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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 about the viruses?
Hi! How are you?
I meet you at these coordinates in order to have your advice.
See you later! Thanks