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The CEO of German chipmaker Infineon Technologies will step down next week, the company said Monday.

Wolfgang Ziebart, who has run the company since 2004, is leaving on June 1 "due to different opinions on the future strategic orientation of the company," Infineon said in a statement.

Peter Bauer, an executive vice president and head of Infineon's automotive, industrial, and multiple-market business group, will assume Ziebart's position as spokesman of the company's management board.

Bauer, who was CEO of Siemens Microelectronics in the 1990s, joined Infineon when chip operations were spun off from Siemens in 1999.

Infineon, which has been losing money recently, also announced a program to try to improve margins.

The company, which is based in Neubiberg, Germany, has about 43,000 employees and is one of Europe's biggest chipmakers.

About six months ago, German police reported disrupting a terrorist plot against U.S. installations in their country, thanks in part to intelligence tips from American agents. Now officials in the two nations have hatched a formal plan to share more information about known and suspected terrorists.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and their German counterparts--Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries--initialed an agreement on Tuesday to swap fingerprint and DNA data.

At a Tuesday press conference at German government headquarters in Berlin, Mukasey hailed the proposed cooperation as a "great achievement" that would make both countries safer.

"Terrorists who threaten our way of life see no barriers in borders between countries--neither should our efforts to stop them," he said, according to a transcript.

Details on the plan are sketchy thus far--and reportedly subject to approval by both German and U.S. legislators.

By Mukasey's description, the new system will be configured so that each of the countries can access the other's fingerprinting databases on a "yes-no" basis. That is, if evidence is picked up at a scene by one country's agents, they can check that evidence against the partner country's database. If a match comes up, then "the agreement also sets forth procedures for obtaining it through lawful processes that also ensure appropriate protection for personal data," Mukasey said.

According to officials quoted by Agence-France Presse, the information would only be shared in investigations of terrorism and other "serious crimes," not "ongoing criminal cases."

German and U.S. officials also attempted to diffuse the inevitable privacy concerns raised by such a scheme. Zypries, the German Justice Minister, reportedly said any requests for information--and subsequent replies--would be "recorded," seemingly for auditing purposes if abuse or misuse is alleged. Furthermore, data that isn't ultimately used would have to be "destroyed," she said.

The U.S. officials said they hope the bilateral agreement will serve as a model that other nations will follow. Sharing such data among countries is not unheard-of in Europe: The controversial Prum treaty allows a number of European Union states--Germany, Spain, Austria, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg--to access each other's databases of DNA profiles, fingerprints, and motor vehicle registration data. Several other countries indicated they would also sign on.

But privacy concerns have accompanied that effort, and similar questions are already being raised about the scope of the new U.S.-German agreement.

Peter Schaar, Germany's privacy commissioner, was quoted by Reuters as expressing concerns that non-terrorism suspects--such as asylum seekers or protesters--could find their civil liberties violated.

"If I have participated in...a rally and...my identity was checked and my fingerprints taken, then this may be important to German police," Schaar was quoted as telling Deutschlandfunk, a German radio station. "But does that give the right to the United States, when I travel there and maybe have the wrong stamp in my passport, to get access to these data? I would say no."

German auto giants Volkswagen and Daimler have taken minority shares in renewable-energy specialist Choren Industries, which has developed a process for turning leftover agricultural products and other biomass into liquid fuel.

Choren is currently building a beta plant in Freiberg, Germany, that will produce about 15,000 metric tons of fuel a year. That's enough to provide fuel for 15,000 drivers for an entire year. It then hopes to follow up with a production plant that can crank out 200,000 metric tons of fuel. Ten to fifteen of these plants, Choren estimates, could cut up to 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2020.

The companies said that Choren's fuel is compatible with diesel engines. However, it is not your standard biodiesel production. In biodiesel, vegetable oil or animal fat are cooked to remove the gummy glycerin. The resulting oil is then consumed as fuel.

Choren cooks biomass and turns it into a carbon- and hydrogen-heavy synthetic gas. This synthetic gas is then converted into a liquid via the Fischer-Tropsch process, which was invented several decades ago to convert coal into liquid fuel. South Africa used the coal-to-liquid process extensively because of trade bans during the apartheid era. So did Germany during World War II. With the process, Choren is looking beyond diesel to create other types of synthetic fuels.

If you are thinking of installing solar panels, don't wait.

Lyndon Rive, CEO of solar installer Solar City, says that prices for residential solar systems are climbing. Over time, they will decline. In five to seven years, he predicts solar energy will be on par with regular grid power. (Dick Swanson of SunPower has made the same prediction.)

Unfortunately, buyers right now are caught in a bind. The lingering shortage of silicon continues to keep panel prices high. Meanwhile, the subsidies are going down. Last year, California offered a rebate of $2.80 per watt, he said. This year, it's $2.20. It will go down to $1.90 next year.

Residents typically put a 3-kilowatt panel on their home.

Solar City's twist on solar installation lay in group buying. The company canvasses residential neighborhoods. When it gets 50 or so committed customers, it purchases the panels and then sends out teams of five or so installers to erect them. Volume discounts and concentrated installation leads to a reduction of about 20 percent in the overall cost, according to Rive.

Solar City recently raised $21 million. The company will use the money to build out its warehouse and hire and train people. The 12-month-old company has gone from two to over 100 employees. It concentrates on California but will expand to Colorado soon.

National chains of energy experts is a trend we wrote about. Read the dreamy article here.

Like a lot of people in the green energy business, Rive is a refugee from IT technology. He used to work at a software company called Everdream.

A group in Dessau, Germany, has received funds and famed architect Rem Koolhaas as an adviser in its quest to build the world's largest structure.

Dubbed a "monument for all of us" the new "Great Pyramid," which is estimated would take about 30 years to complete, would be about 1,900 feet tall and 10 times larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, according to the Great Pyramid's Web site.

Instead of being a monument to only a few individuals, Germany's Great Pyramid would be a communal tomb open to anyone regardless of nationality or denomination. It would offer burial space in the form of a "tomb container with ashes of the deceased" and engraved "memorial stones" with time capsules to store personal memorabilia.

A burial spot will cost about $960 (700 euros), Jens Thiel, an economist and one of the Friends of the Great Pyramid leaders, told U.K. construction magazine Building .

On Sunday, the group presented a stone prototype of the Great Pyramid at a Great Pyramid Festival in Streetz, a small village north of Dessau.

Pritzker-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is set to lead the jury for choosing a final design for the project, according to several reports. Students under Heiko Holzberger at Weimar Bauhaus University in Germany conducted a technology feasibility study that concluded the project is viable, according to the Great Pyramid Web site.

The project has been given starter funding by the "Future of Labor" program of the government-backed German Federal Cultural Foundation.

As part of the group's business plan, the structure would be built up and out incrementally so that stones are added only as people buy placement in the pyramid.

In the name of nabbing terrorists, the German government is floating a plan that would permit authorities to plant spyware on suspects' hard drives through e-mail messages appearing to stem from official sources, according to various news reports out of Berlin this week.

The proposal, which has not yet been made public but was leaked in part to some German news outlets, is reportedly the brainchild of Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. He's pushing for its inclusion in a broader security law under consideration by Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government. The spyware provision is a response to a federal court decision earlier this year that frowned upon secret remote searches of computers, according to a recent report by the Associated Press.

But left-wing party members and civil liberties advocates are railing against the idea as a potential invasion of citizens' privacy, according to AP and Agence-France Presse reports. One Left Party Parliament member told AFP she also feared the policy would make citizens fearful to open e-mails from government sources.

Advocates of the plan, for their part, have tried to assuage fears about abuse of the technique. They have told reporters they would use the so-called "Trojan horse" spyware in a targeted way and would do so only with court approval.

Police use of spyware, as readers of CNET News.com should know, is hardly a new idea. Recent cases in the United States have revealed agents with the FBI and the DEA have installed spyware--in both cases, with a court's permission--as part of investigations.

It was not clear how the German software would operate, although the news reports indicate the goal is to snoop on a suspect's hard drive data and Internet activity. An FBI tool called CIPAV, for example, can immediately report back to the government a computer's Internet Protocol address, Ethernet MAC address, "other variables, and certain registry-type information." Then, for the next 60 days, it will record Internet Protocol addresses visited but not the contents of the communications.

The widespread availability of spyware-detection software could arguably make it more difficult for any government to hide such a scheme from a tech-savvy suspect. In a recent CNET News.com survey of 13 leading anti-malware vendors, not one acknowledged cooperating unofficially with government agencies--at least U.S. ones--to mask the presence of police spyware. Some, however, indicated they may keep quiet if ordered by a court to do so.

As of Saturday, it's a crime in Germany to build, sell, distribute or obtain so-called "hacking tools" designed to allow access to protected data or promote other illegal acts.

The intention of the lawmakers, who proposed the item last year and passed it in late May, was to crack down on attacks on government and private-sector computer systems. Penalties include prison sentences of up to 10 years and fines, IDG News Service reports.

But some security industry representatives are worried the law will actually make the nation less safe because they believe it'll be more difficult for "good" hackers employed by companies to do research. They say the law could make it illegal to use popular free tools like nmap, an open-source network exploration program, and Nessus, top-rated network vulnerability-scanning software.

"Already it seems that the law will have the unintended consequence of making legitimate research just that much harder, only deterring the legitimate researchers and the opportunistic attacker," a representative from the Australia-based security research firm Sunnet Beskerming wrote on the company's Web site Sunday. "The serious criminal will just keep on going with their malicious activity, probably a little bit bolder--safe in the knowledge that the German government has just made it a little bit more difficult for them to be found."

Some security experts say it's arguably still kosher for them to report on security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them, but it's possible some tools they would use to derive those findings could be verboten.

Still, like the well-documented phenomenon of corporations moving their operations to more favorable tax-law climates, some groups and firms have already opted to shift operations that they believe may run afoul of the law to outside German borders.

The makers of a product called KisMAC, a wireless network discovery tool for Mac OS X, said in a note at their Web site that the law shows "complete incompetence" but vowed to resume their activities in the nearby Netherlands.

"Even worse politicians still believe in the successful ban of digital information, obviously not reckoning globalization," the KisMAC representative wrote. "We are heading straight to a country I do not want to be living in."

A group called Phenoelit also recently abandoned its German Web site and relocated its network packet-sniffing and password-cracking tools to a U.S. Web server.

For those of you who can read German, the government's explanation of the new law is available in PDF form.

Germany's Schott Solar and Wacker Chemie AG have formed a joint venture to produce silicon wafers for solar cells, another sign of how the solar industry is consolidating.

Under the deal, Wacker will supply purified silicon to Schott Wacker (easily one of the more accidentally amusing company names in years). Schott Wacker will then turn the silicon into wafers and sell the wafers to Schott. Schott will then turn the wafers into solar cells. The joint venture will also sell wafer to other solar cell makers.

By 2012, the joint venture is expected to produce enough wafers to for a gigawatt worth of solar cells a year. The two companies estimate the joint venture will create 700 jobs in Germany. Total investment will come to over $500 million.

With the joint venture, Wacker effectively locks in a customer for its silicon and Schott guarantees itself a supply of silicon. In the past three years, several solar cell makers have been plagued by silicon shortages. Schott makes solar cells (as well as equipment for solar thermal plants) but has not participated in wafer manufacturing to date.

Other companies are also moving to absorb more portions of the solar cell manufacturing process as a way to reduce costs, guarantee supplies or streamline supply chains. China's Suntech Power Holdings has begun to experiment with designing its own manufacturing equipment. Not all companies, however, are following this trend.

Looks like Google will finally have to stop using the Gmail trademark in Germany. A German appellate court ruled against the company, says German venture capitalist Daniel Giersch, who brought the case against Google. The court is expected to provide a written ruling on July 4, according to Google and Giersch.

Giersch runs an electronic postal delivery business that goes by the name G-mail, which is short for "Giersch mail." Giersch says he only wants to use the trademark in Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Monaco.

A Swiss court also has ruled against Google.

Separately, Google had to rename its e-mail service Google Mail in the United Kingdom in 2005 after losing a trademark case there. Google's use of the trademark also is being challenged in Poland.