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Google is facing renewed privacy scrutiny in Britain, as a U.K. regulator reopens its investigation into how the Web giant's Street View program gathered personal data.

The U.K. Information Commissioner's Office announced today that it was motivated to reopen its probe, after information provided in an earlier U.K. investigation appears to have been contradicted by the Federal Communications Commission, which found in April that Google's data collection had not broken the law.

"During the course of our investigation, we were specifically told by Google that it was a simple mistake, and if the … Read more

As Google takes Street View off-road with its new Trekker backpacks, German company Streetview Technology is taking the mapping technology in yet another new direction -- DIY terrain.

That's right, with "DIY streetview," people can create their own versions of Google's popular, unpopular, and sometimes artsy high-tech atlas.… Read more

The Windows Registry contains lots of useful information used by COM stored in a variety of keys. NirSoft's RegDllView is portable freeware that extracts and displays a list of all registered DLL, OCX, and EXE files. It shows lots of data about each file, such as the last time it was registered and all registration entries (CLSID/ProgID). RegDllView not only displays entries but also disables, unregisters, and reregisters them; deletes selected entries; and creates .Reg files for deleted entries. It can also open entries in RegEdit. RegDllView has a customizable view, and it can create and save HTML-based … Read more

Google's Street View keeps on playing the muse to various digital artistes out there and yielding interesting visual confections.

Our buddies over at the Creators Project have made us aware of a trippy little film called "Chemin Vert" that uses Street View images to let Rome-based creator Giacomo Miceli visualize what he calls on his site "one of my childhood fantasies, riding a rocket launched at full speed just above the ground of a long road."… Read more

Do you know about alternate data streams and the potential threat they pose to your PC? They're a little-known part of the NTFS file system found in most PC hard drives today. Most are used by your system and pose no threat, but hackers can hide rootkits and other malicious software in alternate data streams in compromised systems and execute them without the owner's knowledge or permission. You may be unaware that your system has been compromised until the alternate data stream is executed. Now that we have your attention, we'll tell you about NirSoft's AlternateStreamView, … Read more

Traveling to the world's most famous attractions is far and away the best way to see them, but Google doesn't want those who are short of time or money to be left out of seeing icons like Stonehenge, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Starting today, Google's new World Wonders Project brings the company's famous Street View technology to 132 famous sites in 18 countries, sometimes using pedal power instead of its now familiar camera-topped cars.

Among the sites included in the project are Versailles in France, Jerusalem in Israel, Historic Route 66 in the United … Read more

I admit to having a certain fascination with the Nokia 808 PureView smartphone camera, which employs a much larger sensor than usual in order to take pictures up to 41 megapixels in size. Just how much larger that sensor is compared to the typical 5-megapixel and 8-megapixel smartphone sensors will impress you.

Yesterday I sat down with Juha Alakarhu, the head of camera technologies at Nokia for smart devices, who happens to be visiting the U.S. from Finland. After letting me tinker with the camera some more, he pulled out a felt-lined card studded with a trio of camera sensors and two camera modules, into which the sensors ultimately go.… Read more

Despite earlier reports saying that it might do so, Australia won't take aim at Google's Street View service over the collection of Wi-Fi data.

The country's news.com.au service reported today that Australia Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim was planning to evaluate a recently released U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report on Street View data collection to determine if his office should call on the Australian Federal Police to launch an investigation into the search giant's practices. However, in a subsequent media statement, the commissioner's office made it clear no such investigation would be … Read more

Two congressmen have asked the Department of Justice to reopen its investigation of Google's Street View street-mapping service, which collected and stored data from unencrypted wireless networks.

Google's Street View cars, which were supposed to collect the locations of Wi-Fi access points, also inadvertently collected e-mail and text messages, passwords, Internet-usage history, and other data from unsecured wireless networks for two years or so, beginning in 2007.

In the wake of a recently released FCC report that concluded no laws had been broken by the surreptitious data gathering, Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and John Barrow (D-Ga.) … Read more