How Spies Will Find You Through Your Pics

IARPA, the research body of the intelligence community, wants to know where you took your vacation:

"In an announcement for its new “Finder” program, the agency says that it is looking for ways to geolocate (a fancy word for “locate” that implies having coordinates for a place) images by extracting data from the images themselves and using this to make guesses about where they were taken.

More and more digital cameras today don’t just take pictures but also capture what is called metadata — often referred to as data about data — that can include everything from when the picture was taken to what kind of camera was used to where the it was taken. This metadata, often stored in a format called EXIF, can be used by different programs to understand different aspects of the image — and also by intelligence analysts to understand different aspects of the user who took it, and the people who are in it. Like who they are, what they are doing, and where and when they did it."

More: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/spies-find-you-through-pics/

Most of the metadata can be read already by anyone. Don't want to share this data with the world? Process your images through a photo-editing software before posting them online.

The sky yellow as brass

"The sky was yellow as brass" Erich Maria Remarque starts his Three Comrades (first sentence).

 

Summer exhaled its last breath. It's warm, so we decided to hike to this "lost" lake in the woods. To get there one must follow animal paths and use a GPS receiver. Hike in each direction took 3 hours. We found the lake. Tired, hot and thirsty we plunged into the warm shallow waters. We laughed and thought we knew what Champlain must have felt like - first white people to dip our feet in the pristine waters of an unnamed lake. Until something glistened just under the surface - a supermarket bag with four beer cans. Oh, well! Beer was nice and cold, so we drank it and went back home.