Life2go.net Get a life ...to go.

Are people becoming more security aware or have manufacturers simply started to ship WiFi base-stations with encryption enabled as default? All of the eight stations in ranger here by the market square in Töölöö, Helsinki, had encryption turned on - even the one named "default".

Good news from a security perspective. Bad news for those who would like to see cities covered in open hot-spots available to the passing laptop/pda user.

A DB-9 / DE-9 / RS232 connector spotted in an exposed steel pipe in a tram in central Helsinki. There used to be paper-ticket processing machines on top of those extended pipes.

I experienced my first denial-of-service (ddos or dos) attack today. Out of the blue I got a message on IRC saying "You have one day to change your nick". Later the same person said he wanted to use my nick name and if I did not give it to him (he could not use it as long as I was using it) he would "ddos me" so I would lose my internet connection and he would be able to take my name. I politely told him I had used the name whenever possible since 1995 and had no intention of handing it over to someone who threatened to ddos me.

So he attacked me. I lost my connection. He took my name.

It really was that simple for a teenager somewhere to shut out a random user from the entire net.

I had no internet connection for two hours and although I don't care that much about a nick name I did care that some teenager can threaten me and shut me down like that and get away with it. And what bothered me most of all, was that he is able to do this thanks to an Austrian company called Freakshells.com that provides a "bouncer" account behind which he can hide and brag to me about how he ddossed me and will do it again if I try to take any legal action against him.

I contacted freakshells, explained the situation, included my conversation with their customer and asked if they would let him continue to threaten me and ddos me from behind the facade they provide him. They told me I was "wasting my time" as they claimed it is almost impossible to prove a ddos attack and that I too should buy a bouncer account to hide my identity and survive such ddos attacks.

Now, that is an interesting business idea. They sell account that their users can hide behind to stay anonymous while threatening random internet users and commit crimes - and then the company offers the same service to the victims as the only means of protection from their abusive customers.

I see no other meaningful use for their service than to provide an environment for abusive and illegal activities. Under their "news" section they even mention that they now offer their customers a new virtual host to hide behind: "abuser.be".

I am sure they follow the letter of the law and would shut down a customer if forced to by law enforcement, but they are certainly not following the spirit of the law as they seem to do their best to protect these customers and turn a blind eye to their customers illegal activities for as long as they can.

"Together we can do it."

?

It's a construction company. They build apartment buildings. Trained professionals doing big stuff using heavy machinery. Do they expect me to participate? Are they going to leave something undone?

"No toilet? Oh, no, that's YOUR part - we're doing this TOGETHER."

What exactly are they referring to, "it" is a bit vague?

Are they trying to communicate an inability to perform alone? Big strong men with matching hardhats, what exactly do they need me for? Perhaps they have outsourced so much of their business that they simply can not do anything without outside participation anymore?

I would be a lot more reassured if they left out that first word and just wrote:

"We can do it."

Corporate slogans are silly. Watch and learn: www.digemo.fi.

Today Flickr officially got built in support for geotagging. This is my first attempt at using the new "drag and drop" geotagging feature in Flickr. I have hundreds of photos with coordinates in the EXIF header of the image, but Flickr does not recognize this - I really have to drag and drop every single one onto the map.

Once I have manually placed the photo on the map, the photo page gets an extra line:

"Taken near Helsínquia, Etelä-Suomi"

"Etelä-Suomi" is Finnish for "Southern-Finland" and I think "Helsínquia" is Portuguese for "Helsinki".

The Yahoo map has a much less detailed satellite photo of Helsinki than Google and no street level map at all, only the main highways around the city, where Google has a complete street level map of Helsinki including even the smallest alleys.

The geoblogging support in Flicker today is very similar to the one in Google Picasa, but Picasa has better maps, better satellite images and automatically recognizes coordinates inside images in the EXIF header.

update: Flickr is working on the GPS EXIF problem, but Sam Judson beat them to it an hour ago: GeoReTagr.
It reads the GPS EXIF coordinates from Flickr and puts them back in Flickrs own format. It worked for me.

One and a half year ago I visited Senegal. While sitting on the passenger side of a car driving trough Senegal's old capital St. Louis I switched my camera to video mode and shot a one minute video. I have always been more interested in still photography and my current D-SLR does not even have such a thing as video mode, so this is one of the few videos I have ever captured. Looking at this video now, I'm happy I made it and I am starting to wonder if I should do it a bit more often.

The reason I got back to this old video now is that Google included the "video" search feature on the main search page as a new feature and when searching for videos they offer a simple way to upload your own videos. I picked this video to try out how easy it is to upload videos to Google and to see the quality of the video once it has been uploaded. All in all, it was easy and quick to upload the video and the quality is decent - this is certainly a simple and cheap way to share holiday videos with frie

There are stickers on shopping windows all over Tallinn, Estonia, advertising free WiFi hotspots. This photo shows a sign about free WiFi in the cafeteria at the Stockmann department store. It is interesting to note that Stockmann's headquarters and main department store is in Helsinki and there they do not offer WiFi to their customers.

Yet another one day trip to neighbouring capital Tallinn, only 90 minutes away at this speed. The city is said to have a large number of free WiFi hotspots, at least compared to Helsinki and this will be my first vist to Tallinn wth a WiFi enabled phone so now I will have a chance to see for myself. At least 3G/UMTS is already available as I get closer to the harbour in Tallinn.

It seems my old GPS device can achieve greatly improved precision by simply switching on the "WAAS mode" in settings - even in Europe.

OK, we know that GPS works by receiving time stamps from different satellites and by comparing the delay in the signals from the different satellites it can calculate its distance to the different satellites and therefore its own position here on the ground.

But different atmospheric phenomenons can cause the radio signal to travel slightly faster or slower than usual, causing degraded accuracy. To compensate for this, there are observation stations around the world that analyzes the current error in the GPS system in that part of the world and then sends this information back to the satellites - the satellites then sends this "augmentation" information to all GPS receivers the same way that the normal GPS signal is sent. A compatible GPS device checks if there is augmentation information available for the area where the GPS device is, and if so, includes the augmentation data in its calculations. This is also known as "Differential GPS" or "Satellite-Based Augmentation Systems" (SBAS).

This brings us to the "compatible device" part.

In the US, this system has been in use since 2003 and is called "WAAS", or "Wide Area Augmentation System". Many ordinary GPS devices for consumers are WAAS compatible, including my Garmin Foretrex 101 which I bought in 2004. Usually, WAAS support is disabled and needs to be specifically switched on. My Garmin was in "Normal" mode and one of the alternatives was "WAAS mode". Most texts about WAAS states that it is available only in the US which is correct but misleading. Some texts also state that Europe has a "similar" system under development, known as "EGNOS" or "European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System".

As it turns out, EGNOS and WAAS are fully compatible and EGNOS is operational. So I switched to WAAS mode and sure enough, after a few minutes the ordinary "Accuracy" changed to "DIFF" to show that the device is in "differential GPS" mode and making use of augmentation data. Based on the satellite list, it seems to have received augmentation data from EGNOS satellite AOR-E (prn 120) listed as satellite 33.

I have been experimenting with geotagging for about two years now and finally got it to work on a large scale. One of the most promising software's I have tested have been RoboGEO which can add GPS coordinates to a batch of photos by writing the coordinates into the EXIF headers of the photos based on a tracklog from any GPS device. It compares the timestamps in the photos with the timestamps in the GPS log and picks the closest coordinates for inclusion in the EXIF headers. Since I usually wear a wrist GPS when travelling, this means I have logs with usable coordinates for a lot of my photos. Unfortunately, until the most resent version of RoboGEO, I was not able to get this to work properly. But now it does.

Too bad I can't batch-update already uploaded photos.

But there is a problem with geotagging at Flickr: geobloggers.com made it populare using tags and a "home made" integration of Yahoo's Flickr service and Google's Google Earth/Map - two rivals. It was kind of obvious this solution would not last nor could it become really mainstream. In fact, geobloggers.com does not work anymore, but the person behind it is now working for Yahoo and I am quite confident Yahoo/Flickr will have a end-to-end solution for geotagging photos eventually. But in the mean time, what is the most future proof way to do it today?

And of course Google is at it too with their webpicasa.google.com and the Picasa client integrates nicely with Google Earth and makes manual geotagging simple: you select an image in Picasa and a place using Google Earth, and when you click "geotag", the coordinates are added to the image.