Software engineer Michael Weiss-Malik had been dating his girlfriend, Leslie Moreno, for "some years" when he decided to ask her to marry him in April.
But this "Proposal 1.0" as he called it, was "quiet and low-key", he said on his website, and "lacking in pizzazz".
So Mr Weiss-Malik decided to make a large sign that read "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!" and hold it up as the Street View car rolled past his office.
Mr Weiss-Malik, a Google employee, had heard that the Street View cars would be updating the images of the street outside his Silicon Valley workplace, and like other employees, he was encouraged to do a funny pose for the car-mounted cameras as an "Easter Egg" – an extra treat hidden within Street View.
Some employees rode bikes behind the car, others staged mock fights, and one even dressed up as the yellow Street View placemark.
Mr Weiss-Malik didn't tell Leslie about the stunt. Instead he set up a website, www.marrymeleslie.com, to explain his upgraded proposal and encourage visitors to tell Leslie about it.
"When she woke me up, she asked why there were all these strangers e-mailing her telling her to marry me," Mr Weiss-Malik told The Mercury News.
Google Street View has been criticised for invading people's privacy as the service, which launched in Australia this week, allows anyone with a broadband connection to see 360-degree views of most streets in major cities and country towns.
A pro-privacy group recently protested against Street View by posting images of Google co-founder Larry Page's house, plus details of his car route to work.
Despite the issues, Mr Weiss-Malik said he was comfortable with the technology.
"I dare say that it's the first time anyone in the history of mankind has proposed marriage in quite this way," he said on his website.
The couple plan to get married in May.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: Geek's marriage proposal on Google Street View
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: Lost gadgets 'phone home' to catch thieves
Then a funny thing happened: her camera "phoned home".
Equipped with a special memory card with wireless internet capability, DeLauzon's camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.
"I opened up the Eye-Fi manager on the computer and, lo and behold, there are the guys that stole our cameras," said Ms DeLauzon, a native of New York's Long Island.
"Not only is it the guy who stole our camera... but the guy took a picture of (his accomplice) holding our other camera."
Ms DeLauzon received the Eye-Fi, a 2-gigabyte SD memory card that fits into millions of digital cameras, as a holiday gift to go with her Canon camera.
Priced at about $US100 ($104), the card automatically uploads pictures to a home computer or online photosharing service like Flickr as soon as the user is linked to a familiar wireless network.
Luckily, the culprits passed by an unsecured network, whose factory-installed setting matched that of Ms DeLauzon's home system, and the Eye-Fi automatically shipped the photos: first baby pictures, then the snap-happy scoundrels.
Her experience reflects the rise of technology that empowers everyday gadgets to protect themselves or the priceless personal data – from family phone numbers to business budgets – that consumers keep on portable electronics devices.
Cameras are perhaps the most common home-phoning gadget used to thwart criminals.
An eerie case occurred last month, when a Japanese man set up a hidden camera because food was disappearing from his kitchen. While he was out, the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of the intruder – an unknown woman living secretly in his closet.
A few years ago, there was a well-publicised case of a Sidekick mobile phone that was first lost in a New York taxi, then found by a 16-year-old who used it to take pictures and send instant messages.
But the device's mobile service provider automatically backed up such data on remote computers, allowing the owner's friend, Evan Guttman, to uncover a trail – and launch an online shaming campaign against the 16-year-old, who was eventually arrested.
While passive systems have helped reunite missing gadgets with their owners, more aggressive measures can be employed to protect everything from laptops to iPods and BlackBerrys.
US company GadgetTrak sells software that can be loaded onto any of those devices and works from anywhere in the world. If a BlackBerry, for example, falls into the wrong hands, the software grabs information from the new user's SIM data card and emails it to the rightful owner.
With an Apple Mac computer, the software instructs the built-in camera to take video of the thief and sends to the owner, along information about nearby wireless networks.
Some 20,000 GadgetTrack licenses have been purchased in about one year -- including 10,000 from storage company Seagate.
"The reason we have been so successful is that people are not expecting this kind of software to be installed," said Ken Westin, the company's founder.
"No security solution is 100 per cent – there are always going to be work-arounds. But your average thief is not going to be a computer expert."
Ms DeLauzon didn't want to press charges against the people who had her camera, both employed at the restaurant where she accidentally left it. Retrieving pictures of her baby boy was the most important concern.
"When we finally got it back, my husband and I spent the night just sitting and watching the videos – stupid videos, like him feeding himself for the first time or him pulling himself up in his crib for the first time. We sat down one night and just relished it."
Friday, October 3, 2008
LATEST TECHNOLOGY: ROBOTS VIII : Finally, someone teaches dogs to play poker
IF you think you can't teach an old dog new tricks, think again — students from Griffith University have developed a poker-playing robot puppy.
Information technology students Nicholas Dahm and Mark Johnson taught a Sony Artificial Intelligence Robot (AIBO) – a programmable robotic dog – to play poker against humans.
The project, titled MiPal AIBO Texas Hold 'Em, was part of Griffith University's Student Expo, held yesterday at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre.
To create an "intelligent" poker player, the students developed two separate modules, which could analyse the robot's hand as well as its opponent's behaviour.
But although it may beat the average journalist in a game of poker, it had not yet reached a level to challenge the professionals.
Mr Dahm said the robot was first dealt a hand, then the data from this was fed through either a wireless connection linked to a computer or through its voice-recognition system.
"It works on emotional feedback to give it a more real response," he said.
"It will wag its tail if it has a good hand although it may also wag its tail when it is bluffing to throw the opponent off."
Sony's AIBO pets were released in 1999. They are able to see via a camera, interact with their owner's voice, walk, wag their tail and a host of other tricks.
The robots can be programmed to learn additional skills and movements – leading to their entry in competitions like the RoboCup Four-Legged Robot Soccer League.
In 2006 Sony announced it would discontinue making the robotic pets.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: Infidelity spies get smart
New hi-tech spy gear can read every text message you've sent or received - even the deleted ones - as well as track your every move and listen in on all your conversations.
There's even an over-the-counter semen detection kit that can unequivocally reveal infidelity.
It all sounds like gadgets from a James Bond movie, but Brisbane retailer Craig Mitchell is struggling to keep up with demand.
"We have difficulty keeping stock up with the SIM Card Recovery Pro," says Mr Mitchell, who owns OzSpy security systems at Tingalpa on Brisbane's eastside.
"The beauty of that product is that it can read deleted messages off a SIM card.
"But our biggest seller when it comes to infidelity products has always been the CheckMate kit which is a semen detection kit.
Other spy gear includes a key logger which can capture and decode every letter you type as well as a device which looks like an electrical extension cord but has a mobile phone transmitter and microphone embedded in it.
Suspicious partners can silently call the cord from anywhere in the world and listen in to conversations occurring within a 15m radius of the device - perfect surveillance equipment to catch out an office affair.
According to private detective Frank Morgan, the number of spurned spouses looking for evidence of their partner's infidelity has doubled in Brisbane in recent times. He puts it down to tough financial times.
"When money is not running well there are arguments and men tend to shag the blonde around the corner to make themselves feel better and women do it with the gym instructor for the same reason," says Mr Morgan, who has been a director of Morgan Turner Freeman investigations for more than 40 years.
"We carry about 90 live jobs here in Brisbane at any one time and half of those would be matrimonial ones."
Many people are simply looking for the truth, Mr Morgan says.
"Not everybody is after evidence they can take to court," he says. "They simply want to satisfy themselves that their marriage is definitely over before they pack up and move on."
Mr Morgan says the new spy gear on the market has changed his modus operandi dramatically.
While once he would have staked out suspects and followed them by car all day, he now fits a device to a vehicle or installs a program into a mobile phone and is able to tap into every move and conversation.
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: Stolen account prices fall as market flooded
Researches for web security firm Finjan said details like account numbers with PIN codes that once fetched $100 or more might now go for just $10 or $20 each due to the number of records being traded.
The high volumes and falling prices had forced cybercriminals to look elsewhere to boost profit margins, they said.
In its latest quarterly survey of web trends, the company said cybercrime had evolved into "a major shadow economy ruled by business rules and logic that closely mimics the legitimate business world".
Chief technology officer Yuval Ben-Itzhak said that new types of stolen data were now commanding a premium, such as patient healthcare information that can be used for insurance fraud or to illicitly acquire and sell medicines.
The Finjan report, based partly on contacts the company established with five groups trading online in stolen data, describes a Mafia-type cybercrime hierarchy in which bosses operate as entrepreneurs and leave the actual online attacks to underlings.
An "underboss", or second-in-command, provides the Trojan infiltration software for launching attacks. The workforce that carries these out is paid according to the rate of infections achieved and the country of origin of the infected computers.
"Resellers" then trade the illicit financial data in the same way that a criminal "fence" disposes of stolen goods.
In online exchanges with resellers, Finjan researchers were offered a menu of stolen data – with platinum, gold and corporate card details commanding the highest prices.
Sellers promised the data was "fresh" and one even offered a 48-hour guarantee to supply new details if those originally bought were rejected by payment systems as stolen cards.
"It's like in the regular business world – when you buy a good and it doesn't work, you go back and you want to replace it," Mr Ben-Itzhak said.
"It indicates a competitive environment... They need to build reputation, they want to show they're providing high quality data for your money so you can go back and buy from them rather than go to the other groups."
Mr Ben-Itzhak said he expected banks, which until now have shouldered the burden of compensating people whose data are hacked, to seek to put some of the onus for security on the customer.
"So far the banks are not mandating the (end user) to have some sort of security on their desktop. They're taking the risk, better to say they're paying the risk, when your account has been compromised," he said.
"However what we noticed recently is the volume increased significantly and the banks are starting to ask the question: did you install something or do you have something running on your desktop?
"The banks will start to ask questions of the end-users and put some responsibility at least on them."
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: Player-made games to be sold on Xbox Live
The world's largest software maker announced that it will start selling "user-generated" games later this year in a Community Games section of its online Xbox Live service - and it will share up to 70 per cent of revenue with the game developer.
Microsoft began offering game production tools in 2006 to amateurs and hobbyists under an initiative called "XNA," which allowed developers to create a game that could run on the Xbox, a Windows-based computer or its Zune media player.
User-generated content, or UGC, is the backbone of many advertising-supported websites such as Facebook and YouTube, but the video game industry has relied mostly on deep-pocketed developers to create sequels or games based on licensed properties.
Facebook and YouTube provide a free forum for new applications and videos, but they do not share advertising fees with users.
Microsoft, however, requires the prospective video game developer to buy a $US99-a-year ($102.13) premium membership to the XNA Creators Club, but offers a slice of the revenue.
The games will be sold on the Xbox Live Marketplace at three different prices — the equivalent of $US2.50 ($2.57), $US5 ($5.15) or $US10 ($10.31) — using Microsoft points.
In order to get the game into the Xbox Live store, the games must pass a peer-review system.
"Not only are we democratizing game development with Xbox Live Community Games later this year, but we're creating an opportunity for aspiring developers," Chris Satchell, chief technology officer at Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business group, said in a statement.
Microsoft expects the games created by users will double the number of games available for the Xbox 360 when the Community Games section of its Xbox Live online store comes out of "beta," or test, mode later this year.
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: F-word town censors itself on the internet
The problem lay with the pronunciation of the town's name where the "wh" takes an "f" sound.
The censorship was uncovered when a visitor to the tourist town on the east coast of the North Island tried to connect to the local council's wireless service called Freenet.
"The content filter is an American-based product, and it does a phonetic analysis of what has been typed in,'' he said.
"Whakatane, to the system, sounds like an F-word."
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: 'Spam king' kills family after escape from jail
Eddie Davidson was named the "spam king" for his multimillion-dollar business of covering the tracks of unsolicited marketing emails – a service that earned him as much as $US3.5 million ($3.6m) per client.
Davidson last week escaped from a minimum security prison in Colorado, where he was serving a 21-month sentence for falsifying email identification.
He then murdered his wife and three-year-old daughter before turning the gun on himself, the Associated Press reported.
At Davidson's sentencing last year, the judge said he was not a flight risk or a danger to others.
On the day he escaped from Florence Federal Correctional Complex, Davidson's wife Amy Hill rang police and said her husband had forced her to help him break out, the AP said.
According to a police statement filed by his teenage daughter, Davidson drove them back to their house in Bennett, southwest of Denver.
He then got out of the car and shot Ms Hill, his teenage daughter and his three-year-old daughter before turning the gun on himself.
The teenager, whose identity has not been revealed, said she survived by running away.
Her statement was taken by police after she was rushed to hospital.
A seven-month-old boy in the back seat of the car, whose identity has also been kept secret, was unharmed.
A US Marshals spokesman said authorities did not know where Davidson got the gun. He said they were also investigating Ms Hill's involvement with the escape.
Davidson's spam operation ran from 2003 to 2006, with millions of unsolicited emails sent out to promote company stock.
He shares the "spam king" nickname with another convicted spammer, Robert Soloway, who was sentenced to 47 months in prison last week.
The US Federal Bureau of Prisons website still lists Davidson's status as "ESCAPE" and location unknown.
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: Defence hacker was 'just looking for aliens'
Gary McKinnon was arrested in 2002 after US prosecutors charged him with illegally accessing computers, including the Pentagon, US army, navy and NASA systems, and causing $US700,000 ($741,240) worth of damage.
In 2006, Mr McKinnon said he was just a computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens really existed and became obsessed with trawling large military networks for proof.
However, Britain's highest court, the House of Lords, ruled that the gravity of the charges should not be understated and they would carry a maximum life sentence under English law. It turned down his appeal against extradition.
Mr McKinnon's lawyers had argued that sending him to the US would breach his human rights, be an abuse of the English court process and should be barred as his extradition was sought "for the purpose of prosecuting him on account of his nationality or political opinions".
If found guilty in the US, Mr McKinnon could face up to 70 years in prison and fines of up to $US1.75 million.
Using his own computer at home in London, Mr McKinnon hacked into 97 computers belonging to and used by the US Government between February 2001 and March 2002.
Mr McKinnon is accused of causing the entire US Army's Military District of Washington network of more than 2000 computers to be shut down for 24 hours.
Using a limited 56K dial-up modem and the hacking name "Solo" he found many US security systems used an insecure Microsoft Windows program with no password protection.
He then bought off-the-shelf software and scanned military networks, saying he found expert testimonies from senior figures reporting that technology obtained from extra-terrestrials did exist.
At the time of his indictment, Paul McNulty, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said: "Mr McKinnon is charged with the biggest military computer hack of all time".
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: GTA pulled from shops after taxi murder
"We are sending out requests today to outlets and shops to pull the games off their shelves and we will replace them with other games," Sakchai Chotikachinda, sales and marketing director of New Era Interactive Media, said.
"We are also urging video game arcades to pull the games from service," Mr Sakchai said.
An 18-year-old high school student, now in custody pending further investigations and a trial, faces death by lethal injection if found guilty of robbing and killing a 54-year-old taxi driver with a knife at the weekend.
Police said the youth, an obsessive player of Grand Theft Auto, showed no sign of mental problems during questioning and had confessed to committing the crime because of the game.
"He said he wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game," chief police investigator Veeravit Pipattanasak said.
The youth, described by his parents as polite and diligent, was arrested late on Saturday after he was found trying to steer a cab backwards out of a Bangkok street with the severely wounded driver in the back seat, newspapers reported.
The suspect told police he did not mean to kill the driver, whom he had chosen as a possible victim because of his age, but that he stabbed him to death when he fought back, newspapers reported.
Grand Theft Auto, now available in its fourth edition, has been criticised for depicting violence including beatings, carjackings, drive-by shootings, drunk driving and prostitution.
A senior official at Thailand's Culture Ministry said the murder was a wake-up call for authorities to tackle the issue of violent video games, and urged parents to pay closer attention to what their children played.
"This time-bomb has already exploded and the situation could get worse," Ladda Thangsupachai, director of the ministry's Cultural Surveillance Centre, said.
"Today it is a cab driver, but tomorrow it could be a video game shop owner."
The ministry has been pushing for tougher regulation of video games such as Grand Theft Auto, including the imposition of a rating system on sales and restriction on hours that youngsters can play the games in public arcades.
A multi-million dollar lawsuit was filed in the US state of Alabama against the makers and marketers of Grand Theft Auto in 2005, claiming that months of playing the game led a teenager to kill two police officers and a 911 dispatcher.
The blockbuster Grand Theft Auto games are published by Nasdaq-listed Take-Two Interactive Software .
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: Claim Apple computers 'emit toxic gas'
In news that has sparked an internal investigation by Apple and frenzied blogging, Liberation cited findings that the computer emits seven "volatile organic contaminants" including styrene, benzene and its derivatives.
Benzene, a carcinogen, damages bone marrow and can decrease red blood cells, leading to leukemia and other blood cancers.
The researcher from the French National Centre for Scientific Research said his computer had released a musty smell. It allegedly comes from Mac Pros built before 2008.
Apple has not denied the report but told Macworld magazine it had no evidence of the claim
TECHNOLOGY NEWS: Finnish website removes kindergarten killer game
"We have removed pages from our site that are not necessarily appropriate for younger family members," lastenpelit.fi said in a statement on its website.
The game, Kindergarten Killer, can still be found widely on the internet. The group that made it, ZSOA or Zombie Slaughter Owns All, is responsible for another violent animation, Violenza Estrema.
In defence of the earlier movie, one of the ZSOA members posted a statement defending their work.
"What people don't understand is that this is simply art inspired by real life happenings," the statement said.
"You don't understand our use of irony to condemn violence in society. (We) are not violent, psychotic people we just put our ideas into a flash movie."
Matti Saari, 22, last week killed 10 people at a vocational school in Kauhajoki, Finland, in the country's second school shooting in less than a year. Saari prefaced his rampage with boastful video clips on websites such as YouTube.
Finnish student Pekka-Eric Auvinen did the same before shooting six fellow students, the school nurse and the principal to death at Jokela high school last November.
Both Saari and Auvinen shot themselves following their rampages and died later from their injuries.
TECHNOLOGY NEWS:Google plan to rank social networking users
The web giant could apply the technology it uses to rank search results to people in a bid to sell advertising on websites like Facebook and MySpace.
Patent application documents published this year show the company has devised a system to "rank" users of social networking sites depending on how influential they are.
Users would be given a rating based on how many people visited their profile, how many friends they had, how active they were, which groups they were a member of and so on.
The most popular users in a community, dubbed "influencers" by Google, would then be singled out to have advertisements displayed on their profile.
"The number of advertisements displayed on a profile depends on the rank of the member within the community," reads one example of how the system would work.
A spokesperson for Google played down the application and said the company filed plans for many ideas but did not act on all of them.
"We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don't," said Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin.
"Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications."
The patent application was revealed in July after being kept under wraps for 18 months in line with the US Patent and Trademark Office's pre-grant publication rules.
The office has published 69 applications for patents filed by Google so far this year, containing ideas ranging from smart billboards that could display products available in nearby stores to floating data centres that draw power from waves.
The 15-page document on social networking ranking details a series of methods to determine a user's influence that go beyond simply counting how many friends they have.
For example, a user who acted as a conduit between different groups of people would be ranked higher than one who had more friends belonging to just one circle.
"Factors such as member interactions, content on member profiles, dynamically changing size of the community and the like establish a hierarchy within a community where certain members are more popular than others and, consequently, wield enhanced influence over other members," the application says.
The application also mentions the possibility of using PageRank, the system Google uses to rank search results, to determine the influence of each user in a community.
If adopted, the system could give Google an edge over rival Microsoft in controlling advertising on social networking sites.
Microsoft currently has a deal to provide ads for market leader Facebook, in which it owns a small stake, while Google has a partnership with MySpace.
TECHNOLOGY NEWS:GPS blamed as truck crashes on steep road
Police said the 49-year-old man from Ipswich was lucky to escape his semi-trailer when it rolled on a gravel corner at Mapleton in the Sunshine Coast hinterland yesterday morning.
The truck came to rest against a tree, dangling over an 80 metre drop.
The driver said he was following instructions from his GPS to travel between Brisbane and Kenilworth when it directed him onto Obi Obi Rd, which was unsuitable for heavy vehicles.
A Queensland Police spokesman said the driver had passed a warning sign at the bottom of the steep road that prohibited large truck access.
Police and the Department of Transport will investigate.
A spokesman for the RACQ said the state's changeable weather and road conditions meant it was wise for drivers to check road conditions before they set out, instead of relying on GPS alone.
