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Links: Italy censorship obfuscation, iPhoto & GPS, still no Atlantis

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  • Italy censorship watch: The eagle-eyed Michael Unterleitner writes in to point out a blatant case of censorship obfuscation — where censors try to hide that they are censoring imagery by replacing real imagery with fake imagery, instead of just pixellating. The huge airbase to the south of Aviano Italy is clearly shown in Google Earth/Maps, which uses DigitalGlobe satellite imagery:

    geaviano.jpg

    The same exact view in Microsoft Virtual Earth, which uses aerial imagery from the provider TerraItaly:

    veaviano.jpg

    Note how the end of the runway sticks out at the bottom left of both images, indicating that no, the TerraItaly imagery is not just old imagery from before a runway was built. So: How can we possibly trust anything else by TerraItaly if any field of theirs could be fake? Who could possibly want to buy any of their imagery?

  • iPhoto & GPS: Craig Stanton, maker of the very useful Geotagger Mac application, has been rooting around in the innards of the latest iPhoto, checking out how the new Places feature works. He’s discovered something very interesting in the application’s database: Evidence that Apple has been working on a GPS tracking feature:

    The tables are called SqGpsTracks and GpsTracksEventsJoin. What this tells me is that Apple were working on the ability to link a GPS track with an iPhoto event for people that may have a GPS Datalogger and a camera as separate devices. iPhoto would then be able to match up the time a photo was taken with the GPS log and work out where the photo was taken.

  • No Atlantis (officially): The Press Association has a Google spokeswoman confirming the obvious. I guess the silver lining is that plenty of laymen and women got educated about bathymetry as a result of this story.
  • NASA publishes a US carbon dioxide KML layer: NASA publishes a US carbon dioxide KML layer which is also viewable as a very complete browser-embedded Google Earth tool.
  • Virtual Philadelphia: An incredibly high-detail rendition of Philadelphia, based on “gigabytes of aerial photos, street images, laser scans and geodetic measurements.” Windows only, though. (Via Digital Urban)
  • Augmented reality proof of concept: I’ve been wanting to try this out before reporting on it, but just haven’t found the time. More at Google Earth Blog and Digital Urban.
  • Sensor network data aggregator tool: Oceanic sensor network guru Jeremy Cothran writes:

    Wanted to relay that I’ve been experimenting with VMware and the VMware player and have created a virtual instance/image/appliance of the ‘Xenia’ development and associated scripts and database (xeniavm).

    The 1.5 GB rar-compressed (6 GB uncompressed) VMware image/appliance is available for download.

    This vmware image was developed on top of the FOSS geospatial VMware image (geostatistics package which includes ‘R’) available here (appliance description) – thanks to Ricardo Pinho.

    While the Xenia scripts do not directly utilize/interact those included applications in the gisvm image at this time, I thought they represent the best existing collection of FOSS geospatial software for future development.

    I’ve created wiki documentation relating to the vmware instance with the starting link here.

    The documentation details some getting started info and how to add your own imported data files formatted as ObsKML and get the immediate benefit of your observation data aggregated, restyled and reformatted into a variety of formats and services listed below.

    * Google Earth/Maps, Latest ObsKML, Styled KML
    * time-series graphs
    * GeoRSS
    * html table styling
    * convert from ObsKML to other formats (CSV,shapefile)
    * Data source files – zipped ObsKML and SQL
    * Latest 3 day database and julian weekly archive databases
    * DIF SOS
    * Flow/Feed status and notification

    Anyone interested in providing feedback or contributions(development or data) regarding the image/development please contact me.

3 thoughts on “Links: Italy censorship obfuscation, iPhoto & GPS, still no Atlantis”

  1. The virtual Philadelphia has been around for a number of years now. In a previous job, we used a small portion of the database in our simulators. the polygonal count was massive due to the use of lidar. We met with the Israeli’s that are building this DB and they had some interesting stuff other than Philly.

    The Urban Simulation Team our of UCLA does similar things as well.

    http://www.ust.ucla.edu/ustweb/ust.html

  3. Aviano base, in Italy, is a NATO base used by US Air Force. sikiş It was one of the military airports on Italian soil used for the Serbia/Jugoslavia bombings in 1995 and 1999

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