The most power-hungry flat screen LCD and plasma TVs could effectively be banned across California from 2011 under new regulations proposed yesterday.

The California Energy Commission, which manages the state’s energy policy, said it was working on new standards for TV sets designed to cut energy consumption across the state by the equivalent of the energy use of 86,400 homes. The commission is likely to target the most power-hungry widescreen plasma sets, which can consume up to three times more energy than traditional cathode ray machines.

It said that a second wave of more demanding standards would then be introduced from 2013, which could target Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) TVs that use 43 per cent more electricity than traditional models.

Leading Chinese Internet portals said Tuesday they would do what they could to stamp out pornography in line with a new government crackdown, but said it would be hard to carry out in practice.

The nature of the Internet makes it difficult to stop obscene material from showing up in their search engine results, they said, a day after officials threatened to close down sites that failed to wipe out online vice.

“We cannot block this material automatically,” said Li Mei, an official at the popular Internet portal Sohu. “It’s actually quite difficult to immediately spot and delete anything that is vulgar or pornographic when netizens post them, but we will definitely step up our efforts,” she told AFP.

Motorola Inc unveiled a cell phone made of recycled water bottles on Tuesday, hoping to cash in on the trend for environmentally friendly products.

The company, which dropped to No. 4 in the global handset market in the most recently reported quarter due to a weak product line-up, said the W233 Renew eco-friendly phone would be sold by Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile USA in the current quarter. It did not disclose pricing for the phone, which will be showcased at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Motorola said it was the world’s first carbon neutral phone. As well as using recycled materials for the plastic casing, the company also pledged to offset the carbon dioxide used in manufacturing, distribution and operation of the phone through investments in renewable energy sources and reforestation.

Exposing the dark side of cloud computing, Salesforce.com suffered an outage that locked more than 900,000 subscribers out of crucial applications and data needed to transact business with customers.

Salesforce, the 800-pound gorilla in the software-as-a-service jungle, was unreachable for the better part of an hour, beginning around noon California time. Customers who tried to access their accounts alternately were unable to reach the site at all or received an error message when trying to log in.

Even the company’s highly touted public health dashboard was also out of commission. That prompted a flurry of tweets on Twitter from customers wondering if they were the only ones unable to reach the site.

It’s not much of a secret at this point, but CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to announce official availability of the closed Windows 7 Beta 1 release during his Consumer Electronics Show keynote address on January 7. The official (non-Torrented) Beta 1 bits should be available to pre-approved Windows 7 Beta 1 testers later Wednesday night or early on January 8.

Ditto with Windows 7 Server, a k a Windows Server 2008 R2. The private Beta 1 release of that product is scheduled for late January 7/early January 8, I’m hearing. I’ve gotten a number of questions from readers this year already about the expected public betas of these products. I’ve made some discreet inquiries.

The public (the one and only) beta of Windows 7 client and server could be released simultaneously with the private Beta 1 builds this week, according to some of my sources. What’s the point of a simultaneous public and private beta? The private testers’ feedback will get top priority; the public beta will be more of a milestone marker than anything else.