Attached are pictures of a van that tailed a vehicle shooting pictures for Google Street View. Looks like a stereotypical child rapist van, right? That's the thing: It apparently pulled out from beside the home of rapist-kidnapper Phillip Garrido.

Google has deployed its much-anticipated spy-cycles to the streets in Europe, complete with nine cameras and freaking laser beams. This is helping the company get even closer to your windows.

Tonight someone emailed us to point out a truly bizarre glitch in Google Maps — apparently they think that anyone in New York who searches for directions from JFK airport is Arab.

Apparently Google's drivers sometimes forget they're driving around with pole-mounted cameras on their car roofs.

It's not just philandering husbands who fear Google Street View's roving cameras; the residents of a wealthy British village have taken to the streets as well. Literally.

A woman, checking out a female friend's house on Google Maps, was surprised to see her husband's Range Rover parked out front, complete with blingy hubcaps, reports The Sun. A divorce is underway.

What scrapes will those goofy Street View cars get into next? Google's roving panopticons ran over a baby deer and captured a guy toting a gun on the street. America, you are Google Maps!

Hope and change has come to Google Maps. The official residence of the vice president, obscured until Dick Cheney's last days in office and residence, now shines in satellite sunlight.

As a stunt, Google has wrapped subway trains in New York City with ads for Google Maps. Inside, ads give specific directions to tourist landmarks like Madison Square Garden. Unfortunately, they misplace Grand Central Terminal by several blocks, directing people to subway lines which do not run through the station. A mistake we can see someone sitting in a cube in Mountain View making — but doesn't Google have a large New York office full of employees who might have been called on to vet the ads in their 20 percent time?

What does $240 million get you these days? That's what Microsoft invested in Facebook, but the software giant hasn't gotten much love in return. On election night, whose online maps did Facebook use? Google's.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted funding from Sequoia Capital in 1999, they had no problem finding its Sand Hill Road offices. A decade later, Google Maps doesn't seem to know where 3000 Sand Hill Road is, the swanky-office-park Mecca of venture capital firms, including Sequoia, which funded Cisco, Apple, and Yahoo, in addition to Google. Typing in Sequoia's address takes you to a highway surrounded by brown fields. The real location of the Sand Hill conclave is actually a few minutes northeast, surrounded by a lush golf course watered every day with the sweat and tears of entrepreneurs. So what?Okay, okay — there's an error on the Internet! But far more boring than thinking this is a glitch in Google's database is making up a conspiracy theory that this has something to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who maneuvered to get Sequoia partner Michael Moritz off Google's board last year.

A correction on our previous post about LinkedIn's financial woes: Contrary to our tipster's assertions, plenty of LinkedIn employees use the company-provided shuttle bus from San Francisco to Mountain View. The bus even has its own Twitter account. That account is private — but it links to a public, annotated route map on Google Maps. CEO Dan Nye and marketing VP Patrick Crane, among others, have their home addresses listed. Other employees have left notes, in plain view, about their commuting preferences. "Your privacy is our top concern," LinkedIn's privacy policy states. But if the company is so slapdash about guarding its own employees, can it really be trusted to protect users? Here's an embedded version of the map:Click to view
View larger map

"You can see everything in those photos! That is opening house and home to criminals!" says Molfsee town councilman Reinhold Harwart, who plans to block Google Street View trucks by demanding they get local street vendor permits, then denying the permits. Peter Schaar, Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection (can we get one of those?) told the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung that putting photos of people's houses on the Internet "will not do." Google spokeswoman Kay Oberbeck retorted in yet another German newspaper, "We don't need [no stinking] permits." (Photo by DDP)

Google has kept its camera-mounted Priuses away from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's Chicago house, a tipster notes — even the entire neighborhood. Start your vast left-wing conspiracy theories! Did Obama pull strings with Google to maintain his family's privacy?Come on: Images of Obama's house are all over the Web. There are aerial views of the home on Google and Microsoft's online maps, as well as shots uploaded to Flickr. The small wealthy community or North Oaks, Minnesota was able to block Google's Street View cars from entering their neighborhood, but that's probably not what happened in Obama's. Despite what you've heard Hyde Park, Obama's academic enclave and home of the University of Chicago isn't quite entirely a South Chicago colony for the elite. At least, not according to the conservative Weekly Standard:

David Karp's Tumblr, the New York-based blogging startup, rolled out a site redesign yesterday. One of the new features is a Google Map showing where Tumblr users are located. We weren't surprised to see the highest Tumblr densities are in Brooklyn and San Francisco — "sisters in idiosyncracy" dubbed Sanfrooklyn by the New York Times. We were shocked, however, to learn that there are actual Tumblr users in the rest of America — like say Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example. The cartographic evidence:Tumblr users in Kalamazoo, Michigan:

Google's Street View drivers on contract have photographed more than just estates in Sonoma's wine country. They've also snapped shots of stretches of private roads in Humboldt County — nearly a quarter of a mile past "no trespassing" signs, according to one complainant. That particular area of California long ago cut down the profitably harvestable timber and has turned to cannabis cultivation. It provides the state, and the nation, with some of the most carefully bioengineered marijuana strains known to humanity.You can thank local botanists who fly under the radar of law enforcement. Grow operations are packed tightly into indoor and outdoor spaces, which Google's all-seeing eye-level cameras could easily betray. So if your dealer's supplier goes down thanks to a Street View intrusion — lawful or otherwise — which brand ought to feel the wrath of your pointlessly paranoid post-analysis? (Photo by Miss Gong & The Flickers)

Ploddingly methodical reporters at the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa pored over Google Maps and found the company's camera-equipped trucks photographed more than 100 private roads in Sonoma County, snapping photos of "Private Road" and "No Trespassing" signs as they barged on past, shooting through secluded living-room windows hundreds of feet beyond property barriers.My favorite shot is the guard dog on private Simone Road in Sonoma. Google spokesliar Larry Yu swore up and down that Google trains its drivers not to do this, they give them specific routes to follow, they hire local drivers who know the area, blah blah blah —- all of which Yu retracted after a reporter talked to a driver who refuted the whole story.

Google Maps can't always remember where in the world war-torn Georgia is, but the Googlers behind it did not in fact hide road maps of the country — they were never there to begin with, according to product manager Dave Barth. However, satellite imagery from the region is, which might have proved useful to South Ossetian and Georgian troops. (Russia, which is supporting South Ossetia's independence, has its own network of spy satellites.)Both satellite photos and topography would be just the thing for planning, say, an armored column advance or in identifying industrial and civilian targets for sabotage and terror, respectively. While the photos aren't current enough to track enemy movements, the detail at the lowest scale is certainly good enough for a sniper to find a roost near Josef Stalin's birthplace for instance. And if anyone needed road maps, then they could have just used Microsoft's more Caucasus-complete Live Maps. Just imagine what separatist guerrillas could have done with Street View!

Heh. Google Maps Streetview is still showing us funny things. We've already had a supposed drug deal, a boob flash, a bicycle accident, and a maybe pretend shooting that were all caught by the little VW Bug with the magic camera on its roof. Oh, and Valleywag shows us that they also caught a house fire! It's a sprawling portrait of the daily drama. And now we have the above photo, which shows a drunken man in Australia passed out on his front lawn. I wonder if the guy driving the car noticed him and decided to include him for comedy value. Streetview is like a videogame with all of its Easter eggs and hidden things except, you know, it's real life. So cheers to our blotto friend, asleep there in his Irish pajamas. May he take a screenshot and hang it on the wall. [TIL] After the jump we've compiled the other aforementioned images.

Google Street View's picture of a burning house on Eagle Point Drive in Sherwood, Arkansas, went viral over the weekend, prompting the solicitous censors of Mountain View to remove a 360-degree chunk of imagery from Google Maps. Google can erase the picture, but it can't erase this fact: The Google Street View car making the rounds in the neighborhood that day kept driving past the burning home, taking its assigned pictures. All of these images, like the one above, remain visible in Google Maps.