From Google LatLong Blog:
Welcome to Russia! You can now virtually travel through the world’s largest country to the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg using Google Maps Street View.
Take an online stroll around famous Red Square and Moscow Kremlin, or go to outskirts of Moscow to wander around the beautiful Tsaritsino or Kuskovo parks. You can also visit the former site of the palace in Kolomenskoye, once considered the 8th World Wonder.
From Lifehacker:
Google recently announced it was unifying its privacy policies and would be sharing the data it collects about users between all of its products, starting March 1st. That means your web searches and sites you visit will be combined with other Google products like Google Plus and YouTube. If you’d rather avoid that, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us you can remove your Google search history and stop it from being recorded.
Turning off search history is one of the top Google settings you may already know about anyway if you didn’t want Google recording any sensitive searches (health, location, interests, religion, etc.), but with Google becoming more like AOL these days, now’s as good a time as any to check if you’ve got your web history paused or not.
From Android Guys:
We haven’t heard much from Google on their location-based Latitude service, until now. The Google Maps app was recently updated, and by extension, the Latitude service. The update brings something that just might help it compete with other services like Foursquare: a leaderboard. Now Latitude users can check in, and they’ll get points for doing so. The points are displayed on a leaderboard that includes the user and any Latitude friends they have.
We launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 to help make the web faster for everyone. Today, we’re no longer an experimental service. We’re the largest public DNS service in the world, handling an average of more than 70 billion requests a day.
DNS acts like the phone book of the Internet. If you had to look up hundreds or thousands of phone numbers every day, you’d want a directory that was fast, secure and correct. That’s what Google Public DNS provides for tens of millions of people.
Google Public DNS has become particularly popular for our users internationally. Today, about 70 percent of its traffic comes from outside the U.S. We’ve maintained our strong presence in North America, South America and Europe, and beefed up our presence in Asia. We’ve also added entirely new access points to parts of the world where we previously didn’t have Google Public DNS servers, including Australia, India, Japan and Nigeria.
Shortly after launch, we made a technical proposal for how public DNS services can work better with some kinds of important web hosts (known as content distribution networks, or CDNs) that have servers all of the world. We came up with a way to pass information to CDNs so they can send users to nearby servers. Our proposal, now called “edns-client-subnet,” continues to be discussed by members of the Internet Engineering Task Force. While we work with the IETF, other companies have started experimenting with implementing this proposal.
We’ve also taken steps to help support IPv6. On World IPv6 Day, we announced our IPv6 addresses: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844 to supplement our original addresses, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
Google Public DNS’s goal is simple: making the web—really, the whole Internet!—faster for our users. If you’d like to try it yourself, please see our page Using Google Public DNS. For more information, please see our Introduction to Google Public DNS and Frequently Asked Questions.
From Lifehacker:
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google—usually a software creator—is putting together an entertainment system, for which they’ve designed both the hardware and the software. It would stream music from Google’s online store and send it either to wireless speakers or other networked computer, using smartphones or tablets as a remote control. We don’t know much else yet, besides the fact that they’re aiming for a release later this year. It’s a pretty big step for Google, though, who usually only makes the software for such devices—see Android and Google TV, both of which exist on devices manufactured by other companies. This approach is much more Apple-like than we’ve seen from Google, so it will be interesting to see how this works for them going forward—with any luck, it’ll get rid of that horrible fragmentation problem.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203824904577213430617644196.html | Wall Street Journal via Computerworld
