A Day in the Life

This is pretty geeky, but I really enjoyed it.  Andrea and I use Google docs for all sorts of things, but I have never tried to make art out it.  Check out this video from the people at Google.

I don’t know if may of you have seen this yet, but I recently discovered a new feature of Google Maps named Street Views. It is very amazing because you can virtually drive down the street and see everything. This feature is only available in certain areas in the United States, but it does raise some interesting questions about privacy and information security.

I don’t quite know how I feel about it yet, it seems like a good feature, especially now that Andrea and I are looking for housing. It would be nice to “drive” down the street and look at the neighborhoods that we are interested in.

Take a look at this article that I found online today:

The Pentagon said that Google Street Views is a threat to national security and made Google pull images taken on streets near U.S. military bases. Google complied with the governmental order, even though the images were taken from public streets. Freedom of information and security butt heads once again.

The government was concerned that the images, which included views of the entrances to military bases, were a threat. Gen. Gene Renuart, head of the military command responsible for homeland defense, said, “It actually shows where all the guards are. It shows how the barriers go up and down. It shows how to get in and out of buildings. I think that poses a real security risk for our military installations.”

But the images were taken from public streets, where anyone could walk and take the same pictures and/or video and post them to the Internet. The question remains whether the government had the right to request that the images be removed. While that question is assuredly being debated, Google complied. Google spokesman Larry Yu said, “We have been contacted by the military. In those instances where they (the U.S military) have expressed concerns about the imagery, we have accommodated their requests.”

Street Views has caused controversy from the start. Many privacy advocates claimed that even though images were taken in public places — where no reasonable assumption of privacy really exists — people were being exposed doing things they might not wish to have plastered on the Internet for all to see.

According to this Reuters report, “a man was pictured exiting a San Francisco strip club. In another case, a woman was shown sunbathing. Complaints have even included a woman asking that a picture of her cat be taken down, a request Google denied.”

This is definitely a thorny issue. The government has been eating away at various public freedoms and due processes for the sake of security. While I believe ensuring our protection is one of the federal government’s main functions, Benjamin Franklin’s words continue to ring in my head: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Article Taken from Information Week -

I am interested to see what others think about this issue and whether Google should be allowed to post these images to the internet or not. Leave a comment and let us know.

So tonight my sister called me with a computer problem. She said, “Can your hard drive just stop working or something because I turned on my computer and all of my documents and pictures were gone”. Well this was weird, and I didn’t really know what to say. I asked a few questions and everything appeared to be right. I told her to just come over and we could take a look.

When she got here we turned on the computer and it prompted her with the normal Windows XP login. When all of the personal settings were loaded (which took forever), the desktop was blank and the My Documents lead to a blank folder with the sample Music and Photos. It basically looked like a virgin install of XP.

Well I accidentally clicked on the Picasa icon and the program started up. Right away, the program started finding all of the files on the hard drive. As it turned out, all of the files on her computer weren’t gone, Windows had just gotten all messed up. Somehow, and I don’t know how yet, the registry or something was changed, because a new used file had been created named ‘TEMP’ and all of the shortcuts were remapped to those folders.

Even though I don’t know exactly why things got all messed up, at least the files were not deleted. That would have been the worst. We backed them up to an external hard drive and then tried to run a virus scan and spy ware remover. They both ran and of course found nothing. Likely I will just reinstall the OS and all of the documents so her computer will be healthy again. So even though It isn’t fixed, Picasa helped us find the missing files in a jiffy. Thanks Picasa, therefore, thank you Google!