lives and work are hosted in the cloud, the debate points to an important question about how far tech companies should be going to use clean energy, which costs more than fossil fuels today. Should companies like Apple completely avoid coal-reliant regions? Or should they build their own renewable infrastructure and use their influence to green the power mix of places like North Carolina?  

Read Technology Review’s Business Impact section this month for a more detailed look at the intersection of IT and energy. It includes a Q&A with Facebook’s Bill Weihl, where he talks about these issues. The Greenpeace report also applauded Google’s expansive renewable energy efforts. You can read more about Google’s work here.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicked off the usual media frenzy yesterday, but not by announcing a new product. Instead, Jobs announced his resignation from the position of CEO. Though Jobs will continue to serve as chairman of the board for Apple, the move represents the end of an era. Jobs became known in particular for his ferocious commitment to design. Over the years at Technology Review, we're featured a number of hacks inside key Apple products. What we always found when we opened Apple devices up is that the minimalist, ordered look the company favors goes far more than skin deep. The inside of an iPad, for example, is every bit as exacting and perfectly ordered as its exterior—and hard to coax into unintended uses. The following shows three classic hacks:

The Apple I (See Interactive)

The iPhone (See Interactive)

The iPad 3G (See Interactive)

Are you worried that iCloud could tell Apple just how much music you've pirated? A humorous infographic by technology and pop culture comic Joy of Tech suggests that a lot of people are.

iTunes Match is a service that makes it easy for Apple's customers to get their music into the company's cloud, whether they originally bought it from iTunes or not. For about $25 a year, the service scans your music collection, maps it to Apple's iTunes library, and automatically places high-quality versions of the songs into your iCloud account, making it easy to download them onto any device loaded with iTunes.

But if Apple can somehow detect illegal downloads, perhaps it could also delete them from a user's library.

Forbes' Parmy Olson asked Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde for his thoughts:

[Sunde] says iTunes Match marks a big step towards consumers losing control of their media. The problem isn't the $25, it's that it doesn't make sense to pay Apple, with its closed-source system, to gain access to music you've downloaded. More crucial than that, he says, is what that could mean for the future of sharing music. [...]

Sunde's other big worry is that some day, Apple might actively remove music tracks from your iCloud account which are deemed illegal. "They might say, you can't do that, so you have to remove it," Sunde says, adding that when your music is put on iCloud, Apple essentially owns that data, not you. It's stored on their server, not yours. "So they [could] also decide which music you can't have. That's what you're allowing in the future."

Philip Elmer-DeWitt of CNN Money sees the situation differently, suggesting that the $25 fee every year is actually the cost of amnesty from record-label interference with pirates:

A one-time charge of $25 to convert up to 25,000 pirated songs to legal iTunes-plus quality copies is a no brainer. If [my kids] plan to continue stealing music, however, they'll have to make a calculation at the end of the year. Have they collected enough new music to justify spending another $25 to bring them into the iTunes fold?

Ars Technica's Chris Foresman says Apple is unlikely to get involved in policing pirated content one way or the other:

There doesn't appear to be a reliable way for Apple to know for certain if a particular song has been pirated—barring certain metadata that could be easily stripped out—so really the only benefit is that low-quality rips get replaced with high-quality rips.

Even if Apple doesn't police tracks, however, its deal with record companies may mean that they get paid royalties on the tracks it pulls into the cloud, according to a report ahead of the announcement by the New York Post:

The music companies will divide the fee with Apple, with the tech firm taking a 30 percent cut, 12 percent going to music publishers, and the rest to the labels to divide with their artists.

In some cases, this means that labels and artists are getting paid for pirated tracks; in others, they'll get paid twice for a song a user bought once.