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BOSTON - After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however.

Although Google’s Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year.

As specially equipped Google vehicles cruised city streets snapping panoramic images of homes and businesses, the resulting photos revealed people falling off bikes, exiting strip joints, crossing the street, sunbathing — everyday, in-public things but nonetheless, things they might not have wanted preserved for posterity.

Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View’s goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there.

This week, Google revealed it had indeed begun deploying a facial-recognition algorithm that scans photos for mugs to blur. The changes are happening first in scenes in New York, before slowly expanding to the other 40 cities in Street View.

Google spokesman Larry Yu said the company is still tweaking the system. For now it tends to err on the side of blurring too many things — things a computer erroneously interprets as faces — but that is better than leaving too many faces unblurred, Yu said.

Yu said Google was responding not only to privacy complaints in the U.S., but also trying to head off legal or cultural objections that might emerge as Street View expands into other countries.

Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, praised Google’s decision, but she added that “it’s just a shame it didn’t happen before the tool launched.”

EarthLink has notified its Wi-Fi customers in Philadelphia that the broadband service provider will soon be terminating its metropolitan Wi-Fi service in the city. The company, which stopped accepting new customers to the network in early May, said it would provide its Philly customers with a 30-day grace period through June 12 to transfer to another provider.

EarthLink incoming CEO Rolla Huff decided last November that there was no money to be made from metropolitan Wi-Fi. “After thorough review and analysis of our municipal wireless business,” he said, “we have decided that making significant further investments in this business could be inconsistent with our objective of maximizing shareholder value.”

Houston subsequently elected to allow EarthLink to back out of its deal with the city, and the broadband provider is currently in negotiations to ease out of its contract with Anaheim, Calif. However, finding a graceful way of out its agreement with Philadelphia has been problematic.

Finding an Alternative

EarthLink says it has been trying to reach an agreement for months on a free transfer of its entire $17 million Wi-Fi network in Philadelphia. Moreover, the company said it had even offered to sweeten the deal with cash payments and the donation of new equipment.

“Unfortunately, our hope that we could transfer our network to a nonprofit organization that had planned to offer free Wi-Fi throughout Philadelphia will not be realized,” Huff said. “Since we have exhausted our efforts to find a new owner of the network, our only responsible alternative now is to remove our network at our cost, and assist our Wi-Fi customers with alternative ways to access the Internet.”

EarthLink has filed a proceeding in federal court seeking a declaration that EarthLink may remove its equipment from the city's streetlights. The lawsuit also attempts to limit EarthLink's potential liability in Philadelphia to $1 million or less.

Houston, We've Got a Problem

Wireless Philadelphia CEO Greg Goldman said that transfer of the EarthLink network is by definition a complex, time-intensive, multiparty transaction, and there is nothing in his organization's 10-year network agreement with the operator to provide access “that would permit EarthLink to unilaterally impose deadlines for the network's transfer, turn off the network, or remove network equipment.”

“Wireless Philadelphia and the city are still working actively together to identify alternatives for preserving this network and applying it to numerous civic, commercial and social purposes,” Goldman said. “We remain optimistic for an orderly resolution of this matter.”

Metropolitan Wi-Fi may be down on the mat in Philly, but don't count the city out of the fight just yet, if Houston's experience is anything to go by. After EarthLink missed its deadline for starting work on Houston's network, the network provider paid $5 million to get out of its agreement with the city, according to media reports.

Houston currently plans to spend $3.5 million to start work on one of 10 “Wi-Fi bubbles” targeting low-income housing areas representing a population of nearly 480,000 residents and more than 160,500 households. Houston is also pondering several other ways to bring free Wi-Fi to city residents.

For example, the city is currently considering possible mixed-use approaches for extending free Wi-Fi access to Houston residents and visitors alike. Moreover, Houston said in a recent request for information document that it might also attempt “to simultaneously monetize excess network capacity through the use of ad-based hot-spot business models.”

Apple's announcement Tuesday that CEO Steve Jobs will keynote the company's Worldwide Developers Conference is fueling speculation that Apple will announce a 3G version of the iPhone. Jobs will speak on Monday, June 9, at 10 a.m. The conference runs June 9-13 in San Francisco.

The timing is certainly right. Rumors have been circulating for most of the year that Apple would release a 3G iPhone in the second half of the year. Those rumors have been stoked by reports that Apple is winding down inventory of the current version. Both the U.S. and British versions of the online Apple Store list the iPhone as currently unavailable.

And sales representatives at Apple retail stores across the country reported the iPhone out of stock. “The iPhone is sold out companywide,” a sales representative at the Apple Store in Braintree, Mass., told Computerworld.

iPhone 2.0

“On its own, this means nothing, but we all know that there could never be a major product announcement without Jobs on the stage,” Charlie Sorrel wrote on Wired's news site, predicting Jobs would unveil a “proper update to the MacBook Pro line” as well.

The rumor mill has suggested that the price of the new iPhone could be substantially less than the current version's $399 cost.

While the possibility of a 3G iPhone announcement is pure speculation at this point, what is known is that Apple will release version 2.0 of the iPhone software, the final version of the iPhone software developers kit and the App Store, where developers can publish and users can wirelessly download third-party applications.

“I do expect to see a lot of developer focus on the platform and if it weren't for the problems with the lines last time, I'd be certain there would be lines for the phones again this time,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “Still, if the price is anywhere near where it is rumored to be, they should set some records if events at the time don't nerf the launch.”

This year's WWDC features the first-ever session track for iPhone, where developers will learn how to create applications that make use of the iPhone and iPod touch's user interface, three-axis accelerometer and geographic location technology.

Don't Forget the Mac

Other iPhone sessions will focus on using application-programming interfaces for CoreOS, Core Services, Media and CocoaTouch technologies.

Of course, the iPhone is just one part of WWDC, a sprawling developer conference with 150 sessions. On the Mac track, Apple engineers will present sessions for beginners and experts on OS X Leopard, including interface design and implementation, application frameworks, security, localization and networking.

In a press release, Apple emphasized that attendees can bring their own code and work side-by-side with Apple programmers, learning development methods and best practices to improve their applications.

Apple introduced the software development kit for the iPhone in March and says more than 200,000 developers have downloaded beta versions. When the iPhone 2.0 software is released, the home screen will feature a link to the Apps Store where users can wirelessly download applications, many of which are expected to be free.

The support for third-party applications and the apparent ease with which they will be released to the public suggests that the iPhone will transform from a cool phone into a mobile computing platform. One question, however, is how quickly Apple will be able to refill sales channels with new versions of the device.

Analysts are still assessing Hewlett-Packard's announcement Tuesday that it will acquire Electronic Data Systems for $13.9 billion. Together, HP and EDS will be a tech-services behemoth with 210,000 employees worldwide in 80 countries and revenues of more than $38 billion. That figure more than doubles HP's service revenues.

HP's plans are simple: To establish a new business group. That group will be called EDS — An HP Company. EDS Chairman, President and CEO Ronald Rittenmeyer will lead the group.

“The combination of HP and EDS will create a leading force in global IT services,” said Mark Hurd, HP's president and CEO. “Together, we will be a stronger business partner, delivering customers the broadest, most competitive portfolio of products and services in the industry.”

Gaining Ground on Big Blue

With this acquisition, HP moves to the number-two position behind IBM in providing IT services to the world's largest corporations. That catapults HP in front of Accenture and puts it into a strong position to sell solutions to its largest accounts.

Any time you can go into the market and become the No. 1 or No. 2 player is a good move, according to Murray Beach, managing director of TM Capital and chairman of M&A International. Of course, he continued, the deal that would have really given IBM heartburn would have been an HP-Accenture tie-up, but the EDS deal gives HP a nice jump in government and financial services.

“IT outsourcing is also at the heart of the data center, and this is a critical arena for HP. Becoming significantly more competitive with IBM in this area will [also challenge] IBM's server and data-center position,” Beach said. “This is a nice strategic move from this angle. Their new government strength is an area that HP can exploit against IBM, as they should be one of the largest government-services players around, though still much smaller than Lockheed or Boeing.”

Acquiring EDS advances HP's stated objective of strengthening its services business. The company has accomplished that goal and more, according to Beach. In fact, HP seems poised to give the services market a run. Similar to its product strategy, he explained, HP seems happy to build from the bottom up, going for an IT outsourcing play as opposed to a SI/Consulting/Strategy route. Either way, it's a direct challenge to IBM.

The Downside of the EDS Acquisition

Analysts aren't all sold on the deal. As Beach noted, an Accenture acquisition would have served HP better. Accenture could have launched HP to the top of the IT-services food chain virtually overnight. Add Accenture and a couple of strategic business-software components, and HP would have replicated Big Blue's business model.

“In an uncertain market, making a big acquisition splash protects your future — as long as you can execute — and enhances your footprint. It also eases the burden of driving organic growth,” Beach said. “HP has its work cut out, but it has moved clearly into the number-two position in the services landscape. Plus they did this at a very reasonable price. This should put further competitive pressure on the Indian crowd and companies like CSC and ACS. If I were IBM or Accenture, I'd take a hard look at CSC, as they have to be a bit worried.”

NEW YORK — A wireless memory card for digital cameras now comes with an added twist: Besides making it easier to store and share photos, the latest version of the Eye-Fi card also helps sort images by location.

Eye-Fi Explore, due out next month, taps into a database run by Skyhook Wireless. That company sends trucks up and down streets to scan for home wireless routers or commercial hotspots and record the unique identifying code and location of each.

The Eye-Fi card can sense the Wi-Fi access point that happens to be nearby, regardless of whether that access point is open or password-protected. The unique code for that access point gets matched with what’s in the Skyhook database. When you take a photo, Eye-Fi automatically attaches data about the current location, as determined by Skyhook.

“Today, that’s a very manual and time-consuming process,” said Jef Holove, chief executive of Mountain View, Calif.-based Eye-Fi Inc. “We’re saving people the time and the hassle.”

Citing privacy and security of photographers, subjects and location owners — especially in the case of photos of kids or valuables — Holove said Eye-Fi tags the photos with just the city and state where they were shot — plus, when available, a neighborhood.

That could make Eye-Fi’s approach less useful than the GPS-based “geotagging” products, which tag photos with latitude and longitude coordinates. Such precision lets you pinpoint photos on a digital map, even within a park.

Still, Eye-Fi could help boost geotagging, which remains limited to more tech-savvy or professional photographers. Without the aid of Eye-Fi or a GPS device, location information needs to be entered manually.

The $129 Eye-Fi Explore comes with 2 gigabytes of storage and works with any camera using SD memory cards.

Like previous Eye-Fi models, Explore can also automatically send photos over Wi-Fi from your camera to your computer or photo-sharing sites when within range.

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On the Net: http://www.eye.fi

BOSTON - A new service named Foneshow offers a quick and easy way to access the downloadable radio shows known as podcasts. Instead of synching your music player to a PC to get audio clips that interest you, Foneshow lets you listen to podcasts on demand from your cell phone.

In a way Foneshow is an update of old-fashioned telephone information lines, those 1-900 numbers offering sports scores or weather updates. There are two main differences: Foneshow is free, and its pool of content is potentially vast, since any podcast on the Internet can be converted into a Foneshow.

When I tested the service I found it easy to use. I liked being able to squeeze podcasts into little slices of the day, on a whim. When I had to sit in my car for a few minutes, waiting for 9:30 a.m. to strike so my parking spot shifted from tow zone to legitimate, I entertained myself by dialing up a mock news show by The Onion. While waiting for a train, I tried to get smarter with a minute-long science show from Scientific American.

You sign up for Foneshow online. You enter your cell phone number but don’t have to give any other information. Then you select which of the few hundred available podcasts you want to subscribe to. Some last a minute, others an hour or so.

The variety should multiply because Foneshow doesn’t hand-pick all the content. Anyone can post a podcast’s Internet feed to Foneshow, which will relay it.

Once you subscribe to a Foneshow, the service sends a text message to your cell phone the instant a new segment is available. The text message reveals the number you have to dial to hear the podcast. That’s especially simple to do if your phone, like most, will automatically call a number embedded in a text if you hit “Send” while viewing the message.

When the audio is playing, you can pause, rewind or fast-forward the file with the phone’s number keypad. If you hang up in the middle, Foneshow will resume from where you left off if you call back.

Foneshow hopes to fund itself largely through advertising, but in this early stage of the service it’s unclear how obtrusive those ads might be. Right now the text messages come with easily ignorable ads at the very bottom.

The downside of listening to audio clips on the phone is that well, you’re on a cell phone. You’re likely out and about, not in a quiet place where it’s easy to hear a prerecorded broadcast.

Also, this service probably will work only for people with unlimited text-messaging plans. If you lack such a plan and pay 20 cents per message, a common rate charged by wireless carriers, subscribing to a few Foneshows suddenly gets expensive.

Fortunately for the pay-as-you-go people and for people who might find endless text reminders annoying, Foneshow lets you click an on-vacation box on its Web site to temporarily stop the messages.

Another flaw is that once you’re given a number to dial for a Foneshow, you can call it only from your cell phone, not a landline. The service will not connect a call made from numbers its caller ID doesn’t recognize.

That rule exists because allowing calls from any phone could swamp Foneshow’s Internet-based network, forcing Foneshow to buy a bigger bank of phone numbers to handle incoming calls. But Foneshow should slightly relent and let people subscribe from one or two landlines in addition to their cell phones.

Otherwise potential users might face the dilemma I found a few times, when I decided against calling for a Foneshow because I didn’t want to eat up minutes on my wireless plan. However, I would have been happy to call from the office phone in a slow moment at work. Not that those exist, of course.

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On the Net:

http://www.foneshow.com

NEW YORK - Google has surpassed Yahoo to become the most popular Web site in the United States, according to comScore Inc.’s rankings by the number of unique monthly visitors.

Google Inc. has long been the Internet’s leader in search, but its audience has trailed Yahoo Inc.’s when counting other services such as e-mail and photo sharing.

April’s numbers, which Internet tracking firm comScore plans to formally release Thursday, show Google on top for the first time.

The lead is tiny — 466,000 visitors out of about 141 million apiece. And while such measures are good as a gauge, they aren’t known for precision. In fact, rival rankings from Nielsen Online already had Google as the top Web brand.

Still, comScore’s finding is one more hint of Google’s dominance over Internet pioneer Yahoo.

Jack Flanagan, comScore’s executive vice president, said Google’s dominance in search creates “a halo effect” that can boost its other services.

Google now has the Picasa online photo-sharing service, competing with Flickr from Yahoo. Google also has launched a site on finance, while its Gmail e-mail service keeps growing — and competing with Yahoo.

Google’s $1.76 billion purchase of YouTube in November 2006 gave it the leading video-sharing Web site.

According to comScore, Google’s unique U.S. audience in April was 141.1 million, an 18 percent increase from the same month in 2007. Yahoo’s audience grew 7 percent, to 140.6 million. Microsoft Corp. was third at about 121 million.

That said, Yahoo still leads in page views, meaning visitors spend more time there or return more often. Many Google users make a simple search request and quickly go elsewhere based on the results. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views to Google’s 28.7 billion.

The comScore data come from its Media Metrix panel, recruited primarily using random phone-based techniques.

ComScore recently took heat for its data on paid search clicks, which come from a larger panel that relies heavily on online recruitment techniques dismissed by many more traditional pollsters.

In that case, however, Wall Street concerns that the faltering U.S. economy could bog down Google resulted largely from investors and analysts ignoring comScore’s advice on how to interpret the paid-click data. Google wound up surpassing the analysts’ predictions in producing a first-quarter profit of 30 percent.

BRUSSELS (AFP) - NATO launched Wednesday a new cyber-defence training centre in Tallinn to defend against attacks over the Internet, a year after Estonia fell victim to a “cyber-war” blamed on Russian hackers.

At NATO headquarters in Brussels, seven member nations — Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain — signed documents formally establishing the Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in the Estonian capital.

“The need for a cyber-defence centre to be opened today is compelling,” said General James Mattis, who heads NATO's transformation efforts. “It will help NATO defy and successfully counter the threats in this area.”

The centre, due to open officially in 2009 but which has already been working informally, will conduct research and training on cyber warfare and have a staff of 30, half of them IT experts from the participating countries.

The choice of Estonia is no accident: besides having first-hand experience of a cyber-war, the country is home to a flourishing hi-tech industry which has earned it the nickname “E-stonia”.

In late April and early May last year, a flood of attacks forced the temporary closure of Estonian government websites and disrupted leading businesses in what is one of the world's most wired economies.

While Estonia has prosecuted several young ethnic-Russian hackers based in the Baltic state, most of the cyber-soldiers were believed to be operating from Russia itself, out of reach of Estonian justice.

The attacks came after Estonian authorities decided to shift a Soviet-era monument from central Tallinn to a military cemetery. The move was marked by riots in the capital on April 26-28.

Afterward, relations between Moscow and Tallinn plunged to their worst since Estonia regained independence.

Tallinn has said that even Kremlin computers were used to carry out some of the attacks. Moscow has denied any involvement.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) said on Wednesday its Xbox 360 game machine beat Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) Wii and Sony Corp's (6758.T) PlayStation 3 to reach 10 million units in U.S. sales.

“History has shown us that the first company to reach 10 million in console sales wins the generation battle,” Don Mattrick, a Microsoft senior vice president who heads the company's Xbox business, said in a statement.

The Xbox 360 was the first of this latest generation of game machines to launch in the United States when it was released in November 2005. The PS3 and Wii were launched in the United States a year later.

The Wii is closing in on the Xbox 360, with 8.8 million units sold as of the end of March, while Sony has totaled 4.1 million PS3 units sold, according to market research firm NPD.

Microsoft also said global membership of its Xbox Live online service reached 12 million members.

(Reporting by Daisuke Wakabayashi; Editing by Braden Reddall)

SINGAPORE (AFP) - Software piracy increased last year in the Asia-Pacific region, boosted by China's growing use of personal computers, an industry group said on Wednesday.

The Asia-Pacific's average PC software piracy rate in 2007 increased to 59 percent of the software in use in the region from 55 percent the previous year, said the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which works to fight piracy.

The increase was largely because of China's growing share of the region's overall PC market, it said.

Losses from software piracy in the region rose to more than 14 billion US dollars in 2007 from almost 12 billion dollars in 2006, BSA said as it released a global study of the problem.

BSA's members include Microsoft, Apple, McAfee and other major industry players.

It says piracy includes illegal manufacture, the retail sale of pirated software, unauthorised downloading or uploading, and use of unlicensed software by businesses.

Jeffrey Hardee, BSA's vice president and regional director, said the Asia-Pacific market for PC software is growing rapidly as incomes rise in emerging economies.

The high growth rate for PC sales in countries such as China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, which have large populations, is resulting in a higher loss from piracy compared with mature markets, he said.

China's software piracy rate had fallen in three previous years but held steady at 82 percent from 2006 to 2007 as PC shipments to homes and small businesses grew rapidly, BSA said.

Excluding Australia, Japan and New Zealand, the Asia-Pacific piracy rate would be higher than 70 percent, it said.

Expanding usage of the Internet in the region could also worsen piracy through illegal downloading of software and unauthorised sharing of files, Hardee said.

Bangladesh had the highest Asian piracy rate in 2007, at 92 percent, followed by Sri Lanka's 90 percent, BSA said. Vietnam was third-highest with 88 percent.

Armenia's 93 percent piracy rate was the highest in the world and the United States had the lowest rate at 20 percent, BSA said.

Global research group IDC conducted the study of 108 countries, BSA added.