The last few weeks have been good ones for clean energy in Silicon Valley. On Monday, Apple touted[1] its new environmental initiatives designed to tackle climate change, and launched an urgent new ad about the importance of sustainability. Earlier this month, Greenpeace praised the company[2] for its “innovative” and “aggressive” use of clean power. On Wednesday, the EPA released a list of the top 100 U.S. organizations using renewable energy[3], and four of the top 10 brands are major tech corporations: Intel, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Also on Wednesday, Google announced[4] that it has teamed with solar panel manufacturer SunPower in creating a $250 million solar power fund. The two companies will use the money to purchase solar panels, which they will lease to homeowners at a rate "typically lower than their normal electricity bill." “So by participating in this program, you don’t just help the environment—you can also save money,” explained Google in a blog post[5]. "By participating in this program, you don’t just help the environment—you can also save money.”Google boasts it has invested more than $1 billion in 16 renewable energy projects across the globe. Meanwhile, SunPower claims more than 20,000 homes have opted into the company’s solar lease program since it launched in 2011. The initiatives come on the heels of Earth Day, and highlight the critical role of corporations in driving both clean energy investment and sustainable business practices. Last year, Reviewed.com's Earth Day Series[6] took an extensive look at how consumer technology effects the environment, with four in-depth stories on green technology, pollution, and efficiency standards. We’ve included links to those stories below. Earth Day Series References^ touted (www.theverge.com)^ praised the company (www.theverge.com)^ top 100 U.S. organizations using renewable energy (kagstv.com)^ announced (googleblog.blogspot.com)^ blog post (googleblog.blogspot.com)^ Earth Day Series (refrigerators.reviewed.com)...

Jefferson Graham answers readers questions-on using password manager apps on the go. PasswordBox interface(Photo: PasswordBox)LOS ANGELES — Last week we spoke about using password manager apps to keep track of the ever-growing list of passwords and user names for favorite websites.Free tools like Dashlane, PasswordBox and LastPass work great when used on a computer. But we heard from readers with follow-up questions about using them elsewhere.Gary, for instance, on Facebook, comments: "Much harder on mobile than desktop."Considerably. For instance:— Will Dashlane open the lock screen on my iPhone? (No.)— Does PasswordBox throw the iTunes password in there for me when I pick up new apps? (Wouldn't that be nice?)— Can any of the password managers key in my password for websites I visit via Safari, like Facebook or Dropbox? (Most won't, but PasswordBox will. On Android phones, it's not as cut and dried: You can do way more with password managers.)So let's take a closer look, using, as examples, Dashlane and PasswordBox, two heavily downloaded apps.Both apps have free versions. Dashlane charges $29.99 yearly for mobile access, while PasswordBox charges $12 yearly if you access more than 25 passwords.The challenge for Dashlane is using it to create impossible-to-remember passwords, and then trying to open those sites on Safari, the Web browser for the iPhone and iPad.Instead, think of Dashlane as a vault, a place to store those hard-to-remember combinations of letters, numbers and symbols that were created within the manager.Open the app on the iPhone or iPad, and from there you can copy the password by clicking a tab, and then pasting into a website for sign-in.Or, if you prefer signing in without copying and pasting, you can use the built-in browser — both Dashlane and PasswordBox have them — to bypass Safari. This is the workaround to open up…

Andre Mouton, Minyanville 11:48 a.m. EDT April 14, 2014 A combination made on March 25, 2014 shows pictures of the logos of the companies Twitter taken on March 11, 2011, Facebook taken on May 10, 2012(Photo: Getty Images)Is Twitter turning into Facebook? That was the question asked last Tuesday,[1] when the social network unveiled a new user profile page with Zuckerbergian design tendencies. Panoramic photos and visual chaos, long staples of the Facebook experience, will soon find their way to Twitter. Users will also have the ability to pin their favorite Tweets, a la Pinterest; and profile visitors will be able to filter old Tweets, and go digging with a shovel rather than a spade.This wouldn't be the first time that a social network flattered its competitors by imitating them. Facebook adopted Twitter's iconic hash tags last year and is itself moving toward a more photographic page design[2]. The success of Snapchat and Instagram hasn't gone unnoticed, and at this point the big boys are less worried about differentiating themselves than they are about losing ground to upstarts.So it's all the more striking that Twitter has yet to copy Facebook's defining feature: its algorithms. In the past, Twitter has taken a hands-off approach towards user content, preferring a chronological news feed that doesn't discriminate between individuals, groups, and businesses. This latest update may take some visual cues from the competition, but with pins and filters, control remains squarely in the hands of users.Control over content has become a hot-button issue for social media companies, and algorithms mark the line of battle. Facebook first came under fire for its "curation" of posts in 2012, when businesses and social groups began experiencing a decrease in the reach of their posts. This drop coincided with the post-IPO rollout of Facebook's ad network, and…