geekosystem

To me, the Street View function of Google Maps is generally more entertaining than necessarily helpful, but it's a good tool for scoping out a place you intend to visit. But the creative people of Teehan+Lax have found a new way to use the tool: Google Street View Hyperlapse, a Chrome-based gadget that lets you make an awesome video sequence out of Street View images. Basically, it allows you to pretend to be the Flash anywhere the Google Street View car has been, thereby fulfilling at least several childhood dreams here in the Geekosystem office.

Google Chrome is once again making a name for itself as the go-to browser for neat stuff, weird toys, and all kinds of stupid browser tricks that are kind of awesome. The latest gizmo to be added to Chrome's toy chest is 100,000 Stars, a three-dimensional guided tour of stars throughout the Milky Way. Whether you're looking for a better way to get a sense of your place in our incomprehensibly vast universe or just looking to kill some time between meetings, we highly recommend checking this thing out today.

In case you missed it, Google just hosted their Pwnium 2 competition at the Hack In The Box conference in Malaysia. Like the name implies, this is the second such competition hosted by the search engine giant in order to improve the security in their Google Chrome browser. Pinkie Pie, for the second time this year, won the $60,000 prize for successfully producing the first Chrome vulnerability at the conference. Sadly, the name is just a handle, but we couldn't resist the above image.

Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it sure can buy a lot of other things. Google has recently been exploiting this fact by using it to buy hackers, essentially. After offering $1 million in prizes to potential hackers as a part of their Pwnium contest, Google is going to have to pay up, about which I'm sure they're happy. On the very first day, Russian University student Sergey Glazunov cracked Chrome wide open, snagging a $60,000 prize, marking the first time Chrome has been hacked in a public competition. He wasn't the only one to pull it off either.

With Chrome gaining more and more of the world's browser share, it's important that it be secure; important enough that Google is going to be offering prizes totaling $1 million to hackers who can uncover exploits of varying intensity in their popular browser. The prizes are being offered alongside the sixth annual Pwn2Own contest where hackers will compete to use and abuse Internet browsers. Those taking on the Windows 7 version of Chrome stand to win individual prizes of $20,000, $40,000, or $60,000 depending on the l33tn335 of their 5k1llz.

Late last year, Google's Chrome browser finally overtook Firefox in global usage. Now, Chrome is making new strides in its quest for dominance and coming to Android. For the moment, it's still in beta and relatedly only available for Ice Cream Sandwich users, but even so, it looks pretty sweet. Along with speed increases and better UI, mobile Chrome intends to make good use of its desktop sibling.

There's an ancient proverb that states: "You gotta go fast. You gotta go fast. You gotta go faster. Faster. Faster, faster, faster." The new Google Chrome Beta browser has taken this principle to heart and added functionality that will actually start pre-loading pages before you've finished typing their addresses. If you're not familiar, the Google Chrome Beta browser has all the space age functionality that isn't yet fit for a standard Chrome release, and is available to anyone who wants to play with it. The question is, are you really comfortable with having Google Chrome reading your mind?

Just the other day, some intrepid bloggers turned up several instances of Google breaking it's own paid link policy by indexing paid links pointing to the official "Download Google Chrome" page. It was revealed to be a technical mistake on a blogger's part, caused when said blogger forgot to throw in a nofollow tag. Nonetheless, Google had broken its own rules and has always been strict about dishing out punishment. That being the case, Google has punished itself, ranking the offending, sponsored-content blogpost as "untrustworthy" and reducing the Download Google Chrome page's PageRank for 60 days, knocking it off the first few pages of results.

Yesterday, Aaron Wall of SEO Book made an interesting discovery: If you did a Google search for "This post is sponsored by Google," you'd get a whole bunch results that were relatively hollow, content-thin endorsements of Google Chrome. You know, the kind of sponsored content that's more about mentioning a name and dropping a link more than anything else. The problem? Google's own rules say that paid links have to be designated as such, so they won't affect a page's PageRank. These links were not, and the penalty could be painful.

Website analytics company StatCounter reports that Google's browser, Chrome, has taken a lead over Firefox in global market browser share for the first time. The reported numbers -- Chrome at 25.69% market share and Firefox at 25.23% market share -- only give Chrome a slight lead, literally a fraction of a percent, but I'm sure the folks at Google are happy to note that it is a lead nonetheless. Somewhat depressingly, StatCounter also reports that Internet Explorer still has the majority of global market browser share, with 40.63% of the browser market firmly in its grasp.

One of the biggest deterrents when it comes to using Google+ has been that you have to start over. Think about it, you've probably spent years cultivating your Facebook account, tagging pictures, adding trite quotes to your info page and most of all, acquiring a bajillion "friends." It'd be depressing to go from that huge, comforting, self-affirming number down to, say, two when you start up a Google+ account, right? Enter Mohamed Mansour's Facebook Friend Exporter for Google Chrome. The extension wasn't made for Google+ migration, but it happens to do the job well. That's probably why Facebook decided to block it.

The extension works by going through and collecting your Facebook friends' email account, which likely serves as their identity elsewhere on the internet (unless they still log into Facebook with an embarrassingly-named Hotmail account from high school, like I certainly don't). In order to keep this from happening, Facebook recently implemented measures that will hide an email account from you if you frequent the owners profile page on a regular basis. While it's troubling that Facebook has taken the initiative to take information that was explicitly shared with you (email addresses between friends) and hide it, taking emails from off the site is technically a violation of Facebook's Terms of Service. Whatever the case, the spirit of this new restriction seems a little bit, well, petty. For the time being, the extension still sort of works, and a determined user can wiggle their way around the new restrictions. Check out ZDNet for instructions on coaxing the extension to work, but be warned, coaxing probably won't work for long. (via ZDNet)

Browsers were in the crosshairs yesterday for the first day of hacking competition pwn2own, and the "you don't need to worry about security for Apple products" set may not be too happy to hear that Apple's Safari fell within five seconds of French security firm VUPEN trying out their hack, which involved a webpage they had crafted packed with malicious code. The firm won $15,000 and a new MacBook Air for being the first to successfully exploit a browser vulnerability at the competition. IE8 also fell to the first person who attacked it, security expert Stephen Fewer, who reportedly did it by bypassing Protected Mode. Chrome, however, did not fall: According to Ars Technica, the hacker who had registered to try his skills against Chrome did not show up: "One possible reason for this is that Google published a Chrome update yesterday, closing at least 24 security flaws. The would-be Chrome attacker may have been depending on one of these flaws to attack the browser. Or he or she may have been unable to produce a reliable attack. Google has sponsored the Chrome hacking contest, awarding extra prize money for Chrome hacks, but with stricter rules for the hacks." As for Firefox, it isn't home free yet: It has been successfully hacked in past pwn2own competitions, and it's on trial today, along with the four major smartphone operating systems. (via Ars, ComputerWorld)

We're big fans of Google Chrome, and based on our site stats, more than a quarter of our readers are too. We're not fans, though, of the "sad tab" page which pops up whenever Chrome blows up, as happens with some frequency whenever Google updates the browser with a few bugs still intact. That said, we approve of the new sad tab page in the latest Chromium build, which shamelessly panders to its techy early-adopter audience by quoting Dr. McCoy. Some foreign Chrome users report a gorier crash page with a bullet hole through the sad tab's head. This seems excessive. (via Unofficial Google OS)

Internet advertisers are able to create personalized ads by tracking user's browsing habits with cookies (a term which has been subjected to far too many puns to warrant another), which is why you may see an advert for the next Twilight movie on your favorite website. While tailored ads are more relevant -- and generally more tolerable -- than their generic counterparts, they also raise privacy concerns: websites can sell personal information to 3rd party advertisement agencies without the user's knowledge. To protect their users' privacy, both Google and Mozilla have devised "Do Not Track" solutions for users to easily opt-out of personalized advertising. While the end goal is the same, the two companies have vastly different approaches.

Yesterday was a big day for Google: In addition to unveiling Chrome OS [check out our explanation of Chrome OS], they unveiled the Chrome Web Store, where users will be able to download paid and unpaid web-based apps, extensions, and themes for Google's Chrome browser. While the web store has a smoother UI than Google's previous outlets for downloading Chrome extensions and themes [see our roundup of good Chrome extensions], the biggest change is the introduction of applications, which many tech pundits have seen as an attempt by Google to take on Apple at its own game. The key difference, however, is that whereas Apple's apps live within the walled garden, Google's are entirely web-based, though many have offline capabilities. What makes a good web app, exactly? What distinguishes it from desktop applications and plain old websites? It's a blurry line -- the biggest complaint in the comment sections for many apps currently in the store is that they're basically just links to webpages. But among the most important characteristics are good user interface design, speed, and, when possible, the potential for offline use. (As you'll see from the apps below, a gray and black color scheme seems to be an unwritten requirement.) If the evolution of iPhone and Android apps -- many of which have Chrome store counterparts -- is any guide, there's a lot that can be done with web apps that hasn't yet been done. In the meantime, here are eight of the best apps we've seen from the Chrome web store: