Google Maps street views a revealing candid camera

Smile, you're on Google.

Street-scene photographs added to Google Maps and Earth last week capture passers-by in delicate situations and have privacy advocates accusing the world's most popular Internet search firm of breaking its "Don't be Evil" code.

Google's "Street View" feature weaves photographs into seamless panoramas of parts of San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami, and renowned technology Mecca Silicon Valley in northern California.

"With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans," Google said on its website.

Privacy advocates counter that it also provides offensively candid glimpses of people unwittingly photographed while going about their daily lives.

Pictures show what appears to be men urinating streetside. Young women are pictured in skimpy swimsuits sunbathing near Stanford University, the California alma mater of Google's founders.

There is a picture of a man climbing a home's security gate, hopefully without criminal intent. People are pictured going into a pornography shop.

A couple can be seen embracing on a sidewalk while another couple gets intimate on a bus stop bench. A homeless man pictured sitting with his dog on a street corner has reportedly died since the photograph was taken.

Technology-centric Wired Magazine is asking online readers to vote for "the best inadvertent urban snapshots...be they citizens flaunting the laws or hot dog vendors rocking a sweet style."

It is legal to photograph people in public places in the United States.

"What Google does is not illegal, but irresponsible," said Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a US non-profit group dedicated to defending Internet freedom and privacy.

"Google Street View technology has been an intrusion of privacy to many people captured in their pictures. They could have waited until they developed technology that would allow them to obscure peoples' faces."

Miami abortion clinic director Elaine Diamond is troubled by a Google Maps picture showing protesters outside the facility.

"I wish they would replace it," Diamond said. "I couldn't contact them. I tried quickly. It's not easy."

Women visiting abortion clinics are under enough stress without adding fears that Google Maps might feature pictures of them entering or leaving the facilities, Diamond said.

Operators of places such as drug, alcohol or sexual health clinics worry about protecting their clients from the stigma of being pictured in Street View.

Google said it worked with shelters for battered women and children to avoid photographs endangering their visitors.

"Everyone expects a certain level of anonymity as they move about their daily lives," EFF attorney Kevin Bankston told Agence France-Presse.

Google says photographs are taken down or replaced in response to complaints.

"Street View only features imagery taken on public property," the Mountain View, California-based Internet titan said in its defense. "This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street."

Google's Street View has fans among those eager to explore places as an adjunct or replacement to travel.

Google used a fleet of vans equipped with special cameras to amass 360-degree imagery of major US cities during the past several months and said it planned to add more urban areas to the Street View menu.

Google said it intends to update the images regularly.

"How long until this becomes live video?" technology entrepreneur and author John Batelle asked rhetorically.

Firefox 3.0 may Block Sites Fingered by Google

Sites that Google has determined to be housing malware would be blocked by a feature under discussion for the next major release of Firefox.

Mozilla Corp. is considering adding a tool to Firefox 3.0 that would automatically block Web sites thought to harbor malicious downloads, but the company's security chief refused to spell out details, saying Mozilla is "not ready to talk about the feature."

Even so, there are numerous details to be found on a blog by a Firefox designer and in a back-and-forth discussion of the feature in Bugzilla, the management system that Mozilla uses to track changes in its software. Together, the two offer a behind-the-scenes look into Mozilla's open-source development process.

"Similar to how Firefox 2 blocks Web sites that are potentially going to try to steal your personal information, Firefox 3 will block Web sites that we believe are going to try to install malicious programs on your computer," said Alex Faaborg, a user experience designer in a blog entry last week. "Mozilla is coordinating with Google on this feature."

And in a Bugzilla entry that offers comments from Mozilla and Google employees -- including Chris Hofmann, Mozilla's director of engineering, and Mike Shaver, its director of ecosystem development -- information is even more free-flowing about malicious site blocking in the next major update to Firefox.

The discussion centers on how Firefox 3.0 will warn or alert users to a potentially malicious site. Faaborg mocks up a warning notice, then someone else offers up another option entitled "Scarier error page". But at times the thread lingers on technical issues.

"If a site does not appear in the blacklist but the response from Google says 'this is a malware site,' will Firefox stop showing the page immediately and load this error page in its place?" asked Jesse Ruderman, a PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, and a unpaid Firefox developer.

"I think the plan for malware is to only use the local lists so we don't have to slow down page load or unload a page (which would probably be too late anyway)," replied Tony Chang, one of the Google software engineers who works full-time on Firefox.

"This is an example of how development goes on [at Mozilla]," said Window Snyder, the company's chief security officer. "This is a great example of working with the [open-source] community" in a give-and-take atmosphere where ideas are batted back and forth, she added.

Still, she wouldn't commit Mozilla to adding a malicious blocking tool to the anti-phishing filter already present in Firefox. "It's definitely one of the things we're looking at," Snyder acknowledged, while noting that the feature is currently rated P2 (Priority 2). By Mozilla's definitions, only P1 features are mandatory for Firefox 3.0.

If the security tool makes it into Firefox 3.0's final build, Mozilla will rely on long-time partner Google to provide the blocking blacklists. Google already does that for Firefox 2.0's anti-phishing feature, which is powered by the search giant's open-source "Safe Browsing" code. (Safe Browsing was offered as a separate plug-in for Firefox before Version 2.0, then baked into the Google Toolbar for Firefox.)

But comments made by developers, designers and others on Bugzilla show that Mozilla has questions about the Google technology. "Will the google malware blacklist include sites that are known to be exploiting just Firefox, or IE, or all browsers?" queried Chris Hofmann. "Do we need to make that distinction and/or communicate it to the user so we don't overstep our bounds?"

"What we are actually doing here is giving Google veto power over any web page. Hmm..." added Gervase Markham, a lead developer for Bugzilla.

Google warns its search engine users of potentially dangerous sites with an interstitial page. Google's current blacklists, and presumably those downloaded to Firefox browsers, come from StopBadware.org, a group created by Google, Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd., and Sun Microsystems Inc. that collects flagged URLs. Some Web sites, however, including one associated with a in Kansas educational service center, have complained that Google erroneously blocks their sites.

No other browser currently includes an integrated tool for blocking sites flagged for downloading malicious code. When asked if Mozilla sees this as a chance to pull away from the competition, Snyder said: "We're always looking for ways to keep our users safe."

Mozilla's developers have until mid-July to add the feature to Firefox 3.0. According to Mozilla's development schedule, the browser will be feature-frozen for Beta 1 on July 17.

That urgency was communicated by at least one Bugzilla commenter. "Alex's design depends on being able to render error messages as he mocked up, which I'd love to see, but am not sure we can do," said Mozilla's Mike Beltzer. "We need to scope and determine that feasibility pretty damned quickly, IMO."

How to Run Google Talk in Firefox Sidebar...

Recently, Google has launched a new way to use your favorite instant messaging software, Google Talk. Yap, you guessed it right, I am talking about the Google Talk Gadget - a web-based module that you can add to your Google Personalized Homepage. The Google Talk Gadget is clearly more usable than the stand-alone GTalk desktop client or the floating AJAX version in GMail. But you will be thrilled to know that you can even put your Google Talk client in your Firefox sidebar so it always stays in the foreground no matter what website you are on currently.




In order to add Google Talk in your Firefox sidebar, you have just to do the following simple steps:

1. First, open this page with your Firefox Browser, then Right click on the following link and select ‘Bookmark this Link’: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client

   
   

2. Now click on Bookmarks button from your Firefox menubar and then select ‘Organize Bookmarks...’ - your Firefox Bookmarks Manager window will be popped up.

   
   

3. Navigate to the link, you have just bookmarked in step-1, from the right pane of your bookmarks manager, select it and then click on the Properties button at the top of the window.

   
   

4. Now tick the checkbox from the properties window that says ‘Load this bookmark in the sidebar’ as shown in the following screen-shot:

   
   

- Just open your created Bookmark whenever you want to run your Google Talk client in your Firefox Sidebar and enjoy chatting with your Google Talk buddies while surfing in the net using Firefox.

Google launches search translation service

SAN FRANCISCO: Google on Wednesday launched a test version of a translation tool that enables people to search the Internet in any of a dozen languages and have the results converted into their chosen tongue.

A beta version of Google's "cross-language information retrieval" feature is online at http://translate.google.com/translate_s.

The service "in effect, will make the Web universal", Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber said while describing it to the press at the Internet search giant's campus in Mountain View, California, last week.

"We have been working on translating all of the Web to all languages," Manber said. "The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there."

Google's new software translates queries to perform multi-lingual searches of the Internet and then converts the results to a searcher's language.

The languages included in the service are French, Arabic, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and traditional and simplified Chinese. The service is to eventually be expanded to include other languages.

"Here at Google, part of our mission is to make the world's information universally accessible to our users, regardless of differences such as language," the company said in a release.

"We are happy to announce the arrival of a new cross-language search feature that allows users across the world to find and view search results on foreign language web pages in their own native language."

Google revamps its Internet search

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California : Google went live on Wednesday with a revamped Internet search engine that integrates video, books, maps and news into "universal" results to online queries.

Google spent two years transforming the architecture of its search engine to broaden results to include web pages that one had to previously seek out in separate search categories such as "photos" and "news."

"It's all the stuff on the web," said Google's vice president of search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer.

"The assumption is that if it is there and it is findable on the web we should get it."

The "Universal Search" platform delivers more comprehensive results and raises the profiles of Google features such as online books and video, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

"In a way it is a doubled reward because it gives more exposure to our other features such as books," Brin said after the launch was announced at the company's campus in Mountain View, California.

"It's a little bit of a shame that until now they were under-utilised." Mayer announced the search engine overhaul at a one-day "searchology" conference focused on Google's evolution since it launched in 1998 and some of its plans for the future.

"We certainly feel we are Number One and are broadening the gap," Brin said when asked about how Google was doing against rival Internet search firms.

"We are very happy with the progress we have been making."

Navigational links atop search-result pages let users "drill down" to particular types of information if they wish to focus exclusively on specific categories such as news, according to Mayer.
- AFP/de

Check out Google's latest ideas

Google on Wednesday also launched a website where Internet users can peek at features the world's most popular online search engine is experimenting with.

The website at www.google.com/experimental shows tests Google is doing with services such as generating time-line charts and maps to put search results into chronological or geographical context.

People are able to sign up to take part in the Google experiments, Mayer said. [Mayer is Google's vice president of search products and user experience]

Google said "very soon" it will launch software that translates queries from any of a dozen languages into English, scours the Internet for relevant web pages and then converts the results to a searcher's language.

"That, in effect, will make the Web universal," Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber said while describing the "cross-language information retrieval" feature.

"We have been working on translating all of the Web to all languages. The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there."

Google held firm that it is vigilant about respecting copyright material such as books, music and video and that it is keeping general, not personal, search data stored to protect the privacy of users.

And while Google is working to better organise the world's knowledge online, it insisted it is still leaving room for creative disorder.

"I think chaos is important in the right proportions," Brin said. "We have always run our company with about 20 percent chaos."
- AFP/de