The New York Times’ Nick Bilton today broke the news that Facebook will be incorporating location-based updates into users’ news feeds beginning next month.

According to Bilton’s sources, the social networking site will debut the location-based service at next month’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco.

The battle of location-based services is supposed to be one of the highlights of next week’s South by Southwest (SXSW), where Foursquare famously got its first bit of major buzz last year. Now, along with duking it out among themselves, Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown will have to take on the major players in social networking.

While Facebook’s move could definitely affect traffic to the other services, Bilton’s sources say that Facebook’s move is aimed not at other location-based social networks, but at Google’s local ads.

As far as Facebook goes, most of its audience are not early adopters, but have proven eager in the past to try out features culled from other services. One-quarter of Facebook users are already using the site on their mobile phones, so the user base for location-based social networking is already there. And since people are already logging in on the go, so there’s no extra steps required on their part.

Also built in is the market for any Facebook games that could be built on top of the technology.

While they’ve been getting a lot of buzz in geekier circles, location-based services have not yet caught on with mainstream users. As with Twitter last year, it’s only a matter of time before they do, and Facebook is perfectly positioned to bring location-based services to critical mass.

One of Facebook’s main strengths is that it acts as a clearinghouse for new social-networking technologies, so expect location-based services to accelerate in adoption when users of the one of the most powerful sites in the world start to play around with them.

If “atoms are the new bits,” hackerspaces are the new processors.

After Chris Anderson shared his inspiring thoughts about changes involving new economics, the Internet and opensource technologies Monday at Stanford, we think that production processes are quickly evolving. A new paradigm in conception, production and distribution is born.

And even if they won’t change the way we produce objects from the ground up, these new places will strongly improve innovation.

What is a hackerspace?
Hackerspaces, or hacklabs, have been spreading all over the world over the last two years. Today there are few hundred,  mostly concentrated in the United States and Europe (Germany, Netherlands). First born in academic laboratories, they are now open to everyone and catching the attention of companies’ R&D departments.

Hackerspaces are places where people who are willing to imagine and build projects in electronics, art, design, and programming can work together, share tools and learn from each other. “How to make almost everything,” is the catchphrase of Waag Society, MIT’s fablab representative in Europe.

In hackerspaces, small projects come to life, useless devices are built, and new ways of working together are experimented with. Opensource cars, Wii drones, coffee machines working with Twitter, LED walls, 3D printers. . .  The new, the unbelievable and the hijack are the leitmotif of this new kind of innovation.

The projects are usually made together by sharing production tools and knowledge between members of the space. The prototyping phase, production and distribution processes are available and explained on the Internet in order to give others the possibility of copying or improving devices.

What does it change for organizations?
At L’Atelier, we think that there is something to learn from this movement. It won’t substitute the way the design-production chain works but it is giving us the key to help innovation evolve faster. Small groups, high specialization and segmentation of the prototyping phase with a specific attention to expertise and the makers’ desire, quick transition from virtual design to real object : these are some of the ways innovation occurs.

(Image:  Wired)

Earlier yesterday during a press conference, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was responding to questions about government computers not being able to access sites like Twitter, which comes to no surprise for me. The conversation drifted on over important privacy notes regarding officials’ use of the micro-messaging site.

As part of the Presidential Records Act, established in 1978, the government keeps tracks of all inbound and outbound electronic messages sent from government machines which brings up several important questions. Are tweets considered to be electronic messages? If so, is the White House archiving all of its staff members’ activity on Twitter under the PRA?

The other question that comes to mind is about Gibbs’s followers and the people he follows. Are their activities also archived? I invite you to watch the video below and tell us what you think about it.

Privacy breaches are always in the news (generally coinciding with the latest Google app or Facebook update), but what’s a little different this week is that the privacy breaches are being very publicly challenged by lawsuits.

In a suit filed in Pennsylvania, Harrington High School is charged with monitoring students at home via school-issued laptops. The suit alleges that the Rosemont, PA, high school watched a student’s at-home activities with a school-issued laptop’s webcam, as it believed that the student “was engaged in improper behavior in his home,” according to Philly.com.

The school did not disclose to the students that the laptops they issued were equipped with remote-control webcams that could be activated at any time. The suit claims that the school violated federal and state wiretapping laws, violated students’ civil rights, and that the school’s acts were an invasion of privacy that could have led to the creation and dissemination of child pornography.

And that wasn’t today’s only lawsuit.

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We have earthquake simulations in San Francisco, but I’ve never heard of a simulated cyberattack. They happen, just aren’t advertised.

Except for this one.

Next week, February 16, there will be a public, simulated cyberattack on America. Dubbed ‘Cyber Shockwave,’ the attack, coordinated by the Bipartisan Committee, “will provide an unprecedented look at how the government would develop a real-time response to a large-scale cyber crisis affecting much of the nation.”

It will take place at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington D.C., where the White House Sit Room will be recreated.

Cyber ShockWave was created created by former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and the co-chairs of the 9-11 commission, Thomas Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton.

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University of Missouri professor Ming Leu is testing the use of the Nintendo Wii’s remotes – Wiimotes – to streamline the aerospace manufacturing process.

Leu is using the Wiimote to record an assembly process to improve employee training, shorten cycle time, reduce injuries and improve global communication between plants.

The benefits of the Wii are its cheap price, wireless communication and the fact that its signal covers a long range.

Leu also hopes to use the Wiimote’s camera to capture the movements of factory workers.

“The Wiimotes allow us to easily capture motion in the assembly process wirelessly,” says Leu. “We can track that motion, analyze the processes and make improvements based on the data generated through the motion-capture.”

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Spam and malware attacks on social networks have risen 70 percent in the last year, according to data protection firm Sophos.

Thirty-six percent of respondents to Sophos’ survey have been sent malware over social networks in the past year, an increase of 69.8 percent. Fifty-seven percent of respondents have been spammed via social networks.

“Computer users are spending more time on social networks, sharing sensitive and valuable personal information, and hackers have sniffed out where the money is to be made,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

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The recent attacks on Google have brought increased attention to cybersecurity. Now a new report (PDF) from political scientists at the University of Cincinnati says that defense is ultimately in our hands as citizens.

In what has undertones of the Cold War and the Patriot Act – but also indicates the new levels of engagement, both private and in terms of national security – that we might ultimately have as citizens in an age where privacy decreases and corporate, governmental and individual vulnerabilities increase.

The report’s authors, Richard Harknett and James Stever, say that while discussions of cybersecurity coordination frequently occur between governmental agencies and businesses, a crucial third element, the public, is not brought into the discussion.

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As we’ve written before, using a phone while driving has been deemed to be as dangerous – if not more – than driving drunk. (We’ve also recently learned that things are doubly bad, as a new study claims that driving reduces your ability to talk on the phone, too, but that’s outside the scope of this article.)

That idea that using a phone while driving is incredibly dangerous has become accepted as true and is the force behind states’ efforts to ban the practice. But those bans might not be effective in reducing traffic accidents at all.

A new study by the National Institute for Highway Safety claims that banning the use of phones while driving actually has no effect on accident rates.

“The laws aren’t reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk,” said Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute, which undertook the study.

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Looking back I shouldn’t be surprised.

I was reading Kim-Mai Cutler’s VentureBeat article on how Twitter is aiding medical efforts in Haiti when I got to the point of the story where they named the guy who put the whole thing together: Josh Nesbit, founder of FrontlineSMS:Medic. With a just a Twitter message, Nesbit ended up creating a “makeshift version of 911″ in the earthquake-ravage nation.

Josh spoke at Atelier last year. What he had done up to that point was very impressive; what he has done since then exhausts superlatives.

Nesbit spearheaded relief efforts with a simple Twitter message. Here’s Cutler’s description of how the efforts started:

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