A year ago nobody (except Apple internals maybe) would’ve dared to predict that the next generation of Microsoft’s Windows, Windows Vista, will run natively on Apple hardware. (via MW)
a personal website slash blog
Monthly Archive for April, 2006
Page 2 of 2
Apparantly GoYellow is doing what Google Local plans to do in the German market, and they are doing it quite well! Is it possible that non global players mean some serious regional competition to Google in that segment?
Spring finally arrived in Vienna, sun is shining and I could reactivate my bicycle. Since I go quite often by bike during summer months I decided to start a kind of a “bike project” this year. My bike will serve for another purpose too than just bringing me from point A to B, it’ll track and share the way in-between.
Recent discussions about INSPIRE and free geodata directed my attention to the OpenStreetMap initiative. In my opinion it’s a great idea and I decided to participate. But first a few GPS street tracks for sharing are needed. So I equipped my bike with a Garmin GPSmap 60C. Well, to be honest, it’s rather carrying the device with me than owning a GPS enabled bicycle now. Btw, can somebody recommend a clamp or another good method to mount the Garmin GPSmap 60C on a bike?
The plan is to track every meter I’m going by bicycle during this summer. It allows me to add some more street information of Vienna to OpenStreetMap and I get an interesting picture of how often and which bike routes and streets I’ve chosen. This may sound pretty geeky, actually it is, but I kind of enjoy toying around with geo technology.
The continuously growing picture of my bike trails you can observe online, in my so called bike_trails map.
If you’re interested, this script let me easily display my GPX formated GPS tracks as overlay in a customized Google Map (mashup, to name a buzzword and make some search robots happy). As you can see, the GPS tracks don’t exactly match the Google Map behind. I’m not quite sure which one of both is more inaccurate, Google or GPS…
Since Google Maps API Version 2 is now beta, I updated my little Vienna Underground Map to use the GMap2 class and added station names as tooltips in the map.
The german IT news site heise is reporting (in german) that a security expert called Klaus Dieter Matschke blames Google Earth to be a potential security risk for the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany. He claims that with the help of Google Earth’s accuracy on certain places in Germany it would be easy for terrorists to point russian Scud missiles onto various public targets.
These missiles are accessible on the international weapon black market for years. Their range is approx. 300 kilometers and, according to the US anti-missile defense authority, they can also be launched from cargo ships. Above all, Iran is suspected to have such missiles in cargo ships installed. (no further comment needed…)
All that are probably correct facts and the coordinates shown in Google Earth could be used as target information for missiles. But, if I have the power to buy Scud missiles and equip cargo ships with them, I won’t have any problem to get accurate target coordinates. This information is not unique in Google Earth. I guess the problem is that Google Earth is publicly available. As you notice even security experts managed to access Google Earth. They now see that there is something called geographic information out there which might result in security issues, meaning business to them.
Somebody has to tell them that GIS and accurate digital geographic information already existed long before Google Earth did!
So if we are confronted with security issues based on public geographic information, what should we do? Forbid and ban every kind of GIS and accurate map except for authorities (and security experts of course)? Oh wait, it reminds me of something: can it be that less censorship, better public information and knowledge within countries and governments is, let’s say, an improvement that came along with democracy and modern society?
Update #1:
Read the full (german) article at Technology Review. Remarkable detail in this article is the paragraph where Prof. Reinhard Zölitz-Möller, University of Greifswald – Dept. of Geography, claims that the German National Mapping agency only provides coordinate information for city centers, but not for buildings. I couldn’t believe that and checked it on their website: just in case they forgot to map buildings in their 1:5.000 vector model than you’ll for sure be able to pinpoint buildings in their orthophotos.
Version 4.0 of GPS-Photo Link, an ArcGIS Extension to locate photos along GPS tracks, now directly supports Google Earth. We used it quite a lot to build and manage comprehensive photo documentations of some project areas. A well working and, for our purposes, very useful tool. It’s a free upgrade for existing users.
Lately I registered at Platial, a social networking platform that allows you to share places. It works quite similar to del.icio.us‘s bookmark sharing, Flickr‘s photo sharing or last.fm‘s music sharing. You can add every kind of place, you can tag them, comment, collect them in maps, publish maps where others can add still more places. You can do a lot of nice things with Platial. [Read more about Platial on Wired]
While exploring some maps and places people added, this marker came up in the recent places category:
Ok, hmmm, so what’s that supposed to mean. Well, I’m certainly not defending sexual offenders, but I doubt that a service like Platial is the right platform to list and pinpoint such citizens. How would I feel if I find a label saying “sexual offender” or “released murderer” floating over my or my neighbours address? There is no way to check this accusations or to find further information about it on Platial. Nor isn’t Platial designed to provide appropriate legal documents either. Such a label only makes room for several speculations, resulting in insecurity.
Platial is based on geographic information, enriched by personal experiences in order to enable social networking. The problem I see is that unlike other social networking platforms, Platial allows sharing others privacy. I can pinpoint my neighbours house and tag it with “tasteless architecture”. Primarily I would share my personal experience, but do I have the right to share my neighbours location too? Of course I could take a picture of my neighbours house, upload it to Flickr and tag it with “tasteless architecture”. But as long as I don’t add name and address nobody’s privacy would be violated. The photo description on Flickr, where I add name and address, would classify as additional information because Flickr is about photo sharing, not photo-description sharing. Furthermore, if my neighbour finds out about his house, address and my tag on Flickr he still could flag the photo as “may offend” and let the Flickr administration team know.
In del.icio.us I share my bookmarks, my favorite sites in the internet, something very abstract. I can’t share somebody else’s bookmarks. On last.fm the root of any social activity is sharing my taste of music. I can’t share the genres somebody else is listening to. It’s impossible and wouldn’t make sense.
In Platial the required information to enable social networking is the location. Combined with the single word “fraud” as place name this basic information can already do a lot of harm and heavily violate someone’s privacy. That’s the main difference between Platial and other social networking sites I think.
Platial is a great idea (hopefully it’ll be successful in Europe too, so far there are not many european Platial users) but something has to be done to prevent abuse and respect the privacy of people who don’t want to get involved.
Update #1:
Luistxo from Tagzania encounterd the very same problem: sex offenders of Detroit have been mapped by a user on Tagzania. [Read the post en español].
The first comment on that post is quite interesting. It points to Google Maps API Terms of Use where you’ll read:
You agree that when using the Service, You will not:
defame, abuse, harass, stalk, threaten or otherwise violate the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others
Says it all, or maybe not? Marking out some addresses and labeling them with the word “sex offender” isn’t violating any rights in Google’s eyes.