Authorities in both Germany and the US are expected to begin inquiries into Google's "accidental" collection of WiFi payload data by its Street View cars. German commissioner for data protection Peter Schaar has asked for a detailed probe of the incident while consumer group Consumer Watchdog has demanded that the US Federal Trade Commission look into Google's activities on this side of the pond.

The furor erupted after Google admitted on Friday that its Street View cars had been collecting more data than the company realized. The cars are supposed to only take photos of the street and collect basic WiFi information, such as the SSIDs and MAC addresses of WiFi routers. The WiFi data was to be used in Google's location-based services, and Google argued last month that it only collected the same data that was publicly available to anyone walking down the street with a WiFi device. Google insisted that it did not collect any kind of IP or packet data in the course of its WiFi collections.

The increasing criticism of Flash as a vehicle for online video delivery (as well as Apple's dislike of Flash) appears to be driving the adoption of H.264 video. A recent study by video search site MeFeedia reveals a 160 percent increase in the proportion of video encoded in the iPad-friendly format since January of this year.

MeFeedia's indexing data was compiled from over 30,000 sources of online video, including Hulu, CBS, ABC, CNN, MTV, YouTube, and others. According to its data for the month of May, 26 percent of all video in its index was in H.264 format. That's up from just 10 percent in January—the month that Apple announced the iPad.

The report revealed that a lot of older content, including news and TV episodes, had not yet been reencoded from their largely Flash-based formats. However, most new content is being encoded in H.264, suggesting that the iPad is helping push adoption of H.264 and HTML5. Just before the iPad launch in April, a number of media companies announced plans to transition content from Flash-based players to H.264 video delivered via HTML5 specifically for the device. A side benefit of this transition is that such video is also compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch, as well as Android-based mobile devices and Safari and Chrome on the desktop.

The increasing trend toward H.264 has been corroborated by data released earlier this month by video encoding service Encoding.com. Two-thirds of the video encoded by the service in the first quarter of 2010 was in H.264 format, more than double the percentage encoded as H.264 a year ago.

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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act serves many purposes, some of which are good, but certain parts of it are ripe for abuse. The infamous DMCA takedown notice is at the top of anyone's list of most-abused parts of the act. These notices are meant to make it easy for content owners to have violations removed, and they do. But the notices also make it easy for anyone to try and silence criticism or stifle angles they simply don't like, even if the party in question is working perfectly within the confines of fair use.

Over the course of our coverage here at Ars, we've seen a number of DMCA takedown cases that were just plain lame. And, although there are plenty more lame cases that have happened in the world, we thought we would highlight some of our "favorite" ones to show how the DMCA takedown system can be used in an attempt to control content instead of merely enforcing copyrights. Plus, these examples just make us chuckle at the absurdity.

Google has admitted that it has been "mistakenly" collecting payload data from open WiFi networks as its Street View cars drove around taking pictures. The company said that it never used any information about who was using those networks and what sites they were visiting, but the company has nonetheless decided to completely stop collecting WiFi data from its Street View cars.

Google put up a blog post last month detailing exactly what kind of data its Street View cars collected in response to an inquiry from German lawmakers. At the time, Google said that it collects SSID information as well as the MAC addresses of WiFi routers it encounters along the Street View route. This is for use in Google's location-based services, like Skyhook Wireless' services that are widely used on mobile devices without GPS.

Facebook says it has discovered the identity of "Kirllos," the hacker who claimed to be selling 1.5 million Facebook logins on the black market last month. It turns out that Kirlios didn't quite have as many accounts as he originally claimed, though he did manage to sell a number of credentials to third parties. Facebook has also updated its login system to make it more secure for users who want to make sure they maintain control of their accounts.

Facebook has not published Kirllos' identity, but says that he is based in Russia and the company has alerted local law enforcement to his activities. "We have determined Kirllos' identity through IP addresses, online accounts, and other information and believe that he's very likely a low-level actor," Facebook Spokesman Simon Axten told ComputerWorld.

A report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) examining phishing behavior in the second half of 2009 suggested that ISPs and domain registrars are becoming more effective at taking down phishing domains. Most phishing attacks appear to originate from Eastern Europe, with one organization responsible for about two thirds of all attacks.

The period in question saw a large increase in phishing activity. Attacks appeared to hold fairly steady between the first half of 2008 and first half of 2009, but in the most recent monitored period, phishing attacks have more than doubled, from 55,000 to just under 127,000.

Around 84,000 of these attacks were believed to be due to the Eastern European Avalanche gang. The criminal organization has developed robust and effective phishing software, allowing it to rapidly register new domains and propagate its phishing software, targeting over 40 major financial institutions and online services. As an added bonus, the group also distributes the Zeus botnet software to enable yet more data theft.

The large increase in attacks is substantially attributable to Avalanche's work. The group is believed to also be responsible for a phishing operation known as Rock Phish, which ran between 2006 and 2008, but which is now largely defunct.

The good news is that ISPs and registrars are detecting the suspicious activity of phishing servers more rapidly than before, and corporations are working together more effectively to act to combat the problem by deregistering domain names and refusing to route packets of network providers known to be friendly to malware.

The result is that average takedown time for a phishing site has dropped from 49.5 hours in 2008 to 31 hours, 38 minutes. Avalanche sites, because of their heavy traffic and high profile, are brought offline even quicker—on average in just 15 hours, 35 minutes. This improvement is tempered somewhat by the fact that non-Avalanche sites actually took longer on average to take down; 63.5 hours.

On top of the rapid response to Avalanche domains, an unknown group of researchers managed to take the entire system offline for about a week.

It's clear that the spammers, botnets, and phishers still have the upper hand at the moment; spam, used by all three kinds of criminal, still makes up the majority of e-mails, and the attackers are using increasingly sophisticated software to escape being brought offline.

Nonetheless, there are real indications that the fight back is becoming more effective. Greater corporate cooperation, increased awareness among ISPs and domain registrars, and more effective law enforcement are all making it easier to make malicious servers inaccessible, and researchers are even proving able to use the criminals' own systems against them, using peer-to-peer communication to disrupt or disable infected machines.

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Apple has launched a beta version of its MobileMe mail client that introduces a number of changes to the Web-based service. Though the company added new features and performance improvements, the most visible change is a new iPad-inspired user interface.

A new "widescreen" view breaks up the interface into three columns or panes. At the left is the source pane, which lists your Inbox and various folders. At the right is the message pane for reading e-mails. In between, Apple has sandwiched a preview list of e-mails, similar to the list shown in Mail on the iPhone or iPad. "Compact view" collapses the source column, similar to Mail's UI on the iPad in landscape orientation. "Classic view" shows the source pane on the left, message list on top right, and message view on right bottom just as it does now.

In addition to changing up the interface, Apple also added a few new features. You'll be able to define and apply rules using MobileMe's Web interface, just as you can on the desktop. You can also file away any message to an archive folder with a single click, and rich text formatting is also coming to the Web interface. Along with these features, Apple says it is improving performance and adding SSL encryption for improved security. In all, it looks to be a useful and welcome update.

To take advantage of the new features during the beta, you have to request to be added to the beta program. When you log into MobileMe and open Mail, you should see a link to request to participate in the lower left corner. 

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Voltage Pictures and the US Copyright Group are teaming up to sue "tens of thousands" of P2P users who downloaded the film The Hurt Locker illegally. A lawyer from the group confirmed the studio's plans to the Hollywood Reporter Wednesday, noting that the scope of this lawsuit is much more far-reaching than the copyright group's past pursuits.

The Hurt Locker, like many other Hollywood films, was leaked onto BitTorrent months before its official release in theaters. It wasn't a particularly high-grossing film—it only made $16 million—but it did end up winning six Oscars. Undoubtedly, the film's early leak online combined with the relatively low earnings is part of the reason Voltage and the US Copyright Group decided to sue. The lawsuit has not yet been filed, but the firm expects it to happen later today.