Google and its Dutch map provider told the UK Telegraph they have no idea how the fake town got onto Google Maps. "There are occasional errors," a Google spokesman told the paper. But the paper points out cartographers often insert fake minor features like "trap streets" to catch people copying their work. If Google and its partner don't know anything about the town, that leaves a possibility the Telegraph was too polite to bring up: Perhaps the data in Google's maps was, itself, purloined from an offline source.

Time to start asking this Dutch company some tough questions, Google. Either that, or you can risk that some aggrieved British mapmaker might see the coverage of "Argleton" and starting asking the tough questions for you.

(Top pic: Adam Burt)

Hasbro has announced the creation of a "live worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps as the game board;" the involvement of Google, which lets anyone mash-up its map using a public API, is unclear. What is known, per the Guardian, is that you get three million virtual dollars with which to "buy" actual land, knock down buildings, erect skyscrapers, construct prisons, or pay "rent" to some jerk looking to bankrupt you. At least when he does, you won't have to see the smug look of victory on his face. (Until version 2.0.)

The footage would have been taken before Garrido was caught for kidnapping an 11-year old girl, holding her captive in his back yard for 18 years and fathering two children with her. It was spotted by the commenters over at Boing Boing, and assembled by the site into a gallery of Google Street View images. Boing Boing co-founder Xeni Jardin estimates the van follows the Street View vehicle for at least six blocks.

A psycho like Garrido, who thought he could control "a set of voices" with his mind, would probably have been freaked out by a van festooned with cameras driving by his property even if he didn't have something terrible to hide, which, in any case, he clearly did. So maybe he was, as Jardin wonders, following the van in some sort of panic. Or maybe this is a neighbor's car. But either way, the images are now just a terrible reminder of how long this evil bastard was able to roam free while three humans were locked down in his yard.

(Images via Boing Boing)

According to the Associated Press,

The U.S. company has hired two young cyclists to ride through gardens, historical sites and other pedestrian-only areas on the device to take thousands of digital photos.

AFP reports the bikes even have lasers attached to their (pole-) heads, to assist with some sort of future 3D system; excerpt from the wire service's video is attached. Google will blur faces on request, in Europe at least, but the policy is to do so by default only for people on the street; those in the privacy of their own homes get no such consideration. Google certainly wouldn't want to admit to a zone of privacy anywhere near your computer, after all.

[via Buzznewsroom]

Here's what our tipster pointed out:

Go to Google Maps and click "get directions." Type "JFK airport" into the A search field and any NY location like "Williamsburg, NY" as the B destination. Click "Get Directions" and "JFK airport" is suddenly Arabic!!!

So I tried it multiple times searching for directions from JFK to White Plains, Long Island, Park Slope, Buffalo, Queens and Harlem, and each time the name of the airport showed up in what appears to be Arabic. Try it, it's sort of weird!

That's the likeliest explanation for why one of the internet giant's vehicles slammed into a low bridge outside Pittsburgh. It was in the process of driving around and taking pictures for the Street View feature on Google Maps and Google Earth; hence, the crash has been preserved on Google's servers.

You can start here and keep clicking the forward arrow to watch as the cameras apparently get bent by the bridge, or just watch the video above.

You have to hand it to Google for having the good humor to leave these images online. The scene has already produced lots of chuckles over on Reddit.

Or maybe Google just didn't want to go to the trouble of deleting the wreck images. After an accident, the best approach is often to brush yourself off, pick up your camera and move on. Any spy worth his salt can tell you that.

Villagers in Buckinghamshire formed a "human chain" to stop one of Google's vans from taking pictures for the Street View feature of Google Maps and Google Earth. One particularly irked villager stopped the van before rousing his neighbors to join him in the street.

His beef? Thieving poors should not be allowed to ogle his valuables! Here's how he put it to the Times of London:

Mr Jacobs said: "This is an affluent area. We've already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police."

The van made a peaceful U-turn and left.

The story illuminates an important truth about privacy in the modern era: It's not so much an illusion as a precious commodity, bought above all with the time and energy the rich have (or hire) in abundance.

Unfortunately, most people can't afford nearly so much privacy as the citizens of Buckinghamshire. (One wonders how the police and driver would have responded if a similar mob had formed in a poor inner city neighborhood.) But don't let that stop you from setting up a neighborhood Google Watch group if you have the time and inclination.

It's a story so tidy, one almost doesn't want the British tabloid to bother fact-checking it. The paper's initial (and thus far only) source is a "top media lawyer" named Mark Stephens. Presumably, then, the anecdote will be confirmed as the case winds its way through the British courts.

It's worth noting that the Sun doesn't yet know so much as the name of the husband, much less posess the "Street View" image in question.

But there have been enough examples of unexpected and embarrassing Street View pictures that he point of the story stands regardless of whether it's fact or fiction: Google is happy to provide you with enough privacy — say, via GMail and GChat — to get yourself involved in some illicit scandal. Then it will happily bust you as that scandal unfolds in the real world.

(Pic: Amsterdam's red-light district on Google Street View, via The Next Corner)

UPDATE: Stephens mentioned this divorce case in a sly piece he wrote for the Times of London poking (it would seem) a bit of fun at the hubub over privacy as it related to Google Street View. After tracking the media lawyer down (via email, alas, not Google Street View) for a chat, we're confident the Sun is relaying his story correctly (in broad terms at least). We're confused, though, as to why a random blogger, "Idiot Forever," is claiming to have "duped" the Sun when he or she is clearly not the source of the paper's story. Maybe "Idiot Forever" was trying to put one over — on us. Shrug.

Google has a squad of drivers who drive specially equipped cars down the streets of most cities in America. The ostensible purpose: Snapping streetside views to help Google Maps users find local businesses. But it's beginning to look like Larry and Sergey are secretly working on a real-time documentary of Americana to rival anything the Works Progress Administration funded in the 1930s.

Via the Smoking Gun, a Harley-Davidson lover shows off his purchase at a Rapid City, South Dakota gun store:

The scene after a Google Maps driver ran into a baby deer on a street called Five Points Road in upstate New York:

Google apologized for killing Bambi. So much for "don't be evil"!

A reader tipped us off that Google Maps now showed a clear overhead image of One Observatory Circle (below), the address which has served as the home of the vice president since 1974. It's the first glimpse Google users have gotten of the place. Kate Hurowitz, a Google spokeswoman, explained in an email:

Google Earth and Maps are regularly updated as new imagery becomes available. Our most recent update, which went live last week, included updated imagery of the Washington D.C. area from several providers. The imagery of the Naval Observatory comes from Digital Globe.

The changeover happened on January 18 in Google Earth, the search engine's 3D mapping service, and on Thursday in Google Maps. In other words, the vice president's house was revealed on Google the same week Cheney moved out and Joe Biden moved in.

For the past four years, since Google first began introducing high-resolution satellite imagery into Google Earth and Google Maps, people have noticed that Cheney's house remained obscured (top photo), even as the White House itself could be seen clearly. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in 2005:

The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping, is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth's database to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured. You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld's lair.

Questioned about the blurring at the time, Google flacks said that the map images were displayed unaltered from the source — in this case, the U.S. Geological Survey.

The new, detailed images of the Naval Observatory grounds are still not quite as crisp as their surroundings, a difference Google's Hurowitz attributes to the difference in quality between aerial and satellite images, not any deliberate alteration of the map, as was the case when Dowd noted Cheney's willful obscurantism.

Could there be a better visual metaphor for the change of administration? The old one hid behind blurry pixels. The new one welcomes a close look.

Okay, okay — there's an error on the Internet! But far more boring than thinking this is a glitch in Google's database is making up a conspiracy theory that this has something to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who maneuvered to get Sequoia partner Michael Moritz off Google's board last year.

View larger map

Come on: Images of Obama's house are all over the Web. There are aerial views of the home on Google and Microsoft's online maps, as well as shots uploaded to Flickr.

The small wealthy community or North Oaks, Minnesota was able to block Google's Street View cars from entering their neighborhood, but that's probably not what happened in Obama's. Despite what you've heard Hyde Park, Obama's academic enclave and home of the University of Chicago isn't quite entirely a South Chicago colony for the elite. At least, not according to the conservative Weekly Standard:

It is the most racially integrated neighborhood in the nation's most racially segregated city. On three sides it is closed in by some of the most hellish slums in the country, miles of littered streets, acres of abandoned lots, block after block of shuttered storefronts and empty apartment buildings left over from the 19th century.

Shots of Obama's house:

Tumblr users in Kalamazoo, Michigan:

More in Des Moines, Iowa:

There's one in Muncie, Indiana!

Tumblr users exist where they used to make Goodyear tires in Akron, Ohio:

In East Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they must call the Tumblr-using Sioux Falls kids crybaby emos:

You can thank local botanists who fly under the radar of law enforcement. Grow operations are packed tightly into indoor and outdoor spaces, which Google's all-seeing eye-level cameras could easily betray. So if your dealer's supplier goes down thanks to a Street View intrusion — lawful or otherwise — which brand ought to feel the wrath of your pointlessly paranoid post-analysis?

(Photo by Miss Gong & The Flickers)

My favorite shot is the guard dog on private Simone Road in Sonoma. Google spokesliar Larry Yu swore up and down that Google trains its drivers not to do this, they give them specific routes to follow, they hire local drivers who know the area, blah blah blah —- all of which Yu retracted after a reporter talked to a driver who refuted the whole story.

Both satellite photos and topography would be just the thing for planning, say, an armored column advance or in identifying industrial and civilian targets for sabotage and terror, respectively. While the photos aren't current enough to track enemy movements, the detail at the lowest scale is certainly good enough for a sniper to find a roost near Josef Stalin's birthplace for instance. And if anyone needed road maps, then they could have just used Microsoft's more Caucasus-complete Live Maps. Just imagine what separatist guerrillas could have done with Street View!