Slashdot Mirror
Writing Messages In Empty Space With GPS
meiocyte writes: "This New Scientist story about leaving messages in empty space seems very cool. You upload a message (or perhaps a picture, audio clip, etc.), it gets tagged with your GPS coordinates, and then anyone else who goes there gets to see/hear it. Every GPS-resolvable parcel of empty space will have its own web site!" Combine this with user-forums, and restaurant ratings could take on a whole new dimension. Update: 01/20 23:28 GMT by T : Oops -- looks like I duped Michael. Sorry.
I don't like this at all... Currently, this sounds like a bucket of hype without the technical possibility of making a system like this actually work.
So, every parcel of space will have a website, eh? And where, pray tell, will these gajillions of websites be stored? Or, more likely, will each parcel of "space"--meaning its coordinates--be mapped to DNS? If so, this sounds just like the stupid idea a year or two ago of mapping peoples' phone numbers to DNS. (It's exactly the opposite of what you want to do. If you want to find a particular person's website, why not make use of the new .name TLD and use the person's full name?) Combine that with the current abuse of the DNS system, and the ongoing violations of its original design, and you have a big mess. (The ongoing violations are as follows: Every company or d00d out there gets the same domain name registered under .com, .net, .org, .this, .that, and whatever other .'s there are out there. The correct way to do this is by subdividing everything by two-letter country codes, as was originally intended, so that the address space won't get all jumbled up like it is now, thanks to the current mess.)
In other words, this sounds like just one more way to send SPAM. Oh well.