Filed under: Security, News, Google
Google cleared of grabbing personal data via Street View vehicles
A UK regulatory body has cleared Google of stealing users' personal data via Wi-Fi snooping from its Street View vehicles. Google admitted that it mistakenly snooped packets of data from open Wi-Fi hotspots while taking photos for Street View, and it turned over the data to several governments who wanted to investigate exactly what had been collected. The UK Information Commissioner's Office concluded that the data Google ended up with was "not significant."This doesn't let Google off the hook in Germany, Australia, or any of the other countries that have opened investigations, but it's a good sign for the company. According to the BBC, the UK ICO couldn't find any case where an individual could have been harmed or compromised by the data that Google gathered, but they said that the company was still "wrong" to collect it.
Like to spend as little time as possible mousing around your desktop? Windows has a built-in feature called Mouse Keys which lets you move your pointer by using the numeric keypad, but not every keyboard has one.
If you love data visualization, this one's going to blow your mind: I just found an incredible IBM demo, called World Factbook Dashboard.
It basically takes a ton of demographic and economic data (from the CIA World Factbook, I presume) and presents it in several beautiful ways that (mostly) make instant sense.
This is one of those rare cases where screenshots simply would not do, so I rolled up ...
When you're the big dog, evildoers are more likely to target you with their nefarious schemes. That's certainly the case with desktop malware and Windows -- it's the most popular computing platform by a wide margin, so it gets the most attention from malware developers.
The same is apparently true for Google when it comes to distributing malware. In a recent report, Barracuda Labs found that ...
Curious about how your current Internet provider compares to other local options? Take a look at Ookla's Net Index, which has compiled user test results from around the world into easy-to-understand rankings.
Data is gathered from both speedtest.net and pingtest.net, and covers the entire globe. In total, Net Index has sifted through more than 1.5 billion tests, and there have probably ...
There's only four weeks to go until the next IE9 developer preview, and it looks like Chinese leak site Cnbeta might have got its hands on the new build already.
I'm not quite sure what to make of the screenshots, nor the Google translation. The Developer Previews (Internet Explorer Test Drive) are not meant to have a user interface -- they're just there to show off the Trident rendering ...
There's no exploitation in play here, just the wholesale harvesting and presentation of superficial data for roughly one-fifth of Facebook's half-billion strong user-base.
Ron Bowes, of Skull Security, posted the torrent to the Pirate Bay after realizing that his pet project had become something that others might be interested in. He had basically crawled the Facebook directory, and indexed the ...
Chromatic is one of the best time-wasters I've recently come across. It's all about the gameplay -- no Flash graphics here. You play a "circle" (it doesn't really have a name in the game). You move around with the arrow keys, and you change colors with Z, X, and C.
You can either be red, blue, or yellow, and you can switch at any time during the game. Each color has different capabilities -- yellow can double-jump, while red has a longer dash (which is like a forward sprint, activated by double-pressing DOWN).
Each ...
