Web Photos That Reveal Secrets, Like Where You Live

Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived. , keep reading




The Web site ICanStalkU.com provides step-by-step instructions for disabling the photo geotagging function on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Palm devices.
A person’s location is also revealed while using services like Foursquare and Gowalla as well as when posting to Twitter from a GPS-enabled mobile device, but the geographical data is not hidden as it is when posting photos.

A person’s location is also revealed while using services like Foursquare and Gowalla as well as when posting to Twitter from a GPS-enabled mobile device, but the geographical data is not hidden as it is when posting photos.

A handful of academic researchers and independent Web security analysts, who call themselves “white hat hackers,” have been trying to raise awareness about geotags by releasing studies and giving presentations at technology get-togethers like the Hackers On Planet Earth, or Next HOPE, conference held last month in New York.

Their lectures and papers demonstrate the ubiquity of geotagged photos and videos on Web sites like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Craigslist, and how these photos can be used to identify a person’s home and haunts.

Many of the pictures show people’s children playing in or around their homes. Others reveal expensive cars, computers and flat-screen televisions. There are also pictures of people at their friends’ houses or at the Starbucks they visit each morning.

By downloading free browser plug-ins like the Exif Viewer for Firefox [url=http://opanda.co...xif for Internet Explorer anyone can pinpoint the location where the photo was taken and create a Google map.

Moreover, since multimedia sites like Twitter and YouTube have user-friendly application programming interfaces, or A.P.I.’s, someone with a little knowledge about writing computer code can create a program to search for geotagged photos in a systematic way. For example, they can search for those accompanied with text like “on vacation” or those taken in a specified neighborhood. , more .......







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Rise of the speed machines

Dr Oz Parchment gives a tour of the Iridis 3 supercomputer's server centre
In the frigid bowels of a nondescript building outside Southampton, twelve racks of blinking green lights mark the location of one of the fastest computers in the UK.
"It is basically the equivalent of four thousand traditional desktop computers all linked together," said Dr Oz Parchment, the university's IT infrastructure manager.
Iridis 3, as it is known, is capable of performing 72 trillion calculations per second (seventy-two teraflops), making it the fastest supercomputer to be exclusively owned and run by a UK university.
Since coming online in November of last year, the machine has been operating at more than 90% capacity, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
It is one of a growing number of high-performance machines around the UK....

Here’s a quick thought, among many, about why the Web can’t possibly be dead, as Wired boldly proclaims

Many of us use full-size personal computers or laptops at work, and unless workplaces discontinue this practice, the makers of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and other browsers I neglected to mention can all breathe a sigh of relief.
Wired’s main point seems to be that consumers are using apps more and more, and that the Web browser is becoming less important. This ties in, of course, to the increasing use of smartphones and the mobile Web. But when people are at work, they use browsers. Sure, they also use separate apps such as those for e-mail, Twitter, IM and perhaps even standalone RSS readers, which Wired mentioned. But the hundreds of millions of users of Facebook and Gmail and Yahoo, just to name a few indispensable sites, are logging onto them during work. And although some employees are increasingly mobile, we are not to the point where a majority of them are using iPads and tablets and smartphones — on which the “new” apps make the most sense — to do most of their work.
Also, the convenience and ease with which users can access the content available on the Internet via a browser hasn’t gone away — there need not be an app for all Web pages. Those of us who use apps on mobile phones know that some of them just don’t add much to the experience of browsing the originating site. In addition, the limited capacity of tablets and smartphones makes it impractical for users to have too many apps, or to constantly “push” content to their devices, as some apps do. Sometimes, it’s worth the extra wait of a few seconds to retrieve stuff using a good old-fashioned browser.
Still, Wired is right that apps are here, they’re real, some are excellent, and they’re here to stay .
In fact, Google is reportedly opening an app store in October. For now, it looks like an iTunes mostly for games, but other types of apps likely will be available, at least according to what Google showed off at its developers conference earlier this year. But take note: The app store’s name is supposed to be Chrome Web Store, which means it will be accessible through the browser

Facebook Launches ‘Check-In’ Service to Connect People in Real Space

Facebook announced a new Places product Wednesday evening that will let users check-in from a mobile device, see who is around them, let friends or the public know where they are, and find interesting, new places.
The announcement extends, yet again, the reach of the immensely popular social network, in hopes that the new service will convince its 500 million users to feed more information as they move around in the physical world.
The product is not unlike the popular Foursquare location-based service, and lets you “check-in” at a place and send a notification to your friends who are nearby. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Places has been in testing for a few months, and will be available to U.S. Facebook users starting Thursday.
Zuckerberg said he knew the product was ready when he was showing it off to his girlfriend at a restaurant in a town he didn’t usually go to. She noticed that some friends of theirs she hadn’t seen in a while were at a restaurant next door, and suggested they go say hello.
“It was when that moment happened, that serendipitous moment, that we knew we were ready to go,” Zuckerberg said......

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