Google robo cars drive selves on public streets

Google has built a fleet of cars that drive themselves, and over the past several months, these robotic vehicles have driven over 140,000 miles on public roads, from the Pacific Coast Highway to the famous twists and turns of San Francisco's Lombard Street.

As the company revealed on Saturday morning with a blog post, each car is equipped with video cameras, radar sensors, and a laser range finder that alerts the vehicle to other traffic, and they navigate using maps previously collected by cars that were driven by people. The self-driving cars, Google says, are never unmanned. A human sits in the driver seat and can take control of the car at anytime.

According to Google's blog post, the project aims to improve car safety and efficiency. "Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use," the post reads." Naturally, Google says it has no firms plans to actually make money form the project. But speaking with The Times, it seems to indicate that it might be able to profit by providing information and navigation services for makers of self-driving vehicles.

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Hitachi LG Prototypes 1TB Bluray Cartridge Storage

Hitachi LG Data Storage has developed a prototype data storage device that can automatically back up unused data to Blu-ray Disc cartridges, each capable of holding one terabyte (1TB) of data.

Packed with Blu-ray Discs based on the new BDXL format, each cartridge can hold 1TB of data. BDXL was standardized earlier this year and offers 128GB of storage space on a write once disc and 100GB on a rewritable disc. Each disc contains several recording layers. The system is programmed to run automatic back-ups, transferring little-used data from the hard disks to the cartridge for backup.

For most consumers or professionals the creation of even a terabyte of data would take years, but users working with high-definition video can quickly generate massive amounts of data that needs to be archived. The system is meant for such users.

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Facebook Photos Go High-Resolution

Catering to some 500 million users who upload more than 100 million images each day, Facebook said it is adding high-resolution image support and a new photo upload tool.

Facebook in April purchased Divvyshot for the expertise of Sam Odio, who as the founder of that startup wrote software to let groups of people upload photos to the Web, share them and edit them.

Many of the social network's 500 million-plus users use the Website to build whole digital photo albums online, adding pictures from computers and mobile phones, storing them for posterity.

As Facebook Photos Product Manager, Odio was tasked with drastically revamping the company's photo software. After adding face detection and photo-tagging in July, Odio has added new perks to improve the service.Facebook began rolling out free support for print-quality, high-resolution photos, which are geared for larger images. Odio said he is increasing the size of the photos stored by a factor of 8, from 720 pixels to 2,048 pixels on the largest edge.

Don't fret if you don't see the new photo capabilities right away. They will roll out over the course of October.

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U.S. Wants Broader Internet Wiretap Authority

The Obama administration is developing plans that would require all Internet-based communication services such as encrypted BlackBerry e-mail, Facebook, and Skype to be capable of complying with federal wiretap orders, according to a report published Monday.

The bill, which the White House plans to deliver to Congress next year, would require communication service providers be technically capable of intercepting and decrypting messages, raising serious privacy concerns, the Times said.

The proposal has "huge implications" and poses a test to the "fundamental elements of the Internet revolution," vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, James Dempsey, told the Times. "They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function," he was quoted as saying. Officials contend, however, that without new regulations their ability to prevent attacks could be hindered.

Internet and phone networks are already required to have eavesdropping abilities thanks to a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, but the mandate does not apply to communication service providers.

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Facebook outage spotlights social media addiction

Frustrated Facebook users find themselves jonesing for updates when site crashes. Industry watchers say Facebook users suffering through the two-and-a-half-hour outage were like drug addicts going through withdrawal. Facebook's more than 500 million users have grown accustomed to sharing updates about their cats and colleagues, and posting funny pictures of drunken friends and kids acting silly. They certainly don't like it when the social networking site goes down.

This past summer, a report from The Oxygen Media Insights Group, which is part of a company that focuses on Web sites for women, noted that a majority of the women in a survey said they are addicted to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. More than half (57%) of the women polled said they communicate with people more online than they do face to face, and 39% called themselves Facebook addicts.And analysts say social media's addictive qualities aren't only catnip for women. Men are also posting, uploading and checking out news feeds throughout the day.

While some users joked that U.S. worker productivity might skyrocket without Facebook, others said that instead of focusing on work, they spent their time complaining about the outage.

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Twitter Hack Started With `Rainbow Tweets,' High School Student Says

A person in Australia, who claims to be the center of an incident that impaired service on Twitter Inc.’s website for thousands of users, said he had no malicious intent when he disclosed a security weakness to others. A Twitter user identifying himself as Pearce Delphin, a 17- year-old high school student in Melbourne, said in an e-mail interview that he saw the potential for trouble in the short messages of another user in Japan.

As a test, Delphin said he created messages containing the Javascript command “onmousover,” which displayed the words “uh oh” when a mouse was dragged over it. Hackers, who saw his demonstration model on Sept. 21, tweaked the code to direct people to pornography websites and to create malicious software, or “worms,” that copied themselves into the message stream of anyone mousing over them. He said he didn’t write malicious code himself.

Twitter said in the blog post that the security flaw was identified and repaired about a month before the incident. It resurfaced following a software update, the company said.

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Google Docs is going mobile

Google has announced that mobile document editing will soon come to mobile users. First will come a new verification process that will reduce the reliance on passwords and increase the security of connections. But "in the next few weeks," document editing will come to Android and the iPad.

Google has provided almost no details of the editing capability, though it did show a demonstration at its Atmosphere event in Paris.

For corporate users, Google has launched two-factor authentication for mobile users. One of the factors is the mobile device itself, but it's still a step up from securing solely against a password. That feature is available to enterprise users immediately.

Mobile document editing is an enviable consequence of Android's move into the tablet space, and Google's provision for the iPad (no mention of iPhone support) is unsurprising as the company seeks to make cloud editing standard.

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Yahoo and Microsoft gain little ground on Google

New Internet search partners Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. left a small dent in Google Inc.'s market dominance last month. Google ended August with a 65.4 percent share of the U.S. search market, down from 65.8 percent, based on an analysis by the research firm comScore Inc.

The share that Google lost in August went to Yahoo and Microsoft, which are teaming up in an attempt to pose a more formidable challenge to Google. Yahoo's website in the U.S. switched over to Microsoft's search technology in late August as part of a partnership that is supposed to last for the next decade.

Yahoo ranked second with U.S. search share of 17.4 percent last month, up from 17.1 percent in July. Microsoft's Bing processed 11.1 percent of U.S. searches in August, up from 11 percent in July.

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