How easy is it to vandalise Street View?

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Answer: alarmingly easy. Last Friday, I asked Google to remove a photo of me and my young family standing on a Kensington street. This morning, I received an email confirming my image had been removed. Just one problem: it wasn’t me or my family in the picture. 

Google, it appears, will take down any image – without any checks or balances – if you appear to have a legitimate complaint. In my case, I argued the picture of my pretend family and I standing outside our house was a “privacy concern”. Google asked for no proof of identity, other than a contact email address (which was a generic Gmail account, with no surname to cross-reference against the address). On that flimsiest of pretext, we’ve been able to black out part of a Kensington street.

We will, of course, ask Google’s press office to reinstate our deleted image. But our little experiment highlights how effortless it is to vandalise the service. How easy would it be, for example, to remove a photo of a rival business from the high street, by claiming you’ve been caught walking past?  

(more…)

Surely a dollar doesn’t yet equal a pound?

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

There I was, in the center (sorry, centre) of all things financially evil and I needed some cash. I am, of course, referring to Las Vegas, not the City of London. At least in Las Vegas, you have a pretty good expectation that you will come out poorer. In the City, they promise to look after your money, and then just take it anyway.

So I wandered up to an ATM machine, of which there were dozens across the gambling hall of the Venetian Hotel, home to last week’s most excellent Microsoft Mix09 conference.

I dropped in my debit card, and was relieved to see it understood all about chip and pin. Four digits later, and I had the option to check the balance of my current account. Clickety click, and out popped a paper receipt with the information printed on it. (more…)

H.M.G. Gets a Life

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

According to this BBC news article our beloved Civil Service has splashed out the thick end of £20,000 on a virtual home inside Second Life. This is the online virtual world you may have seen cropping up in various odd places like CSI:New York or sundry other moving-picture sources. It’s not really hit the general public, possibly because we currently have no Raymond Baxter figure to tell us all about it with appropriate gravitas and a twinkle in the eye – but nonetheless, the Department of Work and Pensions seem to have got the idea, very quickly… whatever that idea might actually be.

The BBC report quotes the DWP as suggesting that the Second Life setup could help with carbon emissions reduction, presumably by allowing people to “meet” virtually and share sundry 3D structures. This was something I spotted when I first looked at it in 2006, though I must say I now regret the email I wrote saying it was clearly a step-change in technology and a strategic platform, a bit like the Global Positioning System, and it was a serious issue that Europe didn’t have one of these to ourselves.

(more…)

How to add punch to your digital photos with the Levels and Curves tools

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

A common complaint from new DSLR owners is that their cameras leave their images looking rather dull and washed out: not like the punchy, eye-catching images they used to get from their cheaper compact camera.

The complaint isn’t baseless. Most DSLRs, by default, do less in-camera processing than compacts; the assumption being that you’d rather start with as exact a replica of reality as possible and edit it later.

Still, there’s little worse than a perfectly-composed, perfectly-exposed image that nonetheless doesn’t look as exciting as you thought it would. The answer is to get to grips with the Levels and Curves tools. The good news is that virtually every photo editor includes these, from Photoshop and Lightroom, to Photoshop Elements, and even free applications such as the GIMP.

(more…)

How to use Accelerators and visual search in Internet Explorer 8

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Two of the big new features in IE8 are its Accelerators and visual search facilities. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, claims that both will make a big difference to your browsing habits. But what does it all mean?

Accelerators are the headline act. Think of them as contextual searching: the ability to do a search related to any piece of text on a page. But IE8 doesn’t simply perform the equivalent of copy-and-pasting your highlighted text into Google: you can do plenty more.

(more…)

Microsoft Live Mesh: Gateway to Paradise

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

And so regular listeners to the PC Pro podcast, and anyone who read our Ten Techs to Watch in 2009 feature, will know that we really rather like Microsoft’s Live Mesh utility. But we haven’t actually written anything specifically about it yet, so I’m going to tell you why Microsoft has, for the first time ever, produced a piece of software that I would call brilliant. Honestly, genuinely brilliant. It’s currently in beta but that doesn’t mean you should waste any time in installing it. (more…)

Lost Zombies: the DIY movie apocalypse

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

The Blair Witch Project used the web to build word-of-mouth hype with incredible success before its release back in 1999, and since then it’s become a bit of a cliche for film studios to do the same. The usual process is to create cryptic teaser websites to whip the fans into a frenzy of chattering excitement before releasing an ultimately disappointing, prosaic film to a near-universal ‘meh’. (I’m looking at you, Cloverfield.)

But Lost Zombies is taking a much more ambitious approach to using the online community, by actually getting the community itself to make the movie.

“In 2007 the flu pandemic began. The flu strain spread quickly, mutating out of control and causing a global zombie apocalypse. Today 75% of the population has been wiped out. We want to hear your story.”

At its heart the site is an online community, with members posting messages and writing articles, but it has the potential to be much more than that – which is why it’s just picked up the Community and People’s Choice Awards at the South by Southwest Web Awards in Austin, Texas.

(more…)

Apple’s limited specs appeal

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

When it comes to in-depth lists of specifications, Apple certainly seems lazier than most. When most other notebook manufacturers seem to love reeling off lists of hardware – take a look at Sony’s exhaustive spec list for the VAIO TT, for instance – Apple take a different tack by being incredibly vague.

A quick glance at its page of ‘tech specs’ for the new 17in MacBook Pro reveals that the machine has either a 2.66GHz or 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 320GB hard disk with an optional SSD and an 8x slot-loading SuperDrive. But there’s no mention of which model of CPU it is, or the amount of cache on the hard disk.

That’s not the end of Apple’s vague spec-babble, though. I wanted to confirm the technology behind the extraordinary screen that I raved about in my review and, to ensure that I got proper information rather than rumour and gossip, contacted the company directly – and it seems that the vagueness of specification is prevalant throughout Apple.

(more…)

Is BT losing its bottle on Phorm?

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Is BT really committed to an unholy matrimony with behavioural advertising service Phorm? Or is the country’s biggest broadband provider beginning to lose its nerve?

Last week BT turned down an invitation to defend Phorm and its like at the House of Commons, using the excuse that it was “too close” to the technology. Presumably, BT will be gracefully bowing out every time broadband is discussed at Government level in the future… 

Today, when asked to comment on Phorm’s claim that making the service opt-out would be enough to pacify the data watchdogs, BT could hardly be less committal. Just look at the obsfucation, in the following, verbatim comment from a BT spokesman.

(more…)

The £250 Challenge: Vote for the self-build PC

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

My colleagues are a fickle lot. Their £250 Challenge computers all had myriad faults, but they can’t stop going on about my garish case, non-operational USB ports and lack of warranty. As far as I’m concerned, though, that’s the sort of charm that money can’t buy, and it’s part of the reason why you should vote for my machine as the £250 Challenge winner.

Take Darien’s second-hand selection, for instance. He may have won favour with our esteemed editor, but that machine is a whole world of pain waiting to happen. I know that mine hasn’t got a warranty, either, but it’s build from brand-new parts, some of which function as they should. Darien’s machine is made from years-old hardware and there’s no telling the stresses and strains that it’s been through. Buying a second-hand car is normally dependant on its mileage; if it’s done 200,000 miles then it’s a less attractive proposition and will almost certainly break sooner rather than later, and the same is true here.

(more…)