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US NAVY Sonar/Lidar Editing Software Released To the World
New submitter PFMABE writes The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) has spent 16 years developing the Pure File Magic Area Based Editor (PFMABE) software suite to edit the huge volumes of lidar and sonar data they collect every year. In accordance with 17 USC 105, copyright protection is not available to any work of the US government. Originally developed to run on RedHat OS with network distributed storage, it has been migrated to Windows 7. This software, and accompanying source code (Win & Linux), has been released to the public domain at pfmabe.software, free for download with registration.
This post was submitted by a company looking to make money by selling training to use the software.
Looks like the official distribution page is http://shoals.sam.usace.army.mil/PFMABE.aspx
That should paste into most torrent clients, watch for CR/LFs though.
Please help metamoderate.
What can you do with it besides edit lidar and sonar information? Does it have some sort of big data application?
/ducks [ Wait there's another pun here ]
Interested parties should also check out MB-System; it's GPL and NSF
funded. If you are familiar with GMT mapping tools this will be right
up your alley. Supposidly there's a Windows build using Cygwin, but with
datasets this large why would you want to?
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/r...
It is ainly focused on multibeam bathymetry but it despite the name it does
sidescan sonar processing too. It's not set up for LiDAR but its scripts
for dealing with massive point clouds could be adaptable.
Editing Lidar data and binning surfaces seems useful to all sorts of things Lidary, not just the underwater world. If this software can handle large data sets than it could be useful in detecting and tagging objects in a terrestrial scan. Scan large areas, add a database, and this becomes an open source "big data" Lidar tool.
If this software can't handle large data sets, then who cares beside Sponge Bob, PhD?
Annoying that this source code has been released in this way. But it is open source as public domain, which mean open season on the code base. If it is worth a damn, I'm sure someone will distribute as a proper open source project soon enough.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
You just know that the NSA has put a shit load spyware in that software!!
Open source at that.... Well, if the NSA is releasing open source spyware, I'm sure it will get exposed with more than just idle speculation soon enough. Certainly the kind of thing that the myriad of parties trying to untangle NSA mischief would be interested in.
Somehow I doubt the NSA would do this. They have a tendency to take without giving back to the community.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
The software is public domain by the US government. All it take is one temporary email account and github to bypass registration nonsense.
Hydrograpic scanning seems a very narrow field, likely populated by people already knowing how to this software (or software they wrote themselves). If this company thinks they are going to make money training, then they probably aren't going to make very much money.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
Anything produced by the US government is public domain. It's written into their copyright law: The government cannot create anything with a copyright restriction. Whatever it produces is for the public good, not for profit.
There are loopholes, though. This only applies to things directly produced by government - it doesn't apply to contractors working on behalf of the government, anything they produce is still restricted by copyright. It also doesn't require the government release things for free - there are some situations where they have 'public domain' material, but it's only available to those who pay an access fee and agree not to redistribute it to others.
Open source at that.... Well, if the NSA is releasing open source spyware, I'm sure it will get exposed with more than just idle speculation soon enough.
That is idle speculation as well. Never blindly trust Linus' Law, I though we learned that lesson already!
The US Navy PFMABE program released here contains a lot of code, it's not that obvious that anyone will bother reading through the complete code.
Passive sonar used on submarines is exactly how surface ships are detected.
Maryland State Motto: If you can dream it, we can tax it.
I was about to say the same think. I think it is more universal than the Navy though as I have never served and learned it a long time ago. I suppose they had to clean it up so niave civilians didn't get the wrong idea about their clean cut a All American boy, and now gals, in uniform .
Swearing! Smoking! Tattoos! Eeeek! ;)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
But it can be restricted due to National Security (TM) concerns :)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
> Anything produced by the US government is public domain.
That is... not even wrong. If you think it has any tie to truth, go get me the addresses and salary information of all NSA personnel, and the list of the home addresses of the staff at Guantanamo Bay. It has to exist, right? Someone send them paychecks, right?
Even NIH funded work, which is publicly available, is not "public domain". Of course it has copyrights on it to prevent editing a few wards, falsifying the document, and republishing it with fake data. And oh, yes, the "public" work done under NIH for electronics and biochemistry? A great deal is patentable, but even protective patents are subtly prohibited by NIH. Why? So that it never blocks a private patent, even if the private patent is a direct replica of the NIH funded work from a decade previously. I know, I had 3 patentable projects with NIH for which I offered to pay for the patent lawyer and patent applications out of my own salary,partly to get the patents on my resume and partly to get them in the public domain and protected from poaching, and they wouldn't let me do it.
Sadly, one of them got poached and used against me. I had one *hell* of a time challenging a fraudulent patent when some private manufacturer tried to inflict it on my research later, NIH and former research colleagues were very reluctant to produce relevant documents, they thought I should just settle. Fortunately, I was a paranoid bastard and had kept copies of my original letters with a patent attorney, which predated their work by a decade and put several of their other patents at risk. I wanted *all* of their patents invalidated, and a big red "uses literature search to steal ideas" stamp used on every patent application from them.
They finally dropped their fraudulent cases, and I was.... discouraged from retribution. I'd have lost my funding, under the guise of "why aren't you publishing instead of pursuing this patent nonsense"? It wasted a lot of my time and money, which I don't have much of because I do research. And it slowed down my work for a *year*, which was much more expensive than helping me get the damn defensive patents in the first place. And it happens *all the time* in long running research projects.
Why is a American submarine shooting an Russian torpedo will be one the last things hear after useing this to seek out of the med.
Most stupid comment ever. If you expect to effectively propoagate spyware, you don't pick a narrow and very specialized piece of software as a vector.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Unless the goal/userbase of the spyware is very specific to an industry.
anyone will bother reading through the complete code.
People don't really 'read' through code to find exploits anymore. There are some capable analysis tools that do most of the grunt work.
Have gnu, will travel.
In that case open source isn't needed either.
The version on pfmabe.software was updated over the weekend (v6.4.0.15) and is being actively maintained and improved. The one on the shoals website is over 3 years old and is missing a great deal of functionality. Nor is it updated/maintained, nor is it likely to be. PFMABE Software was founded to help those users, institutions, governments who wish to use the freely available software. There are other opportunities and other software packages available. The choice is yours.
In that case open source isn't needed either.
How will you know that the binary you are running came from the source you examined?
Have gnu, will travel.
If I examined the source, I wouldn't need the binary analysis tools.
Point taken. SELinux is kinda cool.
But the NSA certainly doesn't open source spyware. And they don't slip spyware into open source code. The NSA tends to operate here bit more subtly when they want to exploit opensource - like promoting flawed encryption that only a handful of people can actually figure out.
And it is very rare that the NSA exposing security flaws they find in open source, even when they know criminal are exploiting the same flaws. Not exactly acting in the public interest.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
Static analysis tools generally like to have the source.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
I'm guessing the NSA is employing trolls these days. Just another in a long line of tactics borrowed from Russian dictators...
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
I thought he was talking about dynamic analysis tools, but if not, then you are correct.