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You might be OK with the concept and execution of Google Street View. However, a lot of people most certainly are not happy. We don't want our houses plastered up on an easily indexed, location linked, photography database.

And it's going to happen anyway, with or without Google. I've posted hundreds of geolocated photos in Earthscape and Picasa. More will come. In 5 or 10 years, perhaps every photographable thing on earth will have at least one geolocated, maps-searchable photo pointing at it.

You're worried about photos of your house. Have you bothered to check Picasa, Flickr, Imageshack, Photobucket, Bayimg? TerraServer? Real estate comparison sites? What of the hundreds of other image and geographic services I have not named?

If not, can you claim with a straight face that this issue is important enough to warrant government involvement in private photography? It is unclear to me that there should be an a priori restraint on publication simply because "a lot of people are not happy". If that's a problem, toddle on down your Congressman's office and see if you can get enough people interested to pass a law. If you don't care enough to bother, fine, but don't tell me it's important to you.

I'm a veteran of these wars. I fought Lotus Marketplace, I wrote letters to my legislators and to Lotus and to Mitch Kapor. That success was utterly irrelevant. What I have learned is that you need to pick your battles, and pick them only when there is real harm being done. Otherwise you risk creating an unwieldly, overbearing enforcement environment that hurts everybody.

google earth is just a program that aggregates a ton of information. All of this information is easily accessibly via other avenues. So just talking to google about this problem doesn't do anything at all really, if a terrorist is even slightly resourceful and can type "sattelite imagery" into google search, he can have instant access to the same pictures google earth provides. there really is no point to having these "talks".

Uh, ignore (I wonder why?) Google is Einstein type stories, point your browser at:

http://www.terraserver.com/ , type "Oslo" to search field.

I think they should put better choices since they exist since 1997!

Man, I can understand Joe Sixpack types but I can't understand Slashdot getting impressed by such stories.

Marketing agreement or something? No, really...

Oh also I don't like to give an address to Google and its lovable 2038 cookie.

Guys, there is http://www.terraserver.com/ , exists for YEARS and in fact it started when terrabyte levels of database was big deal. I am speaking about 1997! ( http://tinyurl.com/9ty3a )

It was sponsored by Microsoft at start because of that reason. Remember everyone was joking about their database stuff those times.

You tell me you didn't know amateur level satellite photography for whole World exists? Also if you are a rich geek, you can buy amazing detail (commercial level) images.

I really can't understand when people act like "Wow Google invented some huge thing". Yahoo maps were always there too.

World's Best Race Circuit (Spa-Francorchamps) is available, though:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=50.439091,5.998192& spn=0.125999,0.170631&t=k&hl=en
For people that don't know the circuit: it's the gun in the picture.

Sure, there's satelite photo's of the world, but no maps!

PS: It's also visible from Terraserver here: http://terraserver.com/imagery/image_gx.asp?cpx=5. 970918092837114&cpy=50.43966506419273&res=15&provi der_id=350&t=pan

The international Terraserver http://www.terraserver.com/ is a pay service, unfortunately.

Strangely enough, even Google's images for Asia are quite limited. Is this due to a lack of public domain satellite images, or just not enough demand for them to put it up?

This site also has on-demand satellite imagery.

Actually, the "satellite" images that Google is using for city-level viewing are aerial [ortho-]photos. And even though they are watermarked with 2005 Google all over, they are actually several years old (at least in Wake Co., NC. - they appear to be 2002). Like someone else posted, they appear to be the same photos that have been available elsewhere, like terraserver. And yes, MapQuest used to have this. It pissed me off when they took it off. But now I have GMaps and they are so much sweeeter anyways.

Oh, and in case it sounds like I could care less about this, thanks Google for adding satellite/aerial photos/topology(like the ocean depths) to your maps.

P.S. - I zoomed in on Bermuda in the satellite but couldn't find it on the worresponding map. Does anyone know why? Is the map incomplete or out of alignment with the satellite/aerials?

- Author of this story = Hoagaboom

- Hoagaboom's slashdot ID link leads to www.hoagy.org

- whois on www.hoagy.org leads to:

Ryan Hoagland
1 Infinite loop
Cupertino, CA 95014 US

- Map quest verifies this address is real

- Terraserver verifys what appears to be a corporate plaza

- A Google search on this address reveals that this is "Apple Corporate Headquarters"

- Crap. Dead end. Hoagaboom is a liar. :)

My goal was to find out where he lived, systematically pinpoint his neighbors residence, obtain their contact information, then notify them by phone that their neighbor Ryan thinks they are ugly, then post the recorded phone conversation for you all to listen to. Oh well. I tried. :)

TerraServer!

Using the latitude and longitude garnered from wikipedia, and terraserver, we can clearly see that this place is an airport. Area 51

That's what you get for listening to Art Bell.

Terraserver has some fairly recent pics.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can look at Mount Ararat for yourself. Happy ark hunting!

Thanks for the link. Of course, the first thing I used it for is to post a link to a satellite pic of Reason's editorial offices to Slashdot...

Reason

I wonder if this what the cover of the boss' copy looks like...

If you're in the USA, you can see your own address plotted for yourself by TerraServer at this page here. The version that the magazine is using is likely a higher resolution source that they had to pay for. These guys even have pictures over "Area 51".

If you're in the USA, you can see your own address plotted for yourself by TerraServer at this page here. The version that the magazine is using is likely a higher resolution source that they had to pay for. These guys even have pictures over "Area 51".

...if you live in Missouri (microscope not included).

BFD. I routinely get the coordinates for addresses (usually geocaches but sometimes business addressses and residences) and make both standard Mapquest maps and aerial/topo maps of the location. Terraserver is quick and easy to use if you don't have access to some of the scripts out there for this...

How does this have far reaching implications? The information is freely and easily accessible. As databases grow? The information is out there now... It's not exactly as if magazines selling your name/address to others is a new/novel idea. It's been going on for ages.

Perhaps if they had your name and your CURRENT, exact, location on file I would be more concerned...

How about this one: http://www.terraserver.com
Maybe it's time for me to transfer to a Utah Marine artillery unit and call a fire mission on those grid coordinates. *grin*

Oops. Did I say that out loud? Better post this anonymously thru a proxy in China..

If your address is correct, then have a look at this

I used to have this payloader rocket that you could load an egg in. One day I was digging around the yard under rocks (like most 14yro boys do) and I found some newts. Hmm, astro... astro... ASTRONEWTS YEAH!

So being the unusually cruel kind of kid that pulled the wings off of flies, and pretended his magnifying glass was the death star at alderon over an ant hill, I began my devious little plan.

I packed up my rockets, grabbed a few C6-7 engines I had (I love the long delay) and headed out to the school on my schwinn with the newt safely in tow.

I set up the launch pad, did all my pre-flight checks (make sure the fins aren't unglued, ect) and loaded the little guy in my egg payloader.

5...4...3...2...1 LIFTOFF!!!

Pretending that I was in mission control, I started saying things to myself like "Ok Houston, we have liftoff, going to full throttle" "Booster seperation complete, deploying parachute" I hopped back on my bike too chase the red and white striped parachute down.

The wind had carried the rocket south off school grounds, it was an overcast day so there must have been some high winds. I must have followed it for a 1/2 mile or so before I lost site of it. Then I noticed the red and white parachute dragging the cone and body of the rocket around the expressway from the wind that was kicked up by the cars. Then the unimaginable happened...

A orange 1976 toyota celica came barreling down the road. I swear to god, the driver looked me right in the eye, looked back at the rocket, and made a beeline straight towards it. I watched in horror as the right front wheel drove right over the plastic payload bay. After the cars had passed, I walked over to my injured rocket, which was now just a mess of carboard tubing, some balsa wood, and a bloody flattened carcase of a newt encased in a polyetheline casket.

I never flew a newt again.

I'm not sure if this is high-res enough for you, but you might want to try Terra Server.

It seems to work fairly well for US locations, and not work well for other (Canadian) searches.

Or satellite pictures...

• Slashdot for first making me a sco-story addict, and then leaving me for hours, sometimes even days without sco story.
• ezines for reporting in favour of SCO, and thus spreading the slander
• US government, for not sending nukes to Lindon, Utah.
• SCO, for not sending me an invoice (I Want One Too!)
• Myself, for replying to an SCO-slashdot post.

BTW, Darl, I'm looking for a new job. Considering that I have no legal experience whatsoever, can think of loads of silly lawsuits in under 5 minutes (see above), I think I'll fit in perfectly with your legal team.

• Microsoft Terraserver.com is one of the big ones, selling images from lots of satellite sources. Originally a 1998 joint venture with MS, USGS and Compaq. Free lower-res stuff, subscription medium-res, high-res pictures for sale.
  
• SRI Digital Earth -
  Talk
  - DARPA project, some good stuff.
  
• LivingEarth.com and EarthImaging.com - more hi-res maps.
  
• Fourmilab.to Earth Viewer also does satellites, stars, etc. Slightly overworked due to Iraq conflict so using lower-resolution pictures.
  
• OpenGIS.org - Standards for geo-enabling web and other apps.
  

Some cities and jurisdictions are finding out that maybe not all cases and information should be easily searchable on the web.

Consider a divorce case. Names, addresses, financial records, employment records, etc, etc.
Home assesment value, taxes.
Now match that against the (sometimes) public bulding permits. Home floorplans and dimensions.

Armed with a little research from the comfort of his own home, a would be burgular or stalker could case the home of a recently divorced woman, figuring out vulnerable access points, when she's at work...a photo from Terraserver, and you can sometimes see fences and tree lines.
Do the job with no one the wiser.

Some things should be hard to get.

Maybe you can already.

Someone else mentioned that Windows Media Player prevented screen copy. The reason for this is video overlay. Most graphic cards support overlays as faster ways of writing streams of changing video frames to the display without worring about the actual window. If you turn graphic acceleration all the way down in WMP I believe it will play directly to the player window rather than overlay, thereby allowing a capture but most cards won't be able to keep up the same performance that way. I was on some site looking at satellite images a few months ago (I think TerraServer) and they gave me the option of smaller images, or nice big images with copy protection (which required a plugin download to see them, though still right in the browser). I tried to capture the images then using PrtScrn and got logos of the copy protection with no sat image. It seemed likely that the window showed the logo, then they used video overlay for the actual images. I wonder why makers of eBook readers don't use overlays in the same manner for this reason. I used the MS Reader awhile ago and it seemed to allow specific titles to allow/disallow printing, clipboard copy, and Save As functionality. If they also used overlays they would be much harder to defeat (though of course still not impossible). As it is, it would take less than an hour to automate PrtScrn, OCR/save, push keystrokes to change to next page. Images are nice, but MS Office XP includes nice OCR now so the tools are mostly at hand!

This seems fine and dandy and will help the authorities do what they are supposed to do in chase situations. However, I'm a bit surprised that even though it's claimed that recent Hollywood efforts are getting their hands on this, that it's similar to "the original Wescam developed in the early 1960's by a Canadian subsidiary of Westinghouse as a battlefield surveillance tool for the Canadian military".

That said, I wonder why it never made its way down to police sooner? Cost of maintenance, perhaps?

I do understand where the ACLU is coming from as regards the invasions of privacy. I believed we recently rehashed this over the debate on metal-detector technology in airports that would let clothing be seen through, or other such nonsense. Yet, I'm surprised no one has made that big a deal over Terra Server. Going on the resolutions they can get down to, you'd be hard pressed to hide much more than a naked sunbather in your backyard, and it's only a matter of time before satellite imaging will make even that impossible. Why the fuss over one and not the other?

Cost-free Internet-based images of Earth are available at Terraserver...

If Microsoft claims it doesn't know where all of the source code is stored (yeah, right), that's not a problem. The Marshals can seize the entire Redmond campus just as easily as they can seize a few server rooms.

So if we go to Terraserver and zoom in on the Redmond, WA area, we should see a line of monkeys carrying boxes of 5.25-inch floppies from the campus to Bill Gates's house?

If only Terraserver was realtime...

You can have some free images on terraserver or globexplorer
----

Here's an aerial shot to illustrate how arbitrary soveregnity is. Quick - what part of the above photo is an independent nation of long and undisputed standing, and what parts are just an ordinary city?

Okay, let's try another country. The narrow strip of coastal buildings in this photo is a centuries old (far older than Germany, to cite one example) nation of undisputed sovereignity.

For that matter - I can think of a dozen nations that are a single rifle shot from end to end. You'd have an interesting time explaining why this structure made of coral is an independent nation (more precisely, a disjointed major fragment of an ocean nation -- just as the Sealand photo in the parent post showed only one platform of Sealand)

National jurisidiction is arbitrary. Who will get mad if the UK invades Sealand? The UK courts , who have already ruled that the UK could not assert territoriality or jurisdiction over these platforms. (The British press would have a nice field day with the 'underdog' angle, too. It's funny how stuff like that weakens or topples administrations in parliamentary systems -- it's kind of like counting chad...)

While that would be cool, something of a similar nature (but even cooler) has been kicking around for a while, and already has just about all of the US - see if you can find your house:

http://www.terraserver.com/findaplace.asp

If you want to see what the US doesn't want you to see, you can always go to terraserver. My home isn't visible, but all the army bases are...

MS got copies of US Geological Survey maps and "1-meter" satellite photos and has scanned them and wrapped them in a slightly over-complicated website. Coverage is pretty good for most of the US, and even for other parts of the world (don't know if USGS is the data-source outside of the US). The survey maps are mostly circa 1981-1992, and the "1-meter" photos are ~ 1988-1996.

I put "1-meter" in quotes because the resolution of many of the shots seems to be worse than that. If you compare the above referenced image against the terraserver photo of the Washington Monument, it is obvious that terraserver's isn't as good. Though, judging by the scaffolding apparent on the monument, the image at NCSU is about 3 or so years more recent, and may benefit from superior "1-meter" technology.

Terraserver recently got "SPIN-2" satellite images, though I've never used them, because the interface seems to demand JavaScript and an image-viewing plugin (CleverContent) that I haven't bothered with getting/checking for security issues.

There are some holes in the satellite coverage for the US, and the places where USGS maps overlap don't always get the best treatment. Twice I've wanted to look at places that were covered up by the key from one map, when they could obviously have been displayed from an adjacent map. Still, for a free (beer) service it isn't so bad.

If anyone cares, I looked this up on Map Blast and Terra Server. What purpose this has, I don't know,but it was still kind of cool. I can't tell if the building is residential or commercial so who knows if it is a scam or running out of someone's bedroom.

Try these links... If I'm right then eventually, once you can get through to the TerraServer Verions, the M$ links should work too. I've put in 2 different versions of the M$ links to account for the slightly different query format.

Image 1 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 2 M$ Version (Slightl y twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 3 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 4 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 5 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version



You want me to come up with a *.sig now too!?!

Try these links... If I'm right then eventually, once you can get through to the TerraServer Verions, the M$ links should work too. I've put in 2 different versions of the M$ links to account for the slightly different query format.

Image 1 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 2 M$ Version (Slightl y twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 3 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 4 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 5 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version



You want me to come up with a *.sig now too!?!

Try these links... If I'm right then eventually, once you can get through to the TerraServer Verions, the M$ links should work too. I've put in 2 different versions of the M$ links to account for the slightly different query format.

Image 1 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 2 M$ Version (Slightl y twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 3 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 4 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 5 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version



You want me to come up with a *.sig now too!?!

Try these links... If I'm right then eventually, once you can get through to the TerraServer Verions, the M$ links should work too. I've put in 2 different versions of the M$ links to account for the slightly different query format.

Image 1 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 2 M$ Version (Slightl y twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 3 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 4 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 5 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version



You want me to come up with a *.sig now too!?!

Try these links... If I'm right then eventually, once you can get through to the TerraServer Verions, the M$ links should work too. I've put in 2 different versions of the M$ links to account for the slightly different query format.

Image 1 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 2 M$ Version (Slightl y twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 3 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 4 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version
Image 5 M$ Version (Slightly twisted) M$ Version TerraServer Version



You want me to come up with a *.sig now too!?!

You'll have better luck if you link directly to a specific image (at least I did). Try this instead: http://www.te rraserver.com/image.asp?S=11&T=100&X=361&Y=56&Z=13 79&W=2

Acutally, terraserver is hosted by a little company called arial images that has a fleet of planes and satelites that take pictures of stuff. the Microsoft Terraserver just worked out a contract with these terraserver fellas about three or four years ago to put a lot of images on their site to show off their databasing skills. Recently, these arial image people have taken those images off the microsoft terraserver and put it on to their terraserver where there is a _very_ slow plugin that you are forced to use.

Actually, the old microsoft terraserver used java but now these Aerial Images fellas restricted all their images and took most of their images off of the the microsoft terraserver, so now, on terraserver.com, they have this _very_ slow plug-in that you are forced to use. I have stopped using both terraservers because microsoft terraserver doesn't have any good images, and the regular terra server uses a deathly slow plugin, probably to keep people from saving the images for mirroring or printing them as usa today did.

Your argument is a good one. But, it would only be useful if we had accurate maps of Mars. GPS will only give your position relative to the satellites. With the current system, it then translates that to longitude and latitude. You still have to have a map of Earth with lat/long on it to tell you where you are.

The only maps of Mars that we have right now are made at something like 10 meter resolutions. Meaning that one pixel represents 10 meters. That is not very accurate. If you look at the satellite photography at www.terraserver.com you can see these maps along with 1 meter resolution maps.

Mars Global Surveyor is currently getting better pictures of Mars, but those pictures will not be processed for some time.

Think of it this way, we were trying to fly a probe MILLIONS of miles (with a radio delay of 6 minutes) and then land on a planet for which the only map we have represents houses as a single pixel. Not impossible but extremely hard.

Survey says: Nope, legal!

Redmond Cam is already here. The new evil empire gangs up with the old one!