Filed under: Google

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.

Google Earth has always been a great way to explore the globe, but now you can use it to explore real-time rain and snow patterns, too. By enabling the new cloud layer and radar layer in Google Earth 5.2, you can track clouds and also see precipitation on a constantly updating radar.

These features are only available in the latest version of the Google Earth desktop app; they are not in the iPhone app or other mobile versions. Google Earth 5.2 also adds the ability to track your speed and elevation by using imported data from your GPS device. You can also see your heart rate and cadence if your GPS records that information.

The Android Market is doing away with its current copy protection scheme for apps, because breaking protection to pirate the apps is a little bit too easy for the comfort of the developers who sell their software in the market. To protect its relationship with the all-important dev community, Google has launched a "licensing service" that verifies whether an app was legitimately purchased.

This kind of scheme isn't uncommon, but it's sometimes unpleasant for users. In a perfect world, your Android phone would always have reception, and a licensing server would always be up and running to authenticate the apps you've bought. There are bound to be a few problems, though, and it's not clear how Google will address them. I'm not going to assume the worst, but I do wonder what happens when you have an offline app and you're in a service black hole. Can it run without being able to access the licensing server?

Google could protect developers without checking apps every single time they run, but there are other possible worries, like legitimate apps failing the licensing check due to glitches (a la Microsoft and Windows Genuine Advantage). On the plus side, Google has some of the best server infrastructure in the world, so it's very unlikely these servers will go down for any length of time.

Currently, this type of authentication is available to any developer who wants it, but it's not mandatory. It'll be interesting to see how many app creators start using it right away.

[via Engadget]

While the built-in default is functional, you might be looking for a way to add some sizzle to your Google Chrome new tab page. Look no further than Start!, a recent addition in the Chrome Extensions Gallery.

Your frequently used bookmarks will appear on the right-hand side of the page, while the central portion is reserved for your recent additions and those in the "other" folder. Start! also supports adding an RSS feed to your display (yes, that's ours in my screenshot!).

The background image is customizable as well, and you can either provide the URL to your favorite image or cycle through the stock options -- or clear it if you prefer a blank canvas.

Start! is a very nice extension, but there is one bug I encountered. You're able to click and drag favicons to reorganize the right-hand panel, though I frequently received an alert that the move failed (even though it didn't). Sitting on the 'esc' key eventually clears all the pop-ups, however, so after your intial setup it's not likely to cause many issues. I also suspect that developer Ilkka Huotari will fix this in short order...

Google has had a "dictionary lookup" feature for a while now -- all you had to do was slap define: before your search term. But they've now made it better, and mostly, made it easier for people to find it: Just search for a "difficult" word, and a definition would pop up as the first result, with quick links to some dictionaries.

What's interesting is that you don't get an instant definition for every word you search for as a single word: it's just the "big words". I would love to see the algorithm they use for deciding when to pop up a definition and when to stay mum.

One feature I like being able to toggle in Firefox is tab thumbnails -- not the ones on the Windows 7 taskbar, mind you. I'm talking about in-browser thumbnails which get displayed when switching tabs. Chrome OS has that snazzy, Cover Flow-style switching interface, but that's not part of the Chrome browser on other OSes.

There are, of course, options available in the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery for those of you who enjoy a visual reminder when looking for that tab you misplaced -- or if you just want a little eye candy!

Ever find yourself wishing you could run two versions of Google Chrome -- like the stable version and the dev version -- side-by-side? It's been a tad tricky to do that in the past, but Google has just made things about as easy as they can possibly get -- by introducing another Chrome build.

Yes, Google is offering a Vista-esque four flavors of Chrome now -- with the release of Canary, a pseudo-dev channel build which installs to a different directory (%localappdata%\Google\Chrome SxS\ on Windows). Canary isn't linked to your Google Chrome installs at all, meaning you can also run different sync profiles, themes, and browser preferences.

Apart from the folder change, Googler Huan Ren states that Canary may also receive updates which the dev channel does not. Canary will be the most bleeding-edge official version of Chrome and somewhat of a mix between Chrome dev and the Chromium snapshot builds.

Canary's arrival has a lot to do with the new Chrome release cycle. With stable builds due out every six weeks, beta branching will occur more frequently and "risky" changes from the trunk can now be pushed to Canary prior to landing them on the Dev channel.

This also says a lot about Chrome's early adopters -- there's obviously a crapload of them if Google feels it can support two official, pre-beta builds. Download Google Chrome Canary here and run it in tandem with your current stable, beta, or dev build.

Wait a sec... "Why Canary?", you ask? I'm guessing this is a reference to the old practice of taking a canary down into a mine... If the canary died, it was unsafe and the miners knew to bail out. If a change kills Chrome Canary, they'll block it from the dev build.

[via Softpedia]

Over at the Chromium blog, there's some good news for Chrome fans... Which is simultaneously bad news for those of you who already think they're getting a little silly with the version numbers. Starting now, Google plans to push a new stable version of Chrome every six weeks.

Yes, you read that correctly. Six weeks.

That's not set in stone, of course -- build issues and bugs could delay a release. Still, this means that the exciting new features you read about popping up in the developer channel will now likely have a shorter path to travel to the stable version. "We have new features coming out all the time and do not want users to have to wait months before they can use them," says the official blog post. It continues, "We basically wanted to operate more like trains leaving Grand Central Station (regularly scheduled and always on time), and less like taxis leaving the Bronx (ad hoc and unpredictable)."

Google also hopes the change will take some heat off the Chrome development team. Instead of having to rush to commit changes in the weeks and days leading up to a release, they'll be sliding in changes more frequently. If a feature isn't ready, they'll simply bump it to the next cycle.

It'll be interesting to see if this puts any heat on Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, and Apple. Will they counter? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Oh yeah...Google also asks that you not pay too much attention to the numbers anymore as they stream past in the rear view mirror -- so no jokes, mmmkay?

Mozilla has recently upped its bug bounty -- meaning that any critical security bug you found and disclosed to Mozilla could net you a cool $3000.

Not to be outdone, Google has just announced that it will be awarding up to $3133.7 for critical bugs. This is not only $133.7 over what Mozilla offers, but also an obvious play on the word "elite" in h4x0r-speak. It's also a typical example of Google's nerdy sense of humor.

If you look at the bigger picture, as ThreatPost has done in their coverage of the issue, you will see that this actually represents the beginning of a paradigm shift in the security world. Up until now, "security researchers" (which is, pretty much, a clean name for hackers) had a tough moral dilemma: Do I take this security hole to Microsoft (or Google, or Mozilla, or Apple) and quietly wait until they fix it while getting little to no pay and recognition? Or do I go to the black market and sell it to an evil group who will give me $50,000 and use it to publish a zero-day exploit that takes the world by storm?

This is a tough call for some to make, but fortunately, Google and Mozilla are making it a bit easier to be "the good guy." Hopefully, other companies will follow suit.

If you've made the switch from Firefox to Chrome and count AdBlock among your must-have extensions, there's one gripe you probably had. Unlike its Firefox or Safari cousins, AdBlock for Chrome wasn't actually able to prevent ads from downloading. As developer Mike Gundlach told The Reg, " We've been having to hide the ads after downloading them or add CSS rules that say 'don't show these ads' even though they're downloading."

That's changed, however, thanks to some recent code updates. AdBlock can now act premptively, saving you precious kilobytes (and possibly some additional frustration). As it turns out, it's Apple who is responsible for the change: the beforeload event was actually slipped in during a recent update to the Webkit engine, which eventually made its way into Chrome.

Apart from AdBlock, this should be good news for Chrome users in general as it provides an important content manipulation function.

Google Image Search has just gotten a much-needed refresh that looks great, works better than ever, and keeps Google competitive with Bing's image search. At the risk of sounding like a Google advertisement, this update is awesome. As a regular image search user, I have to say that every change the Google Image Search team just made is an improvement.

First, the new results page: it's denser with images than ever before, and you can view 1,000 images in one scrolling page before you have to jump to another one. The thumbnails in the results are larger than before, too, which gives you much better idea of what's worth clicking on. There are also new keyboard shortcuts (page up/page down) to make browsing faster.

When you do click on an image, you're no longer presented with an annoying frame at the top of your browser window. That frame was the worst thing about Google Image Search, and I am quite glad they removed it. Instead, the image appears, full size, in a lightbox above a greyed-out version of the page where it appears. If you want to view the whole page, just click outside the image.