It’s not truly “Google’s own,” but the internet giant will get exclusive use of the images for mapping purposes, according to Reuters:
GeoEye Inc said it successfully launched into space on Saturday its new GeoEye-1 satellite, which will provide the U.S. government, Google Earth users and others the highest-resolution commercial color satellite imagery on the market.
Of [...]

Posted September 8, 2008 by Casey
Categories: Dispatches, Technology. Tags: google, satellite, surveillance, tinfoil hats. Be the first one.

Aaron Swartz’s Bubble City, Chapter 8:
He sent the report to his superior and wandered off for a bit to dwell on the power he had as a faceless person deep inside an office park in Mountain View to know every detail of another person’s life. He wondered what it would be like if he came [...]

Posted March 27, 2008 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Dispatches, Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: absolute power, conspiracy theory, google, hegemony, real ultimate power, surveillance, tinfoil hats. One Comment.

Troy expressed both great amusement and trepidation in his message alerting me to Riya, a new photo sharing site:

I don’t know whether to say cool, or zool.

The tour explains that you upload photos, Riya identifies faces in your photos, then asks you to name them (or correct its guesses!). Then you get all your friends to join up and we can all search for everybody by people, location, and time. So say “hi” to Andrejs and Nora.

Posted March 22, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Photoblog, Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: anonymity, brave new world, face, face recognition, facial recognition, fear, identity, identity is reputation, idm, photo sharing, privacy, recognition, reputation, riya, six degrees, social software, spy, spying, Spytech, surveillance, tracking, zool. 4 Comments.

Engadget yesterday had a story about the Mobile Plate Hunter 900, a device that mounts on police cars and scans 500 to 800 license plates an hour. More details are in the Wired News story, where LA County police commander Sid Heal notes that the system is hands-off: “It doesn’t require the [officer] to do [...]

Posted June 21, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: LA county, license plate, license plate reader, license plates, mobile, pervasive, police, police car, police cruiser, police state, scanner, surveillance. 2 Comments.