Earlier today Google released the full report of the FCC’s investigation into the collection of “payload data” from open Wi-Fi networks — aka passwords, email and search history from open networks — that its fleet of Street View cars obtained between 2008 and April 2010. An earlier and heavily redacted version of the report was released on April 15 but today’s version only redacted the names of individuals.

The report found no violation of any wrong doing by the company because there was no legal precedent on the matter. The FCC found that Google did not violate the Communications Act citing the fact that Wi-Fi did not exist when it was written. However, the FCC did fine Google $25,000 for obstructing the investigation, which was presumably the outcome of Google refusing to show the FCC what the data being collected entailed because it might have shown that the company broke privacy and wiretapping laws. Google says any obstruction was result of the FCC dragging out the investigation. Interestingly enough, the report did reveal that the data harvesting was not the act of a rogue engineer and that said engineer notified the Street View team of what was going on.

(Wait. What? Google knew this was going on! It gets even better.)

Except that those members of the team told the FCC that they had no idea it was going on even though the engineer in question sent documentation of the work being done to the entire Street View team in October of 2006. The report also found that up to seven engineers had “wide access” to the plan to collect payload data dating back to 2006.

From the report:

In interviews and declarations, managers of the Street View project and other Google employees who worked on the project told the Bureau they did not read Engineer Doe’s design document. A senior manager of Street View said he “pre-approved” the design document before it was written. One engineer remembered receiving the design document but did not recall any reference to the collection of payload data.

For a little more background, let’s examine what Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research blogged back in 2010:

Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.

In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks.

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

Fair enough. But the following excerpt from the report doesn’t quite sit so well with me: “We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.” To be more specific, the last portion about knowing “what they were doing” seems a bit peculiar. Why would Google need to know what they were doing? Seems irrelevant if you’re just mapping the location of networks, doesn’t it?

So how did Google spin this to the media? It said the data mining was “inadvertent” and that Google now has stricter privacy controls than in the past. Oh and the company hopes the release of the full report would allow them to “put this matter” in the rear view mirror.

Crazy, right? Or maybe not! Discuss.

Correction: April 28, 2012 9:46PM PT

An excerpt from the report has been added regarding the pre-approval of a document sent out by “Engineer Doe” to the Street View team that detailed the work being done and included the fact that Google would be collecting such data.

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Google Releases Full Report On Street View Investigation, Finds That Staff Knew About Wi-Fi Sniffing

Would you look at that? NVIDIA hinted it would be coming today, and it looks like the tease is living up to the hype. The company stormed into the weekend at its Shanghai Game Festival by unleashing its latest offering, the GeForce GTX 690 — and oh yeah, it’s packing two 28nm Kepler GPUs! Trumping the recently released GTX 680 as the “worlds fastest graphics card,” it’s loaded with a whopping 3,072 Cuda cores. The outer frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, while you’ll find thixomolded magnesium alloy around the fan for vibration reduction and added cooling. Aiding in cooling even further, the unit also sports a dual vapor chamber and center-mounted fan. It’ll cost you a spendy $1,000 to pick up one of these puppies come May 3rd, and you’ll likely be tempted to double up — two can run together in SLI as an effective quad-core card. With that said, NVIDIA claims that a single 690 runs 4dB quieter and handles about twice the framerate as a duo of GTX 680s in SLI — impressive, but we’ll reserve judgement until we see it for ourselves. Check out the press release after the break if you’d like more information in the meantime (…and yes, it runs Crysis — 2 Ultra to be exact — at 57.8fps, according to NVIDIA).

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, loads it with dual Kepler GPUs, charges $1k

NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, loads it with dual Kepler GPUs, charges $1k originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, loads it with dual Kepler GPUs, charges $1k

An anonymous reader writes “In what may win awards for the silliest-sounding lawsuit of the year, a case about whether Facebook ‘likes’ qualify for free speech protection under the First Amendment has ended in a decisive ‘no.’ In the run-up to an election for Sheriff, some of the incumbent’s employees made their support for the challenger known by ‘liking’ his page on Facebook. After the incumbent won re-election, the employees were terminated, supposedly because of budget concerns. The employees had taken a few other actions as well — bumper stickers and cookouts — but they couldn’t prove the Sheriff was aware of them. The judge thus ruled that ‘merely “liking” a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection. In cases where courts have found that constitutional speech protections extended to Facebook posts, actual statements existed within the record.'”

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Facebook 'Likes' Aren't Protected Speech

With Firefox 12 out the door, Mozilla is turning its efforts to polishing up Firefox 13, due out six weeks from now. If you don’t want to wait that long, you can download Firefox 13 from the beta release channel today.

Perhaps the best new feature in Firefox 13 is what’s known as “tabs on demand.” Tabs on demand refers to the way Firefox restarts when you have multiple tabs open. Firefox will now only restore the currently selected tab; background tabs are not loaded. Tabs on demand is a welcome relief for those of us who browse with dozens of tabs open all the time. You no longer need to fear restarting the browser since you won’t have to wait while every tab reloads. Instead, tabs will load only when you select them.

Firefox 13 will bring a slightly new look to some parts of the browser. Both the New Tab and the Home Page have been redesigned. The New Tab page now has links to your most recently and frequently visited sites. It looks more or less just like Opera’s Speed Dial, which Chrome also mimics. There’s an option to pin your favorite sites, as well as a button for rejecting sites you don’t want to see.

The default Home Page now has links to menu items like Bookmarks, History, Settings, Add-ons, Downloads and Sync Preferences. There’s nothing here that you can’t access from the menu bar, but it makes frequently used menu items easier for newcomers to find.

Web developers will be glad to know that Firefox 13 introduces support for Google’s not-quite-yet-a-standard SPDY protocol (technically the last two Firefox releases have supported SPDY, but this is the first to have it enabled by default). The SPDY protocol improves on HTTP and in many cases can significantly reduce page load times. SPDY’s other main advantage over HTTP is that all traffic is encrypted. Once Firefox 13 and the Opera 12 preview arrive in their final forms the majority of desktop browsers on the Web will support SPDY.

The Firefox 13 beta also brings a number of improvements to the new Developer Tools. For example, the Page Inspector now allows you to lock in CSS pseudo-classes on inspected page elements—handy for checking out what’s happening in a :hover code block.

For more details on everything that’s new in the developer tools and the rest of Firefox 13, check out Mozilla’s release notes.

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Firefox 13 beta turns on the SPDY, tabs on demand

This is an excerpt from Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks, a blueprint for getting healthy in a connected world. In this section, he outlines the typical day for someone who wants to get healthy without gym memberships, expensive diet plans, and odd tactics.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Try this: you wake up without an alarm sometime soon after sunrise, with plenty of time to spare to make it to work.

It was a good sleep; you went to bed just after nine o’clock after having a snack consisting of coconut milk blended with blueberries and a little whey powder. You’re already savvy about getting enough REM sleep, but now you aim to bump up your deep sleep, or restorative NREM. You might even check out the wave chart your Zeo produced.

The first thing you do is pour a cup of black tea or coffee and go outside to this pool of sunlight you’ve noticed out your window.

You bask and reflect in it for a minute, perhaps followed by a few Tai Chi moves, push-ups on the lawn, or pull-ups on the jungle gym across the street from your apartment. You sip a bit more coffee and return to your living space to get ready for the commute.

Technically speaking, as you gazed up into the sky and basked in that sun, the light rays touched your retinas and were transduced by the hypothalamus and pineal gland in your brain, which has now helped set your circadian rhythms for the day.

Mindfulness

The sun you got wasn’t much, not like spending the morning on the beach in the British Virgin Islands (gotta do that someday…), but it had the effect of lightening your mood, clearing your head, and kick-starting the day. You’ve sent the message to your body and your brain, “It’s morning and I’m well rested and ready to go.”

Every other day you stop at an intervening fitness facility to lift a few weights or do a 300-yard swim interspersed with a handful of 25-yard sprints—nothing too much, but today you’re biking to the train station, where they’ve thoughtfully included a place to lock your rig.

The train ride into the center of the city (Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal; Zurich, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, London, Sydney, Wellington, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto…) takes 35 minutes, and you stand for most of it, just because it feels better.

Geek Gear

You kind of want to rack up more activity points on this web-connected, motion-sensitive, stair-counting altitude calculator you’ve clipped onto your belt (yeah, it’s called a Fitbit), although gear isn’t strictly necessary this morning. It’s just fun, in a geeky kind of obsessive way. You like quantifying and logging your exercise. This act itself seems motivating. The web charts your gear generates later are actually quite impressive. They can show your oscillating movement throughout the day, and pinpoint the days when you need more.

Gathering data is not useless when you act upon it.

The tool for adding up your daily motion mileage works with an odd “tail wagging the dog” effect; you seem to move more when you’re wearing it. Further, you never really knew that ordinary movement could equate to that much mileage during the day. More than six miles sometimes, even though your walks were broken up into several smallish ones. Plodding along on a treadmill just isn’t necessary anymore. You love looking at the stats at the end of the day. Just keep moving, you say to yourself. Seek the sun.

Hard-Boiled Eggs to Go

Breakfast today was two hard-boiled eggs (eggs bought the previous weekend at a farmer’s market), a piece of Swiss cheese, a bite of salmon left over from last night, and two plums plus an avocado (also purchased at the market). Yesterday, you fasted through breakfast, and that felt fine. Actually, the bit of coffee plus “intermittent fast” kept you pretty perky throughout the morning.

You’ve got a little plastic bag in your backpack containing the rest of the salmon, a mixture of almonds and walnuts, an apple, and a square of 85% high-cacao chocolate. In a pinch, there’s a good salad place near work. It only took a couple of weeks not to miss that bagel anymore, and especially all that crappy margarine (you go for really yellow butter now)—the sluggishness and lack of satiety it seemed to leave you with, and the way it seemed to take half the morning to digest it and the donut and scone you piled on top of it.

Hopping off the train, you walk about 30 minutes the rest of the way to work, on the sunny side of the street, even though you could have dipped into the subway or hopped on a bus.

Dude, Take the Stairs

Work is on the third floor of a tall building, but you take the stairs, walking briskly past a line of people waiting at the elevator. Their auras are uniformly glum, as if someone else is pulling their strings. You have never taken the elevator, including that time your supervisors were standing in front of it with expectant looks, suggesting they had an axe to grind.

You take the stairs two at a time, simply because the heft in your upper leg feels good. Your heart rate gets going, but not that much; you’ve noticed that improvement over the months.

OCD About Health

The morning goes on and you switch between sitting and standing in your cubicle—standing most of the time. You have a pretty good stand-up workstation setup. Besides, the standing for hours bumps up those motion and- mileage numbers, which no one else could possibly care about, except other users fidgeting with their tracking devices and apps and going online afterward with the data. You don’t mind having an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving healthy habits. You also don’t mind going without your gear for a day or two. No big deal.

About every hour or 90 minutes during the day, you head down those stairs again and back outside into the sun. When you get blocked on a sticky piece of code or logical problem, this brisk walk helps almost every time. Often, you experience casual moments outside that you always will remember and never would have experienced if you’d stayed in your cubicle all day, like that majestic hawk that hovered in the blue sky before it alighted on the ledge of a distant building. You tried to estimate its wingspan as it hung frozen in the cerulean blue.

Hey, He Likes Me!

That handsome dude or attractive woman with the healthy glow who spoke to you out of the blue that time when you were both sitting on a bench, chilling— that hadn’t happened to you in a long while; it’s usually just awkward silences and departures, ships passing at night. You’re going to see him/her again sometime; you’re going to swap phone numbers.

You take longer walks sometimes in the city, until you find yourself drifting around with a relaxed aimlessness, kind of like Owen Wilson in the movie Midnight in Paris.

You have the usual “meetings” (the quotation marks question their purposefulness) in the mid-morning and afternoon. You stand during both, and it seems to have a contagious effect. Two other people stood up during the second meeting, and you could have sworn both confabs went a little faster. You’re beginning to get a rep as “that healthy guy” around the office.

Knock Off Some Bench Presses

By the end of the day you’ve climbed about 12 floors and maybe walked a couple of miles or more (the number of miles you cover in a day, counting everything, always surprises you). A formal workout in the middle of the day is not necessary. But sometimes you duck into the company fitness facility on a rainy day and knock off some bench presses, pull-ups, and inverted push-ups. Sometimes it’s just a dash on a treadmill, or some karate kicks followed by Tai Chi. It takes no more than about 30 minutes.

Your workouts almost never exceed that length of time. When they do, horsing around would be a better way to describe them than workouts or training sessions: playing catch using a winged Nerf football with your son or a friend, or gliding along a country road on a mountain bike.

It All Adds Up to Something Good

Are you getting the point here? You’re able to shoulder a pretty hard job and commute, while staying healthy, mindful, and reasonably content. The days seem to flow more, instead of banging together like an extended train wreck, with you occupying the middle passenger car. Who could argue with that? You even get the monthly $50 bonus they pay at work to the employees with the fewest sick days!

The intent of the last assemblage of paragraphs wasn’t to get all vainglorious and virtuous about healthy lifestyles—although it was fun to write—as much as to paint a narrative about surviving the Digital Age and emerging from your days mostly unscathed (maybe an occasional bruised ego, but it comes with the territory, right?). This chapter has introduced some basic fitness concepts that the rest of the book will cover in sometimes extensive detail:

• Living in the Digital Age, where culture, data, and networks never sleep, but still incorporating the sun, lots of walking, and outdoor experiences— living closer to the imperatives of our preloaded software (our very deep past).

• The benefits of whole, non-processed, real food—and even a bit of “intermittent” fasting every week.

• The advantages of incorporating ordinary exercise regimes like stair climbing, lengthy, aimless walking (no matter how cold it is!), sprints, jumps, and hill-climbing extemporaneously, when you can.

• Using useful tracking tools and personal metrics to augment your fitness, share your progress with friends, help others work through some physical glitches or sleep issues, or for just plain time-wasting fun (when you have that time, that is).

• The importance of sleep and de-stressing; they could save your life.

• The advantages of other lifestyle tactics like freezing swims, saunas, and fasting, not to mention moderate exercise and a good drink now and then. These are examples of “hormesis,” or good stress (see Chapter 11). Unlike many faddish weight-loss and fitness schemes, the changes just described do not involve any expensive program or club fees, or drastic dietary changes (like “zero carb or fat”), except for the optional purchase of a few fun and useful gadgets or tools when you have a little extra change.

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Book Excerpt: Bruce Perry’s Fitness For Geeks

It’s reasonably well known at this point that Apple is looking to line up partnerships for some sort of a streaming video service. We’ve heard again and again that it’s coming, so get ready to hum along with that ‘ol tune one more time. Reuters is reporting that Apple has been in negotiations with Epix since earlier this year, hoping to secure access to films from Lions Gate, MGM and Paramount Pictures. There’s no indication of when such a service might come to light, but Reuters indicates the company’s current deal with Netflix, which expires on September 1st, could be a conflict (though that hasn’t stopped Google TV in the past). So, no proper Apple-branded TV until the fall? Stay tuned…

Reuters: Apple in talks to stream films owned by Epix, no deal expected before September originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Reuters: Apple in talks to stream films owned by Epix, no deal expected before September

zrbyte writes “Fusion research would get a major boost in a Department of Energy (DOE) spending bill approved today by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations. The panel rejected an Obama Administration proposal to cut funding for domestic fusion research in the 2013 fiscal year, which begins 1 October. It would also give more money than requested to an international collaboration building the ITER fusion reactor in France. This will allow the Alcator C-Mod fusion facility at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to be kept open, which the Administration had proposed closing.”

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Good News For US Fusion Research

According to an indictment unsealed this week, the four alleged members of the BitTorrent movie release group IMAGiNE have now been charged with one count of “Conspiracy to Commit Criminal Copyright Infringement,” four counts of “Criminal Copyright Infringement,” and one count of “Distribution of a Work Being Prepared for Commercial Distribution.” Each count brings a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison.

The group, which TorrentFreak called “one of the P2P scene’s most prominent release groups,” was busted up by federal authorities in September 2011. It is not very common for BitTorrent-related groups to be busted up with federal criminal charges brought against them.

Court documents filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia report that the lead defendant, Jeramiah B. Perkins (aliases: “Butch Perkins,” “Stash,” and “theestas”) was arrested and then released on bail on Monday. The other defendants are Gregory Cherwonik, 53, of New York, Willie Lambert, 57, of Pennsylvania, and Sean Lovelady, 27, of California.

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Indicted BitTorrent group used FM, infrared receivers to record movies in theater

nbauman writes “WW2 veteran ‘Big Hy’ Strachman, 92, pirated 300,000 DVD movies and sent them to soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were widely distributed and deeply appreciated. Soldiers would gather around personal computers for movie nights, with mortars blasting in the background. ‘It’s reconnecting to everything you miss,’ said one. Strachman received American flags, appreciative letters, and snapshots of soldiers holding up their DVDs. He spent about $30,000 of his own money. Strachman retired from his family’s window and shade business in Manhattan in the 1990s. After his wife Harriet died in 2003, he spent sleepless nights on the Internet, and saw that soldiers were consistently asking for movie DVDs. He bought bootlegged disks for $5 in Penn Station, and then found a dealer at his local barbershop. He bought a $400 duplicater that made 7 copies at once, and mailed them 84 at a time, to Army Chaplains. The MPAA said they weren’t aware of his operation. The studios send reel-to-reel films to the troops.”

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WW2 Vet Sent 300,000 Pirated DVDs To Troops In Iraq, Afghanistan

… which means studios have to compete for precious few slots.
Hollywood sees China, with its…

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China only allows 34 foreign movies to be shown in theaters per year…