GeoEye Inc on Thursday said it will provide imagery from its new $502 million high-resolution GeoEye-1 satellite to Google Earth and Google Maps after the spacecraft is launched on Sept. 4.

GeoEye spokesman Mark Brender said the Google logo was on the first stage of the Delta II rocket that will launch the new satellite, which will provide the highest resolution commercial color imagery available on the market.

“Google is interested in collecting the highest quality satellite imagery available and as a symbol of this commitment has agreed to put the company logo on the first stage of our launch vehicle,” Brender said.

He said Google did not have any direct or indirect financial interest in the satellite or in GeoEye, nor did it pay to have its logo emblazoned on the rocket.

If all goes well with the launch, GeoEye’s new satellite will be the world’s highest resolution commercial earth-imaging satellite, offering images at .41 meters resolution in black and white and 1.65 meters in color.

Under current government rules, the company can only offer the public half-meter images.

Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said Google would begin receiving half-meter resolution imagery from the new satellite after 45 to 60 days, during which the company will make sure all the satellite’s systems are up and running.

In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: “use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default.”

Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft’s promise.

This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.

Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID’s security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage.

“Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it’s on Discovery’s radar and they won’t let us go near it.”

German customs police raided South Korea’s Hyundai IT Corp in Berlin on Saturday, seizing flat-screen televisions from its stand at IFA, the world’s largest consumer electronics fair.

A German court had ruled late on Thursday that Hyundai and other east Asian and European firms were marketing unlicensed patented technology at IFA and authorized 69 raids, a spokesman for Berlin’s customs investigation office said.

“Hyundai had the chance today to show us that it had paid for the licenses — then we would have gone. But that was not the case. They could not prove they had paid so we took the devices away,” said spokesman Norbert Scheidhauer.

A Reuters photographer witnessed uniformed customs police removing Hyundai’s flat-screen televisions in front of the public and trade visitors, leaving an empty stand with wires hanging from it.

Scheidhauer said he was not permitted to name other firms affected, but said that around 170 televisions, 140 MP3 music players, 21 mobile phones and 57 DVD recorders had been seized at IFA so far.

“This year is the biggest operation that customs investigators have had to carry out,” he said.

The theft of trade secrets by foreign companies is a sensitive topic in Germany, where the economy depends on a research-intensive export sector.