Does Google’s StreetView invade privacy and encroach upon civil liberties? There are those who say that it does, and into this group we would have to place the Pennsylvania couple, Aaron and Christine Boring, who are suing the search company for both intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion of privacy and mental distress. They seek a minimum of $25,000.

We’re sure that our readers are well aware that we live at a time of uncertainty, and in a world in which conflict seems to be constant. Scenes of the displacement of innocent civilians, especially women and children, into refugee camps, in Darfur, Iraq, the Sudan, and Afghanistan, are ever-present on the news. It’s extremely heartening, then, to hear about Google and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) jointly making available the Google Earth Outreach project, to raise global awareness of the almost 33 million displaced people that the UNHCR is today helping.

Did you know that people from all over the world use Google Gmail, and not all people want to (or can) use Gmail in English? Welcome to Gmail for the global community, because Gmail . com is now distinctly international. Why have your Gmail sign in greet you in English when your Gmail .com account can be set up for any one of dozens of languages? Quiere correo Gmail? No problema! In fact, the top searches relating to Gmail these days are in foreign languages! Speaking of which, can anybody tell us what these mean?: gmail ustvari nov naslov, gmail geslo, gmail prijava geslo, gmail raziskovalec, gmail sprememba gesla, pozabljeno geslo za gmail, zamenjati geslo gmail, sprememba gesla gmail, gmail prijava, gesla gmail, prijava v gmail, or ustvari gmail?

In addition to the breed of filth known as “typo squatters” (people who register domains which are common misspellings of popular domains, and then put ads on them), and “drop squatters” (people who grab established domains the moment that the domain’s registration lapses (i.e. is “dropped”) – and set up shop on the domain – again, nothing but ads – to take advantage of the traffic that comes to the domain), we want to bring to your attention a particularly slimy breed that we call the “Doppelganger Squatter”.

Reports emerged this week from a Holland-based internet security consultant, Dancho Danchev, of a new technique – known as poison Google links – being used by hackers attempting to use legitimate Google searches as a vector to smuggle malware onto the machines of unsuspecting users. So far the poisoned Google links all contain the string “IFRAME SRC=//” followed by an IP address, most recently and commonly 72.232.39.252, but that could change in a heartbeat.

According to a tip received by the Internet Patrol, the resident evil behind the throngs of social networking and other sites that are tricking people into logging into their AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts, and scraping their address book, has a name, and that name is Sigma Visual Technologies. Sigma Visual Technologies provides software that allows sites to get their users to import and email all of their contacts in their address books. Put another way, it lets these sites scrape and spam your contacts. In your name!

Hundreds of thousands of would-be video watchers found that YouTube was down for them Tuesday night – in fact it’s still down for some people – because of an oopsie by the Pakistan government, trying to block its own people from accessing YouTube. Instead, Pakistan accidentally ended up blocking as much as 2/3rs of YouTube users around the world from accessing YouTube.

Here’s a good question: Why use the + when searching on the Internet? (I.e., why use the plus sign when searching on the Internet?)

A Gmail confirmation scam email is going around, asking you to verify your Gmail account. “Dear Account User,” the request starts out – and goes on to say that you need to confirm your Gmail account, or it will be closed down. Of course, the language is wrong, and it wasn’t even necessarily sent to your Gmail account, but still, people will be taken in by this scam, which asks for your account username and password, your date of birth, and your country of residence. Here’s the scam reproduced in full – if you get this, don’t reply!

Massive Gmail storage plus the awesome folder view provided by a Gmail account equals the perfect spam folder! If you have the ability to have your spam filtering program forward all detected spam to a separate email address, then you can create your own Gmail spam folder account too! Gmail is the perfect way to scan all of your spam for mail that you actually want, because the Gmail email folder view shows you the first sentence of the email along with the subject, making it super easy to determine if the mail is really spam or not without opening it! Here’s how!

If you are one of those people who aren’t the least bit interested in using Google Gmail Chat (Google’s instant message chat program in Gmail, similar to AIM and iChat), you probably want to know how to sign out of Gmail chat. So here’s the information you need to disable Gmail chat – to turn the Google chat “feature” off, and deactivate Google Gmail chat instant messages.

The mega popular Facebook site has joined the ranks of social networking sites that trick you into providing your password so that they can steal your AOL , Yahoo, MSN, or other address book, and spam all of your contacts. Only this time it’s with a twist – they are actually spamming your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) contacts in your Buddy List! The spam starts out like this: “According to his Facebook status, Friend’s Name (their username) is now “Friend’s Nickname”. Friend invites you to join Facebook and keep up with what he and your other friends are doing.” What we want to know is WHY are AOL, Yahoo, and MSN continuing to let this go on?

Perhaps nobody is more glad than Google itself that Google this week rolled out its You Tube Video Identification (You Tube Video ID) program – which does video fingerprinting in order to identify copies of copyrighted video material as it is uploaded to YouTube.

With very little fanfare, Google has unleashed their relatively new web history feature on their users. If you had any doubt that Google has the ability to store and track your every move you make – at least through them – let this put all doubts to rest. Here’s what’s really behind that “New! View and manage your web history” link you’re seeing on the Google page.

A new round of phishing spam, phishing for Gmail account information, along with your date of birth and citizenship, was unleashed on the Internet this week. “Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently,” reads the subject.