The European Union has requested that Google make some changes to its Street View service. It wants Google to delete the images that it captures after six months, according to a letter sent to Google from the head of the EU Article 29 Data Protection Group, which is comprised of data protection officials from EU countries.
It also wants Google to alert residents when its Google Street View cars will be in their area. Google takes the photos for this service using cars that drive up and down streets and roads.

Microsoft did its best Woody Harrelson impression this week and set out to bag some zombies. The zombies we’re talking about here are PCs infected with malware. The bad guys spread the malware around and then remotely control victims’ computers as part of a botnet that can do stuff like send out spam email or carry out DDoS attacks. In the real world, of course, you have to aim for the head to kill zombies, and that’s basically the new strategy Microsoft used. In order to take down Waledac, which was one really bad botnet, it was granted a temporary restraining order.

With all the hype surrounding Bloom Energy’s newly launched Bloom Box, it may be tempting to view the new device as a cure-all for the world’s energy concerns. After all, the promise of an on-site power source that can provide homes with reliable clean energy at an affordable price seems like nothing short of a panacea. Just how affordable the devices will really be has already been questioned. In addition, given the Bloom Box’s use of natural gas and biofuels, it’s not entirely clear how clean or green it will be in the long term.

Intuit has rolled out its first Mac-native application for Quicken. The company’s recently acquired Mint.com product team contributed to the product redesign. Quicken Essentials for Mac, or QEM, offers several new features welcome to Mac users seeking a financial application — including an expected increase in the number of financial institutions, banks and credit unions they can access. However, Quicken appears to have watered down some of the more sophisticated functionality.

Web-based applications and cloud computing have presented new challenges for software developers. Most software makers are by no means tone-deaf to user concerns about security and usability issues, but even those software writers who are receptive to these worries must contend with hard-to-plug holes that can open up in cross-platform programs such as Web browsers. For Web app developers, the problems occur on two fronts. Not only do they have to harden the application itself, but they also have to keep up with the occasional new browser release.

Austin, Texas, is the home of the annual South by Southwest Festival, which in 23 years has grown from a music-only celebration featuring a few Sixth Street bars, a handful of bands and lots of Shiner Bock beer, into a two-week, multi-media extravaganza featuring hundreds of Next New Thing musicians, filmmakers and technology movers/shakers — and lots of Shiner Bock beer. I was living and working in Austin in 1988, the festival’s second year, and remember having a great time sweating up a storm while dancing to some great live music at Antone’s.

Microsoft has brought a major botnet to its knees using a combined technical and legal strategy that it expects to deploy again. Earlier this week, a federal judge granted Microsoft a temporary restraining order that cut off 277 Internet domains believed to be run by criminals as the Waledac bot, according to an official company blog post. That cut off traffic to Waledac at the “.com” or domain registry level — essentially severing the tie between the botnet’s command-and-control centers and most of its thousands of zombie computers around the world.

Last week, Dutch group Forthehack launched PleaseRobMe, a site meant to expose the danger of location-based social networks such as Foursquare, BrightKite, Gowalla, and Google Buzz. Basically, PleaseRobMe says that every time someone posts his location in a location-based social network, that person is publicly announcing that he is not home, which could be taken to mean, no one is home. To illustrate the point, PleaseRobMe rephrases public Foursquare posts to say, “@Username left home and checked in X minutes ago …”

Fans of FOSS have no shortage of ways to enjoy openness in the technological world, but when it comes to the other aspects of life, such opportunities can be few and far between. It wasn’t until just recently that we saw the open philosophy applied to fine dining. Yes, you heard that right! There really are “no secret recipes” at Amsterdam’s Instructables Restaurant, because everything there is open — not just the recipes, but even the fixtures and furniture.

Anyone whose home has been under attack from zombies knows all too well how incredibly annoying the problem can get — way worse than termites or even a wasp nest. Luckily, strategic landscaping in the front yard can be an effective defense, at least in the cartoony world “Plants vs. Zombies” inhabits. PopCap’s game for PCs and Macs has been scaled down into an iPhone/iPod touch version, which loosely follows the tower defense game genre while adding in some new features to keep things interesting.

At about the same time in January that Google reported its infrastructure had been hacked, someone broke into Intel’s systems. However, unlike Google, which reported the attack publicly and ended up getting the federal government involved, Intel kept relatively quiet about its intrusion. The only mention Intel made of the attack was in its SEC 10-K filing. That’s because the chipmaker didn’t believe that anything was stolen, spokesperson Chuck Molloy told TechNewsWorld. It’s not yet clear whether the attack is connected with the one on Google.

After years of keeping everyone in the dark about its solid oxide fuel cell technology, Bloom Energy officially brought its first product out into the sunlight Wednesday with a media event launching its Bloom Energy Server, a cleantech refrigerator-sized power plant for homes and businesses. Bloom used the San Jose, Calif., headquarters of one of its first customers, eBay, as the backdrop for announcing the availability of what it’s calling a greener and cheaper way to wean consumers and businesses off power grids and fossil fuels.

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