Google does some stuff…

Irish? Google knows all your secrets!

In 2008 you may have noticed Google cars driving around, collecting information and images for maps.

What they also collected were Wi-Fi network names, MAC addresses and samples of information sent over networks.

On Friday May 14 the Irish Data Protection Authority asked us to delete the payload data we collected in error in Ireland. We can confirm that all data identified as being from Ireland was deleted over the weekend in the presence of an independent third party. We are reaching out to Data Protection Authorities in the other relevant countries about how to dispose of the remaining data as quickly as possible.

Google Blog

The company went on to say they were contacting a third party to investigate what happened and apologised to users.

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

Google Wave open to all…

Google opened its Wave doors to everyone today. Last year the web application was only available to a select few or people that were invited by said few.

Today Wave is supposedly ready for the world and restrictions on access are gone.

It was one year ago at Google I/O that company unveiled one of its most ambitious projects to date: Google Wave. Sadly, ambition doesn’t always equal success. In fact, you might say Google Wave was too ambitious. It was promising to be too many things — it needed focus. And it needed polish. Now, all this time later, Google believes it finally has both.

TechCrunch

Will a bit of polish and time make the project successful? Maybe. You can view their blog for info and tips on using Wave here.

But as one twitter user said on Wave being open to everyone: “Now a lot more people can ignore it”.

Free web video for all!

Google unveiled a new, open source, royalty free video format.

WebM has not only gotten the support of Youtube, but also from browser lords Mozilla and Opera.

“The VP8 and WebM specifications as released on May 19th, 2010, are final, and we encourage everyone to use them for developing applications. Google, Mozilla and Opera are all adding WebM support to their browsers and all videos that are 720p or larger uploaded to YouTube after May 19th will be be encoded in WebM as part of its HTML5 experiment.”

Read more at Cnet.

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