The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will release a report today pointing to the risk of disruption in the supply of materials critical to making hybrid-car batteries, energy-efficient lightbulbs, and lightweight wind turbines. China supplies 97 percent of these materials, a group of elements called rare-earth metals.

The report will be unveiled today at a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. According to the New York Times, the Obama administration is expected to raise the issue with Chinese officials in trade talks today. China imposes export taxes on these materials, and this fall temporarily blocked their export to Japan, one of the biggest consumers, altogether. While research groups at Hitachi, GE, and academic labs work on alternative materials, mining companies outside of China are planning to ramp up production. But people in the mining industry are concerned about the repercussions of the movement, which occurred over a decade ago, of R&D, engineering expertise, and intellectual property out of the United States. The DOE report also points to these concerns about infrastructure, and indicates a political resolve to begin to remedy it.

Until the late 1990s, California's Mountain Pass mine was the world's major supplier of these materials, but a combination of environmental problems and the emergence of less expensive supplies from China pushed mining company Molycorp to halt production; the company let its mining permits expire in 2002. Still, the mine has remained the number two supplier of rare-earths outside of China, processing accumulated ore and selling about 3,000 tons this year. Reserves at Mountain Pass, California are the highest in the world outside of China.

Molycorp claims to have developed environmentally friendly processes and will restart active mining at a rate of 20,000 tons per year in 18 months, with the possibility to scale up to 40,000 tons under current permits. According to the company, 2010 U.S .demand is projected to be 20,000 tons. However, Molycorp will not sell all its product in the United States but will also focus on Japanese and European markets. The company last week announced a $130 million funding deal with Japanese company Sumitomo that promises the financier "substantial quantities of rare-earth products."

Lynas Corporation of Australia will begin active mining at the second largest reserve of rare earths outside of China, at Mt. Weld outside Perth, at the end of next year.

A new tool will join the censorship circumvention arsenal this September.

Feed Over E-mail (FOE) sends restricted content, in the form of RSS feeds, via email. The tool can't help a user browse censored sites or obtain large files. But its creator, Sho Ho, says that FOE could be particularly hard to block and could work in concert with other circumvention technologies. Ho, who is a researcher with the federal government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, gave a talk about FOE yesterday at Defcon, a hacker conference that takes place annually in Las Vegas.

There are plenty of other circumvention tools out there, but it can be hard for some people to gain access to them, Ho says. Also, the makers of such tools can get drawn into a game of cat and mouse with governments that block the access points needed to make them work.

To use FOE, a user just needs access to an e-mail service hosted outside of a censoring country, and the FOE client. Information is sent via e-mail, which can come from servers all over the Web, making it hard for censors to spot a consistent source of censored information. Governments also usually don't block access to foreign mail services (there are some exceptions, such as North Korea).

FOE is different from the average feed reader in that it's able to fetch content from censored sites without requiring the user to visit those sites to set up the feed. Once FOE fetches the content, it encrypts it and sends it via e-mail much like an attached file. The user's client gets decrypts the feed once it's arrived and displays it on the local machine. Ho adds that FOE should be easy for activists to set up and maintain because it uses existing infrastructure.

The version that will be released in September works on machines running Windows, Ho says, but she hopes that volunteers will help add support for other platforms, including mobile devices.

China has blinked in its tense battle with Google, renewing the search giant's license to use its Chinese Internet address, Google.cn.

Thus caps seven months of intrigue that started in January, when Google announced it had been the target of China-based hacking, and intensified in March when the search giant carried out its threat to stop acceding to Chinese censorship requirements. At that time, Google started rerouting search traffic from Google.cn to its uncensored Hong Kong site, Google.com.hk. For users, this meant that search terms they entered would no longer be blocked by Google, as required in China as a condition of operating an Internet company there. But some resulting search returns could still be blocked, as always, by China-based filters run by the Chinese government. This re-routing to Hong Kong caused great irritation in Beijing, which called the approach "unacceptable." So Google's most recent move was to make Google.cn a simple landing page with an unusable search field. Clicking anywhere on the page, however, still took visitors straight to Google.com.hk where they can conduct their searches.

The "extra click" was a subtle difference, but apparently all Beijing needed to save face and not take the drastic step of actually blocking Google from using any Chinese web addresses. Such blockage would certainly have brought on global condemnation over the further closure of China's Internet, which is censored, mainly by means of self-censorship by China-based companies. The question now is whether Bejing's next move will be to add Google.com.hk to its list of blocked sites. "They didn't block it after the redirect took place in March. If they wanted to block it, you'd think they would have done it then," says Rebecca MacKinnon, a China Internet expert who is a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. "But they could always block anything, at any time in the future, for any reason."

While the political stakes were high for China, the corporate ones for Google were quite high as well. Last week, Yasheng Huang, a professor of Chinese economy and business at MIT's Sloan School of Business, wrote me to say that "if Google does not get this license it will have collateral damage to its other operations in China. It operates an R&D center in China and its sales team will be hampered to sell ad space on its website. It will be marginalized further. The Internet, as global and as cross-border as it is, still has geographic roots."