Google starts to blur faces in Street View photos
After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program.
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.
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.
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Microsoft Releases Windows XP Service Pack 3
Microsoft has released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP users. The update should now be offered via both Windows Update or Automatic Updates. The company was expected to release it earlier, but pulled the plug at the last minute due to a compatibility problem with an obscure product they offer.
Microsoft says it is not adding any significant Windows Vista technology into XP with Service Pack 3. No surprise there, given that Microsoft has said Service Pack 3 will be XP's swan song: The company currently plans to stop issuing new licenses for the operating system this summer.
In addition to all the previously released security updates and hotfixes (some of which users may not have, even if they have been keeping up with security patches), SP3 includes "a small number of enhancements, which do not significantly change customers' experience with the operating system," Microsoft said.
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Users Fuming Over Vista Audio Driver Glitch
Several users running Windows Vista with SP1 installed who recently downloaded an audio driver for through Windows Update say the update disables their machines' audio functionality.
The update for IDT (Formerly Sigmatel)'s high definition sound and is called "IDT High Def Codec," according to several users on a Dell customer forum, who claim that installing the update results in a "Code 10" Error after rebooting, as well as the loss of audio.
Sigmatel drivers were on the list of problematic device drivers that caused Microsoft in February to delay the public release of Vista SP1. When Microsoft did release Vista SP1 through Windows Update in March, the vendor blocked users with these drivers on their PCs from downloading the update.
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