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This article titled “George Clooney and Google launch satellite plan to avert Sudan violence” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Wednesday 29th December 2010 20.58 UTC

Google has joined the UN, Harvard University and a pressure group founded by George Clooney to use satellites to scour Sudan for evidence of state-organised violence before next month’s referendum that could see the country split in two.

Clooney said that he had launched the Satellite Sentinel Project to “stop a war before it starts” by warning the government in Khartoum that it would not be able to hide war crimes from the rest of the world, as it did for so long in Darfur, if there is violence in southern Sudan, which is likely to vote on 9 January to secede.

The project plans to reduce the waiting time for satellite images from more than a fortnight to less than 36 hours. The images will be scrutinised by the UN for evidence of mass movements of people, destruction of villages and other indicators of organised violence. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative will also study the pictures.

The images will immediately be made public. If there is evidence of war crimes, appeals for action will be led in part by the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organisation led by the author and activist John Prendergast.

Clooney and Prendergast said today in a statement that there was a serious threat of violence.

“The government in Khartoum has armed militias in contested bordering regions, the government air force has bombed border areas, and both sides have massed military units and equipment along the hottest border spots,” they said. “These areas have witnessed some of the most deadly conflict in the world since world war two. The former director of national intelligence says that southern Sudan is the place in the world most likely to experience genocide.

“We were late to Rwanda. We were late to the Congo. We were late to Darfur. There is no time to wait.”

The referendum is the result of a 2005 peace deal to end more than two decades of civil war that cost more than two million lives. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, has committed himself to respecting the result of the oil-rich south’s vote. But there has already been violence amid accusations that the government is funding armed groups opposed to independence. Last week, the US vice president, Joe Biden, called Sudan’s second vice president, Ali Osman Mohmed Taha, to express Washington’s concern about potential violence.

Jonathan Hutson of the Enough Project said that advances in technology had given humanitarian organisations an advantage that should help not only expose violence but prevent it. “This project is leveraging Google map makers open source platform to wage peace. Unlike previous satellite imagery gathering projects which were after-the-fact documentation exercises, this project aims to stop a war before it starts,” he said. “War criminals thrive in the dark. They behave differently when you shine a media spotlight on them, when you give them notice that satellite imagery can be quickly shared with the world. This is an open source public platform for waging peace and this transforms anti-war efforts from now on.”

“Passing over Sudan at any given time are perhaps a dozen commercial satellites that have high resolution images available for purchase. The cost barrier has been the key factor that has limited the effective use of satellite imagery analysis in the human rights field,” Hutson added.

The Sudan initiative is being funded for six months by Not On Our Watch, an organisation co-founded by Clooney and other film stars such as Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. “We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we’re watching, the world is watching,” said Clooney.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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This article titled “American charged with hacking after snooping on wife’s emails” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Monday 27th December 2010 14.59 UTC

A Michigan man has been charged under anti-hacking legislation designed to protect trade secrets after logging on to his wife’s email account and discovering she was having an affair.

Leon Walker, 33, faces a trial lawyers say could have significant repercussions given that nearly half of US divorce cases involve some form of snooping, such as reading emails, text messages or social networking.

Walker was charged after opening the Gmail account of his wife, Clara, who was married twice previously. Walker found she was having an affair with her second husband, who had once been arrested for beating her in front of her young son from her first husband.

Walker handed the emails over to the boy’s father, saying he was concerned for the child’s safety. The father sought custody.

“I was doing what I had to do,” Walker told the Detroit Free Press. “We’re talking about putting a child in danger.”

When Clara Walker discovered the emails had been read and passed on she went to the authorities.

The Walkers were divorced earlier this month.

The Oakland County prosecutor, Jessica Cooper, said Walker broke the law by hacking in to his former wife’s account.

Walker says the computer was shared. His former wife claims it was hers alone.

Walker’s lawyer said the prosecutor was “dead wrong” about the law.

“I’ve been a defence attorney for 34 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Leon Weiss told the Detroit Free Press. “This is a hacking statute, the kind of statute they use if you try to break into a government system or private business for some nefarious purpose. It’s to protect against identity fraud, to keep somebody from taking somebody’s intellectual property or trade secrets.”

“I have to ask: Don’t the prosecutors have more important things to do with their time?”

Walker is due to stand trial in February.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, is planning a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket in 2011. A company called “Space Adventures” takes wealthy explorers to the ISS, and Brin invested $5 million dollars in the company which will serve as his deposit for the planned trip.

Those rascals at Google are constantly dealing with the unintended consequences of their controversial but really cool Google Maps/Street Scenes.

When you zoom to “street view” in one part of Chicago, what comes up is interesting to say the least. It looks like the Google team accidentally captured a shooting in progress.

The image shows a kid aiming a pistol at another kid (a much smaller kid) as he’s running away.

Click HERE to see this unique “Street view” in all its “gangsta” glory.

(thanks to Gawker)

Google Inc (NasdaqGS:GOOG – News) on Monday spelled out long-rumored plans to enter the mobile phone market in 2008 by building software that could help the industry make the Internet run more easily on phones.

Google, which has no immediate plans to make phones of its own, said it was working with 30 companies, including phone makers Motorola Inc, and Samsung Electronics.

The leading Internet company has long been rumored to be working on a new class of free or low-cost advertising-supported mobile phone of its own, popularly known as the “Gphone.” Google’s Schmidt would not rule out the company developing its own devices but said it had no imminent plans to do so.

The Web search company is looking to expand the range of Internet services it now offers through computer browsers to the far larger mobile phone market, where a range of conflicting handset designs and software standards have hobbled Internet use.