Science and technology news blog

The government of India has asked Google to blur sensitive images of its military bases and buildings that can be seen with its mapping application, Google Earth—a source of concern to top Indian officials since at least 2005.

Google has reportedly agreed to show fuzzy, low-resolution pictures of certain building installations after talks with the officials.

India is not alone in its concerns. Over the last few years, the search engine has received various requests from other governments for similar considerations.
 
False Protection

Google has largely complied with these requests. Yet as imaging technology becomes more and more prevalent, it is likely that abiding by them will do little good.

“Since the technology to create such images already exists, blurring them on Google Earth is unnecessary and it would give a sense of false protection,” Dorota Huizinga, associate dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Fullerton, told TechNewsWorld.

“If Google has it (an image), then the intelligence [offices] of many countries probably have something much better,” she continued. “I think that the governments are better off accepting the fact the technology can be very intrusive, and that they should take protective measures to minimize potential negative impacts of these technologies, instead of asking Google to blur images.”

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Europe’s biggest telecoms groups are aiming to create a mobile phone search engine that could challenge Yahoo! and Google, the US giants.

Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and one American network, Cingular, are among the companies that will come together for secret, high-level talks at the mobile industry’s biggest annual trade show in Barcelona next week.

Faced with declining revenues as calls become cheaper, network operators are determined to secure a large slice of the lucrative search advertising market.

In the UK alone, more than 20 per cent of subscribers are expected to have access to mobile internet at broadband speeds by the end of 2007, which should prompt a dramatic increase in the use of search engines via mobile phones.

The initiative will come as a surprise to Google and Yahoo!, which have lost no time in striking deals with mobile operators and handset makers. But the mobile industry believes it can retain a greater share of advertising revenues by developing its own service.

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A new video on popular internet video site YouTube has raised a question: Is it fake or real?

The movie entitled Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out that was released on the 18th of January shows a woman who was going to get married within hours, but instead she cuts off all her hair.

First, the woman named Jodie, who got her hair done at the hairdressers, comes back to a hotel room where three bridesmaids are doing last-minute preparations. She runs in and falls to the ground screaming that her hair is ugly. They try to comfort her but that wasn’t enough for the so called “Bridezilla”. Then, she cuts off her hair with a pair of scissors while the maids’ watch while taping it all on video camera.

The video, which is still on the main page of YouTube, has been watched over 2 million times. The person who posted the video, wigoutgirl, claims to be 25 and from Canada. It is speculated that the video was shot in a Toronto, Ontario hotel room.

Some YouTube users are saying that it is fake, some say it’s real.

Google has updated its Mini search appliance in a fresh bid to win new small and midsize business customers to the all-in-one corporate search product.The Google Mini is designed to connect to an enterprise network and provide secure search capabilities for employees hunting for documents, applications, and other corporate data. The Mini also can be interfaced with a public Web site so external visitors can find information more quickly in a collection of company-owned content.

New features in the Mini include letting site administrators link search results with a Google-created analytics application, created to provide more detailed information about how people use search on a Web site.

Another improvement comes in the form of the appliance’s OneBox feature, which attempts to identify the intent of searches to create a digest of related data. Security also has been upgraded for the Mini, which for the first time will recognize established access settings for users and documents.

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Google Inc.’s popular video-sharing site, YouTube has received a subpoena from Twentieth Century Fox which stipulated the former to disclose the identity of a poster who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of The Simpsons and 24.

The subpoena filed Jan. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California first came to light on the blog Google Watch (http://googlewatch.eweek.com/index.html). It requests that YouTube divulge the required information to identify the subscriber so that Fox can immediately bring the infringing to a halt. Whether or not YouTube has compiled with the request is still unknown.

It is being wondered if the search engine leader would protect the identity of the poster as Google, which paid US$1.65 billion for the video sharing site, has a standing of being sternly shielding of the identity of its users.

According to the subpoena the four episodes of 24 emerged on the site in advance of their TV broadcast but how the user named ECOtotal managed to get hold of those is still ambiguous. 12 episodes of The Simpsons were also uploaded.

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Months of gabbing between Google and book publishers appears to be closer to paying off. Since March, Web search titan Google has been trying to strike agreements with major publishers that would give users of the Google Book Search tool access to entire books over the Internet.

Talks have progressed to the point that, on Jan. 18, Google felt confident enough to share with 400 publishers more of its vision for the future of the book. At the industry gathering in New York, Google said it not only wants to let users find and preview books online—as it does now through a test version of Google Book Search—but also to sell access to scanned copies that can be read over the Internet and potentially on portable devices. Google cautions that it’s far from revealing details of such a service. “It is something that we have been talking about for quite a while,” says Google spokeswoman Megan Lamb. “But we haven’t announced what an online access program would entail.”

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Video sharing Web site YouTube is blocking steamy footage showing supermodel Daniela Cicarelli in intimate scenes with her boyfriend, the company said a day after a judge ordered it to find a way to stop Brazilian viewers from seeing the video.

‘’The video in question was removed from YouTube because it violated our terms of use,’’ YouTube said on Friday in a statement attributed to spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin. ‘’It was recently uploaded again and we became aware of it through media reports and users flagging the content, and we removed these copies immediately.’’

YouTube’s announcement came after court officials said on Thursday that the judge issued the injunction requiring the company to prevent Brazilian Internet users accessing the wildly popular video showing Cicarelli and Brazilian banker Renato Malzoni making out along a beach near the Spanish city of Cadiz.

The two sued YouTube in September and won an injunction for the removal of the video, but Sao Paulo state Supreme Court Justice Enio Santarelli Zuliani expanded his order this week after the clip continued to appear periodically, the court’s press office said.

Cicarelli, one of the country’s best-known models, hosts a show on Brazilian MTV and was previously engaged to soccer great Ronaldo, who plays for Spain’s famous Real Madrid team. Two Brazilian sites that ran the video complied with the original order, but Malzoni went back to court after it kept appearing on YouTube, owned by Google Inc.

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The patent in question, filed in 2001 and granted in 2005, outlines the business model for offering video content from various providers to consumers over the TV and the Internet, Intertainer Inc. said in its lawsuit.

Intertainer claims Apple, Google and Napster are using the patent without permission. The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, seeks damages and a permanent injunction.

Apple recently started selling movies through its popular iTunes online store, while Google offers a mix of free and for-pay video content and recently bought the highly trafficked video-sharing site YouTube. Napster runs an Internet music service.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said Wednesday the company does not comment on pending litigation, while Napster spokeswoman Dana Harris said the company was looking into the matter. A call to Google for comment was not immediately returned.

Google has fixed a flaw that would have allowed websites to harvest information from Gmail contact lists, a problem that could have let spammers collect reams of new email addresses.

For an attack to work, a user would have to log into a Gmail account and then visit a website that incorporates JavaScript code designed to take contact information from Gmail.

Proof-of-concept code was publicly posted. The JavaScript code used a capability that Google used to integrate addressing with other services including its video download site and online office productivity suite.

Google appears to have fixed the problem within 30 hours of being notified, writes Haochi Chen, a blogger who tracks the company on his blog. A Google spokeswoman in London has confirmed the problem is fixed.

A serious flaw is discovered in Google’s free email service allowing hackers to steal users’ entire contact lists.

To exploit the flaw, the hacker would add a piece of code to their website server, which in turn gave them access to the Gmail contacts of passing browsers, so long as they were also signed in to their Gmail account in another window.

The hacker could then add the stolen contacts to an email spam database, or sell them to other spammers.

Gmail, the third most popular free web-based email service, has been embraced by both personal and business users alike, largely because it allows for easy access to messages from any computer worldwide.

Google’s security team appeared to have fixed the flaw within hours, but various subsequent reports suggested the fix didn’t address the full extent of the issue.

Further, it is understood that spammers were exploiting the security hole for quite some time before it was discovered.

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YouTube’s failure to complete a key piece of anti-piracy software as promised could represent a serious obstacle to efforts by Google, its new owner, to forge closer relations with the media and entertainment industry.

The video website, the internet sensation of 2006, promised in September the software would be ready by the end of this year. Known as a “content identification system”, the technology is meant to make it possible to track down copyrighted music or video on YouTube, making it the first line of defence against piracy on the wildly popular website.

YouTube said on Friday the technology would not be formally launched this year and YouTube’s offices were closed until the new year. While providing no further details about when the system would be made formally available, it said tests of the system had been under way with some media companies since October and the system remained “on track”.

Mike McGuire, a digital media analyst at Gartner, said the important part systems such as this played in building better relations between internet companies such as YouTube and the traditional media industry meant there was likely to be little patience for missed deadlines. “The technology industry really has to start living up to the media industry’s expectations,” he said.

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Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!

Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.

The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year.

Earlier this year he secured multimillion-dollar funding from amazon.com and a separate cash injection from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance projects at Wikia.

However, it is understood that amazon has also collaborated with Mr Wales on the search engine project and is expected to lend its support to the venture in the future.

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Blogger.com, which was acquired by Google in 2003, has helped to make blogging a more ubiquitous activity, especially as more people have grown up using the Web and are adding to the already large blog community of readers and writers.

The latest updates to Blogger might very well help the blogosphere continue its momentum, although there are those who predict that the blogging craze will level off next year. 

Search specialist Google has given its blogging software a major upgrade, adding privacy features, new templates, and tighter integration with Google’s other services. 

With the new Blogger toolkit, now out of beta, users can add photos and other information without HTML expertise. More advanced users can create custom templates in an array of type fonts and colors. 

Also noteworthy in the latest update is the ability to limit access to blog entries. While the blogs are open to the public by default, the settings can be changed to limit access to a select list of readers. 

You enter the e-mail address of a person to whom you want to grant access, and the Google account associated with that address will be given access. If an address is not associated with an account, that person will be sent an invitation to sign up for a Google account.

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Jeremy Allison, a high-profile open-source programmer, has resigned from Novell because of objections over its patent deal with Microsoft and is moving to Google.

In his resignation letter, Allison said Novell’s patent pact with Microsoft has crippled the Linux seller’s relations with the open-source community. At Google, he’ll continue his work on Samba, the open-source project he helped launch. Samba is software that lets Linux servers share files on Windows networks.

“Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is nothing we can do to fix community relations…Until the patent provision is revoked, we are pariahs,” Allison said in the letter, quoting from an earlier message he sent to Novell management. Allison joined Novell in 2005 after working at Hewlett-Packard.

Groklaw, a site that monitors open-source legal affairs, published Allison’s resignation letter on Thursday. On the same day Allison confirmed the letter’s authenticity, saying he had sent it to internal Novell mailing list, but declined to comment further on his departure from Novell.

Google is a major open-source software user and participates in several open-source programming projects. Andrew Morton, a key lieutenant to Linux leader Linus Torvalds, works there, though his salary is paid by the Open Source Development Labs.

Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry declined to comment on Allison’s views, but said the company still employs two Samba programmers. “We wish him the best,” Lowry said.

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Google Inc. said it signed an agreement to resell Web addresses for closely held GoDaddy.com, a unit of Go Daddy Group Inc., and eNom Inc. as part of its effort to penetrate the small-business and education market with a suite of free online services.

The domain-name offering will make it easier for customers to use the suite, Google Apps for Your Domain, Google said. The Mountain View, Calif., company plans to sell domains for $10 a year and will initially support addresses ending in .com, .org, .net, .biz, and .info.

The suite, launched in August and hosted on Google’s computers, has been seen as an assault on Microsoft Corp.’s Office applications. It includes communication tools like the Gmail Web-email and Talk instant-messaging services, an online calendar application, Web-page creation tools and a “start page” where customers’ employees can access applications and content.

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