Google starts to blur faces in StreetView Maps!
After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however. Although Google’s Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year. As specially equipped Google vehicles cruised city streets snapping panoramic images of homes and businesses, the resulting photos revealed people falling off bikes, exiting strip joints, crossing the street, sunbathing — everyday, in-public things but nonetheless, things they might not have wanted preserved for posterity.
Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View’s goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there. This week, Google revealed it had indeed begun deploying a facial-recognition algorithm that scans photos for mugs to blur. The changes are happening first in scenes in New York, before slowly expanding to the other 40 cities in Street View. Google spokesman Larry Yu said the company is still tweaking the system. For now it tends to err on the side of blurring too many things — things a computer erroneously interprets as faces — but that is better than leaving too many faces unblurred, Yu said.
Source: AP, Martin
Time Warner Inc’s HBO cable network is expected to start selling shows on Apple iTunes digital entertainment service, with flexible pricing, sources familiar with the discussions said on Monday. Episodes of some HBO shows are likely to be sold at the standard price of $1.99 per episode or higher, these sources said, marking the first time Apple has agreed to selling television shows at different prices in the United States. The deal could be announced as early as Tuesday, one of the sources said. Although some global iTunes stores, including Japan, already sell songs at different prices, Apple has resisted offering music or television shows at different prices for the sake of simplicity for consumers.
In a newly-opened online showcase, search engine specialist 
The FBI announced Friday that an investigation into counterfeit network components made in China and sold to the U.S. government has recovered about 3,500 fake devices with a value of $3.5 million. The criminal probe, code-named Operation Cisco Raider, was prompted by concerns that counterfeit network components could give hackers access to government databases. But one U.S. official told 
Advanced Micro Devices plans to release processors with 12 cores, which changes its product road map and kills earlier plans to release 8-core chips. The 12-core processor, code-named Magny-Cours, will be targeted at servers and is due for release in the first half of 2010, according to the company’s updated road map announced Wednesday. The chip will include 12M bytes of L3 cache and support DDR3 RAM, according to the road map. AMD is jumping from a 6-core chip code-named Istanbul, due for release in the second half of 2009, straight to a 12-core chip the following year, an AMD spokesman said. Until last month, AMD officials repeated plans to ship the 8-core server chip, code-named Barcelona, in 2009.
MySpace has launched a data-sharing project in which the social networking site will open up its code to partner sites Photobucket, Twitter, eBay and Yahoo. The MySpace Data Availability Initiative will involve the creation of a new section of the site which will manage the data sharing. Users will access the system and share data on an ‘opt-in’ basis, meaning that only information which the user has chosen to share will be viewable by others. The information will then be available for use on other sites, allowing users to display MySpace profile information along with photos and video files on other participating sites.
If you like to download the latest episodes of “Heroes” or other NBC shows from BitTorrent, maybe you shouldn’t buy a Microsoft Zune to watch them on. A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it. Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it would start selling video programming for the Zune, mainly TV shows. These include programs from NBC Universal, which has pulled its shows off Apple’s iTunes Store. Late Tuesday afternoon I reached J. B. Perrette, the president of digital distribution for NBC Universal, to ask why NBC found Microsoft’s video store more appealing than Apple’s.
McAfee has unveiled a secure search service and a security certification programme for retail sites in an attempt to make web surfing safer. McAfee Secure Search will be accessible through a toolbar in the firm’s Site Adviser offering, and will filter sites that use browser exploits or push suspicious downloads. Search results will be displayed with a red, yellow or green icon to indicate the level of risk. The service is due for launch later this summer. “The rise of malicious sites has caused internet users to be wary of searching and shopping online, especially when those activities require personal information,” said Tim Dowling, vice president of McAfee’s web security group.