That demonstrably frivolous lawsuit filed by Jonathan Cobb back in February 2008, alleging that Google stole the idea of Google Sky from him? Dismissed. This just arived in my feed reader via the RSS feed tracking the case:
Cobb v. Google, Inc. et al Docket Report Updated 2008-08-01
MEMORANDUM OPINION, The Court GRANTS defendant’s motion to dismiss and DENIES plaintiff’s motion for declaratory judgment. Signed by Judge Richard J. Leon on 7/30/08. (kc) (Entered: 07/31/2008)
ORDER granting defendant’s Motion 43 to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction; denying plaintiff’s Motion 44 for Declaratory Judgment. ORDERED that judgment is entered for defendant. SO ORDERED. Signed by Judge Richard J. Leon on 7/30/08. (kc) (Entered: 07/31/2008)
For the first time since I’ve started looking, a high resolution satellite image of Jerusalem is available on the web. Until now, such imagery has not been available because of an inane pre-geoweb US law called the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, which prohibits US satellite operators like Digital Globe from selling imagery of Israel and the Palestinian Territories at resolutions higher than what is commercially available in the rest of the world (currently 2m per pixel). I’ve ranted about Kyl-Bingaman before.
Imagine my pleasant surprise to find Chris Pendleton blogging a new service by TerraPixel that lets you “patch” bits of Microsoft Virtual Earth where the imagery might be low-resolution of old, replacing it with your own imagery, or imagery provided by TerraPixel.
Chris points to TerraPixel’s demo, and specifically to the “Holy Patch” sample, which overlays a high resolution map of Jerusalem’s old city over Virtual Earth’s pixellated base layer (courtesy of Messrs. Kyl and Bingaman). Wonderful!
Interestingly, the image has some metadata stamped right on it:
That seems to point to an acquisition date of 1998 (alas Hebrew is not a script I’ve mustered), though this would jar with TerraPixel’s own description of the patch:
Also, I’m not so sure the high resolution imagery is 6 inches per per pixel. I’m guessing it’s more like 50cm per pixel.
Still, now that such imagery is in the wild, here’s hoping that this officially makes the Kyl-Bingaman amendment moot and that we can soon all enjoy high resolution shots of Ceasarea, Armageddon, Askelon, Masada, Bet She’an and Jericho.
What is it about Europeans that makes them so susceptible to populist arguments in favor of expectations of privacy in a public space? Sure, Google does not have the legal right to drive on private roads and photograph from there, as it appears to have done on two documented occasions in the US. That is a clear-cut case. In Europe, however, Street View is getting a steady onslaught of negative publicity, mainly instigated by populist newspapers, about the evils of taking photography in a public place and publishing it.
Critics say the site can be used by burglars planning escape routes from homes and by terrorists looking for military bases. The site has even been used by teenagers arranging unauthorised swimming parties in unoccupied homes.
I love the “even”, as if terrorism is bad enough, but unauthorised swimming parties are beyond the pale.
(None of the tabloids, of course, have picked up on the irony that their paparazzi constantly flout the privacy of their “marks” out in the public space, pictures of which they then sell to an eager readership now being urged to defend its right to privacy.)
“From a privacy viewpoint, we don’t welcome this activity,” Federal Commission spokesman Dietmar Mueller said in an interview today. “Yet we have no legal instance to challenge it — anyone can walk along a street with a camera.”
What a strange concept: Government officials complaining that a company is observing the law, but that they don’t like it anyway.
The right to privacy of an individual is not a absolute right — as by necessity it constrains the freedom of other individuals to document and record their surroundings. As a sometime photographer and journalist myself, I believe there should not be any expectations of privacy in public places (as opposed to private spaces and inside homes, though not in front of windows visible from public spaces). If you’re going to Disney World on a sick day or to a sleazy club instead of bowling, and I or Google accidentally take a snapshot of you and post it to Flickr or Street View, then that should be the end of it. The truth is out there — why smudge it?
On July 30, the Sri Lankan air force bombed what they allege is a Tamil Tiger training camp, and released the video. Bloggers (and the local media) have been quick to locate the spot on Google Earth, where you can see high resolution imagery taken from 2003, before structures on the location were built.
Here is a still from the military-supplied video. Click to see the YouTube video:
I went looking at Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s imagery to see if they might have more recent hi-res imagery, but both maxed out at 15 meters per pixel. It’s in places like these, not in cities, where I get impressed when there is sub-meter resolution, even if it’s from 2003. This is one more reason why globally Google Earth and Map’s uptake is so much higher than the competition.
It occurred to me just the other day that NOAA’s Eric Hackathorn, whom I had met last year at ISDE5, had then said that he was thinking of making a programmable virtual globe in Second Life. I fired off an email to him wondering if he’d ever followed up on that idea. Sure enough, he writes that late last year he and his game-developer wife (SL name) Zora Spoonhammer created “Sculpty Earth” which was then extensively reviewed by Wagner James Au in New World Notes. YouTube excerpt:
A clever piece of hacking projects a movie of recent global cloud map images onto a transparent array floating above the Earth, letting you follow cloud patterns.
But that wasn’t the end of the project. In the last few months the duo have created two more Earths, both works in progress. Below one of them you’ll find a Google Maps application projected onto a plane that lets you load KML files, and which is controlled by nearby buttons. I managed to load some of my own KML content, and navigate around, albeit clumsily.
And while you also can’t click on the map to navigate or interact with the KML, the important point to take home from this proof of concept is that visitors are engaging in social cartography — anything that my avatar pulls up, your avatar can see too in real time. SL developers Daden Limited used similar technology in their Second Life Google Maps, blogged here a few months ago.
The map also lets you get a geosearch going:
Sure enough, when I went looking on the virtual globe:
There are far more efficient ways of finding Cairo, of course, but that’s not the point — these are the first steps in radically new ways of navigating information.
Independently, I got an email from Magnus Zeisig where he writes that the interest in his recently reviewed Second Life map of Sweden had compelled him to experiment with making an entire virtual globe in Second Life. He’d also just found Eric and Zora’s Earth — his in comparison is smaller, but with vertical heights exaggerated 100-fold and with accurate bathymetry. And if you walk into the Earth’s center, you’ll see an exhibition he is building about different map projections.
All these Earths aren’t nearly as smooth as dedicated virtual globe applications, or even browser-based virtual globes. That’s because Second Life is a general-purpose 3D programmable environment — so you lose speed, but get versatility. And these Second Life globes are social — visitors share the same world-state — which in turn opens up interesting possibilities for teaching and science outreach to classrooms. It’s early days yet — and in the meantime, these virtual virtual globes can hold their own purely as works of art that play with our notions of scale and space.
Photosynth to Virtual Earth? Yesterday, we all read the post by Microsoft’s Chris Pendleton that Microsoft’s Photosynth photo geopositioning Live Labs research project had graduated to the Virtual Earth team, the implication being that we would soon see this “productized” inside Virtual Earth.
But by this morning, the link to the post went dead, and there is no more trace of the news in Chris’s archives. False alarm? Premature anouncement? Was it meant to be a secret?
Pity, as I was going to build a post around it about how it really is high time that Microsoft expends more resources on making its web services truly standards-based, i.e. platform neutral. Google Earth’s 3D web plugin is just a few months old and is only a month away from getting a Mac version. Virtual Earth 3D has been out for over a year and a half and still has no cross-platform support. Photosynth, should it be heading for mainstream browser support, really also needs to work on the Mac.
The reason is simple: Developers don’t want to use APIs to build consumer-oriented web services until the results work in a browser irrespective of operating system. Once Mac support arrives for the Google Earth plugin, that’s when its API will enter mainstream use by developers. Microsoft’s geoweb apps are ignoring the Mac minority, which is why they get comparatively less traction.
In his Geoweb 2008 keynote speech, Michael Jones mentioned that among the 1 billion online, there are “400 million Google Earth users”, and that this “constituency” is bigger than the number of Americans.
Time for a reality check. That number for “Google Earth users” can’t be unique users. Downloads, sure, but not users. Just think about it: Let’s even allow 1.4 billion online people in 2008; less than a quarter of them have access to broadband, according to Gartner. And among broadband users, businesses are over-represented — businesses where a program like Google Earth is less likely to be downloaded. To get to the total of 400 million users, every computer on the planet connected to broadband would have to have Google Earth installed, plus a whole lot of people sucking Earth through a 56kbps straw.
Whence the discrepancy? I’ve done my part, downloading Google Earth at least a few dozen times between different versions and successive machines from all sorts of different IP addresses. And likely so have you. This is not to take anything away from the fantastic uptake of Google Earth, not least in the zeitgeist of the world’s technology elites; but just as websites no longer advertise the number of “hits” on their site, isn’t it time for a more conservative number on Google Earth users? Surely Google Earth can concoct a unique hash number for each install so that Google can acquire data for unique visitors per month, just like top websites do? Why not then release that if advertising the popularity of Google Earth is important?
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.
