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Today’s stories:

Microsoft details app store plans

Apple overhauls the iPod Shuffle with new features and more storage in an even smaller case. Reporter Tom Krazit stops by the podcast studio to talk about where the Shuffle fits into Apple’s lineup. Also in this podcast: Google is opening up its Map Maker tool so people can make maps and directions more accurate. At the same time, a California politician wants to blur parts of Google Maps out in the name of national security. And AMD says the problems some users are having with their new MacBooks shouldn’t taint the entire graphics chip industry.

Calif. lawmaker wants to blur Google Earth

‘Silent Drum’ makes noise at music competition

AMD: MacBook issues giving graphics bad rap

Selected Flickr images now sold through Getty

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Apple shrinks its iPod Shuffle

For The New York Times, the digital future is now

Google crowdsources maps directions, too

Nokia tunes up new music phones

This means random surfers can’t find out about members or groups on this Web site. Only members of a private group can visit their online place. Clubbyclub states that its Web site is built for fun and with the assurance that “your ex, boss, or mother-in-law will not be sneaking around your pictures and other materials”.

In reaction to this and to bring back the true meaning of buddy-ship, on Monday, Clubbyclub announced its new social network to provide a private and safe place for friend groups, like student clubs, schoolmates, and sport teams.

If you have a MySpace or Facebook account, you know how hard it is to ignore friend requests. And in no time, you end up with a long list of buddies that contains mostly people you’ve never met or even talked to before. The definition for “friend” has never been more blurred.

At Clubbyclub, you are supposed to connect only to your real friends. The Web site owner goes even further, stating, “Your cousin, your classmate from 2nd grade, or your colleague are usually not your real friends.” Basically, Clubbyclub is a lively place to communicate with your actual friends without using e-mail.

This also means, however, that if you don’t mind using e-mail, it might not be necessary to join the club at all. Personally, I believe if you have something that you don’t want people to sneak around and found out about, it’s best not to put it on the Internet at all.

Looking at the turnoff to Pittsburgh’s Oakridge Lane on Google Street View, though, shows a street sign but no obvious private road warning–meaning that, perhaps, any sign didn’t exist when the Google van drove by.

The lawsuit, filed in Allegheny County court on April 2, claims there was a private road sign on their street that Google should have honored. It claims that Google’s “reckless conduct” has “exposed plaintiff’s private information to the public.”

In addition, photographs of the house appear on the county’s Web site, as well as the assessed value of Aaron and Christine Boring’s home and the lot size.

In general, of course, photographs taken of homes from the public street (or the air) are perfectly legal and protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of the press. Barbra Streisand learned this when she sued a California aerial-mapping site–but was forced instead to write a check to the defendants for $177,107.54 in legal fees and court costs. I wouldn’t be too surprised if this lawsuit turns out much the same way.

A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google because photographs of their home are appearing on the company’s street view service.

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Apple, AT&T mum on iPhone 3G issues

‘Extreme’ gamers padding video game industry’s bottom line

Flash, HTML, Ajax: Which will win the Web app war?

Defcon ends with researchers muzzled, viruses written

Jobs confirms iPhone app blacklist feature

Listen now:

Back from covering the Defcon hacker fest, CNET News’ Declan McCullagh explains the aftermath of a decision by a federal judge granting the Massachusetts transit authority’s request for an injunction, preventing three MIT students from giving a presentation about hacking smart cards used in the Boston subway system…Olympics viewership is stronger than it’s been in the last decade. But the company still hasn’t figured out a strategy to best take advantage of the Internet. Webware’s Rafe Needleman has a few suggestions…With hostilities escalating between Russia and Georgia, the battle has now predictably crossed over into cyberspace.

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Today’s stories:

Tiffany appeals loss in counterfeit suit against eBay

Heat from car exhaust could improve mileage

Verizon averts workers strike

The report delved into cross-ownership, producing some interesting, if a little confusing, data.

True, these committed gamers make up just 3 percent of the 174 million that NPD said play on PCs or Macs or dedicated video game machines. Still, that means 5.22 million people out there are putting in serious amounts of time gaming away. And if you stop and think about the dollars they’re spending, if they’re buying 24 games every three months, it’s kind of breathtaking.

One intriguing fact in the report is that fully 14 percent of games purchased overall were digital downloads. I would have thought that indicated a heavy degree of usage of services like Xbox Live, but the report indicates that 27 percent of that downloading activity–the largest share of any gaming medium–was done by PC gamers.

The video game industry had better thank its lucky stars that hard-core gamers do what they do.

The NPD report identified seven different segments of gamers, including our extreme friends. The others include 9 percent who are “avid PC gamers,” 17 percent who are console gamers, 14 percent who are online PC gamers, 15 percent who are offline PC gamers, 22 percent who are “young heavy gamers” and 20 percent who are “secondary” gamers.

For example, someone who has a PS3 is more likely to also own another next-generation console, like the Xbox 360 or
Nintendo Wii, than those who started with either of the latter machines. And, 45 percent of PSP owners also have a DS, while just 21 percent of DS owners have a PSP as well. I’m not great at math, but I think that means there are a lot more DS owners out there. Perhaps I’m wrong.

NPD said its report was based on a survey of 20,000 gamers.

All told, though, the report seems to spell out that the video games industry is relatively healthy, even if those extreme gamers may not be.

I think we tend to forget that in the age of massive marketing budgets for machines like the Xbox, Wii, and PS3, and the incredible hype for games made for those consoles like Halo 3, Guitar Hero III, Grand Theft Auto IV and so on.

Rather, NPD’s “Games Segmentation 2008″ report explained, extreme gamers put in an average of 45 hours a week playing games, and, even better–for the video game industry’s coffers–bought a whopping 24 titles in the last three months.

What does it all mean? Well, it’s hard to tell exactly. But one thing that stands out is the idea that PC gaming is alive and well.

But when Electronic Arts’ Spore comes out next month, it will not be available on consoles. It will be primarily a PC game, though versions will be available for the Mac, for the DS, and for mobile phones.

According to the report’s author, NPD analyst Anita Frazier, the largest group, the young heavy gamers, comprise a group 38 million strong. They tend to favor portable game machines like the Nintendo DS or the Sony PSP, while the extreme gamer spends most of his or her time plopped down in front of a Microsoft
Xbox 360 or
Sony PlayStation 3.

According to a report issued Monday morning by industry analyst firm, The NPD Group, the most active group of players, which it termed “extreme gamers,” devote more than a full-time job’s work week to their avocation. But they don’t get insurance benefits for their efforts.

Still, Frazier reported that PCs are still the single-most popular gaming medium.

If you want to track all the drugs you’ve been prescribed (and the ones you self-prescribe), all the medical diagnoses you’ve received, all the lab results done on you, it’s a clean place to record that information. It does smart things with the data, too: if you look up drug that has a dangerous interaction with one that’s already in your profile, Google Health will alert you.

My bigger concern is that insurance carriers will begin to give financial benefits to patients and client companies if they allow data to go the other way: if patients grant carriers access to their online medical records. In the guise of keeping patients safe, that makes sense. But giving insurance companies access to detailed health profiles on all their clients also lets them mine the data, carve out small insurance groups, and selectively apply elevated rates to people who, through no fault of their own, are at greater risk of requiring insurance company payouts. I would not be surprised to see rate premiums lowered for people or groups who gave the carriers access to their data. But heed my warning on this: it’s a trap.

Yes, I sound paranoid. But I think it’s fair to say that consumers and health insurance companies have long been locked in an adversarial relationship in the U.S., and that the carriers will find a way to use the Google Health data to increase their profitability foremost. We can hold out hope that in doing so they also increase the level of patient care, but I wouldn’t count on it.

But assuming they get there, once you pull in your data, you’ll be able to annotate or add to it as you wish. (But not modify it.) When you head off to another doctor or hospital, you can then give them your complete online record, saving time, money (in duplicated lab tests), and potentially your life (if there’s data in there about prior conditions, allergies, etc.). This is exactly what a medical record is supposed to do for you already, but the portability of medical data has never been very good; Google is trying to fix that.

Hardly anyone, of course, actually has all their medical records at hand, nor the time or expertise to enter in everything in their file accurately. The idea with Google Health is that you get the data from your medical providers–your doctors, your pharmacy, and your lab. Google has a few relationships with diagnostic (lab) companies, some pharmacies, and a few medical centers. But at the moment, chances are that your family physician is not in the system.

I’m in favor of any product that helps patients understand health care in general and their own situation in particular, and Google Health is a great step in that direction. But due to the divisive economics of health care in our country, I can see this remedy having some nasty side effects.

In a word: privacy. Google VP Marissa Mayer told a crowd of reporters that the health data is stored on new super-hardened servers. That’s all well and good, but access to Google Health is via your standard Gmail/Google login, and plenty of people (like me until an hour ago) have old or weak passwords on their accounts. User security on this product is the weak link.

Google has launched its personal health portal, Google Health. It’s a clear and straightforward hub where users can store their medical information, and look up information on conditions and medications relevant to them. See the video for the pitch from product manager Roni Zeiger, a physician who left his practice to run this project (although he still keeps his hand in, as it were, by doing urgent care medicine on weekends).

Google Health is an important initiative, if only because it shows users how completely broken medical record-keeping is right now. But this product comes with a warning label.

The platform is somewhat open: there’s an API that developers can write to use the medical data that users open up to them. Zeiger joked with me that the “When am I going to die?” button will be added within days.

User-input data on conditions like allergies is good, but what you really want is to read in your physician's records.

The worry

You’ll also be able to push your medical data to services that analyze it for you. For example, there’s a heart attack risk calculator from the American Heart Association, and pill-taking reminder service.

So what’s not to love?

The good

Unproven results

More importantly is the relationship of online medical records to the elephant in the room: the insurance industry. Your insurance carrier likely holds more medical data about you than your doctor (whether it’s accurate is another story). I do not expect that the carriers will open up their databases to consumers, since that would enable a level of scrutiny on bills that the companies so far have been able to brush off. It’s telling that no insurance companies or HMOs are partners with Google on this project.

See also: Microsoft HealthVault.

More information can be found on the Apple Web site.

Apple released QuickTime 7.5 late on Monday, fixing a handful of security issues, including holes that would have allowed someone to run malicious code on a computer and remotely control it.

Two months ago, Apple released QuickTime 7.4.5, which addressed a number of “highly critical” security flaws in the media player.

Four other issues affected Vista and XP SP2, as well as
Mac OS X 10.3.9, Mac OS X 10.4.9 through 10.4.11, and Mac OS X 10.5 or later. QuickTime 7.5 fixes a memory corruption issue in the software’s handling of AAC-encoded media content; a heap buffer overflow related to PICT images; a stack buffer overflow related to the handling of Indeo video codec content; and a URL issue that was addressed by revealing files in Finder or Windows Explorer rather than launching them.

Credit for reporting the different security issues was given to Dyon Balding of Secunia Research; Dave Soldera of NGS Software and Jens Alfke; Liam O Murchu of Symantec; an anonymous researcher working with TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative; and Vinoo Thomas and Rahul Mohandas of McAfee Avert Labs, along with Petko D. Petkov of Gnucitizen working with TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative.

One of the issues, which would have allowed a maliciously crafted PICT image file to run code, affected computers running
Windows Vista and XP SP2.

(Credit:
Technorati)

With nearly 1,000,000 posts a day, the blogosphere is overflowing with content and now fully established as a mainstream rather than fringe phenomenon. Traditional media have adopted blogs as a complementary form of content to the traditional news and feature stories. According to Techhnorati’s latest report on the state of the blogosphere, many bloggers are making money. Technorati surveyed a sample of about 1,000 bloggers and found that the mean annual revenue for advertising is $6,000, but sites with 100,000 or more unique visitors are generating more than $75,000 in revenue.

None of these results is surprising. Blogs started as a means of personal expression, and now offer more than a billion people the tools to self-publish. Traditional publishers and an armada of new, innovative publishers, as well as millions of readers, have embraced the blog format and ethos. Marketers, readers, publishers, politicians, and most people on the planet with access to the Internet understand the diversity of voices, as well as the cacophony, that blogs allow. The more savvy bloggers are getting sophisticated about search engine optimization, developing a niche, and making money. Technorati will dribble out more results from its survey this week, illuminating the what, why, and how of blogging.