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Group seeks blinders on Google Street View in Japan

Citing privacy concerns, a group of Japanese lawyers and professors have asked Google to shut down its Street View feature of Google Maps in the country, according to a Reuters report.

"We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing deeply violates a basic right that humans have," said Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of constitutional law at Sophia University in Tokyo and head of the Campaign Against Surveillance Society, in an interview with Reuters.

"It is necessary to warn society that an IT (information technology) giant is openly violating privacy rights, which are important rights that the … Read more

Google doubles Street View coverage in U.S.

Street View is continuing its seemingly inexorable spread across Google Maps, with Google announcing that it's doubled the feature's coverage of the United States.

The states that now have some coverage are Maine, West Virginia, North Dakota, and South Dakota, Google said Tuesday. Cities now covered include Memphis, Tenn., Charleston, S.C., and Birmingham, Ala., and Google filled in many gaps between cities as well; Google spotlighted the Devil's Tower in Wyoming on its Lat-Long blog announcement.

Upon seeing the updated Street View coverage maps posted Tuesday on Google's blog, one co-worker quipped, "It's … Read more

TV has license to kill movies at iTunes, Netflix

Apple is an Internet retailer and Netflix is a Web video rental service, but Hollywood treats them as if they are potential competitors to TV broadcasters.

In the past two weeks, customers of iTunes and Netflix's streaming digital-movie service have noticed that a growing number of titles are disappearing from the sites or are scheduled to be removed. MacWorld wrote a story last week about how one of the site's contributors noticed that of the 15 films he bookmarked for future viewing at iTunes, 9 were no longer available. Among the movies that vanished were Charlie Wilson's … Read more

Light and easy

To put it gently, Adobe Reader is a real pain in the hindquarters. It's monstrously large, slow to load, and includes many features most users will hardly ever need. Foxit PDF Reader 3.0 kills the bloat and throws in some useful features, such as multimedia support and content-sharing options, while still allowing you to quickly access your PDFs.

The interface mimics Adobe's, so you won't have to change your reading habits. In our test, the text readability was similar. The small program starts surprisingly fast compared with Adobe. You might need to fiddle a bit to … Read more

Terminate unwanted processes

Greatly improve your process-killing ability with this freeware utility. Process Terminator's simple list-and-button interface is immediately operable by intermediate to advanced users. Most won't even crack open the simple four-paragraph Help screen.

Operating Process Terminator is intuitive and simple. On start, the app loads the list of running processes. Selecting a process displays its start time, total CPU time utilized, maximum physical memory used and amount allocated, thread count, handle count, and whether the Process UI is responding. Double-clicking a listed name opens the folder where the process is located. Any process is easily killed with a single … Read more

Chrome developer version bashes Street View bug

Google on Wednesday night released the new version 0.4.154.31 of its Chrome browser to bash a bug that bit me by blackening the new big-screen version of Street View.

Indeed, I no longer get the problem. Now if the company could get its Google Earth browser plug-in to work with Chrome, it would look more like Google's right hand is cooperating with its left hand.

According to Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson, the new version also fixes "trackpad scrolling on more laptops (and the) Sogou Pinyin Chinese input method editor skipping the first letter typed.&… Read more

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Bush signs law promoting censorship of kids' programming

President Bush on Tuesday signed the Child Safe Viewing Act, requiring the Federal Communications Commission to explore the market for technologies that allow parents to censor the programming their children watch.

The new law requires the FCC to issue a notice of inquiry to examine what advanced content-blocking technologies are available for various communication devices and platforms. It also calls for the FCC to consider how to encourage the development and use of such technologies without affecting content providers' pricing or packaging.

The term "advanced blocking technologies" is defined in the law as technology that enables parents to … Read more

Create a collapsible list in Microsoft Word

Years ago, I promised my cousin Bill (who doesn't have a TV show, by the way) that I would convert the family tree he had created into a Web page. It was pretty easy to find various JavaScripts that let you open menus and submenus, either by clicking or simply by hovering over them.

The only problem was the unwieldy HTML coding required to ensure that the lists opened and closed, as expected. What ended up working better for me was Microsoft Word's Outline view, which lets you use headings to show and hide information in a tree … Read more