[wsfii-discuss] OpenGeoData-related comments from LWN

Thu Sep 29 17:56:39 UTC 2005

That's pretty sweet. I once thought of making a website which tracks the
police. A sort of watching the watchers who are watching you. For example
many US law enforcement agencies are required to make the blotter (log of
incidents) publicly available. There is some amazing things you can do with
this. For instance, especially if you can get the data in digital format and
parse it, one can create a geographical map with statistics information
based on correlating the street intersection with the census database, in
the US I used TIGER. This turns the street into a Lat/Long suitable for
plotting, recording, or feeding into your GPS. If you get enough people with
GPS enabled laptops and open it to the public with the use of even cell
phone cameras and SMS it becomes logistically infeasible for the police to
counter this public intelligence. You log where you see police and when and
match it with the database. This would sort of keep in check any sort of
corruption. Then you can attach an ogg vorbis encoder to a police band
scanner and later chop up all the audio based on the time and store it in
the database. This would proove invaluable both to law enforcement in being
able to track trends. For instance I found once a sequential linear address
progression in breakins in an airport warehouse section.

Using open wireless networks we create the fear panopticon society of
science fiction novels where common deceny is enforced by the sheer
likelihood of one being recorded in the act. This is slightly on the lunatic
fringe, as Bruce Schneier once said @ defcon, but I think it's something
that would benefit all. It's obviously a double edged sword. But the
implications are that the governments and powerful companies already are
tapping into the abundance of data available at all times for their
purposes. It's time to give the populace some means to tap into the global
information network freely with supplies cheaply acquired.

</rant>

On 9/29/05, Mamading Ceesay <mamading at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Was reading Linux Weekly News and saw the following comments on an
> article:
>
> Some additions/comments
> (Posted Sep 22, 2005 10:36 UTC (Thu) by subscriber laf0rge) (Post reply)
>
> Please see the OpenTom project for TomTom GO navigation systems.
> TomTom has been very helpful in releasing all kernel code under GPL
> (there even is 100% free SD-Card support). They even released pinouts
> of the connectors, etc.
> <snip>
>
> Some additions/comments
> (Posted Sep 22, 2005 13:10 UTC (Thu) by subscriber wookey) (Post reply)
>
> Indeed. Tom Tom have been remarkably enlightened as companies
> approached by GPLviolations.org go. They were smart enough to employ
> (some of) the open tom hackers to help with their kernel 2.6 port for
> example.
>
> The big potential for devices like this is to help collect input data
> for open geospatial data projects like openstreetmap.org<http://openstreetmap.org>.
> If some of
> the world's TomToms have software which makes it easy to collect,
> annotate and upload track information then we can make fairly complete
> road-map datasets remarkably quickly.
>
> This stuff will no doubt be discussed at the World Free Information
> Infrastructure Conference on 5th/6th October in London.
>
> On the newer TomToms with flash drives in them you have enormous
> potential for making cool systems which play music and movies, and log
> tracks, as well as doingyour navigation. Build systems like Open
> Embedded and Embedded Debian should make it easier to knock together
> small-enough systems using standard components for relatively powerful
> devices like this. I'd encourage anyone with an interest in the
> potential to help out wherever they can.
>
> Some additions/comments
> (Posted Sep 22, 2005 13:25 UTC (Thu) by subscriber wookey) (Post reply)
>
> That should have been 1st/2nd of October for the conference. Apologies
> for my brain-rot.
>
> End of excerpt from http://lwn.net/Articles/152628/#Comments
>
> --
> Mamading Ceesay
>
> "Isn't a state that keeps files on innocent persons a police state?"
> -- David Mery - Innocent In London http://gizmonaut.net/bits/suspect.html
>
> _______________________________________________
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> wsfii-discuss at lists.okfn.org
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>
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