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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.
Great - we can get spammed on GPS as well... Just imagine someone like a soda manufacturer buying a stretch of highway for a month, for example. If you use GPS navigation in your car, you'll get incessant harping about how thirsty you are, and how that particular brand of soda apparently makes your life better in one way or another.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Yar ho ho, maybe i can use it to hide my Mp3/divx booty! X marks the spot. Kinda wierd how history repeats itself (in a way)
Carpe meam simiam!
Ugh, there are some places where i would really rather not have a video clip of previous activities, imagine getting a new room at uni halls or a hotel or something... eyugggh.
I can see it now... Random baseball diamonds around the world:
All your base are belong to us..
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
You think the web is already litigious? Wait until you see companies claiming they "own" the rights to certain property.
Like Disneyowning all comment space in/around/driving to Disneyland and using that to squelch any warnings about, say, a child getting his foot caught in a ride.
And food-lovers could post messages outside a restaurant door, giving subsequent visitors an instant endorsement-or a warning to take their custom elsewhere.
Does anyone really think this has a chance? Or isn't it more likely the restaurant owner will sue anyone who posts disparaging messages for libel and slander while at the same time posting 1000 comments extolling the virtues of the food.
The FBI will scream bloody murder about terrorists arranging targets or drug dealers arranding drop off points.
As useful as this idea is, I can't see any possiblility of it existing in the US of A. After all, the Internet is non-coporial and there are still giant bitch-slap fights over companies thinking that some completely unrelated (but similarly named) website in on their turf, when the Internet is actually linked with turf it'll open up Pandora's legal retainer.
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
And like most technologies, the first mainstream use will quickly turn into spam.
Just like searching for "Middle East" will get you pr0n, you'll get ads for restaurants 30 miles away.
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Today's Top Deals
I saw this a month or so ago, and remember thinking at the time that I was worried about the S/N ratio of this 'empty space' around me ...
.. *grin*
I'd hate to walk around every corner and get an X10 Popup
Groove Salad -- a nicely chilled plate of ambient grooves and beats.
Pinning messages in mid-air, using the location's Global Positioning System (GPS) reference, could become the next craze in communications. The messages are not actually kept in the air: they're stored on an Internet page. But that page's Web address is linked to coordinates on the Earth's surface, rather than a person or organisation. As you move about, a GPS receiver in your mobile phone or PDA will check to see if a message has been posted on the website for that particular spot.
I don't see why we would want to force the Internet into the reality sphere.
Of course, GPS scavenger hunts are fun, but what would this be used for?
Advertisements.
It's not useful for community-rating or for espionage because everything there is not in the air, but on the Internet. And all GPS data goes through a small network of satellites, so if you stop in the middle of a playground in Bethesda, MD. the spies may not see your message, but they know you stopped there if they have access to GPS data, or at least know the last coordinates you took.
So what it's useful for is e-biz and advertising. I don't think its worth exchanging our privacy for this advertising. I don't want everyone to have to carry a GPS phone, which has so many other security caveats, in order to plug into a new layer of advertising.
Goat sex free since 2001
int lat = 0;
int long = 0;
while(1) {
for(lat = 0; lat < 360; lat++) {
for(long = 0; long < 360; long++) {
GPS_printf(lat, long, "ALL YOUR COORDINATES ARE BELONG TO US!!!\n");
}
}
}
The idea was that students could tag places as they saw fit.
You can read more about the projects here, and here.
very interesting. You could just use your GPS phone while sitting at your computer in order to store data. Sure, anyone else who was in the same room with a GPS could access it, but it would be perfect for stuff like MP3s. Of course, there are lots of "storage for ads" style sites already on the net, but i wonder if the people behind this have already considered whether or not this is the kind of service they want to offer.
In todays world, any technological service provider must consider not only how they want it to be used, but the myriad other ways that people might think of to use it.
lysergically yours
..if most people were intelligent and responsible, but personally I don't feel like accessing it at some point in the woods during a camping trip and seeing that someone took a shit where I'm pitching my tent.
I will basically degenerate into graffiti that needs no physical object to exist, "I wuz here" messages written in empty space.
Still a cool idea though.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Imagine the police attaching one to the car of a suspect. Technology providing yet another way for our rights to be violated.
They've been bugging cars for years. When was the last time you, as an innocent person, checked under your car for a bug with a 5 mile radius, allowing tracking wherever you are.
Of course the criminals will check...
More worrying is every object you own will have a gps in, no doubt to elp locating when it gets stolen. Got a watch? it has a bug in. Pen? Phone? Beer bottle? It'd be "enemy of the state", but for real.
Along with every bit of digital information you own tagged, the only freedom you'll have is that of your mind. And how long will that last?
Kilroy was here?
I remember seeing this about a month back. A repeat, perhaps? If you can find it, please reply and post!
Everything is mainstream now.
This is true. The most travelled parts of the new web would be the most travelled parts of the world. I can think of a million and one random fun uses for this. For example, going and sitting under my favorite tree in the City Park and composing poetry, then just leaving it there. Or imagine someone comes up with something really interesting, one of those catch everyone's attention for a few seconds things(like All-Your-Base). Then they post it somewhere, like on the sidewalk of the main street in their city. Within half an hour, there are dozens of people trying to cram within a few meters of this spot to check it out. Then some clever person reposts it a few blocks over, and so on...
lysergically yours
People aren't "writing messages" into the GPS system (I'm still astounded at how many people totally misunderstand GPS. Almost everyone who sees my GPS asks me what the `subscription' to it costs, or if I'm concerned that they're "tracking" me: People don't understand that GPS, as a base technology, is completely passive and is just the triangulation [What is it called when it's among 12 points?] of a ping from 12 points). Basically you could do something like this by making a website that took longitude/latitude, and you find the closest record to their point and send it as the response: It's neither brilliant, nor amazing, but it is an obvious merging of technologies, and it's localizing the net (which is a fantastic thing not only for the user experience, but also truly for advertising).
Yeah, well for this to work, your cell-phone/GPS would have to report your location to a central point. I know of quite some people who would love THAT!
Not for me, thank you, I'd rather keep my privacy.
Nothing really new here, except for tying the information into a web server rather than a local DB.
The concept certainly has its uses. For example, an aviation GPS system linked to a digital elevation model of the terrain will warn you if you're currently flying at an altitude lower than some of the rocks in the area. That can be helpful. Ditto for warning about restricted airspace, or dangerous areas while backpacking or boating (eg old mine shafts, possible dangerous concentrations of volcanic gasses, old toxic waste dumps, etc, etc.)
The web connection allows for dynamic updating of the data, which is cool, it also means you don't need to carry the whole database around with you.
Of course the advertising/spam aspect is a real down side. And just wait till they start building the stuff into everything: do you really want your digital camera telling you there's a Kodak Picture Point coming up?
-- Alastair
Here's another thought:
.GPS top level domain? Will all of the these locational web sites be browsable through the web as we know it?
If the way that this works is that a "web page" is being created on HP(or whoever) servers for each spot the first time someone posts there. This "new" web is basically just an extension of the old web. Will we end up with a new
Basically, if i want to know what people are saying about my favorite restaurant/movie theatre/porno shop/whatever, do i have to actually go there or can i just plug the latitude and longitude into my web browser while sitting at home?
lysergically yours
That should be:
for(lat = -90; lat 90; lat++) {
I'll excuse the longitude, although I'd suggest -180 to 180.
So now when we wander over pristine territory we can get inundated with "first post" messages from the usual cretins. At least they'll be wandering around the planet with GPS units and will have less time to infest slashdot. Maybe we can look forward to the occasional 'first post' adventurer getting eaten by a wild animal.
Whenever I see an ad pop up in front of me, I'll just whip out my faithful mirror, and send the beam back to its source, thereby destroying the nasty sattelite that created the spam.
Why don't we have an ipv6 subnet that is allocated for the purpose of GPS-coordinate based 'websites'?
Ever need an online dictionary?
GPS has an accuracy of around ~5 feet so in order to ensure that a message was delivered to any particular spot, one would need to broadcast the message for a radius of 5 ft around the destination spot. This means that at most, messages would have to have a 5 ft buffer. In order to make it give atleast, a 50-50 chance of encounter the message within the buffer space, the message would need to be broadcast for a space with a radius of about 12.5 ft. Add the 5 ft buffer and you end up with a circle with a diameter of 35 ft.
So, I don't think you'll see a new message every couple feet. 35ft blocks are pretty big, and statistically, that would still only give you a 50-50 chance of actually hearing the message.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Think about it:
All postings to this GPS system get moderated (and then the moderations get meta-moderated of course). The higher a message is modded, the higher priority it is, or perhaps the more space it occupies.
Your phone company might offer one as a premie for use with the phone. Of course it would likely have all of the restrictions that a phone company would impose (basically no content but for hotlinks to merchants and a few public services websites.)
Your local mainstream and alternative papers might offer their own with reviews and schedules and of course links. Stand in front of a bus stop and see its schedule, wander in front of a theater and see the show times and buy them with a click. Walk into a store and you can look up their advert or just get dumped to their website (or whoever paid for those coordinates on that database.)
Business and schools would use these to tag their own space. There'd likely be an IS database with notes on the hardware closet one is next to, directions for following a cable run through the building. University students would doubtless have their own databases with tips for which corners are good for sex and that the pizza in that cafe is rumored to have rat bits.
Credit cards would likely love these. Use Amex and you'd have access to the Amex database listing only merchants who take their cards and likely a copy of the Zagats guide or something.
Sure lots of graffiti could be a problem in some public databases, as with intrusive or inappropriate advertising. That's why I expect to see multiple databases with some sort of pruning or content enforcement mechanism (heck, /. moderation for tags.) The same as the web the useful ones would flourish, the others wither away, and need to find a funding source.
We've already seen something like this for the web. I've lost track of their names but a few years ago there was a spate of plugins that would allow folks to annotate webpages. If you had BrandA plugin when you went to a webpage with a note "attached" it could appear superimposed. They weren't actually on the webpage but served from the plugin's host database and left by other visitors. There was much outcry but what really killed the whole thing was the graffiti.
However I expect that there are ways around the graffiti problem (paying folks to keep the database clean or even moderation, and of course commercial ones) and we could see space tagging work be a breakthrough product for phones.
My own list of dream apps:
- Restaurant reviews from the local papers
- Traffic news relevant to my location
- Public transit schedules from where I'm standing or the nearest station/stop with estimated times & delay notification
- Find the nearest ATM on my network
- Browse the website of the store I'm in and easily jump to their competition down the street's website
- Advertise my need for a cab to my location and see who shows up first
- Maintain a list of personal notes attached to places: Where we first kissed, the salesperson I liked here was "Sue" etc.
- Share notes with my friends & family: The chocolate mousse in this place is gelatinous...
- Stand outside a bar or sit on a train and look up if anyone I like has listed themselves as being nearby (by their choice on our circle-of-friends tagsite.)
Again, these wouldn't all be in big public databases but in a variety, some general public others subscription and some private.I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Now you can get black market stuff/drugs without halving to visit a dealer or them halving to know you. You walk arround with your cell phone (perpaid for privacy, of course, and with it's own stash of digital cash) When you get near the drug drop, it will indicate you are in a buying area and will allow you to put your digital cash in escro, upon payment you will get detailed instructions of how to get the stash and you will be prompted to release escro upon inspection.
For insurance measure, the stash could be connected to an acid/poison/ink discharge device triggered by it's own cellphone that would destroy the commodity if not approved.
Just a thought.
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?)
How about because two different people can have the same name, while no two people can have the same phone number? If you use names then you're just asking for domain wars all over again. This is, I think, one of the biggest failings of the Domain Name System with respect to the modern Internet: no two people or organizations can have the same name, at least and get equal recognition. Especially now that we have Google, I don't really see much of a problem with switching back to a numbered system (maybe not IP addresses, since you can't move those around, but some similar system with arbitrarily assigned numbers). After all, telephone books served us quite well back in the day...
Maybe that should be a new feature of slashcode. An automatic searcher thingy that would look for similiar articles and warn the editor that is a similiar article and allow them to view it. It would search on URL's keywords and title.
why not implement a system like everything2 + gps?
Check out confluence.org, where people can post photos and descriptions of every long. lat. combination on the globe.
All this person is doing is presenting an opposing viewpoint. Are moderators really so one-dimensional that, in their own little candy-coated world, there isn't anything bad about attaching messages to GPS locations? Seriously, there's the potential for this technology to be really cool, but, like JanneM said, there's also the possibility of it being misused, or used for purposes other than what some of us would like (such as advertising.) Are moderators so stupid as to consider this opposing viewpoint "Flamebait"? Are we all supposed to blow our load in the comments to this (and every other) story about how neat-o keen this tech is, and squash all opposing viewpoints, no matter how cogent the argument?
Wait, yes, we are. Slashdot needs two (and only two) moderation categories: +1 Groupthink, and -1 Thoughtcrime.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
GPS Can resolve altitude; but the accuracy for altitude is considerably less than for lat/long.
Typically with a GPS you can get 10meters accuracy, but the accuracy for altitude is around 25 meters.
People here assuming the accuracy is higher than 10 meters (lets assume a 10meters sphere just to make things simply) are woefully mistaken. Even with systems like WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) the accuracy can be increased substantially, to about a 3meter sphere; but it doesn't work very well on the ground as the geosynchronous satelites used are near the horizon. Good for aviation though. (Which is the intent).
Mmmm, yes, not moderation, but a peer web of trust. I don't think it's feasable for this type of project with current technology, but it seems to work great (on paper) for the P2P IM client I'm working on. Basically you have a list of friends and their public keys. The software validates the message/presence of the other user by key alone. You can keep a local list of "friends" with levels of trust.
funny munging
The cafeine laden air was then pierced by a cry, "lets invent the dorkiest, nerdiest hobby ever and use slashdot to persuade people to do it!".
Their first idea was to have people stand at airports and train stations taking the numbers of the trains as they pass. Then someone did a search on Google (which runs Linux) and found that 'trainspoting' has been thought of already, they even found a Web site giving advice on the best model of parker to wear while doing it.
The GPS drawing idea was the result. $3 Billion dollars of orbiting infrastructure and they use it to make an etch-a-sketch.
The more time people who do that kind of thing can be persuaded to do that kind of thinginstead of finding members of the opposite sex and procreating the happier I feel about the future of the world.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
What we need is a moderation system for shitty drivers (i.e. the 90 year blind, crippled, and deaf paraplegic who drives a "boat" from the 70's - or fuckin teenie-boppers on cell phones. . )
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I mean, sure, it may have application somewhere...
but is everyone going to have a PDA with a full time net connection & GPS, as well as audio/video capability? Because until we do, this is hype.
And even then.. how hard is this? IF said device exists.. this is TRIVIAL. THey make it sound like 'new technology. It's not new.. it's OBVIOUS
I'm sure someone has patented this great idea too.
What about the viruses?
Hi! How are you?
I meet you at these coordinates in order to have your advice.
See you later! Thanks
"I farted here, 4:37pm CST, 11/06/02...enjoy!"
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
More interesting perhaps are location-dependent messages sent out by beacons that transmit information (via Bluetooth or IR) locally--you really have to be physically there to receive the information. And those kinds of systems actually happen to be a little easier to deploy, since handhelds already have IR (and soon Bluetooth) built-in, while GPS is still an expensive option.
Great way of leaving dirty jokes in public bathrooms