yarrrr

Now that Netflix is in the original content business, the company has to deal with piracy. It took some time, but House of Cards is now all over the torrent sites. [Variety]

Is Apple working on a competitor to Street View? [Apple Insider]

New software would leave student essays to be graded by A.I., leaving professors more time for other tasks. What professors are doing that's more important than evaluating the progress of their students is anyone's guess. [New York Times]

"If you install this, then it is very likely that Facebook is going to be able to track your every move, and every little action." [GigaOm]

A secrets-sharing app named "Whisper" just raised $3 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners. [PandoDaily]

Whoops. (Photo: The Amazing iOS 6 Maps)

Word on the street says Apple has fired the manager who oversaw the development of its ill-fated Maps app. [Bloomberg]

This anthropologist completely submerged herself in the culture she was studying for three years ... meaning she moved to the Bay Area and started chatting up hackers. [Wired]

Google has released an icy slew of Street View updates, including photos of Svalbard, Norway--which is about 400 miles north of continental Europe. [TNW]

The most commonly asked politics question on Ask.com in 2012: "Who will win the Presidential race?" Guys, it's a search engine, not a crystal ball. For fortune-telling, you need Nate Silver. [VentureBeat]

Nokia is suing to block the sale of many RIM products until they can straighten out royalties, not that it'll save either company from the scrapheap of corporate history. [ComputerWorld]

Street View UFO (Google Street View)

Andrea Dove, who lives outside Houston, Texas, was using Google Maps to get directions to a relative's house when she made an interesting discovery on Street View: something that resembles a fading, pinkish UFO straight out of cartoon sci-fi.

KLTV-TV sent a reporter after the story, who went full man-on-the-street in tracking the alien image:

I looked up a dozen different cities and didn't find any similar anomalies. That must make Jacksonville special.

"Do you see anything?" I asked a couple residents.

"Not yet," they replied.

The KLTV reporter seemed to be unaware that finding anomalies on Google Street View is a cherished Internet past-time. Other high strangeness captured by Street View cameras includes:

• Ghosts--several ghosts, in fact
• Randomly levitating children
• And to bring things full circle, the likely pilot of the Texas UFO, ET, the extraterrestrial.

Of course, Street View is also good at capturing scary slices of real life, as we recently discovered when the Google cameras captured the business end of a gun.

As for the UFO in Texas, chances are good it's an artifact of light refracting inside one of the many lenses inside the Street View car's Death Star-shaped camera.

When a Hacker News user named "lutfidemirci" posted a photo of employees at Google Dublin lined up and smiling for the cameras, other users unearthed a trove of other photos of employees in countries like Germany, Switzerland and the U.K. doing the same thing. Employees in Hamburg evengot out some literal Google-colored pom-poms to do a little cheer for the Street View team.

It's interesting to note that the German employees are the only ones with their faces blurred-out; we assume that's because of how much Germany dislikes Google street view.

Click through the slideshow for some screenshots.

level343.com

While $25,000 is pocket change to the search giant, the news that the Federal Communications Commission has fined Google for Street View data collection may come at a bad time P.R.-wise for the company, considering questions being asked by U.K. organizations regarding Google's use of CAPTCHAs to resolve blurry house numbers seen on Street View.

Here in the U.S. the F.C.C. issue an order on Friday, April 13 giving evidence Google wouldn't go along with its investigation into Google's data collection practices during the 2007-2010 phas of its Street View project. The F.C.C. stated that Google's poor conduct in this instance "...threatens to compromise the commission's ability to effectively investigate possible violations of the Communications Act and the commission's rules."

It is believed Google gathered highly sensitive information it didn't need for the Street View project, including passwords and Internet usage data.

Reuters reports Google "could not be reached for comment."

The same image is presented to other Google users around the world at the same time. If enough people submit the same number, Google accepts they have accurately read the photo and are therefore not bots.

Traditionally these security checks – of which there are estimated 200 million a day - have involved typing blurred letters or words into a box.

According to the U.K. Big Brother Watch's delightfully named Nick Pickles, this constitutes "a serious privacy issue with identifying the individual number of people's homes."

It is also an instance of Google being "underhand and crude," according to Mr. Pickles, as the company is essentially using the public as "unwitting data loggers."

Google claims there is no security risk, as the photos presented in CAPTCHAs are cropped and visible from public motorways. As Google's spokesperson told the Guardian, "We often extract data such as street names and traffic signs from Street View imagery to improve Google Maps with useful information like business addresses and locations."