With news that Google have just got that little bit closer to providing users of Google’s Maps and Earth a more detailed than ever view of where we live, I wonder if it’s all such a good thing..

The GeoEye satellite, 423 miles about the Earth, peers down as you’re outside doing the gardening. Little do you know that while you prune your petunias, the large lens of a hi-resolution camera is watching your every move, down to a 50cm resolution. What does that mean to the average person?

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The Hacker from Blighty, Garry McKinnon, has recently lost his most recent battle to prevent his expedition to the US on counts of hacking.

Gary, who is being charged in excess of $700,000 in damages, is taking his case to the European court, which is expected to take at least a couple of years before it’s looked upon again. Originally charged with hacking into the NASA computer systems, the damages really amount to the cost of upgrading their systems (and user’s education you would imagine) to counter future attacks. Surely NASA should be shaking his hand, giving him a paycheck and patting his back for showing them how to improve their systems, after accounts were hacked using the most obvious methods possible: Administrator accounts without passwords, or default passwords, all available over the net via a terminal services connection. That’s like making a guy who punched you in the face to not only pay for the surgery to your teeth, but also pay for a couple of bodyguards, and karate lessons for you, to ensure you were more prepared in case somebody else tried their luck. I’m sure we would all want it, but is it really justified??

The UK’s government are currently “undecided” as to whether they should have a database that records and tracks every email, website or telephone conversations the UK public make.

What is given another “to stop terrorist activities” reasoning is again interfering with normal innocent daily lives. It’s the general public that are going to be spied on, not the terrorists. How many terrorist’s do they think they would catch, baring in mind that potentially 65 million people would be victimised? All your private communications that are your right as a citizen to be conducted in any way you see fit, stored on a system to be read or listened to without your permission? It seems a little backward and completely open to abuse.

And of all the terrorists using email, visiting websites, or talking to each other - the vast majority will already know about the law and put a very simple layer of encryption in place to protect themselves. And as most of you know, this is not difficult, even with a very basic knowledge and Google at your fingertips, you can be completely anonymous within minutes. It’s just shows the lack of understanding and information the government has when it comes to technology. I don’t know whether to blame their advisers or their own stupidity, but either way this sort of Big Brother attitude can’t be allowed to continue.

Due to privacy advocates being unhappy with the prospect of people not being able to remain anonymous (visually at least) on Google Street, the search giant have introduced “face-blur” technology to relieve concerns.

Google Street, a close cousin to Google Maps, allows the interested to click a button to get a street view of the surrounding area. Useful when trying to remember the name of a shop, or to check the location for parking. Of course that means from time to time people get their pictures taken too - which Europe isn’t comfortable with. Strong laws in the EU & in the UK prevent people from being singled out and taken a picture of. Likewise, if you are part of a crowd it is thought to be fair game - it’s just unsure as to how interpretation will play a part. Hopefully with the face-blur technology in place, which is visible if you visit the street views of New York, Google will be able to put the fears to rest and map lots of areas for the future. I personally think it’s a great idea, as long as people can’t be identified - even though I’m sure most of us would be quite happy to be famous on Google!

Every now and again, two of my favourite subjects come together (No, not blackmail and hard discs) - Technology and Motorsports.

Formula 1 star of the McLaren-Mercedes team, Lewis Hamilton, has been the focus of a blackmail attempt by a man in Germany, named simply “Dieter.” Dieter somehow obtained a hard drive, that had supposedly been disposed of some months before, that contained documents and other personal information. For those who are unfamiliar with the McLaren-Mercedes scandal of last year, the team were found guilty of using secrets from another team to improve their own car - and this hard drive could possibly had more such evidence on it. Trying to sell the hard drive to the German motorsport magazine, “Bild”, Dieter was arrested by police after the magazine tipped off the authorities, as reported by the Daily Telegraph today.

So how do you properly and permanently remove sensitive information from your hard disc?

Remember - when you delete things in Windows the data is usually still there - just because you can’t access the information doesn’t mean somebody else won’t be able to. The very nature of deleting a file just means renaming the first character of the filename, to let the system know the space it takes up can be used for new files - and the data is still there until new files are written in the same place. And even if the space the file used to occupy is overwritten with different files, there are techniques that can be employed to find out what used to be on the surface of the disc. Once you know this, you need something a little better than the recycle bin in windows to remove your sensitive data, and there are three methods you can use to do it:

The first way is with a program that allows you to securely delete files - rather than by using the recycle bin in Windows, download Eraser. It has a drag and drop interface that allows you to do a multiple-pass wipe so that the bytes the file occupies get overwritten properly, making it practically impossible to retrieve the data that used to be your file. Amongst others, by default, it uses the “Gutmann” method of wiping that employees 35 separate passes of specially selected data to make sure nobody can retrieve the information, chemically, from the drive. This should be enough if you just need to remove the odd file that’s a bit sensitive. It is geared towards doing things in batches, so you could drag files you want to remove into the program and before you log out, process them all in one go. This takes care of single file deletes.

The second way is a little more abstract, and Eraser is up to the task of removing this type of data too. Remember when your files are removed, they aren’t actually erased, the space is allocated back to the system to write files into? Baring this in mind, all the files you’ve deleted previously, will have data scattered all over the drive, in places ready to be overwritten, but for whatever reason the system hasn’t got around to using yet. So the second method is to wipe your free space on the drive. Every byte that isn’t allocated to a file will be subjected to the same rigorous treatment, using the same methods.

When you’ve come to the point when you’re ready to throw the hard drive away and want to be sure there’s nothing left on it, the last method to remove data is to wipe the whole drive. And the best way to do this is to melt it down! Failing that, if you don’t have a kiln in your house, try DBAN (Darik’s Boot And Nuke). Download DBAN, burn it to a CD, boot from that CD and you will be able to wipe any drive in the system with multiple passes of random data. Eraser, above, also supports wiping whole drives and can create a “Nuke Disc” to boot from. DBAN, however is a personal favourite, and I’ve never had problems with using it. This should securely remove the data - although of course, nothing is as secure or cool as melting it - plus you get the added advantage of doing something cool to video and put on youtube!

An odd one, this one. Microsoft filed a patent on December 20th, 2006, for a device called the “Guardian Angel”. The idea is to have a device to detect the number of people in a room, single them out and recognise them. And then gather information on them, presumably from the net, about previous convictions and stuff.. Hmmm, not saying that people need to be safe, but two things come to mind straight away:

1) If there are dangerous people in the room, shouldn’t they be in another room, like, oh I dunno, a jail or something?

2) If the device flags someone as “dangerous” I guess it doesn’t matter if that person has already served his time, and probably gone through rehabilitation? The person could be completely different to his criminal record now.

So I think I’m saying this is a massive invasion of privacy, and straight away sets a machine up to pass judgement on someone else in the room. Surely this is wrong? The original article by slashdot can be found here. Another interesting feature of the Guardian Angel was a “heart monitor” like people need a machine to tell them they’re having a heart attack, or that they’re dead? Well I guess it hasn’t stopped Microsoft in the past for providing “features” to things that they think the buying public need - just look at Vista..!

Those of you who use the McAfee SiteAdvisor plugin for Firefox, will be aware of how McAfee are helping to protect users from malicious sites. The plugin notifies users with a simple colour coding that allows users to visually work out if a website has been reported for malware or spyware attacks. The plugin works with community support - reports being fed to McAfee from users with comments posted on the site’s page detailing the problems they faced.

Well now, McAfee have teamed up with Yahoo, to do a very similar thing on their search results. When you search for a term using Yahoo’s engine, there will be an indication next to the site that identifies it as malware/spyware, if it’s been reported that the website has been up to no good. This should hopefully prevent people from clicking on the link, or at least, make them find out why the site has gained such a reputation. If you already have McAfee’s SiteAdvisor plugin installed, all search engine results are automatically checked anyway, so you won’t gain much. And you have the added advantage of being notified of a malicious site when you’re browsing it. At least the Yahoo deal is a step in the right direction. Read the Yahoo! press release.

Tesco have offered their customers WMA files for a while now, but the really interesting thing with this story is that they will also be offering MP3’s next month - no DRM. This is obvious competition to iTunes, but I think more importantly with be a direct competitor to Amazon when they release their MP3 downloads service in the UK. Are Tesco trying to get a foot in the door early?

In an article on the Register, O2 have basically admitted that everyone who uses their 3G service is automatically placed on 128Kb/s, rather than the theoretical maximum of 384Kb/s. It gets better though: All of you with a personal mobile with 3G won’t ever get any more. Corporate customers can go to O2 and get it upped to 384Kb/s, but it’s still apparently under their terms.

This just seems to echo how the industry treats people’s internet access in this country. The companies like Tiscali and Virgin Media, and others - now including O2 - think they have the right to restrict usage just because their infrastructure can’t handle the demand. Personally if it’s all about money, I would rather pay a little bit extra to guarantee a decent connection, rather than all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Read the full article here.

I hope you enjoyed using P2P to download your Linux distros because it looks as though the legal users amongst us have just lost out. If you use Virgin Media as your ISP, you’ll be interested to know that they are about to start trials of the 3 strikes rule the government recently detailed in a white paper.

Trialled last year by Tiscali which resulted in a handful of users being disconnected, the 3 strikes rule focuses on re-offending P2P users. But how do they know who is using P2P for legitimate means? Only just recently a TV company in Canada released Hi-Def versions of one of their prime-time shows as a bittorrent in an incentive to trial new methods of distribution. Does this mean these methods of legal distribution, that benefits all, will become a thing of the past? Click here for more information.