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Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Google Adds Photos to Street View, Nearby to Search
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Well, that didn’t take long.
Google has added photos from Flickr, Panoramio and Picasa to Street View. One had to figure this was coming, given the fanfare around Bing’s recent addition of Flickr photos. Check out this historic area in Prague.
Both Bing’s and Google’s photo integration offerings have different strengths. Bing’s Photosynth allows for a 3D-ish feel you don’t get in Street View. Street View allows for the integration of a lot more pictures, essentially adding area that the Street View cameras couldn’t get at, like pedestrian areas or this view of the same plaza from the top of a tower. And while it’s only significant to a percent or two of us, Street View is usable from Linux (Flash), while I haven’t had any luck with Bing (Moonlight FOSS implementation of Silverlight). In any event, I think we all win in this race.
Google also added a nearby option to its standard search page, which is extremely handy. Google can derive your location by IP or you can specify your location.
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News Roundup – Vancouver Maps, ESRI FedUC, FOSS Pirates
Friday, February 26th, 2010
First up in the news this month is maps of Vancouver and the winter Olympics. Google updated their 3D imagery for the Olympics, and you can get a good tour using this KML file. How do you get street view on the slopes you ask? You use one of these:
For web based maps, I have to agree with The Map Room – the NY Times site has the nicest site I’ve seen.
There was a lot of news out of the ESRI FedUC this month. After reading summaries and summaries of summaries, aside from the usual round of ArcGIS desktop improvements, it looks like the big new items are:
- ESRI is partnering with Amazon to offer cloud rental of AGS on their EC2 service. This is a good move for ESRI and its customers, though you’ll need an ELA to qualify. Rent-what-you-need cloud space is ideal for CPU-stomping AGS, though we’ll need some metrics to see what the long term cost savings would be.
- Volunteered Geographic Information, or VGI (must we hyphenate everything?), ala OpenStreetMap. Surveying, Mapping and GIS has a good summary of the topic and the concerns involved. Hopefully it’ll involve direct integration with projects like OpenStreetMap and not reinventing/branding the wheel.
- Support for the iPhone. According to James Fee, they basically took their old slideshow and did a find-replace on Windows Mobile with iPhone. Anybody stuck with Windows Mobile doing data collection out in the field should be dancing in the streets.
Ars cites a study showing just how spatially boring we humans are. Researches collected customer cell phone location information from cell phone providers found that you can predict someone’s location and movement patters up to 93% of the time. Just threw your cell phone in the back of a moving chicken truck with out of state plates? They probably predicted you’d do that too. If you’re wondering how people can get that information from your cell phone without asking you, check this out and prepare to freak.
And finally, in the are-you-kidding-me department, big content has asked the Office of the US Trade Representative to denounce countries that encourage FOSS. The International Intellectual Property Alliance, which is made up of such luminaries as the RIAA and MPAA, asked USTR to add Brazil, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam to its 301 list (countries we give meaningful frowns to) because they encouraged the use of open source software. As an example (via Ars),
Indonesia’s policy “weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness” because open source software “encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations [and] fails to build respect for intellectual property rights.”
Many US agencies, including the Department of Defense, have also endorsed using FOSS. The IIPA apparently forgot to put the US on the list of countries we should denounce.
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Augmented Reality Maps (Bing)
Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Here’s the TED talk on upcoming Bing map features that has been in the news lately. In a nutshell, MS Worldwide Telescope and Flicker geotagged image integration with a demo of a live video overlay. It’s an impressive demonstration. The coolest bit is the Flickr image integration – it’s doing some kind of SIFT operation to get the Flickr image in the exact right place on the background imagery.
Doh!
Unfortunately, when I head over to Bing Maps I get one of these.
Thank you, Microsoft. No luck trying to run it via Moonlight, Novell’s open source Silverlight implementation, either. Sigh.
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News Roundup – Geodesign, ArcGIS 9.4 Goes to 10, Haiti Disaster Response
Friday, January 29th, 2010
What follows is notable news and happenings that I want to purge from my bookmarks folder. It will be a combination of things you already know spiced with things you probably won’t care about. I apologize in advance.
First up is geodesign, which has had an ESRI summit and a brand new Wikipedia entry. What is geodesign you ask?
Geodesign is a set of techniques and enabling technologies for planning built and natural environments in an integrated process, including project conceptualization, analysis, design specification, stakeholder participation and collaboration, design creation, simulation, and evaluation (among other stages). “Geodesign is a design and planning method which tightly couples the creation of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts.”
So it’s….basically all the stuff we’ve been doing for years. GIS as a field tends to have random taxonomy/nomenclature fluctuations. Remember when we become geospatial people instead of geographic people? Did it change your life? Neither will this. Moving on.
As was widely reported, ArcGIS 9.4 has been re-branded as ArcGIS 10. The big changes here are the merging of ArcCatalog and ArcMap (ArcCataMap?) and, like it or love it, the adoption of the MS Office ribbon interface. That’s enough for a major version number change in my book.
Haiti dominated the news this month, and there are a couple of projects helping out that I want to highlight. In particular, check out what people did on OSM in just a few short days.
Hats off to everybody that worked around the clock to update that area. Via Red Hat’s new opensource.com, a couple of other great FOSS projects that have been helping out in Haiti are Ushahidi and CrisisCamp. Proprietary vendors have historically been very gracious in putting aside licensing and cost concerns during crises, but it’s always quicker when those things aren’t an issue at all.
On the browser front, Chrome passed Safari and is the #3 browser on the web. I never thought I’d see the day I’d use something other than Firefox as my main browser, but I’ve been using Chrome 90% of the time lately. It’s significantly faster, generally stable, and now that the extension ecosystem has taken off I find myself opening Firefox less and less. Sigh. I think Chrome is helping Firefox get out of a rut though. Since it came out Firefox has sped up significantly, and now they’re moving to rolling release schedule to push out improvements more quickly.
A couple of interesting developments in the FOSS world this month. California is taking steps to define and encourage open source software use in government. From what I can tell it looks like what I consider the best policy – to put FOSS on the same level as proprietary solutions, not grant it special favoritism. There was an interesting story from New Zealand this month about a school that went almost completely open source (some virtualized Windows desktops are still there). As tight as school budgets are I’ve never understood how that happens so infrequently.
Via Slashdot, the map of the month goes to the New York Time’s interactive map of Netflix queues by neighborhood. Check it out now before the news industry points a paywall gun at its head and kills itself.
And finally, as both a Linux geek and a remarkably unaccomplished guitarist, I couldn’t pass this up without a mention. Behold – the Gentoo guitar!
Can I has? Pleaseeeeee?
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Internet Explorer Aurora Exploit in the Wild
Sunday, January 17th, 2010
Score!
I’m happy to note that according to Google Analytics only 28% of you are using Internet Explorer. My hat’s off to 72% of you. If you are in that other 28%, however, unless you like your personal data compromised or you want to feel the thrill of having your PC ride in a botnet herd, use it to download Chrome or Firefox or Opera or Safari or whatever and don’t open it again until Microsoft gets out a patch for the Aurora exploit.
If you’ve read the hubub about China hacking into Google to go after dissidents and others in recent days, you may have heard that IE was a primary attack vector. The exploit is now in the wild and was added to Metasploit, an open source security testing framework that is a ton of fun to play with at wifi hotspots (so I’ve heard) but can otherwise be used to ruin your whole day. This video should send chills down your spine:
No social engineering hacks required. Just clicking on a link can compromise your system. Reports are indicating that all versions of IE, 6 to 8, are affected.
If you think I’m being over-reactionary or that my anti-Microsoft bias is shining through, note that Germany has recommended everyone stop using Internet Explorer immediately and over 20 other tech companies have been hacked. Right now there is no patch from Microsoft.
Hopefully by the time you read this Microsoft will have a patch out, but if that isn’t the case, don’t click on the big blue E unless it’s to download a different browser.
*Edit: France has now joined Germany in advising its people to stop using Internet Explorer until there’s a fix.
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