TECHNOLOGY
Sunday, October 24, 2010
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Google apologizes for privacy lapses, to tighten controls WASHINGTON: Google pledged Friday to strengthen its privacy and security practices after its “Street View” mapping service gathered private wireless data, including emails and passwords, in dozens of countries. “We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we’re acutely aware that we failed badly here,” Alan Eustace, Google’s senior vice president of engineering and research, said in a blog post. “So we’ve spent the past several months looking at how to strengthen our internal privacy and security practices,” he said. Eustace provided Google’s most detailed description yet of the private data on unsecured wireless networks scooped up by Street View cars as they cruised through cities around the world taking pictures. “While most of the data is
fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords,” he said. “We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologize again for the fact that we collected it in the first place. “We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users,” Eustace said. He said Google was appointing Alma Whitten, a Google expert on privacy and security, as director of privacy “to ensure that we build effective privacy controls into our products and internal practices.” Google would also enhance privacy training and require employees to take part in a new “information security
awareness program,” Eustace said. In addition, Google will require that a “privacy design document” be included as part of all of its engineering projects, he said. Google announced in May that Street View cars taking photographs of cities in more than 30 countries had inadvertently gathered data sent over unsecured Wi-Fi systems. Canada’s privacy commissioner said Tuesday the data collected included “complete emails, email addresses, usernames and passwords, names and residential telephone numbers and addresses. “Some of the captured information was very sensitive, such as a list that provided the names of people suffering from certain medical conditions, along with their telephone numbers and addresses,” it said.
Google has since stopped the collection of WiFi data, used to provide location-based services such as driving directions in Google Maps and other products, by Street View cars. In June, Google said it has already deleted private wireless data collected by its Street View cars in Austria, Denmark and Ireland. Google is facing civil suits in Oregon and several other US states demanding millions of dollars in damages over its collection of personal wireless data and a number of countries have taken action against Street View. Spain’s data protection authority has filed suit against Google and the Czech data protection authority last month banned the company from taking Street View pictures, saying they violated privacy. Google this week said that nearly a quar-
ter of a million Germans have asked the Internet company to pixel out images of their houses on Street View. Street View, which was launched in 2006, lets users view panoramic street scenes on Google Maps and take a virtual “walk” through cities such as New York, Paris or Hong Kong. Until the practice was stopped, Street View cars were collecting Wi-Fi data in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States. — AFP
Music-based videogames losing fans DENVER: A fresh batch of music-based videogames is hitting stores in the hopes of generating strong year-end holiday sales despite the difficult market for the once-booming gaming genre. “Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock” arrived in stores Sept. 28, hip-hop karaoke game “Def Jam Rapstar” came out Oct. 5, and “DJ Hero 2” and “PowerGig: Rise of the SixString” were released Oct. 19. Coming up are two other key titles, “Rock Band 3” (Oct. 26) and “Dance Central” (Nov. 4). The fourth quarter typically accounts for about 45% of annual videogame sales, according to the Entertainment Software Assn. But sales data ahead of the final three months of 2010 do not bode well for a cheery holiday season. Overall videogame sales totaled $614 million in September, down 6% from the same period last year, while sales through the first nine months of the year totaled $4.9 billion, down 8% from a year earlier, according to NPD Group. Meanwhile, music games are plunging this year at a much steeper rate, totaling just $152 million through Sept. 30, down 50% from a year earlier, according to Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter. Music games racked up U.S. sales of $875 million in 2009, but this year the category will be lucky to break $500 million, Pachter says. He observes, “Everybody who wants a music game has one.” Against this gloomy backdrop, here’s a look at the prospects for the newest music game titles. GREAT EXPECTATIONS “ROCK BAND 3” (MTV GAMES) MTV Games and developer Harmonix keep the innovations coming in the music game genre. For the third installment of “Rock Band,” they take a big leap with the addition of a 25-key keyboard controller. It opens up both increased revenue through the sale of a new peripheral and an expanded catalog of songs that includes keyboard-heavy tracks from the Doors (“Break On Through”) and Dire Straits (“Walk of Life”). “DANCE CENTRAL” (MTV GAMES) The motion-based dance game is considered a “must have” for anyone buying Microsoft’s motion-based Kinect controller for its Xbox 360 console. Microsoft is projecting worldwide Kinect sales of about 3 million units through the end of the year. Analysts like Pachter expect almost anyone buying the Kinect to also pick up a copy of “Dance Central,” one of the most anticipated game titles using the controller. JURY’S OUT “DJ HERO 2” (ACTIVISION) The first “DJ Hero” generated decent sales but still fell short of expectations, given that it helped expand the music game category into a new music genre. The sequel features tracks by Lady Gaga, Deadmau5, Kanye West and Rihanna and has earned high scores for improving on the original title. But it’s still saddled with a high price tag due to the turntable controllers needed to play the game. “DEF JAM RAPSTAR” (KONAMI) A new entrant to the field, this hip-hop karaoke game has the benefit of the Def Jam brand and an innovative social networking element that lets users record their performances and post them to a dedicated website for peer review. An in-game store will be stocked with new downloadable tracks every week. It’s received positive, if not glowing reviews. One common criticism: lyrics that have been heavily edited to achieve a teen rating. DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH “GUITAR HERO: WARRIORS OF ROCK” (ACTIVISION) The franchise that virtually invented the music game genre came close to killing it during the last two years by saturating the market with too many editions and too little variety. While “Warriors of Rock” returns to the series’ roots, critics have slammed its new “Quest” (storyline) mode for being confusing and too limiting. “POWERGIG: RISE OF THE SIXSTRING” (SEVEN45) Among the titles adding instructional elements to their game play this year, “PowerGig” goes further than others by featuring an actual six-string guitar. But upstart developer/publisher Seven45 will face challenges stocking the game against titles from larger rivals. It will also have to fight the perception that “PowerGig” is an instructional title rather than just a game, despite featuring music by Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews Band and Kid Rock. — Reuters
KTX train
The first international forum on a train SEOUL: Five years ago, Lee Sang-Ki, founder of the Asia Journalists Association; was ambitious to launch the train of peace carrying delegations from Asian countries participating in the annual forum of the association to promote dialogue for development. This month, precisely on October 28, Mr. Lee’s dream comes true when the train of the International Forum (Busan KTX) leaves the station of the Korean capital Seoul to Busan in the south coast of the Korean peninsula, with speakers on (G20 Summit as seen by the Asian Media). The occasion is coming in the prepartion
for the global event held on 11 and 12 November 2010, when South Korea hosts the G20 Summit for the first time. The special high-speed train which hosts the Asia Journalists Association Forum was operated for the first time in December 2004, and travels at 300 kilometers per hour. The G20 Summit members are the 7 economically developed countries and 12 developing countries (the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, South Korea, Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Australia,
South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Turkey), and the European Union. This was formed 11 years ago after the Asian financial crisis. The openning ceremony will have the speeches of Kang Ji-Won, Chairman of Asia Journalists Association, Ivan Lim, president of Asia Journalists Association, Chung Un-Chan, 40th Korean prime minister, Sa GongIl, chairman of the G20 Summit preparatory committee, Lee Sang-Ki, founder of Asia Journalists Association,, and Kim Hak-Joon, Advisor of Dong-a Ilbo. The main cession will have the papers of Soo-Sung Lee, the 29th
MySpace, apps share user IDs with advertisers LOS ANGELES: MySpace has been sharing with its advertisers data that can be used to identify user profile pages, but the company doesn’t consider that to be a problem. The company said it did not consider the data to be information that could identify a person, partly because MySpace doesn’t require members to use their real names. The social networking site acknowledged transmitting information to advertisers that included a user ID and the last page viewed before a user clicked on an ad. MySpace issued the statement following a report in The Wall Street Journal on Friday disclosing the sharing. The Journal and MySpace are both owned by News Corp. The Journal also said some MySpace applications developed by outside parties had been sharing user IDs in violation of MySpace’s terms of use. Although MySpace also shares user IDs with application developers, it does not allow them to share that data further. The social networking site said it found recently that an app called “Tagme” had again violated this prohibition, but that the developer, BitRhymes Inc., had “promptly complied.” “Tagme was briefly suspended at an earlier time
due to a similar violation of our terms, but complied within a matter of hours before being reinstated,” MySpace said. BitRhymes said in a statement the sharing “was inadvertently done by an advertiser company we worked with,” and said its policy was not to pass personally identifiable information to third parties. “When we were informed of the issue, any suspect relationship was immediately dissolved,” it said. The Journal report was part of its continuing investigative series on online privacy. It came a week after a similar expose found that all of the top 10 applications on larger social networking site rival Facebook, including Zynga Game Network Inc.’s FarmVille, with 59 million users, have been transferring user IDs to outside companies. In both cases, the companies said knowledge of a user ID did not allow outside parties to view data the user had listed as private. But the Journal found that data gathering firm RapLeaf Inc. had linked Facebook data with its own database of Internet users and sold it to other firms. RapLeaf told the newspaper that those transmissions were unintentional. — AP
Austrian with high-tech robot arm dies after crash VIENNA: In the five years since losing both arms in an accident, Christian Kandlbauer had regained much of his cherished independence thanks to a high-tech, mindcontrolled robotic limb. He even got a driver’s license. Now the 22-year-old has died of injuries suffered when the car he was driving veered off the road and struck a tree. The cause of the crash is unknown — including whether the arm had anything to do with it. “Don’t live for others, live for yourself!” Kandlbauer had written on his website, which on Friday was filled with condolences after hospital officials in the southern city of Graz said he did not recover from injuries sustained in Tuesday’s accident. Kandlbauer was the first person outside the United States to wear the innovative, robotic limb that recognized signals from his brain and moved accordingly, said Otto Bock of HealthCare Products GmbH that produced the prothesis. With a normal prothesis for his right arm and the high-tech prosthesis in place of his left, Kandlbauer’s daily life had largely returned to normal. He was able to get a job at a warehouse for an auto repair shop and obtain his driver’s license in October 2009. “Thanks to the mind-controlled prothesis, I’m almost as independent and self-reliant as I was before my accident,” he said in comments on the Otto Bock HealthCare Products GmbH website. “I can pretty much live the life before the accident.” For the prothesis to work, four of Kandlbauer’s nerves were redirected to his left chest muscles, expert Hubert Egger was quoted as saying on the website. To enable Kandlbauer to drive himself to work every morning, his Subaru Impreza was adapted with special equipment, including a modified emergency brake and a button to operate the horn, indicator lights and windshield wipers. It was approved by local transportation authorities. — AP
GERMANY: The file photo shows Austrian Christian Kandlbauer presents his mind-controlled arm prosthesis during a news conference at the international specialized fair Orthopedics and Rehabilitation Technics in Leipzig, eastern Germany. —AP
Korean Prime Minister, Sohn Ji-Ae, spokesperson of the G20 in Seoul and former president of the CNN office in Seoul, the Egyptian journalist Ashraf AboulYazid, Editor, Al-Arabi magazine, the representative of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Peter Lewis, the Turkish journalist Alpagu Sinasi, and Eddy Soprato, MNC Business Channel, Indonesia. The second session shall review reports of journalists from China, Japan, Turkey, Singapore, Indonesia and the UAE, and Mongolia on media coverage of the summit in their countries.
Branson dedicates spaceport runway in US desert UPHAM: World’s first commercial spaceport. Check. Solo flight of a rocket ship for tourists. Check. A runway in the southern New Mexico desert to help them climb to the heavens. Check. The dream of whisking tourists to space for a few minutes of weightlessness edged closer to reality on Friday. “Today is very personal, as our dream becomes more real,” said Sir Richard Branson, whose company, Virgin Galactic, will operate the flights. “People are beginning to believe now.” All that is left for the company is more rocket testing on SpaceShipTwo and sending it into space. The British billionaire said he expects flights for space tourists to begin in nine to 18 months, and he will be among the first passengers. Stretching across a flat dusty plain 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of Las Cruces, the nearly twomile-(3.2-kilometer)long runway is designed to support almost every aircraft in the world, day-today space tourism and payload launch operations. Virgin Galactic is the anchor tenant of the taxpayer-funded $198 million spaceport and plans to use the facility to take tourists on what will first be short hops into space. State officials want to add companies for other commercial space endeavors, such as research and payload delivery, once the spaceport’s terminal hanger facility is complete next year. Branson was joined at Friday’s ceremonies by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, tourists who have already paid their deposits for a seat into suborbital space and Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the moon in 1969 as part of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. Virgin Galactic’s White Knight Two — the special jet-powered mothership that will carry SpaceShipTwo to launch altitude — also made an appearance Friday, passing over the spaceport several times before landing on the new runway. Spaceport America is the world’s first facility designed specifically to launch commercial spacecraft. Until now, space travel has been limited to astronauts and a handful of wealthy people who have shelled out millions to ride Russian rockets to the international space station. Tickets for suborbital space rides aboard SpaceShipTwo cost $200,000. The 2 1/2-hour flights will include about five minutes of weightlessness. Some 380 people have made deposits totaling more than $50 million, Virgin Galactic officials said. Branson, the president of Virgin Group, which counts airlines, entertainment and mobile communications among its businesses, partnered with famed aviation designer Burt Rutan on the venture. While space tourism projects such as Virgin Galactic’s receive plenty of publicity, the commercial space industry is rapidly developing with companies like SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, seeking to supply the International Space Station for NASA. SpaceX has successfully placed a dummy pay-
load into orbit and has contracts to lift satellites next. Other firms, including Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California, and Armadillo Aerospace of Rockwall, Texas, are testing systems that would carry unmanned payloads to space. Last month, Congress approved legislation that affirms President Barack Obama’s intent to use commercial carriers to lift humans into nearEarth space. “Each flight we make, we’ll learn more, we’ll experience, we’ll open up more opportunities that we cannot even conceive of today,” Branson said. “This history, we’re making it right now.” —AP
UPHAM: Virgin Galactic’s White Knight Two jet-powered carrier aircraft flies over Spaceport America during a runway dedication ceremony in Upham, New Mexico last Friday. —AP