Senators Like Mike
• When Bloomberg speaks, Washington listens? The mayor is praising senators for killing an amendment — it would have forbidden the feds to share gun data with local police — he recently ripped to shreds. [NYDN]
• It looks like we have a mob war on our hands, with a second Mafia-related hit in three days. First a Gambino capo’s son was attacked; now an alleged Genovese mobster is found executed. Or is it all just an HBO promo? [NYP]
• Remember Wall Street West, a Pennsylvania developer’s plan to sell NYC financial firms a kind of giant, high-tech office park as a backup facility? There’s one snag: Nobody’s biting. [NYT]
• The city’s slowly getting used to those spindly, War Of the Worlds–like “Sky Watch” surveillance towers. The next question is whether they actually reduce crime. [amNY]
• And a Long Island gym teacher was arrested for endangering the welfare of a minor after he duct taped the legs of a student, presumably to teach him some sort of lesson. If we’d known this kind of stuff was actionable, our gym teacher would probably still be in jail. [Newsday]
intel
With Street View, Google Has Won Victory Over Ourselves. We Love Big Google.
As you may have heard, Google this week rolled out another beta feature that will soon, depending on how things play out, either prove an innocuous time-waster or some sort of privacy-ending, terror-enabling, total-surveillance nightmare. It’s Street View, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a ground-level Google Earth that plants you smack in the middle of a street rather than floating above it. New York is one of the few cities to get the early treatment, with most of the Manhattan grid and good chunks of the outer boroughs already covered. Once plopped down at an intersection of your choosing, you can take in a 360-degree view or “walk” up and down the block; storefronts distend woozily around you, and parked vehicles dissolve into nothing where the photos are stitched together. As trippy as the experience is, we’re a little intrigued about Street View’s next step. What happens when the company photogs have traversed all the places with, you know, streets? Volunteers roaming every hill and dale taking pictures? Flying unmanned Googledrones scouring the countryside? Of course.
Street View demo [Google]
