A picture of us all

The thing I like the most in writing science news is that the majority of the news is good news. Think of scientific research. It can only bring progress, and most of it is directed towards discovering things we can do and not things that we cannot do.

Sometimes, though, there are bad news. Exactly a month ago the first man that stepped on the moon died. A pioneer, or better, the pioneer of lunar exploration had complications after heart surgery and left us with one of the most remarkable achievements of humans, not just on the world, but on the universal scale. This is a gift not only appreciated by people in the USA, which launched the Apollo 11 expedition, but by the entire world, and consequently everyone mourned his death.

He did not like to be in the spotlight for his biggest achievement and he dropped his career as pilot (and astronaut) after his big mission. However, he did not stop from looking at the future as he started teaching in the University of Cincinnati in the department of Aerospace Engineering.

If you want to know more about his life, there are plenty of sources, and I would suggest you to do it, as it was a very interesting one, for sure, regardless of his longest trip.
What I am going to talk about here is about one of my favorite pictures of Neil:

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. You really want to click on this picture to enlarge it.

You might be asking yourself if I it is a typo or not. And you are right, the most visible astronaut in the picture above is Buzz Aldrin, but if you zoom on his helmet's visor, you will notice a familiar reflection:

Zoomed-in visor showing reflections

And this landscape in the reflection is what makes me love this picture.
That is the reflection of Neil Armstrong, right in the middle, taking the picture of Buzz.

It is amazing to think about the trip photons had to undertake in order to form this picture. Coming from the sun, traveling through a distance of 149980571 kilometers, at around a billion km/h, roughly taking 8 minutes, to end up hitting Armstrong's suit.

In all the possible direction they could have been reflected (or absorbed, finishing their trip), they got reflected towards Buzz Aldrin's helmet. Instead of going through the visor, into Buzz's eyes, or (more rarely) being absorbed by the visor itself, they got reflected back exactly towards Neil. In particular, they got reflected towards his camera, and having passed the lens and all the components of the camera smoothly, finally they met their fate getting absorbed by the film, which is now letting us seeing the amazing pictures of men on the Moon.

But that is not all. There are at least other two amazing facts in this picture.

The first, being the "halo" around Buzz's shadow.
If you see the picture of the reflection from the visor, you will notice that the lunar grounds look lighter around Buzz's shadow. An interesting fact, which helps explaining the phenomenon, is that the halo of light is not seen in the original picture (unzoomed) where Buzz's shadow can be seen unreflected.

That is because it is an optical illusion, commonly called opposition effect. It does not just happen on the Moon, as seen here, but the high concentration of regolith on the moon increases the strength of the effect.
The opposition effect happens when the observer (or photographer) is pointing at the opposite direction of the light source (the sun). As regolith has high retroreflective properties, the zone which opposes the sun will reflect much more light and will then be brighter.
All of this, reflected back to us thanks to Buzz's helmet.

It was not just enough having Neil's reflection and a reflected opposition effect, as the picture includes something even more astounding.

Mankind in a shot

All of us are in the pictures as well, as the visor also reflects the Earth in the sky. Highlighted in the picture above, we are all there, on the pale blue dot. I can safely say that this is the only human-made picture which includes the whole of humanity (Michael Collins is in the module, which is also reflected by the visor, on the right) and in general, a picture which includes every living organism known to us.

I need to say it again: I love this picture, and I hope you can fully understand why, now. I will conclude with a touching quote about this very photo, from Buzz Aldrin, which can surely express better than me the beauty of this shot:

"As I walked away from the Eagle Lunar Module, Neil said 'Hold it, Buzz', so I stopped and turned around, and then he took what has become known as the 'Visor' photo. I like this photo because it captures the moment of a solitary human figure against the horizon of the Moon, along with a reflection in my helmet's visor of our home away from home, the Eagle, and of Neil snapping the photo. Here we were, farther away from the rest of humanity than any two humans had ever ventured. Yet, in another sense, we became inextricably connected to the hundreds of millions watching us more than 240,000 miles away. In this one moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind."

Buzz Aldrin - Apollo, Through the Eyes of the Astronauts

Of Einstein's genius

This man oozes brainpower. Maybe not in this picture, though.

The real genius in Einstein's work is in the fact that he discovered a fundamental property of the universe from only a few assumptions.
He set the speed of light as constant in different frames of reference and developed the mathematics of Lorentz transforms further to come up with one of the most beautiful theories in physics.

While usually in physics direct evidence and data is studied to deduce a phenomenon, he inductively derived his theory having no evidence at all. He made his own axioms and derived everything again from them. And the best part is that it worked, at least in theory. Despite a few physicist immediately recognized his genius, his theories were not completely recognized by the scientific community at the beginning, especially when the paper for his theory of Special Relativity presented no references. Einstein's reasoning was outside the lines, but sharp, nonetheless, and it proved no mistakes.

Evidences for his special theory of relativity started to come up only much later, around 1932, with the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment testing the dependence of the speed of light on the velocity of the measuring device.
Direct evidences of the general theory of relativity are still feeble, even though it is now a firmly accepted theory.

No, it is not photoshopped

The difficulty in testing this theory (linked to the difficulty to discover it) lies in the fact that we need astronomically strong gravitational fields in order to detect the space-time fabric and its tiny ripples: the gravitational waves. I did not use the word astronomical by chance, as the best empirical evidences come from deep space. Usually quasars (active galactic nuclei), which are very far, but bright x-ray sources, are used as indirect test for the theory of general relativity, as their ginormous gravitational field can bend light. Pictures of galaxies behind quasars could be worked out from their light being bent right into our eyes (or telescopes), forming "rings" of light around the quasars.

A more direct evidence of general relativity would be detecting its evident result: gravitational waves. Unfortunately, these waves are far less energetic than anything we can imagine, making it easy to let them disappear into the much higher and chaotic background of radiation. Experiments exist trying to achieve the impossible through interferometers, but a much more concrete evidence, at least for now, is presented by binary pulsars.

Not the most scientifically
accurate gif I could find,
but surely the coolest.

Binary pulsars move into space and their gravitational field emits gravitational waves, which is a leak of energy from the system. Everything, in fact, emits gravitational waves, but for small (less heavy, to be precise) objects their emission is undetectable. As energy is leaking from the binary system of pulsars, their period of revolution will get slightly slower than usual and with enough time passed, this accumulated time will get significantly big to be measured. This is not a direct evidence, as the energetic leak that slows the period down is not necessary given by gravitational waves, but that is the only phenomenon we know that could cause it, for now, and Einstein's model works really well when applied to these bodies, so it is still evidence, even if indirect.

When I started writing this post, it was meant to be an introduction to one big recent news in science in one of the FSND series. I was so excited writing about how marvelous Einstein's theories are that it got too long and I decided that it would easily be a blog post on its own.

The news regards the recent first visible-light evidence of gravitational waves from a pair of dwarf stars, and I'll now leave you in a pointless cliff-hanger (pointless as the news is already out elsewhere) as I will talk about it in the next Fortnightly Science News Digest on 15 September.

iGoogle is closing down. What now?

I have been a faithful user of iGoogle for years. I did not consider it something vital and did not spend much time on it, but when I've heard the news it will close in 16 months ( November 2013 ), I realized that it was my (only) daily source of world news, weather and recipes.

Even if, by far, not the most used website, I think Google is doing a bad move here. I know many people that use iGoogle, more than Google+, honestly, and even if I understand the choice, I think Google is pointing exactly in the direction that I do not like (promoting more profitable Google products).

This is an extract from the news page:

I really like iGoogle -- are there any other alternatives?
On your mobile device, Google Play offers applications ranging from games to news readers to home screen widgets.
If you’re a fan of Google Chrome, the Chrome Web Store provides a similar range of options like productivity tools and applications to check the weather. In addition, just like iGoogle, you can personalize Chrome with a theme.

This is as helpful as convincing users to set the blank page as homepage.
First of all, I am sure there is a big number (the majority? They should know) of people using iGoogle from PCs, including me, so Google Play is useless.
For the rest, they just suggest to use Google Chrome. Please tell me where is the bit where they suggest alternatives, if you can find it.

Since Google didn't do a great job providing alternatives, I went looking for them and I can suggest a few. As trying them out is worth a thousand words, I will not spend much time describing them.

-   Netvibes: maybe the second most popular after iGoogle
-   Protopage: very easy to use, but less implementations
-   Favoor: clean interface
-   uStart: there is no possibility to share content (which I regard as good)
-   Webmag: similar to Netvibes, promoted even for non-smartphones

Higgsteria - How to interpret the mass spectrum graph

The seminar on the 4th of July held at CERN in Geneva - despite the use of Comic Sans font - gave very interesting news to the Physics community.

ATLAS and CMS, two experiments from LHC, both discovered a new particle (5-sigma level is a requirement for a discovery) at 126 GeV in the mass spectrum.

Jargon apart, if you are not a physicist, you can read info about the Higgs boson (such as what is the Higgs, what is a boson, how does it give mass to other particles...) pretty much everywhere nowadays.

What many people may wonder is: what is this 5σ? And what about this 95% confidence level (CL)? But, most importantly, what is 126 GeV?
In this post I will give you an idea, with simple language, about these concepts and you will be finally able to understand this (not-so) mysterious graph.

Why scientists will never be popular

There's things that will never change, and one of them is here right in front of our eyes.

I know the news is a bit old, but I've bumped on this link which I saved in my favourites a while ago:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=scarlett+johansson&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0

I am curious by nature and I love interpreting data, then one of my favourite services of Google is of course, Google Trends. But this search shows something obvious to any reader. The amount of queries for "scarlett johansson" was ridiculously increased when there was the news that her nude pictures taken from her phone by some hacker and published over the internet. Then, it went back to almost normal after a few days (when people obtained the pictures or could not manage to get them).

I've found this particular search query so incredibly relevant to easily explain two problems:

-   Science will never be popular between the general public, as it is clear that people are interested in something else: porn. And all that comes with it, from nude pictures to light gossip between celebrities. If you ask people to name who won the Academy Awards in 2009 I am sure you'll get more right answers than asking who won the Chemistry Nobel prize in 2009. I can't even name anyone who won the ducking Nobel prize that year, figure how well would do someone not involved in science.

-   Never consider anything on your happily connected-to-the-internet smartphone as safe. If people wanted it, they could easily get something you consider private and share it. And don't think that legal actions will make you justice, as Ms. Joahnsson desperately tried. Anything which is (or has been) on the internet once, is public forever.
Oh, and if you use facebook on your mobile, everything in it is property of facebook, anyway.

How to circumvent the Pirate Bay censorship

The annoying screen many people are
experiencing when trying to access
the domain piratebay.org.

I wrote a post about Pirate Bay being censored in Italy a few years ago. I was disgusted at the time and I provided some methods to get around the block.

When I've heard the same news here, not so long ago, I could not believe it. How ignorant and naive must a government be to think that blocking a torrent website should stop piracy?

I will not go into describing all of the copyright problems and morality of using Pirate Bay, as the debate is big and still going on, but I must comment on how stupid is the choice of blocking it.

First of all, I am against any form of censorship and this alone puts me against that choice.
Most importantly, though, Pirate Bay is only one of the million torrent websites. Stopping one is like vaccinating one person against malaria and thinking of having eradicated the bacteria forever.
On top of that, people will always find way around to such puny barriers, and I will list a few down:

1. This is the most hilarious. There is already a new domain with Pirate Bay on it for UK people:
   
   tpb.pirateparty.org.uk
   
   This might be brought down as well, but no worries.
   
2. Use a web-proxy, such as Anonymouse. This is the "anonimized" link to Pirate Bay:
   
   http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://thepiratebay.se/
   
   It's as easy as that and safe on the long-term.
3. Use a proxy (there are many) or VPN services as TOR or Hotspot Shield. Which might be even useful to bypass other country-dependent blocks. 

If you want to stop piracy, you need to think of other smarter and indirect ways. We are in 2012 and it is still much easier to download a pirated version of a movie or a game rather than buying it. This means that a service provided by pirates, for free, is better than any one provided by big money-eater production companies, which only good job is putting irrelevant locks and pointless anti-piracy videos on their products.

Take as an example a person wanting to see a movie already out on DVD:

Legal way:
- Find movie on Amazon.
- Look for cheapest price and buy.
- Wait a few days (or more) for the DVD to be shipped and arrive.
- Put on DVD and watch 10 minutes of trailers even if you didn't ask for it (and can't be skipped).
- Watch the same anti-piracy video for the billionth time, even if you know it by heart, and even if, to watch it, you must've bought your beloved DVD in the most legal way possible.
- Finally watch the movie, if you still have some time left.


Illegal way:
- Find movie on any torrent website.
- Look for positive reviews and download torrent.
- Wait 20 minutes.
- Enjoy movie.


Honestly, I would pay for the illegal way.
A big applause to the incompetent, narrow-minded governments, production companies and anti-piracy associations around the world.

Facebook Change of Regulations

From the 1st of June to the 8th of June 2012, Facebook opened a "voting" which I would rather call "pool", because at the end it is Facebook itself that decides what actions to take.

Nevertheless, I think it is important to vote. Firstly because they gave us a chance to, but also because some sort of action must be taken from its side, if too many people are not happy with the changes in the SRR (Statements of Rights and Responsibility) and Data Use Policy.

Yes, yet another change in Facebook regulations. For some reason, though, Facebook did not publicize this very well. I got to know this just today, while events such as the introduction of the Timeline were repeatedly posted in the Facebook main page. Is there something going on? I don't know, but this time I wanted to be sure I read all the regulations carefully (or as much carefully as I can).

Unfortunately, even if everyone should have and should do, I am sure only a few percentage of the Facebook users actually read the regulations. Mostly because of lack of time (which is a bit contradictory, given that time will be wasted on Facebook anyway) or laziness.
For that reason I wanted to be of some help and read all of the old and new regulation, trying to group the main changes and the points which stand out of the long and tedious list of already known regulations.
Also, Facebook provided some pages related to the changes, but they might be misleading in the sense that they (obviously) depict the change as an improvement and do not talk about the potential problems.

Proposed changes (as of April-May 2012)

SRR

• Section 2.3: the sentence: "When you use an application, the application may ask for your permission to access your content and information" was completed with "as well as content and information that others have shared with you".
  
  What does this mean? If you share something with your friend, e.g. like a page "I love doughnuts", an application which your friend uses may steal (rightfully) this information about you.
  
  Is this fair? Of course not, because everything you now share can be potentially sold to companies not by you, but by your friends using some application. For example, it might be a news application, that your friend uses, that knowing that you love doughnuts, will now show more doughnut-related news to you. But according to Facebook, it was already in the Privacy Policy since May 2008, and now has also been specified in the SRR. I do not agree with this, but Facebook finds its ways, apparently, and cover this as an "improvement in the social experience".
  
  Fortunately, not many people know, but you have control about what apps can see about your information and turn them off (reccomended) in the Privacy Settings under “Apps and Websites”.
• Section 3.7: not a big deal (hopefully), changing the word hateful to hate speech.
• Section 5.9: added a clause "You will not tag users or send email invitations to non-users without their consent". This is not a change in the tagging system, but a statement.
• Section 6.3: change of wording, maybe a bit more general now, but the meaning is the same. This applies for mobiles. The concept is that anything you have on your device can be rightfully used by Facebook within their regulations when you sync it. It is a horrible thing, but it was there already.
• Section 8: changed the word "Share links" to "Social Plugins". This may seem like a small change but it is not quite. This whole section is dedicated on the rights they have if you put the "Share on Facebook" or "Like on Facebook" button in your website/blog. Before, there was only the share button, but now, with many changes, there are others, like the Like, so basically if any of these Social plugins is in your website, you will be strictly tied up on Facebook. You can find the Social plugins here, I'm sure you've seen them already in other sites.
  
  The consequences? Everything you write on your website/blog post must follow Facebook regulations, and you give permission to use the content of the page in which the Social Plugin is. This was the case before with the Share button, but now it has extended to every single plugin. Is the change fair? Maybe, since they had the same regulations just for the share button before, but many of the plugins are not related at all with sharing, but only to post comments or recommend similar pages.
  
  What is not fair is in the fact that putting any of those button in your website gives some rights to Facebook. It is like when banks give out free pens as advertisement, then they ask you that whatever you write with those can be used by them against you. But that was already there in previous regulations.
• Section 13: this is a new section regarding updates on any Facebook Software (since this is a new thing) and pointing out the fact that it is not open source.
• Section 14: this section regards the change on the regulation itself and how will you be notified and when. There are a few points added here, regarding how you accept the regulations.
  
  For how ridiculous it might sound: you automatically accept the regulations if you continue using Facebook, even if you haven't read the regulations. It's like signing a contract automatically because you have not obliged. And the only way to do so, is leaving Facebook. Very democratic, I would say.
  Also, it is in your interest to read the new regulations on the Site Governance Page (that come up less than yearly now) and "accept" them by continuing using Facebook.
• Section 17: this section is about legality in global terms, for countries outside USA. The change is that they added "non-users" in the regulations. For non-user they mean pages of companies or websites which are not single users. I think this is a fair change, as that could have been a hole now that even non-users can have pages on Facebook.
  
  Unfortunately, according to this section, anything you have on Facebook can be used by the US government against you. But this was present in the previous regulation as well.
  
  
  

Data Use Policy

There are some general changes on words due to the introduction of Timeline, but let's pass to the main points:

•  Section I: describes the information they receive and how is it used
  
  -   There are a few more sources of how they receive information from your friends or your actions, but it should be obvious that anything done while logged in Facebook is a source of information for them.
  -   They removed this clause on how they treat data about you coming from advertising companies: "When we receive data about you from our advertising partners or customers, we keep the data for 180 days. After that, we combine the data with other people's data in a way that it is no longer associated with you." . This is a big (negative) change and the consequence is that Facebook will keep data associated with your name for as long as they want to, giving them more power of choice.
  -   They added more specific (but confusing) uses of your data, as providing specific ads based on your interests (they were already doing that, though), or mysterious data analysis and research.
  -   There are more detailed information about account deactivation and deletion, and data retention, which were already applied, but not specified (they keep information about your account even after deletion).
• Section II: this section describes the sharing and finding of users
  
  -   More information and tips about privacy are added, some of them obvious and some of them not really adding anything new, but not a bad thing overall.
  -   More tips for mobile users and reminders of privacy concerns, connecting with SRR:Section-6.
  -   Addition of new rules for new tools coming from the swap to Timeline.
• Section III: this section describes regulation for social plugins, other websites and applications
  
  -   Again more information about Facebook Platform and social plugins, which are new since the last regulations. I have talked about them in the SRR regulations, above.
• Section IV: this section describes the working of advertising and sponsored stories
  
  -   There is more information about cookies.
  -   More details about the ads off Facebook, which may be based on information about you gathered from the website. Delicious news for advertisement companies, but nothing really new.
  -   Explanation of the difference between sponsored stories and ads.
  
   
• Section V: a new section specifically on cookies and similar evilry. They suggest that cookies can be removed or blocked, but the problem is that they do not tell that Facebook needs cookies to work otherwise it won't work at all.
• Section VI: this section is about other information which didn't fit into previous sections. This is mostly about legal disputes. But, also, they introduce a new "Download Your Information" tool that permits to download the user information and history. The problem is that using that you will download only part of the information they keep within the servers, which might be the public information. It does not provide a way to download the raw entire information about a profile. The rest is new features and Timeline changes.

General comments on the changes

In conclusion, my view on the changes is that I oppose them.

Facebook is trying to get slowly more power, by the action of slow changes and by letting users "accept" the changes without asking for permission. The SRR has worsened and the Data Use Policy contains more information of things Facebook was doing already but that were not specified in written form (and it's not good things, unfortunately).

Whatever your view is, please vote, as it will not do harm, but most importantly, you should also read carefully what you are going into, before giving out your life to a company.

Semplice metodo per aggirare la censura di Pirate Bay

 

Se usate costantemente client torrent per il condividere files in una p2p, sarete venuti a conoscenza del recente blocco del sito The Pirate Bay in Italia, uno dei più grandi distributori di torrent a livello mondiale.
Quando tentate di accedere a thepiratebay.org vi dovrebbe uscire un "Connessione fallita" o una irritante schermata della Polizia di Bergamo che informa del blocco del sito. Blocco? Io la chiamo censura.

Il sito, anche se ha subito centinaia di accuse riguardo la violazione di copyright da molti paesi, è sempre uscito vincitore dal tribunale, poiché i file .torrent sono solo dei link a file che circolano nelle reti peer to peer. In quanto link, non è illegale distribuirli, ma scaricare il file in questione, se protetto da copyright, lo è.
Non è da nascondere il fatto che la maggior parte dei torrent riguardano files protetti da copyright, ma non per questo tutto il sito deve essere bloccato, dove circolano anche files molto interessanti, soprattutto per utenti come me che usano sistemi operativi UNIX.
Tra questi si possono trovare diverse distribuzioni di Linux, programmi open source, album musicali non protetti da diritti (tipo "In Rainbows" dei Radiohead) o di piccole band che cercano popolarità, film di più di 70 anni fa (sui quali c'è diritto di copia) e soprattutto il più recente scandaloso "ACTA Agreement".
Un prezzo sacrificabile, secondo lo stato italiano. Con questo gesto ci è stato sottratto un piccolo pezzo di libertà di espressione. Possiamo riprendercelo? Sì, e anche legalmente.

Il primo blocco sul sito è stato effettuato a livello di filtro sui DNS. Niente di più semplice di aggirare, basta digitare l'indirizzo IP di thepiratebay invece del link, ed il gioco è fatto.
Tuttavia, recentemente tutti gli IP del sito sono stati bloccati, quindi questo trucco non è più applicabile. Aspettare che il sito cambi IP o ne prenda di nuovi non è conveniente, anche perché non costa niente mettere un IP in più nella censura.
Un trucco è quello di usare un' intermediario, che si trova in un altro paese dal quale si può accedere, e fargli fare il compito di connettersi al sito, inviandoci i dati al nostro pc. Questo intermediario si chiama proxy.
Un'altra soluzione è quella di criptare i pacchetti, nascondendo i siti ai quali ci stiamo connettendo, quindi non facendo sapere che stiamo accedendo a thepiratebay: una rete vpn.


*LA SOLUZIONE*

La soluzione più pratica e veloce per accedere senza problemi a thepiratebay è usare il sito Anonymouse (che non centra niente con Anonymous, se vi stavate già facendo qualche domanda).
Basta cliccare su questo link diretto per thepiratebay . Potete anche salvarvelo nei preferiti.


Se Anonymouse vi da problemi con i magnetic links, potete usare questa versione mirrorata inglese del sito a questo link: https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/


Per saperne di più:
The Pirate Bay sarà di nuovo censurata in Italia 
Sigillo IP per The Pirate Bay

Problem with Grsync and (partial) remedy

The post is now moved here, in my other blog about Linux greplinux.net.

From Windows to Linux?

I haven't been writing for a while here, since I've been busy particularly with installing, using (and enjoying) Linux.

I decided to install the Fedora distribution (a free Red-Hat product) in a dual boot with the intention of using Linux sometimes and keeping Windows as the main OS. I also decided to try Windows 7 RC, so I built 3 partitions and installed each operative systems:

The reaction to Windows 7 was not so exciting as I thought. The user interface is very similar (if not the same) to Vista. Yes, it was much better than Vista under a lot of aspects, so I was almost convinced to swap to Windows Seven, even if it did not really bring many improvements from XP.

What really shocked me was the compatibility with hardware and software. A lot of programs were not working under Seven, and this is quite acceptable since it is still a RC. But what made me upset were the ATI drivers for Seven, made only for the newest graphic cards (and not for my ancient but still working Radeon X600).
Without the drivers, the "powerful" Windows 7 didn't even recognize the resolution of my display (1440x900) so I was constrained to use a crappy 800x600.
I immediately removed Seven.

Then I installed Fedora 11! In less than 20 minutes the OS was on the hard drive ready to be used, with all the components installed automatically (and the right display resolution).
There are no accurate words to describe it: flexible, light, fast, user-friendly.
I'm not planning to use Windows again from that day.
Maybe one of the few drawbacks is the lack of programs (untrue! I could never be more wrong, repositories are full with programs and much cooler ones than Windows) so I decided to keep Windows for that, but often there are good, if not better, alternatives and there are a lot of more interesting applications.
I can't list the benefits of using Linux here, it is seriously difficult to list them all!

Anyway, I'm not using Windows any more, so I'll write quickly some post about some Windows programs that I planned to write and then I think I'll begin to write IT posts exclusively about the Linux world.

Microsoft makes a comparison chart of its own web browser

This is one of the most hilarious things done by Microsoft so far:

here

(after this and this, of course)

It is a (ridiculous) comparison chart between browsers in which Microsoft compare its browser with Firefox and Chrome.
The result is that Internet Explorer is the best browser in 7 comparisons out of 10 and in the 3 comparisons left is almost at the same level as Firefox and Chrome.

I am not entitled to doubt IE performances, but would you trust a comparison made by a developer of one of the products compared? It's like writing a review to your own product (which is what advertisement is).

Google Maps: Street view in London

Firstly only in the US, but now Street View is spreading out in a lot of countries and from the beginning of 2009 is also available for London. Basically, it's a very fascinating Google Maps gadget that permits to have a street view instead of the traditional satellite view, such as you are walking in the streets. This is not only funny, but in some situations could result very handy if you have to move in unknown places. Yet the problems faced with privacy (360° street photos are patiently taken using a car and it obviously takes also pictures of people walking... or robbing) Street View became popular in the US and in few months it issued from the States to approach Europe, but also Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Alaska. In particular, I've tried Street View in London and I've found it very useful. I've noticed the photos date back to last summer (some clues such as movies ads on the buses or works on buildings that now are finished can prove it) so they are very recent. I really admire the patience to take photos of almost all the city, that's a tough work (not for the multimillionaire Google, obviously). Now enjoy some funny things found with street view (almost like the odd things found with Google Earth in some YouTube videos) here!