News

(Reuters) – Google Inc said its “Street View” cars around the world accidentally collected more personal data than previously disclosed, and that it was changing its privacy practices. Regulators in some of the more than 30 countries where the cars operated are looking into the issue. Google’s Street View cars, which are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city’s streets, collected the data. The company displays the pictures in its online street maps. ...

Rules were made to be broken; that whole 55 MPH thing happens to be my favorite. Western Digital had larger aspirations; the kinds that considered milestones. Reaching the 750GB per platter mark is definitely in the milestone category and that is what Western Digital is releasing today. On the surface 750GB per platter doesn’t really sound all that impressive unless you are really into the whole storage technology scene. Those on the outside will be more excited to hear about the milestone this way; 3TB hard drives that upon launch cost just a little over 200 USD. Do I have your attention now? ...

After the news that the new MacBook Airs do not ship with Flash pre-installed (which is news considering Flash has been part of Mac OS X for a very long time), we now have news that Apple is also taking what appears to be the first steps towards removing Apple’s own Java runtime from Mac OS X. The wording is a tiny little bit ambiguous, but it would seem like Apple is preparing to ditch Java as a standard part of Mac OS X. In the ‘new and noteworthy’ section of the release notes for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, they note the deprecation of Java. ...

Escom LLC has sold the controversial domain name Sex.com for $13 million, according to The Register. Documents filed in a California court say that the domain was sold to Clover Holdings, a stealthy offshore firm, after winning an auction that included eleven other bidders. Domain name broker Sedo was the exclusive brokerage firm representing the domain, and it will likely take a nice percent of the sale price, although the actual figures are unknown. ...

Last mail I got from 12Seconds.com: Dear 12ers, Tonight at 8:15PM PST we will shut down 12seconds.tv. No videos can be recorded after 5PM PST. If you have not yet downloaded your videos, go to 12seconds.tv and use the awesome 12seconds video export tool and save your memories. The tool will be available until 5:15 PM PST, so be sure to export your videos before then. Is this the last time you will hear from us? ...

Facebook has proposed a solution to a recent security flaw that allowed apps to transmit personal data that involves encrypting the relevant string of numbers, according to a post on its Developer Blog on Thursday. The new set of parameters would allow developers to apply encryption within the next few weeks, preventing data that identifies application users from leaking to places it shouldn’t be. Facebook’s security flaw works something like this: when a Facebook user loads a particular kind of application (one that uses iframes) and authorizes the application to access their profile, the URL of the iframe then carries the user’s UID, a number that can link the account to actions on other websites. ...

Google Official Blog: In May we announced that we had mistakenly collected unencrypted WiFi payload data (information sent over networks) using our Street View cars. We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we’re acutely aware that we failed badly here. So we’ve spent the past several months looking at how to strengthen our internal privacy and security practices, as well as talking to external regulators globally about possible improvements to our policies. Here’s a summary of the changes we’re now making. ...

218 million “class members” probably won’t settle for Farmville dollar A suit has been filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of a Minnesota woman charging game maker Zynga with leaking the personal information of 218 million Facebook members in violation of federal law. The suit seeks class action status. The action follows by three days an investigative story by The Wall Street Journal that found a large number of Facebook’s apps – including Zynga games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars – leaked the user IDs of Facebook players and their friends to outside companies. ...

Facebook continues its quest to revamp its popular Photos feature with the launch of the number one most requested feature of them all: drag-and-drop organizing. Demonstrated in the video above, drag-and-drop organizing is exactly as it sounds; users can now drag and drop albums and photos into any order they desire. Today’s launch follows last month’s upgrade of Facebook Photos, which brought high resolution photo uploads and an in-line photo viewer to the News Feed. ...

Google’s ultra high speed fiber network — which the company says can offer speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second — is about to get its first trial outside of the Googleplex. The trial is fairly small and not too far from home; the company will be deploying its network at Stanford University to “a group of approximately 850 faculty- and staff-owned homes on campus. “ Google also points out that this isn’t part of its call for small-to-mid-sized communities to submit proposals to get “Google Fiber” in their towns. That competition sparked an amusing social media battle earlier this year between dozens (if not hundreds) of towns ranging from Topeka, Kansas, to Huntsville, Alabama. Google says that they, “still plan to announce our selected community or communities by the end of the year.” ...