Local Google Street View winners announced

Google and South African Tourism today announced the winners of the online and mobile poll, in which South Africans voted for the first tourist attractions to be photographed by the Street View trike, reports Travelwires.com.

The top three most popular tourist attractions will get a visit from the Street View trike and car in the coming weeks. The images it collects will be carefully stitched together with the aim for them to be available in Street View on Google Maps, in time for the 2010 Fifa World Cup.

The three winners reveal SA's passion for the big outdoors: Chapman's Peak and the Cape coastal routes; Kruger National Park; and the Blyde River Canyon. These tourist attractions will be put right on the virtual map, tempting people at home and overseas to explore SA's scenery and landmarks in an exciting new way, over the Internet.

An e-mail hack that exposed thousands of private e-mails and documents about global warming indicates a shifting paradigm for e-mail as a means of "private" communication, and a continuation of political "hacktivism" to further political agendas, experts say.

According to ChannelWeb, hackers broke into the e-mail server of the Climate Research Unit (CRU), at the University of East Anglia, one of the UK's premier climate research institutes, on Friday, stealing 1 079 e-mails and more than 3 800 documents.

The CRU hack, which occurred in the weeks prior to a major global climate summit in Denmark scheduled for December, was later confirmed by a CRU spokesperson.

Intel's six-core Gulftown processors got delayed to the second quarter of 2010 and were tested by Polish site PC Lab, says Techtree.com.

The six-core Intel Gulftown processor is from the 32nm Westmere family flagship, with 12MB shared L3 cache, and is compatible with Intel Socket LGA1366-based motherboards.

As per the tests, the multi-core Gulftown chip showed a 50% boost in performance. The Gulftown line-up CPUs are likely to be dubbed as Core i9 chips.

The European Union (EU) has voted through the final text of the Telecoms Package reform, after two years of debate on how the EU Telecoms Rules of 2002 should be reworked to make the European telecoms market more unified, reports V3.co.uk.

In recent months, Europe has watched with interest as two areas of the package received particular attention by the elected European Parliament because of the potential detrimental effect on citizens' Internet freedoms.

The first area concerned net neutrality. Broadband operators will be allowed to restrict access to services and applications at their discretion from next year, after the European Parliament voted through the controversial Harbour Report in May.