In our post-WikiLeaks era, the image evoked by the phrase “whistle blower” isn’t dramatic enough. Bradley Manning did something more than merely blow a whistle. He kind of blew stuff up.

That thought must have been on Julian Oliver’s mind when he made the so-called “Transparency Grenade.” The Transparency Grendade looks like, well, a transparent grenade (it’s modeled after a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, to be precise). The device doesn’t actually explode and kill people, fortunately. The only thing it explodes is secrecy.

“Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna,” Oliver explains on the Transparency Grenade site, “the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.” The notion is that you might be a civil servant outraged at what your department or agency is keeping hidden from the world. You storm into a meeting, pull the pin, and boom! It's a data leak detonation.

If this sounds impractical, you should know that the Transparency Grenade is part of an art exhibition in Berlin, the Studio Weise 7 exhibition. It’s a one-off piece, made of a translucent resin and sterling silver. Julian Oliver is something of a hacker-cum-artist; he calls himself a “critical engineer” (one tenet of “The Critical Engineering Manifesto” is, “The Critical Engineer considers the exploit to be the most desirable form of exposure”).

But it’s more than an art installation; it’s the embodiment of an idea, one that Oliver intends to have live on in an Android app that would achieve the same functions as the grenade, only without raising eyebrows (and/or guns) at the security checkpoint. He says on his site that he’s working on an app for rooted Android devices that will mimic the grenade’s functionality while running stealthily on the background of users’ phones. “Naturally this is a little more practical than walking into a meeting with a grenade in your jacket pocket,” he writes.

“The very idea of an immaterial explosion with the power to shake the walls of institutions, businesses and political cultures--moving matter and people in its wake--is naturally attractive, not only in the conceptual sense,” Oliver told the site We Make Money Not Art, adding that he “wanted [the grenade] to look elegant, a bottle of high-class perfume, as much as a weapon.” Oliver, a longtime vegetarian, also said he would particularly like someone to pull the pin on one of these things in a high-level meeting in the agricultural sector.

I know what you’re thinking: Didn’t Barnes & Noble just come out with a Nook tablet a couple of months ago? Indeed it did. It was favorably reviewed.

But it cost $50 more than the Kindle Fire, and technology consumers are a miserly bunch, aren’t we. For B&N, which is currently engaged in something of a fight for its life, there’s no sense waiting more than a few months if they can iterate on their product and offer something more competitive--which is exactly what they’ve done with a new $199 Nook Tablet, priced to go head-to-head with the Kindle Fire.

The principal difference between this tablet and the one released in November is that its onboard storage and RAM have each been halved--you get 8 GB of storage and 512 MB of memory. Of that 8 GB of storage, only a fraction of it--roughly half--is available to use as you please, unfortunately. But the new, new Nook, like its recent predecessor, also has an SD card slot, meaning you can add up to 32 GB with a microSD card. If you already have a vast music library you’ve acquired over the years, that’s a blessing.

To sum up the Nook portfolio, now, there’s a $99 Nook Simple Touch, a $169 Nook Color, the new $199 8 GB tablet, and the original $249 16 GB tablet.

The fate of the Nook, and thus of Barnes & Noble, is extremely important to the future of publishing. The news of the new Nook tablet came bundled with B&N’s quarterly report, which The Verge sums up as a “mixed bag,” mostly because net income is down year-over-year by 16%, from $60.6 million to $52 million. But there’s good news in there, too--such is the nature of mixed bags, after all--including a 5% uptick in total sales, a 2% sales increase even in brick-and-mortar stores, and a 32% rise in online sales.

And how’s the Nook faring? There was a dramatic increase in sales there, a boost of some 64% during the quarter. “[A]ccording to some of the largest U.S. publishers, we maintained or slightly gained share in the eBook market during the third quarter,” claims B&N.

The more competitive 8 GB model should only stand to help matters. Want to know more about it? If you can endure the Rob Schneider ad I encountered the top of this YouTube video, CNET has a good hands-on with the device.

First The Daily said they had a hands-on with a prototype, and gave us a picture. Then Microsoft (via the Times) said it wasn’t so. Then ZDNet parsed Microsoft’s denial. Then The Daily defended its story. Then Microsoft went mum, but then piped up. Then The Verge called the whole thing World War III.

What is everyone talking about? An alleged version of Microsoft Office for Apple’s iPad (to be priced, per the first report, around ten bucks). The Daily’s Matt Hickey is clearly chummy with someone at Microsoft, as he’s been getting a number of MS-related scoops of late. As he told ZDNet: “Right now, someone with a mid-level job at Microsoft is being yelled at. To that person: I’m sorry, I owe you a beer. But say it however you want to, we both know that Office for iPad is on its way. And if it’s as cool as the version I’ve seen, you’ve got a winner.”

Let’s assume for the moment that an MS Office app is on its way to the iPad, which is what most of the tech reporters following this believe. More important than the timing or the exact nature of the app’s launch screen is this: that an MS Office app will inch the iPad closer to becoming a true productivity device.

I’ve maintained, in a few posts, that the iPad and its ilk are not productivity devices, but rather media consumption devices. The iPad lacks a physical keyboard, and traditional workplace applications like MS Word haven’t been available. And yet in the cafes I frequent, the spectacle of an iPad user with an external physical keyboard is increasingly common. People are increasingly willing to make do with tablets as productivity devices, one of the more startling instances, I'd say, of what Wired has told the “good enough revolution.” With the addition of MS Office to the iPad’s app portfolio, the device’s “good-enoughness” will receive a boost, and I expect to see many more ad hoc iPad workstations sprouting up in Prospect Heights’s Sit and Wonder or Park Slope’s Tea Lounge.

Meanwhile, in the unfolding Third World War, Microsoft seems to have had the last word. It tweeted, “Much respect for The Daily but regrettably someone is giving them bad info, and that’ll be clear in the ‘coming weeks.’”

“The ‘coming weeks’”? It initially seemed like a confession that news would soon emerge, together with an egregious use of scare quotes. But then I recalled the deck of the original Daily story, which promised MS Office for iPad--“in the coming weeks.” If Microsoft wants to win this war with the speculative tech blogosphere, all it has to do is...nothing.