Google celebrates Yokohama’s 150th birthday
Today’s logo on Google.co.jp celebrates the 150th anniversary of the opening of the port of Yokohama:
It would have been cool if they shared the logo with the users on Google.com, but I guess it wasn’t important enough for the main site.
[via Mutantfrog]
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Categories: Technology
Some Japanese concerned about Google Street View
A few days have passed since Google launched its Street View service for several major Japanese cities, and complaints are beginning to appear. For many Japanese, the public availability of photographs showing their houses is cause for fear and worry, while others are concerned about the privacy people and car license plates that appear in Google’s images.
Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online has posted a translation of of an letter to Google by Japanese IT professional/blogger Osamu Higuchi. In the letter, Higuchi requests that Google remove images of residential roads from its Street View service because
According to the morals of urban area residents in Japan, the assumption that “it is scenery [viewable] from public roads and therefore it must be public” is in fact incorrect. Quite the contrary, [these morals state that] “people walking along public roads must avert their glance from the living spaces right before their eyes”.
In our way of living, you do not unilaterally, and in a machine-readable form, lay open people’s living spaces to the whole world
Higuchi goes on to suggest that criminals will use Google Street View to plan crimes, and that having “one’s own living space exposed to the whole world without ever having been asked about it beforehand” amounts to an act of “evil.”
A post at the Road to the Deep East about the case of a stalker being arrested attempting to enter the house of 15 year-old actress Shida Mirai also touches the possibility that Google Street View could be used to plan crimes (Google is also compared to Amazon, which had been blamed for failing to protect the privacy of users by not making wish lists private by default on its Japanese site):
It’s still UNCERTAIN whether he used this service for real, but one thing for sure is the crazy person COULD see the outlook of her apartment via Street View just as others did after this incident.
Google Street View is a very convenient service, especially, for the person who has no sense of direction like me. But in a small country like Japan, it can be a starter of serious crimes like this.
At an invasion of privacy lawsuit in Pennsylvania, google explained that there is no complete privacy in modern society. But will google.com make excuse after tons of teenage idols are raped in Japan in this way?
Just like Amazon.com’s case few month ago, this incident seems to me another case caused by the cultural difference between Japanese tradition and foreign company’s officiousness. I mean, Leave us alone!!
Google has been rather quick in removing some images of people in embarrassing situations, but it is doubtful they will remove street views of residential neighborhoods.
Categories: Technology
Group With Google Building Pacific Cable
Anybody want 20% more fiber-optic capacity between Japan and America?
TOKYO (AP) ・A group of six international companies, including Google Inc. of the U.S., is building a $300 million underwater fiber-optic cable linking the United States and Japan.
The 6,200-mile trans-Pacific broadband cable system called Unity will respond to the expected growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the U.S., the companies said in a statement Monday. A signing ceremony was held Feb. 23, they said.
Besides U.S. Internet search company Google Inc., the Unity consortium includes Bharti Airtel Ltd., India’s leading integrated telecom services provider, and Japanese telecommunications company KDDI Corp.
[...]
NEC Corp. and Tyco Telecommunications are suppliers for the project, set to be up and running in the first quarter of 2010. Construction begins immediately, according to the consortium.
The cable is expected to initially increase trans-Pacific fiber-optic capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add additional bandwidth, the companies said. It will connect Chikura, near Tokyo, with Los Angeles and other U.S. West Coast points, and the system will connect to other Asian cable systems via Chikura, they said.
Categories: Technology
