SCOTUS nominee Kagan helped defend RIAA from Jack Thompson
In her lengthy questionnaire (PDF) for the Senate Judiciary Committee, new Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan discussed the "ten (10) most significant litigated matters which you personally handled." They're an odd bunch of cases, involving the National Enquirer, Uri Geller, and the RIAA, for whom Kagan worked on an amicus brief in the notorious 2 Live Crew rap obscenity trial.
Kagan describes her work for the RIAA this way: "We filed an amicus brief in the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America and numerous record companies, challenging the decision of the district court that a musical recording was obscene under the standard set forth by the Supreme Court in Miller v. California. I drafted the brief in the case, which stressed the difficulty of holding music obscene under prevailing constitutional law."
This nationally known case involved none other than Jack Thompson, the now-disbarred-in-Florida lawyer who has spent years going after violent video games.
Back in 1989, Thompson led an "obscenity" charge against 2 Live Crew's album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, and the state eventually charged a music store with obscenity for selling it. The album saw tremendous sales thanks to the controversy, though a federal judge did declare the album obscene. Kagan got involved when the case was appealed, as the RIAA wanted to make sure its products weren't in the habit of being censored. The recording industry won the appeal, and the Supreme Court refused to hear it further.
The case fit with Kagan's interests at the time. As she notes in the questionnaire, "Between 1991 and 1995, I wrote primarily about issues of free expression. My major work at this time proposed a theory of the First Amendment focused on the nature of governmental motives underlying speech restrictions."
Several of Kagan's other important cases dealt with speech issues. She represented the National Enquirer, a sensational tabloid that was accused of libel by "a person mistakenly identified in the publication as being [pentecostal minister] Jimmy Swaggert’s father... We eventually settled the case on terms favorable to our client."
Then there was Byrd v. Randi, in which "we represented defendant Montcalm Publishing Corp. in a libel action arising from an allegation that the plaintiff was in prison for child molestation." McClatchy Newspapers sums up the case:
Sometimes, Kagan played a more prominent role, as in a dispute that pitted "The Amazing Randi" against Eldon Byrd.
Randi made his mark by attacking spoon-bender Uri Geller's claims of having psychic powers. In the late 1980s, Randi called Byrd, an ally of Geller's who'd been put on probation for distributing sexually explicit material, a child molester.
Byrd sued for libel, naming Randi and the publishers of his allegations.
Representing Montcalm Publishing, the publisher of The Twilight Zone magazine, Kagan drafted motions and argued before the Baltimore-based trial judge. She stressed broad First Amendment principles, such as when an individual's reputation already was tainted enough to be libel-proof.
Standing up for 2 Live Crew, the National Enquirer, and The Amazing Randi—Kagan certainly worked on some colorful cases in her early years as a lawyer, though her own involvement seems limited to discovering, writing, and researching. She soon entered academia, moving to the University of Chicago and then to Harvard Law, where she served as dean and oversaw a whole new host of colorful personalities, including Jonathan Zittrain, Lawrence Lessig, and Charles Nesson.
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Chipmaker cartel fined �331 million for DRAM price fixing
A few years after US regulators nailed DRAM producers for price fixing, the EU has gotten in on the cartel-busting action. The European Commission has fined 10 chipmakers a total of €331.3 million for keeping prices on DRAM artificially high between 1998 and 2002 by sharing "secret information" among themselves.
Regulators first became interested in the companies back in 2001, when OEMs such as Dell and Apple began complaining about a mysterious spike in DRAM prices even though there was an excess of capacity. The US Department of Justice started handing out fines as early as 2004, when it nicked Infineon for $160 million after the German company admitted to its role. Hynix and Samsung settled with the DoJ in 2005, with Japanese company Elpida forking over $84 million in early 2006.
Settlement discussions between the EU and the 10 companies began in 2009. Micron was the first to squeal on the rest of the cartel, and, as a result, got off scot-free (the first whistleblower in a cartel gets immunity under EU regulations). The rest of the companies involved will pay anywhere from €1.8 million (Nanya) to €145.7 million (Samsung) in fines for their collusion.
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The new Hotmail: less clutter, more efficiency
A raft of updates for Microsoft's Windows Live products are due to arrive over the next few months. In April, the company described the next version of the Windows Live Messenger instant messaging platform. Now it's Hotmail's turn in the limelight.
The new Hotmail is being promoted first and foremost as a more efficient way of managing e-mail. The new "Sweep" feature is designed to make it easier to manage all those messages that aren't quite spam—mailing lists and marketing mail that we did sign up for or opt in to—but equally aren't what we're really interested in.
These low-value e-mails can be swept away, leaving the stuff we actually care about—messages from our contacts and social networks, current conversations—easy to find. In conjunction with spam filtering, for killing the messages that we don't want at all, this should make inboxes much easier to manage.
The new Hotmail will also allow a monstrous 10GB of attachments per e-mail. E-mails of up to 200 attachments of 50MB each will also be possible. Fortunately, the entire 10GB will not be sent as an e-mail. Instead, the attachments will be uploaded to SkyDrive, and the e-mail itself will only contain links.
Microsoft explains that e-mail is one of the most widely-used ways of sharing photographs. This is in spite of e-mail's unsuitability to this task; most mail services place strict limits on the size of messages that can be used, and e-mailing a picture to a dozen people means that they all have to download it whether they care or not.
Building an image gallery on SkyDrive and then distributing links to that is a neat solution to the problem. It makes the e-mails themselves small and manageable, without requiring anyone to adopt a new workflow; it will still look and work as if they were regular attachments.
Pictures sent in this way, along with movies from YouTube and Hulu, or photos on sites like Flickr and SmugMug, will show up seamlessly embedded into any messages viewed from the Hotmail Web interface, so Hotmail users won't need to switch to other sites to interact with media sent to them.
This integration also extends to Office documents. Any Office document can be opened, edited, and shared, right from the inbox, using the Office 2010 Web Apps. These too will be integrated with SkyDrive, so files can be edited and shared from SkyDrive as well.
Hotmail will also offer an interesting new authentication scheme. When using untrusted machines where keyboard logging is a risk (such as at Internet cafes or in airports), Hotmail users will be able to elect to be sent a one-time password to another mail account or a cell phone. This password can then be used to provide access to Hotmail once. Even if recorded by a keyboard logger, the one-time password will be of no value. In conjunction with the always-on SSL that the new Hotmail will offer, this should greatly improve the e-mail system's security.
We first heard about the new Hotmail when details were prematurely published last month. It's a substantial overhaul of the platform, with much stronger integration between mail, messaging, file storage, and now Office applications. The new Hotmail should start rolling out some time in the next few months; as yet, however, there's no public launch date.
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Vietnamese forum digs up iPod touch prototype with camera
Vietnamese website Tinh tế is officially on a roll, posting its third Apple hardware leak in under two weeks. After getting its hands on a fourth-generation iPhone prototype last week and an updated MacBook a day early, Tinh tế has now revealed that it is in possession of an iPod touch prototype that includes a rear-facing camera.
The third-generation iPod touch, launched last October, was widely rumored to come equipped with a camera like the one in the iPhone. However, the final product lacked the camera, much to the chagrin of prospective buyers. A teardown by iFixit revealed space to fit a low-end camera module similar to the video-only camera included in the fifth-gen iPod nano. We suspected that Apple preferred to wait until it could equip the touch with a camera comparable to the iPhone's—the thinner iPod touch simply had no room for such an advanced module.
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AT&T tethering screen in iPhone OS 4 beta gives users hope
AT&T users may finally get the option to tether their iPhones to their laptops in order to share the data connection—at least if hints from the latest iPhone OS 4 beta are to be believed. A new version of the beta software was distributed to developers Tuesday night, and those with access (such as MacRumors) dug up a new configuration screen that indicates AT&T users will be able to set up tethering on their accounts by either calling AT&T or going to its website.
Apple first announced that iPhone users would be able to tether in June of 2009 at WWDC. There was a catch, however: it would only work with participating global carriers, and AT&T was not one of them. The carrier claimed it would offer such a feature along with multimedia messaging (MMS) capabilities at a later date, but MMS was the only one to arrive before the end of 2009. Last month, AT&T said that it wanted to ensure that it could offer better network performance before allowing iPhone tethering.
(Because tethering capabilities were built into iPhone OS 3 for use by other carriers, however, numerous AT&T users have been tethering via jailbreak. So far, there have been few repercussions from AT&T, though we're sure the carrier doesn't like it.)
The leaked screenshot from iPhone OS 4 offers a ray of hope to AT&T users who have been longing for this feature. Let's keep the excitement under control until we see the price tag that will come with that feature—it's all but certain that AT&T won't allow users to plunder its network without paying an additional premium on top of normal data plans.
AT&T declined to comment on this latest leak, but did tell Ars that the company is not announcing anything new at this time.
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IBM cheats on Cell with NVIDIA Tesla for servers
The Cell chip that powers the PlayStation 3 has been good to IBM's high-performance computing (HPC) efforts, with Big Blue's supercomputers riding the game console chip to fame and glory in the biannual Top 500 Supercomputer List. Cell makes an ideal coprocessor for the kinds of scientific codes that supercomputers run—indeed, it makes more sense as an HPC coprocessor than it does as a game console chip. But the writing may be on the wall for Cell, as IBM has just announced a server that can use two NVIDIA Tesla devices as coprocessors.
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Microsoft files rare patent lawsuit against Salesforce.com
On Tuesday, Microsoft filed a federal lawsuit against software-as-a-service company Salesforce.com, claiming that the online CRM software company infringes on nine Microsoft patents.
Redmond claims that it first notified Salesforce.com of its infringement more than a year ago, and Salesforce.com's January SEC filing warned that the company had been approached by a "large technology company" with allegations that it was infringing on patents.
The nine patents were awarded to Microsoft between 1997 and 2007, and span a range of technology, from "method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display" to "system and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network."
The complaint seeks temporary and permanent injunctions, and monetary damages. It also asserts that the infringement is willful, a claim that would entitle the company to triple damages.
The suit comes as the two companies are becoming increasingly competitive with each other. Microsoft has its own CRM software, Dynamics, and offers many products, including Dynamics, Exchange, and SharePoint, as online services. This is set to expand further with the Office Web Apps, which provide software-as-a-service versions of the productivity suite. Both companies also offer cloud platforms; Microsoft with Azure, Salesforce.com with Force.com.
The move is an unusual one for Microsoft, a company that more often finds itself on the receiving end of patent lawsuits. Microsoft sued peripheral company Belkin in 2006, mouse maker Primax Electronics in 2008, and GPS company TomTom in 2009.
Each suit resulted in a settlement being reached before the cases made it to trial. Traditionally, the company has sought to create a licensing agreement with those corporations believed to be infringing on its patents in preference to getting the courts involved.
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Torchlight sells 500,000 copies, publisher buys in for $8.4M
Independent games have a hard road to tread—little to no marketing budget, small teams, competition from huge, well-known names. That's why it's worth celebrating when a great game from a small developer becomes a hit. And Torchlight didn't just sell in decent numbers, it sold in huge numbers for a game of this type: 500,000 copies to date.
That's not just a hit in the world of independent gaming, that's a hit in any corner of this business.
"We basically approached all the usual suspects—Steam, Direct2Drive, etc, and began setting up those partnerships and agreements," Runic Games' Wonder Russell told Ars. "There is definitely an ease-of-use and approachability with digital downloads that is a huge help to the indie developer, but getting the word out there that you have a game for sale that’s a lot of fun to play is always going to be the trickiest part of the business, especially for a small company like ours, with zero marketing budget."
He shared those thoughts with us back in November 2009. Clearly, things worked out.
In an interesting twist, Perfect World Entertainment has now purchased a majority stake in Runic Games for approximately $8.4 million. Perfect World is known more for Chinese MMO releases than single-player dungeon crawlers, so the company is likely looking towards the MMO update for Torchlight that's coming in the next few years.
This is great news for everyone involved, and it proves that you can still pour your heart into a game and be greatly rewarded. Torchlight is available on a selection of digital distribution platforms, including Steam for Mac gamers, for $19.99.
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Four things you wouldn't expect to be affected by piracy
Movies, TV shows, software, games, porn, and music are the usual topics of conversation when it comes to any discussion about online piracy. After all, those types of media make up the lion's share of content found via P2P. Still, the online world has opened the doors to sharing all manner of ideas and intellectual property besides these obvious examples, and there are a few unexpected types of content that get ripped off pretty often, thanks to the Internet.
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Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space
Quantum teleportation has achieved a new milestone or, should we say, a new ten-milestone: scientists have recently had success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles, an unprecedented length. The researchers who have accomplished this feat note that this brings us closer to communicating information without needing a traditional signal, and that the ten miles they have reached could span the distance between the surface of the earth and space.
As we've explained before, "quantum teleportation" is quite different from how many people imagine teleportation to work. Rather than picking one thing up and placing it somewhere else, quantum teleportation involves entangling two things, like photons or ions, and then moving the quantum state from one to the other.
When one of the items is sent a distance away, entanglement ensures that changing the state of one causes the other to change as well, allowing the teleportation of quantum information, if not matter. However, the distance particles can be from each other has been limited so far to a number of meters.
Teleportation over distances of a few hundred meters has previously only been accomplished with the photons traveling in fiber channels to help preserve their state. In this particular experiment, researchers maximally entangled two photons using both spatial and polarization modes and sent the one with higher energy through a ten-mile-long free space channel. They found that the distant photon was still able to respond to changes in state of the photon they held onto even at this unprecedented distance.
However, the long-distance teleportation of a photon is only a small step towards developing applications for the procedure. While photons are good at transmitting information, they are not as good as ions at allowing manipulation, an advancement we'd need for encryption. Researchers were also able to maintain the fidelity of the long-distance teleportation at 89 percent— decent enough for information, but still dangerous for the whole-body human teleportation that we're all looking forward to.
Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NPHOTON.2010.87 (About DOIs).
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Feature: Fear and loathing at E3: the lie of the game preview
When is the last time you read a preview for a game that was negative? It's a common complaint in the world of game writing: preview coverage is hilariously one-sided, and serves only to get people excited about games that could be years away from completion. Is it a matter of corruption? Bribery? Something even more insidious?
While conspiracy theories are fun, the truth is that the press is only presented information about games after that information has been heavily polished and prepared. Preview events—including demos at shows such as E3—are highly orchestrated, controlled affairs. Interviews take place with PR representatives in the room, with skittish developers looking at their handlers when asked a tough question. The real problem is that there is simply too much at stake to present anything but a perfect experience.
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Wikipedia, porn, and the FBI: how sexual images are handled
Everybody is wondering who is in charge at Wikipedia ever since Fox News reported that founder Jimmy Wales has relinquished some control over the site's material. The story claimed that, following Wales' alleged attempt to delete a slew of pornographic images from the site, he has been denied the right "to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content."
That's something Wales supposedly started doing following a Wikipedia cofounder's letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation claiming that Wikimedia Commons "may be knowingly distributing child pornography."
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Aussie rightsholders make sweating to oldies more expensive
According to Australia's Copyright Tribunal, fitness classes have not been paying enough money for the music they play while attendees sweat into their leotards. To fix the problem, the Tribunal yesterday announced a new rate for fitness center music, and it's 1,500 percent higher than the previous rate.
It could have been (much) worse for gyms—rightsholders wanted a 4,000 percent increase—but many fitness centers are already pledging not to pay. They'd rather play bad cover versions than cough up the cash for the original recordings.
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Teardown gets to the silicon heart of the Kin Two
iFixit, with the help of partner Chipworks, has given Microsoft's social mobile device its usual teardown treatment. A sample of the Kin Two was disassembled, revealing a mostly pedestrian slider design powered by NVIDIA's Tegra processor.
iFixit told Ars that that the Tegra processor was hidden beneath a Numonyx package, but Chipworks was able to verify its true origins via Xray examination. The innards are also populated with a variety of silicon from Qualcomm (CDMA radio), Synaptics (touch digitizer), Texas Instruments (power manager and WLAN), Wolfson (audio), Samsung (NAND), Avago (GPS and amplifier), and Sony (camera). iFixit didn't find anything especially amazing about the electronics, other than the fact that the camera module seemed rather small for 8 megapixels.
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That old copier still holds a picture of your backside
The Federal Trade Commission wants to make sure the public knows an important truth: if you photocopy your butt on a modern copier, it's probably still there, safe on the copier's hard drive. It exists there along with medical forms, financial documents, and that list of gang members your police department was just about to arrest.
CBS News did a story last month on secrets kept by digital copiers. Most digital copiers produced in the last five years archive copied documents on internal hard drives, and those hard drives are easy enough to obtain once the copiers are resold or their lease expires. By examining the hard drives of several used copiers, CBS found "a list of targets in a major drug raid" from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit. It also scored Social Security numbers, medical documents, and "$40,000 in copied checks."
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Fermi's Tevatron finds another bias against antimatter
We tend to view antimatter as exotic and unstable, prone to annihilation when it combines with the vast excess of normal matter present in our Universe. But it didn't have to be that way; most behavior of subatomic particles shows no preference for matter over antimatter, and calculations suggest the two should have been produced in roughly equal proportions during the Big Bang. Figuring out why we live in a matter-filled Universe has been one of the nagging questions facing physicists.
Over the last couple of decades, a few cases of what are called C-P violations have been identified. These are cases where a particle decay that should, in theory, produce equal amounts of antimatter and matter, doesn't. These few instances, however, don't occur with sufficient frequency to explain why the Universe has its current abundance of regular matter. That has kept physicists looking and, this morning, Fermilab announced that research performed in its Tevatron accelerator has provided strong evidence for another C-P violation.
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Best Buy hedges bets, preps movie download service
After months of consideration, Best Buy is making its foray into digital video downloading by buying the rights to the CinemaNow name. Sonic Solutions, which purchased CinemaNow in 2007, will continue to maintain the back-end technology for the service, while Best Buy will focus on marketing and selling the service to consumers. The service will launch soon, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Best Buy had originally planned to build its own branded service using Sonic Solutions' CinemaNow technology, much as Blockbuster did early last year. However, the company later decided to partner directly with Sonic Solutions, acquiring the rights to the CinemaNow name. "It ended up being the perfect marriage because Sonic was not looking to be customer-facing," Ryan Pirozzi, Best Buy's director of digital media, told the LA Times.
Customers will be able to stream movies directly to their computers via the CinemaNow website. In addition, Best Buy is partnering with LG to add built-in support to its Blu-ray players. It will also add support for CinemaNow to Internet-connected devices from its own Insignia house brand.
According to the Associated Press, rentals will cost about $4 while purchases will cost about $15. CinemaNow will also have releases on the same day that DVDs go on sale, unlike rival service Netflix, which won't be able to offer videos until 30 days after DVD release.
Best Buy's move into digital video downloads now is a hedge against a future decline in physical media sales, though Pirozzi doesn't expect downloads to begin to outstrip DVDs and Blu-ray discs until sometime after 2012. Best Buy also distributes digital music via its acquisition of Napster, and DSL and VoIP services via its acquisition of Speakeasy.
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Used cigarette butts turn into steel corrosion inhibitors
Cigarette butts are one of the most common forms of trash found throughout the world. Some estimates put the number of cigarette butts discarded into the environment in the trillions annually. The residual chemicals on cigarette butts are toxic to fish—a single butt, placed in a liter of water, has the potential to kill half of the fish population in it every 96 hours.
Following the mantra of "reduce, reuse, recycle," a team of Chinese researchers have found a use for all those discarded cigarette butts: steel corrosion inhibitors. The researchers started with an extract solution made from soaking cigarette butts in water. This extract was then applied to N80 steel to determine whether it altered the metal's ability to stand up to various strengths of hydrochloric acid solutions.
Using combinations of 10, 15, and 20 weight percent HCl solutions and 3, 5, 10, and 15 weight-percent inhibitor solutions, the researchers carried out two classes of tests to measure corrosion inhibition. The first test was a simple mass balance. Steel samples of known mass were placed in various mixtures for a fixed period of time. The mass loss-per-area-per-unit time would be related to the inhibition efficiency.
The second class of tests examined metal discs before and after their time in the solutions. These are completely independent measurements, but can also be directly translated into an inhibition efficiency, so they should corroborate the simpler mass balance tests.
All the cigarette butt inhibitor solutions were efficient inhibitors of steel corrosion in a harsh environment. Efficiencies were quite high, peaking at 90+ percent in 10 and 15 weight-percent HCl solutions, and 88 percent in the strongest 20 weight-percent HCl mixture. The two different testing methods gave similar trends, so the numbers seem solid. The inhibitor retarded the rate of metal dissolution and hydrogen formation on the metal surface. Perhaps with use, it will become easier to convince people to recycle their cigarette trash instead of just throwing it wherever they find convenient.
Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 2010. DOI: 10.1021/ie100168s (About DOIs).
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Seagate's upcoming 3TB drives will need new motherboards
2.1 TB of storage ought to be enough for anybody. At least, that's what IBM and Microsoft must have been thinking when they set the maximum supported size drive of the venerable Logical Block Addressing (LBA) standard that's now embedded in motherboards, RAID drivers and firmware, and operating systems across all segments of the PC industry. So when Seagate confirmed longstanding rumors that the drivemaker is prepping a 3TB drive for the end of the year, it also had to give a number of caveats along with the news.
"Nobody expected back in 1980 when they set the standard that we’d ever address over 2.1TB," Seagate's Barbara Craig told Thinq. That was the year that IBM introduced the world's first gigabyte drive at a retail price of $40,000 (about $68,300 in 2009 dollars) and a weight of 550lb; it was also the year that Seagate introduced the first 5.25-inch hard drive for the IBM PC-XT, the 5MB ST-506. Given those data points, it's easy to see how 2.1TB was essentially just an arbitrarily large number of bytes, sort of like "a gazillion."
So if you're in the market for a new system as we head into the summer, you'll want to keep an eye out for hardware that can support the larger drives. And you'll also want to keep an eye out for the next version of our long-delayed System Guide, which we're currently working on.
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Red Dead Redemption 360 vs. PS3: our thoughts
Our review copies of Red Dead Redemption have arrived, which means it's time to get to work on some coverage. Rockstar sent both a PS3 and a 360 version of the game, and many people are wondering which version to get, so we thought we'd do a quick comparison.
This is non-scientific, but after playing an hour of both games, and switching back and forth between the two systems on our display, it's clear that the 360 version has quite the graphical advantage. It's sharper, with much less aliasing. The faces of the characters were clearer in the opening section. Gameplay sections likewise looked better, with smoother graphics across the board. The PlayStation 3 version looked impressive, but there was a noticeable jump in quality while playing on the 360.
Keep in mind that the game doesn't look bad on the PS3—not by any stretch—but based on our time with the game and direct comparisons, the 360 version looks better. If you purchase the PS3 version of the game you're not going to be let down, but if you have the choice, pick up a copy for the 360.
Here's another reason to buy the game for the Xbox 360: if you dislike playing with strangers, there are 16 Ars Technica members in the game's thread playing online with the 360 version, compared to three on the PS3. If you're going to be playing, sign up!
Why did we decide to write this post for this particular game? It's rare we get sent both copies of a game, and there has been some discussion about which one to get. Let us know if this is something you're interested in seeing in the future, and we'll try to provide more of it when we can.
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Students to be given access to laptop "spying" photos
Students who were photographed at home by the Lower Merion School District IT department will have the opportunity to see the photos thanks to a court order issued Friday. The students will be able to view the images with or without their parents, and request that the court block their parents from seeing "sensitive" photos if they so choose.
The purpose of the order is apparently to make students aware of exactly what photos were taken, when, and where. According to the order, students and their parents or guardians will receive a notice in the mail if the students were identified in any of the "thousands" of photos taken by administrators. Students and/or parents will not receive a copy of the images, but will be able to view them in a private screening area provided by investigators. If students request that their parents not be allowed to see certain photos, the judge in the case will discuss the matter with the student before deciding.
This will likely be a massive undertaking, considering that nearly 58,000 photos were taken by the school district's IT staff. An "independent" investigation (conducted by a firm hired by the school district) recently concluded that most of those photos were never seen by a human being—despite other evidence in the case showing that the IT department viewed the images as entertainment and the fact that a student was disciplined at school because of what he was seen doing at home via his MacBook's webcam.
Friday's order came just days after another ruling from a different judge directing that the photos be given to the FBI for review. The FBI began investigating the case back in February to determine whether the school broke any federal wiretap laws; that investigation is ongoing.
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Google faces US, German probes over WiFi data collection
Authorities in both Germany and the US are expected to begin inquiries into Google's "accidental" collection of WiFi payload data by its Street View cars. German commissioner for data protection Peter Schaar has asked for a detailed probe of the incident while consumer group Consumer Watchdog has demanded that the US Federal Trade Commission look into Google's activities on this side of the pond.
The furor erupted after Google admitted on Friday that its Street View cars had been collecting more data than the company realized. The cars are supposed to only take photos of the street and collect basic WiFi information, such as the SSIDs and MAC addresses of WiFi routers. The WiFi data was to be used in Google's location-based services, and Google argued last month that it only collected the same data that was publicly available to anyone walking down the street with a WiFi device. Google insisted that it did not collect any kind of IP or packet data in the course of its WiFi collections.
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