Is Google’s Street View violating your privacy?; the future of tech- nology at DEMO 09; the best of our blogs; best free PC games; top photo apps for your vacation pics.

Front What’s New from the World of Tech

Are You on the Map?

Virtual mapping programs, such as Google’s Street View, have raised questions about privacy and security.

Online mapping has come a long way since the days of primary-colored, slow-to-load MapQuest images. Google and Microsoft have taken online mapping to a new level of realism, thanks to satellite imagery and multilens cameras mounted on the tops of nondescript cars and vans trolling the streets of a town near you. This virtual mapping technology has appeared in services such as Google Maps’ Street View and Microsoft’s Live Search Maps, letting users see a panoramic, photographic view of a location, often with overlays of navigational map data. For the cartographically challenged, virtual mapping has been exceedingly helpful, letting them see what destinations look like in real life. But along with photographing streets and buildings, the roving cameras are also photographing people. In most cases, those captured in a virtual mapping image are simply going about their daily lives—strolling down the sidewalk or crossing an intersection. But the rooftop cameras have also caught people engaging in embarrassing or potentially criminal activities, including walking into an adult bookstore, urinating behind a parked car, and climbing the steel gate of a house in what looks to be a breakin attempt. Street View has a built-in feature to blur faces, but many say it does not work consistently. And what about capturing your license plate number, house number, or your kids playing in the front yard? Some argue that virtual mapping is a violation of privacy, since those photographed are unaware, and they are taking companies like Google and Microsoft to task. Pittsburgh residents Aaron and Christine Boring sued Google in April 2008 for privacy, trespassing, negligence, and unjust enrichment after photographs of their

home showed up on Street View. The photographs in question were taken at the foot of the Borings’ driveway and show the couple’s house, a pool area, and a detached garage. Despite the Borings’ claims, Judge Amy Reynolds Hay of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania dismissed the suit, saying that in order to prove invasion of privacy, the Borings must demonstrate “mental suffering, shame, or humiliation.” Along with privacy concerns, there are those who believe virtual mapping is a security risk. Republican California Assemblyman Joel Anderson recently crafted a bill mandating that virtual mapping programs blur out schools, places of worship, government buildings, and medical facilities or face hefty fines and possible jail time. Anderson wrote the bill after it was revealed that

By all indications, Google has cooperated with requests to take down or blur Street View photographs that others object to. But the company has no intention of removing Street View. In the past year, it has added more than 40 cities as well as national parks and recreation centers. Google has also rolled out a crowdsourcing feature in which users can post their own street photos. Believing the service’s benefits far outweigh any potential risks or privacy infringements, Google sTreeT visioN Anonymous cars specially outfitted with included its own reality check in its multilens cameras capture images for virtual maps. motion to dismiss the Borings’ suit. “Complete privacy does not terrorists in Israel and Mumbai used map- exist in this world except in a desert,” the ping programs to help plot terror attacks. statement read, “and anyone who is not a “All I’m trying to do is stop terrorists,” hermit must expect and endure the ordiAnderson told the Associated Press. “I nary incidents of the community life of don’t want California to be helping map out which he (or she) is a part.” future targets for terrorists.” —Chloe Albanesius and Erik Rhey

Looking into the Future

An inside report on this year’s DEMO show.

For the past 18 years, the annual DEMO show has been dedicated to start-up companies and brand-new products. Forward Thinking blogger and former PCMag editor-in-chief Michael J. Miller was on the ground at the spring DEMO ’09 show, last month in California. Here’s his roundup of the show’s highlights. Reflecting the changes in the economy, there are fewer new products here than in any year in recent memory, but I’m still expecting to see a variety of new things, ranging from gadgets to consumer Web services to enterprise software. I’m struck, however, by the number of products designed for personal productivity, an area that has been overshadowed in recent years. For example, I saw Symantec’s Project Guru, an online tool that includes remote diagnostics, network monitoring, and online remote access for tech-savvy users—you know, people like us—to offer tech support to friends and family. This will be a closed pilot initially, and the company hasn’t announced pricing, but it’s a very interesting concept. Also at the show was Gwabbit, an inexpensive add-on for Microsoft Outlook that finds and captures contacts from anywhere within an e-mail message, and then turns them into contact records in your address book. There are a number of other e-mail–based tools slated to be introduced, including the Asurion Mobile AddressBook and Cc: Betty, which is touted as a “personal email assistant.”

Xandros Presto ($19.95), from the Xandros Linux folks, promises to cut any Windows machine’s start-up time by offering an “instant on” feature. AppZero is another interesting product that

sNeAk Peek Among the products displayed at this year’s DEMO show were the Always Innovating Touch Book with detachable screen (left), Coveroos customizable cell phone covers (center), and the Avaak Vue personal video system (right). claims to turn server-based applications into cloud-based applications. Three products at DEMO that are designed to improve Web searching are ensembli, Primal Fusion, and Xmarks. On the hardware side, there were a few products that looked particularly interesting, including the Touch Book, a portable device that works as both a netbook and a touch-screen tablet, and Qualcomm’s mirasol Display, which claims to use significantly less energy than competing display screens. Another compelling display technology was the Avaak vue Personal video system, which the company describes as “a revolutionary wire-free video system that allows remote viewing of anything from anywhere.” And it may not be a big technical advance, but Coveroos may entice people to customize their cell-phone covers. —Michael J. Miller

Best of our Blogs

geArlog

isimple Tranzit Connects iPods to FM Car stereos

iSimple has unveiled the TranzIt, a universal interface that allows iPod and iPhone owners to connect their devices to their car stereos via an antenna bypass.

This device claims to offer static-free listening through any FM car stereo. You set the radio preset as an iPod channel (such as 87.9 or 88.3 FM), plug in the iPod, and turn on the Tranzit. Once connected, you can browse and select tracks using the iPod directly. An iPhone owner could conceivably stream Internet radio via Pandora Mobile, AOL Radio, or Last.fm as well. The connection also offers battery charging while the iPod or iPhone is docked.—Jamie Lendino seCuritY WAtCH

Worm Targets Facebookers

A new variant of the Koobface worm is making the rounds. Facebook users need to be aware of this and other attempts to use clever social engineering related to Facebook to trick them into installing malware. Like the earlier versions of Koobface, this one starts out as a Facebook message from a friend that includes a link to a Web site with something enticing like “a video of you.” As with the old ones, in order to view the video you have to apply what purports to be an update to your Adobe Flash player but is in fact the malware. —Larry Seltzer goodCleAnteCH

Green Gadget for Hackers

At the Greener Gadgets 2009 conference in New York, there was a competition to find the best green gadget—and it’s not at all what you’d expect. In fact, it’s not even really a gadget. Heck, it’s an anti-gadget. Tweetawatt uses a modified Kill A Watt device to monitor and update your power usage, automatically and wirelessly, for all of your friends and followers to view on Twitter. The theory goes, if everyone knows your power consumption, you’ll behave better. That’s all well and good, but I like the side benefit: It makes Twitter useful. The device was designed by Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries and Philip Torrone of MAKE Magazine.—Jeremy Kaplan

@WorK New Business switches Netgear announced a new line of Prosafe FSM Layer 2 Fast Ethernet switches for small and midsize companies. The FSM72E, FSM722RS, and FSM720RS are stackable switches that are designed for edge-of-network connectivity in small IT shops. The SMB switches come with many enterprise features, including support for 802.1x port-based authentication, ACL (access control lists), QoS with VoIP prioritization with Layer 2 through Layer 4 support, and IGMP feature for video surveillance. The FSM72E is priced at $299.99, the FSM722RS at $399.99, and the FSM720RS at $79.99.—Mario Morejon

extremeteCH

The Best Free PC Games

The crew at ExtremeTech uncover some of the best gratis games.

Puzzle Pirates

One of the more popular free games on the Net, Puzzle Pirates is a persistent MMO with a very casual bent. You create a cute pirate that looks like a Playmobil figure and sail the seas in search of pieces of eight. The catch is, each activity (and there are many, like manning the guns, repairing the ship, and bailing out bilgewater) is performed with a simple puzzle game.

Click here for more.

Freeciv

It’s Civilization, and it’s free! Okay, so maybe this free and open-source strategy game “inspired by” the beloved Civ doesn’t have all the nice UI features or pretty graphics of Civilization IV. But once you get the hang of the keyboard commands, it’s really addictive.

Click here for more.

Chalk

Joakim Sandberg’s Chalk is good for a couple hours of free fun. The premise is simple—you guide your character around a chalkboard by right-clicking, and draw chalk lines with a left-click. Use your chalk lines to deflect bullets from enemies, remove obstacles, etc. The catchy tunes and sound effects help bring it all together into a nice, polished, scrolling “draw-er” of sorts.

Click here for more.

F.E.A.R. Combat

As you get ready for the PC release of F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, why not brush up on your skills with the free multiplayer component of the original F.E.A.R.? The graphics hold up great—F.E.A.R. Combat is one of the best-looking free games on the Net.—Jason Cross

Click here for more.

Best

of the Internet

yourFoNTs

This cool, free font generator lets you transform your handwriting into custom hand-lettered type. Just print, fill in, and scan the template, then upload it to YourFonts.com to preview, download, and install.—Jen Trolio

PluQ

This social planning tool allows you to engage your friends or coworkers in scheduling a party, lunch, or major event, free. It gives you a calendar on which you can mark certain days with different colors to indicate to your friends whether they’re good days, preferred days, or bad days.—Alan Henry

DoorFly

DoorFly is a service that lets you build a profile of what you’re looking for in a home and watch real estate agents bid against one another to work with you on your housing search. Each DoorFly agent can create a custom profile page.—AH

For more cool Web sites and handy utilities and apps, visit PC Mag’s blog AppScout (www .appscout.com). ConneCted trAveler

Create Great Travel Pics—Free!

Make the most of your point-and-shooter’s output with these free tools for editing, managing, and sharing your digital images.

If you’re a PCMag reader, it’s a good bet you own a digital camera that you use heavily on vacation or business travel. You may not be a digital darkroom junkie who spends hours tweaking adjustment layers in Adobe Photoshop, but you want your pictures to look good, and you want an easy and inviting way to share them with friends, family, and colleagues. Luckily, there’s a good selection of free software out there these days that can do many of the things Photoshop can. When choosing one of these free apps, here are a couple things to consider: How easily does the photo editor let you transfer pictures from your digital camera to your computer? How effective and simple are its tools for editing your photos? And how easy does it make sharing photos online? Speaking of putting photos online, Picasa 3 (beta) (top left, l l l l h ) is one of the best choices out there. This new version keeps what’s good about the old and adds some new killer capabilities, such as retouching, face recognition, and movie editing. The installed software works seamlessly with your Picasa online galleries, and the two can even be synced automatically. It makes working with scanners, webcams, and screen captures simpler, too. To organize your pics, Windows live Photo Gallery (Wave 3) (top right, not rated) has a unique people-tagging feature and the ability to upload to Flickr and other services. You can group pictures based on folders created for each import session and virtual albums of pictures selected from these. From there you can organize them by date or tags. If you want an online-only option, check out Picnik (bottom left, l lllm ) . This quirky editor has some super-cool features, such as a button to automatically fix the blue- or red-eye in pet photos. Not even Adobe Photoshop Elements can do that automatically. It also integrates with your favorite social networking sites like MySpace, Flickr, and Facebook. Mac users, of course, have the old reliable, iPhoto ’08 (bottom right, l lllm ). It is still one of the best consumer photo-editing options around. In addition to the blemish remover, flexible sharpness feature, and noise-reduction filters, this version has a new “straighten” command that lets you rotate a photo freely until it’s right. Its division of your photos into Events also works well. If you want to share your pictures on Web galleries with iPhoto, however, you’ll need to spring for the $100a-year MobileMe service.—Michael Muchmore