No place to hide ...
2005-08-24 21:19
Cape Town - The streets of Durban and Cape Town are visible on satellite
images that can be seen on a new Google web service.
Attorney Reinhardt Buys said Google Earth is "one of the most outstanding
technologies" he has seen in the past five years.
Google Earth is a high-resolution three-dimensional map of the earth.
Residents of Cape Town and Durban can now see their suburbs, street
addresses and houses from space, simply by typing information about the
location at this website.
Google says all images are less than three years
old and are regularly updated.
Google Earth was designed mainly for commercial use.
The website is of great value to people such as architects, engineers and
travellers.
The issue of whether Google Earth will make terrorism and
breaking in easier, is now being debated in the Netherlands.
But Buys doubts
whether Google Earth could promote terrorism.
"High-resolution photos of most places on Earth were available before
Google Earth evolved.
"Many other websites provide air and satellite photos
free of charge," Buys said on Wednesday.
But he added that Google Earth
could make it easier for terrorists to obtain information.
"The website gives the precise latitude and longitude of any place and has
a built-in facility to measure the exact distance between two places."
Google Earth is 10.07MB in size and can be downloaded free from http://earth.google.com.
Sapa-AFP reports that Google also launched Google Talk, an instant messaging
program, on Wednesday.
Director of new products, Georges Hank, said people
using Google Talk could chat to one another or send messages while they play
games online.