Don't Be Evil

While Google's Street View team were jaunting around the planet's twisting laneways and sprawling freeways, they were also war-driving, according to this New Scientist article.

Wi-Fi antennas on the cars were hunting down wireless computer networks, and equipment inside was recording the networks' names, locations and the unique MAC address of the routers supporting them.

Dude! Creepy! Apparently the search giant uses the data to help GPS-enabled smartphones more smart.

According to Peter Schaar, the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection in Germany, he was not told that the Street View cars would be obtaining wi-fi information as they took photographs for Google Maps.

Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, says they didn't ask permission first because wi-fi details are publicly available, and Google won't be making the information public.

He admits, however, that it might have been a good idea to ask for permission first.


Ya think?!



image credits: boetter and Titanas

Sunday Secrets

You've all heard of Post Secret, yes? It's a blog run by this dude who gets sent often very creative postcards, with the one proviso that they contain a secret, something that the postcard's author has not revealed to anyone, and they now wish to convey to the whole internet. I have bought one of his books, and I read the website every week, but lately it has essentially been bullshit.

I did chuckle (actually out loud) at a couple from this Sunday, though! Such a rare occurrence I was driven to make a post about it.

Bravo, Frank. Bravo.

Awesome geek tattoos

These totally awesome comic book and geeky tattoos make me want so badly to overcome my fear and get inked myself. Wired has a wicked gallery of comic-inspired tattoos from ComicCon.

Gallery, via BoingBoing

(Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Women in the Israeli army

You may have seen this already, and I'm sure I've come across a few of these images, but not the whole collection.

Photographer Rachel Papo's Serial No. 3817131 is just a stunning collection of amazing photos depicting the everyday lives of women in the Israeli army. The project is named after the photographer's own ID number during her service.

Incidentally, I had to use kroxy to get to the gallery, because the photography is apparently unsafe and categorised as "weapons". Filtering, you're doing it wrong.

Serial No. 3817131 via BoingBoing

Apple announces MobileMe subscription extensions

Following my previous post about the poor performance of MobileMe, users today received an email from Apple Support offering a 60 day period of free the service, in the light of the disastrous launch and the numerous problems encountered.

The Support article is understated in the admission that the launch was hasty and bug-ridden. Apple claims "[t]he transition from .Mac to MobileMe was rockier than we had hoped" and that MobileMe is "still not up to our standards", and announced an extension to any free trial period users may be taking advantage of.

This is the danger with early adoption, and it is great to see Apple acknowledging the issues, and promising to work them out. However, I hold out very little hope that the computer manufacturer will actually address the concerns of users. Apple has a long history of ignoring the glaringly obvious (MMS and video recording for the iPhone spring to mind, not to mention a character counter for SMS length).

MobileMe users wait with baited breath to see if Apple can redeem themselves, but any free time extension offer does little to ease the pain of having already sunk money into the crippled service.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

A friend of mine (HI BRYAN) is currently doing a digital cultures class at uni and has been nattering non-stop about it for the past few weeks. Luckily it is all very interesting stuff and this video he sent me was really an amazing piece of work. It totally articulated some of my thoughts about the value of this goofy little video sharing website and by extension the entirety of the ways people share information online. It's an amazing video and if you have an hour to sit and watch it, Michael Wesch will totally blow your mind.

Do I Hate the Cloud?

A post over at Lifehacker has been sitting in my mail for about a week now, waiting for the article that is in my head to get written. It's called Do You Trust the Cloud? and focuses on the risks and benefits associated with having a web-based presense. That's email, calendars, contacts, photos or data storage, that is primarily accessed via an online service like Gmail or MobileMe.

The "cloud" refers to the system of what Apple calls "push", which is where your mobile device or computer speaks to a "cloud", which is connected to the internet, so you're informed of updates like a new email, without the need for your email application to be actually open. The LH article focuses on recent outages and what you do when your entire digital presense just disappears whenever there's a hitch, but it prompted me to think more on a recent dilemma I have been experiencing lately, and that is: Do I Hate the Cloud?

I spent four hours in line for an iPhone, and I knew ahead of time that I was also going to get one of those fandangled MobileMe accounts, because I really liked the idea of using a web-based email program that looked like a native OS application. All things considered, it was not a problem I really needed to spend approximately $100 solving.

And now, instead of using Gmail, I use MobileMe. Or at least, that's the plan. My iPhone certainly beeps at me when I have a new mail, Blackberry style, but when I'm at work I tend to just have gmail.com open. Here's why.

At my work, we hotdesk. It is unpleasant for many reasons, but one of them is differing levels of insane user restriction. Some computers will let you install your browser of choice (Firefox 3) but not the flash plugin, some will let you install flash but it won't run with sound, some will let you do nothing of the sort, etc etc. I used to solve this by running Firefox Portable from a USB stick but MobileMe and FP did not get along. Not even a little bit. Seems that MobileMe needs a little too much juice than the USB stick can provide.

But apparently it is also taxing for some of the computers at work themselves, so I never know when I sit down what my day is going to look like. I also hate that MobileMe does not automatically filter messages into folders, like every other email solution has been doing for the last five years. Oh, and it hasn't got any web-based chat option like Google Talk, which is a great way to waste time in between news bulletins.

Apple needs to at least get folders and auto-filtering working, ASAP, as well as working out whatever causes all the hanging and freezing. It is a laughable to call this a syncronised or mobile solution to email.

Meme Timeline

Sometimes I wonder how all of this "internet" stuff is going to look to our distant descendants.

The Internet Meme Timeline, via Laughing Squid.