An interesting use of UAVs/drones comes courtesy of SpatialSustain this week, where they claim that BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay, will use GPS-controlled drones in which to house their servers. The drones will float a few kilometres up in the air, thus evading law enforcement. Incredible.
ArcTechnica has an interesting piece on the way that LiDAR is impacting archaeology and – the normally technophobic – anthropology. The archaeologist interviewed even goes so far as to call it a paradigm, shift.
It’s nearly been 72 years since the 1940 US Census, and that means that the records will soon be released in full. For an idea of what the records will hold, as well as some of the uses they will be put to (the interesting bit), GIS Lounge have the skinny.
More and more companies are switching to Open Street Maps since Google announced that it will start charging for heavy API access. O’Reilly Radar have an interview with the co-founder of StreetEasy – one such website that has made the switch – talking about the benefits of open data vs proprietary.
Speaking of ‘open’ Henri Bergius has a post pimping a collection of essays that he contributed to, entitled Open Advice. It’s a free download and the subtitle – Free and Open Source Software: what we wish we had known when we started – kinda tells you what the collection focuses on. Well worth a look for anyone interested in walking the path of FOSS.
I don’t really like publishing two articles from the same blog in a single week, but you may have noticed that I sometimes do. This week is one of those weeks: O’Reilly has a really interesting piece on hidden data that’s generated about us, rather than by us – and the amount of it that we give away without even knowing it. Privacy has always been an important issue in spatial science, and with more and more people generating and publishing spatial data every day – thanks to the smartphone revolution – articles like this are as relevant to us as ever.
Finally, if you have a website that uses Google Maps, perhaps you’d be interested in integrating Google Earth, rather than Maps. If so, the Google Earth Blog has a post outlining a tool that makes it easy to add Google Earth presentations, including Street View slideshows.
