As recent discussions show, open data is a huge topic also in the geoinformation sphere. I think the political importance of this movement cannot be stressed enough. Opendata.ch invites tomorrow [German/French], January 19, to its founding event in Bern, Switzerland. I’ll be there! Let me know, if you’d like to join. Continue reading Opendata.ch founding event
According to a presentation by two UK researchers at Where 2.0 conference, iOS4 devices constantly track and timestamp their location and dump that data into a file, which is shared with your desktop computer if you choose to backup your iPhone’s content. This presents a major potential for privacy breach. For some phones, there could … Continue reading iOS4 devices track and store their location
A new method developed by Wang et al. claims to be able to geolocate IP addresses much (they claim 50 times) more accurately than has been previously feasible. The new method uses a three-tier approach: 1) sending a data packet and measuring how long it takes to bounce back, indicating an imprecise distance; 2) doing the same with all institutions with known geolocation (for example, universities or businesses) within 200 km distance of the first guess and comparison of bounce-back-times to refine the estimated location; 3) doing a similar refinement to 2) at a finer resolution.
Continue reading “New method locates you within a few hundred metres”
By filing a legal suit against Deutsche Telekom German politician Malte Spitz (Green party) was able to obtain data recorded under the German preventive data retention act. He chose to publish the data which was collected in the timespan from August 2009 to February 2010 and encompassed exactly 35.831 individual records (Spitz’s phone checked for … Continue reading Geoprofiling using cellphone data (and some volunteered information)
