Did you kow that google can track you on the move?

SAN FRANCISCO — With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet.
The new software to be released Wednesday will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.
The feature, dubbed "Latitude," expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.
"This adds a social flavor to Google maps and makes it more fun," said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.
It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access to the service.

Google also is promising not to retain any information about its users' movements. Only the last location picked up by the tracking service will be stored on Google's computers, Lee said.
The software plots a user's location — marked by a personal picture on Google's map — by relying on cell phone towers, global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location. The system can follow people's travels in the United States and 26 other countries.
It's left up to each user to decide who can monitor their location.
The social mapping approach is similar to a service already offered by Loopt Inc., a 3-year-old company located near Google's Mountain View headquarters.
Loopt's service already is compatible with more than 100 types of mobile phones.
To start out, Google Latitude will work on Research In Motion Ltd.'s Blackberry and devices running on Symbian software or Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile. more

Did you know Joe Francis was Arrested for Tax-Evasion?

“Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis was arrested Monday afternoon after failing to appear for a hearing earlier in the day in a federal tax-evasion case.
U.S. District Judge S. James Otero issued the warrant, which directed authorities to take Francis into custody and present him in court, according to Tom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.
Officials with the U.S. Marshals Service said Francis was taken into custody when he reported to Otero’s courtroom Monday afternoon, about five hours after he was supposed to appear there.
Last year, a grand jury in Reno accused Francis of two counts of tax evasion. He has pleaded not guilty.
Wait a second. Can’t he just withdraw his nomination to serve in the Obama administration? It’ll be embarrassing, but hey, these things happen. Forgive and forget, right? We can’t afford to be partisan and divisive at this crucial time in our nation’s history, can we?

Did you know 90,000 sex offenders have been removed from myspace?

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - MySpace officials say about 90,000 sex offenders have been identified and removed from its huge online social networking Web site.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said Tuesday the new figure is nearly double what MySpace officials originally acknowledged last year when detailing who had used their site.
Cooper and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal have led the charge seeking efforts to make social networking Web sites safer. MySpace officials sent the numbers to Blumenthal's office Tuesday.
Last year, the attorneys general received agreements from MySpace and rival online networking site Facebook to push toward making their sites safer for young users. Both implemented dozens of safeguards, including limiting how older users can search members under 18.

Did you know these 4 Chicago women stab, and beat man to death in courtyard?

(Left to right) Tiffany Cox, Carmelita Hall, Miesha Nelson and Roslind Ball were ordered held without bail after they were charged with armed robbery and murder in the stabbing death of a man who authorities say broke a cigarette during a card game early on the morning of February 1, 2009. (Chicago Police Dept. photos)
As he fled for his life, dripping blood along a South Side sidewalk early Sunday, Morris Wilson III called a friend on his cell phone, desperately seeking help."He kept saying, 'I'm at 81st and Drexel—hurry up, hurry up,' " said Wilson's mother, Clara, recounting the story she was told by the friend.His friend came too late. Wilson, 30, a father of a 9-year-old boy, was found dead of stab wounds in an apartment courtyard.Four women—all mothers but one—were ordered held without bail Monday on charges of armed robbery and murder in Wilson's death. Authorities said his death stemmed from a drunken fight over a cigarette at about 2 a.m. Sunday.
The women—Carmelita Hall, Tiffany Cox and Miesha Nelson, all 25 and of Chicago, and Roslind Ball, 23, of Evanston—were playing cards and drinking with Wilson in an apartment in the 8100 block of South Drexel Avenue, prosecutors said.A quarrel started when Wilson broke one of the women's cigarettes, a police source said. Assistant State's Atty. LuAnn Snow said the women told Wilson to leave and he threw a beer bottle at the front door on his way out.

Did you know Cleveland man put 9111 operator on hold to make drug deal?

CLEVELAND—Police in Cleveland say a man who called 911 put the dispatcher on hold to make a drug deal.
Police say the 20-year-old man called 911 Saturday night to report that two men with guns were watching him near West 44th and Clark Avenue and hung up.
The dispatcher called him back, and during the call the man asked the dispatcher to hold on and made a drug deal.
A voice can be heard on the recording saying, “What you need? A 10-pack? A 10-pack, alright.“ A 10-pack is slang for a bundle of heroin.
The dispatcher called police, who saw the man crossing a street and found crack cocaine in his pants. The man, who didn’t have identification, was arrested and taken to jail.

Did you know SWAT team was called for a prank?

Doug Bates and his wife, Stacey, were in bed around 10 p.m., their 2-year-old daughters asleep in a nearby room. Suddenly they were shaken awake by the wail of police sirens and the rumble of a helicopter above their suburban Southern California home. A criminal must be on the loose, they thought.
Doug Bates got up to lock the doors and grabbed a knife. A beam from a flashlight hit him. He peeked into the backyard. A swarm of police, assault rifles drawn, ordered him out of the house. Bates emerged, frightened and with the knife in his hand, as his wife frantically dialed 911. They were handcuffed and ordered to the ground while officers stormed the house.
The scene of mayhem and carnage the officers expected was nowhere to be found. Neither the Bateses nor the officers knew that they were pawns in a dangerous game being played 1,200 miles away by a teenager bent on terrifying a random family of strangers.
They were victims of a new kind of telephone fraud that exploits a weakness in the way the 911 system handles calls from Internet-based phone services. The attacks — called "swatting" because armed police SWAT teams usually respond — are virtually unstoppable, and an Associated Press investigation found that budget-strapped 911 centers are essentially defenseless without an overhaul of their computer systems.

The AP examined hundreds of pages of court documents and law-enforcement transcripts, listened to audio of "swatting" calls, and interviewed two dozen security experts, investigators, defense lawyers, victims and perpetrators.
While Doug and Stacey Bates were cuffed on the ground that night in March 2007, 18-year-old Randal Ellis, living with his parents in Mukilteo, Wash., was nearly finished with the 27-minute yarn about a drug-fueled murder that brought the Orange County Sheriff's Department SWAT team to the Bateses' home.
In a grisly sounding call to 911, Ellis was putting an Internet-based phone service for the hearing-impaired to nefarious use. By entering bogus information about his location, Ellis was able to make it seem to the 911 operator as if he was calling from inside the Bateses' home. He said he was high on drugs and had just shot his sister.
According to prosecutors, Ellis picked the Bates family at random, as he did with all of the 185 calls investigators say he made to 911 operators around the country.
"If I would have had a gun in my hand, I probably would have been shot," said Doug Bates, 38. Last March, Ellis was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to five felony counts, including computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence and falsely reporting a crime.
In a separate, multistate case prosecuted by federal authorities in Dallas, eight people were charged with orchestrating up to 300 "swatting" calls to victims they met on telephone party chat lines. The three ringleaders were each sentenced to five years in prison. Two others were sentenced to 2 1/2 years. One defendant pleaded guilty last week and could get a 13-year sentence. The remaining two are set to go on trial in February.
A similar case was reported in Salinas, Calif., where officers surrounded an apartment where a call had come in claiming men with assault rifles were trying to break in. In Hiawatha, Iowa, fake calls about a workplace shooting included realistic gunshot sounds and moaning in the background. In November, a teenage hacker from Worcester, Mass., pleaded guilty to a five-month swatting spree including a bomb threat and report of an armed gunman that caused two schools to be evacuated. more

Did you know three senior citizens were allegedly caught stealing from Costco?

Three senior citizens were allegedly caught red handed trying to steal from a Stockton Costco store, according to authorities.Dora Mae Lewis, Sandra Denise Williams and Susan Diane Lockette Gibson loaded their cart with liquor bottles and other items and attempted to walk out of the store without paying, according to the Stockton Police Department.When security confronted the three senior citizens, the situation became ugly."One of the females became combative with the employees that were trying to stop them," said Pete Smith from the Stockton Police Department. "She began swinging a full liquor bottle at one of the employees."As the confrontation escalated in the parking lot, another suspect allegedly tried to return the stolen merchandise back in the store.Police say the three ladies are now facing robbery and burglary charges.