PC Magazine - 2009 04.pdf - Libertad Zero - Blog

home showed up on Street View.
The photographs in question were
taken at the foot of the Borings’
driveway and show the couple’s
house, a pool area, and a detached
garage. Despite the Borings’ claims,
Judge Amy Reynolds Hay of the U.S.
District Court for Western Pennsylvania
dismissed the suit, saying
that in order to prove invasion of
privacy, the Borings must demonstrate
“mental suffering, shame, or
humiliation.”
Along with privacy concerns,
there are those who believe virtual
mapping is a security risk. Republican
California Assemblyman Joel
Anderson recently crafted a bill mandating
that virtual mapping programs blur out
schools, places of worship, government
buildings, and medical facilities or face
hefty fines and possible jail time. Anderson
wrote the bill after it was revealed that
PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
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terrorists in Israel and Mumbai used mapping
programs to help plot terror attacks.
“All I’m trying to do is stop terrorists,”
Anderson told the Associated Press. “I
don’t want California to be helping map out
future targets for terrorists.”
Looking into the Future
An inside report on this year’s DEMO show.
sTreeT visioN Anonymous cars specially outfitted with
multilens cameras capture images for virtual maps.
For the past 18 years, the annual DEMO show has been
dedicated to start-up companies and brand-new products.
Forward Thinking blogger and former PCMag
editor-in-chief Michael J. Miller was on the ground at
the spring DEMO ’09 show, last month in California.
Here’s his roundup of the show’s highlights.
Reflecting the changes in the economy, there are
fewer new products here than in any year in recent
memory, but I’m still expecting to see a variety of
new things, ranging from gadgets to consumer Web
services to enterprise software. I’m struck, however,
by the number of products designed for personal
productivity, an area that has been overshadowed in
recent years.
For example, I saw Symantec’s Project Guru, an
online tool that includes remote diagnostics, network
monitoring, and online remote access for tech-savvy users—you
know, people like us—to offer tech support to friends and family.
This will be a closed pilot initially, and the company hasn’t
announced pricing, but it’s a very interesting concept. Also at the
show was Gwabbit, an inexpensive add-on for Microsoft Outlook
that finds and captures contacts from anywhere within an e-mail
message, and then turns them into contact records in your address
book. There are a number of other e-mail–based tools slated to be
introduced, including the Asurion Mobile AddressBook and Cc:
Betty, which is touted as a “personal email assistant.”
Xandros Presto ($19.95), from the Xandros Linux folks, promises
to cut any Windows machine’s start-up time by offering an
“instant on” feature. AppZero is another interesting product that
By all indications, Google has
cooperated with requests to take
down or blur Street View photographs
that others object to. But the
company has no intention of removing
Street View. In the past year, it
has added more than 40 cities as
well as national parks and recreation
centers. Google has also rolled out
a crowdsourcing feature in which
users can post their own street
photos. Believing the service’s benefits
far outweigh any potential risks
or privacy infringements, Google
included its own reality check in its
motion to dismiss the Borings’ suit.
“Complete privacy does not
exist in this world except in a desert,” the
statement read, “and anyone who is not a
hermit must expect and endure the ordinary
incidents of the community life of
which he (or she) is a part.”
—Chloe Albanesius and Erik Rhey
sNeAk Peek Among the products displayed at this year’s DEMO show were the
Always Innovating Touch Book with detachable screen (left), Coveroos customizable
cell phone covers (center), and the Avaak Vue personal video system (right).
claims to turn server-based applications into cloud-based applications.
Three products at DEMO that are designed to improve Web
searching are ensembli, Primal Fusion, and Xmarks.
On the hardware side, there were a few products that looked
particularly interesting, including the Touch Book, a portable
device that works as both a netbook and a touch-screen tablet, and
Qualcomm’s mirasol Display, which claims to use significantly less
energy than competing display screens. Another compelling display
technology was the Avaak vue Personal video system, which
the company describes as “a revolutionary wire-free video system
that allows remote viewing of anything from anywhere.” And it may
not be a big technical advance, but Coveroos may entice people to
customize their cell-phone covers.—Michael J. Miller