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Message Digest
Volume 28 : Issue 95 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: The Officer Who Posted Too Much on MySpace
Highest crime rate in L.A.? No, just an LAPD map glitch
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Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:32:36 -0800
From: John David Galt <jdg@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Re: The Officer Who Posted Too Much on MySpace
Message-ID: <grb90k$bal$1@blue.rahul.net>
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> In a discussion of this issue on the roads newsgroup, several people,
> apparently journalists, were all for this sort of information
> sharing. They claimed it was "public" years ago and "public" today
> and computerization is irrelevent. I disagree. Years ago adverse
> information would lay in the bottom of a single filing cabinet, hard
> to find, hard to access, and hard to transmit. Computers have changed
> all that and that MUST be considered in public policy and privacy
> today.
>
> ***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> IANALB ISTM such databases would be sued out of existence in short order.
What databases? There aren't any databases for the purpose of ratting
out people like that officer. Would you ban sites like Facebook from
archiving old messages? How about Google Groups, which maintains the
former DejaNews archive of Usenet posts?
Here's a little perspective.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/02/privacy_in_the.html
I suggest that anyone who wants to play the fictional-persona game do
his posting under a pseudonym, and on an Internet site that will hide
his identity (or doesn't know it). I also suggest that anyone reading
posts that may have been made anonymously/pseudonymously, take them
with a grain of salt, at least.
***** Moderator's Note *****
Although it's actually fairly hard to hide from a professional
investigator's search, and almost impossible to conceal one's online
identity from a government investigation, it _is_ relatively easy to
conceal your identity from the kind of casual searches done by HR
departments and hiring managers or headhunters, which last only until
they realize that it's actually hard work and very time consuming:
there are, for example, at least three different people posting to
Usenet as "Bill Horne".
With the economy in freefall, and corporations able to pick the best
of the best talent while keeping an electronic eye on every employee,
some Internet users feel it is becoming a wise precaution to hide
their identities.
There _are_ ways to do so; even to the extent of "going dark" and
vanishing off the net entirely while carrying on electronic
communicaitons within a limited circle of trusted friends. Programs
like W.A.S.T.E., which broke new ground by showing what is possible,
have whetted Internaut's appetites for access to online discussions
and debates while still preserving anonymity.
In the future, parents having "the talk" with pre-pubescent teens will
have to include cautions about the dangers of public displays of
affection - not only with other people who may not be the best choice
down the road, but also for ideas and convictions which may not stand
the test of time.
Bill Horne
Temporary Moderator
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 02:27:50 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu
Subject: Highest crime rate in L.A.? No, just an LAPD map glitch
Message-ID: <p062408d9c5ff5068ece3@[10.0.1.6]>
Highest crime rate in L.A.? No, just an LAPD map glitch
The department's online map incorrectly showed many crimes downtown
-- near City Hall and the police station -- when its 'geocoding'
software couldn't interpret the true address.
By Ben Welsh and Doug Smith
April 5, 2009
Los Angeles Times
On Monday it was a grand theft auto and two robberies, on Tuesday two
more robberies and four aggravated assaults. By Friday the toll had
risen to 39 major crimes.
And, according to the Los Angeles Police Department's website, that
week late last month was pretty typical of the mayhem around the
corner from City Hall.
Since the inception of the LAPD's online crime map three years ago,
the 200 block of West 1st Street has consistently shown up as the
most likely place in Los Angeles to be victimized by crime.
But don't believe everything you read on the Internet. The spot,
directly in front of the Los Angeles Times and a block from the new
LAPD headquarters, is actually quite lawful.
Behind the apparent enigma is a case of virtual unreality. The crimes
reported there were real, but they actually happened somewhere else.
The only thing they had in common was an address that proved
impossible for a computer to find.
The distortion -- which the LAPD was not aware of until alerted by
The Times -- illustrates pitfalls in the growing number of products
that depend on a computer process known as geocoding to convert
written addresses into points on electronic maps.
In this instance, www.lapdcrimemaps.org is offered to the public as a
way to track crimes near specific addresses in the city of Los
Angeles. Most of the time that process worked fine. But when it
failed, crimes were often shown miles from where they actually
occurred.
Unable to parse the intersection of Paloma Street and Adams
Boulevard, for instance, the computer used a default point for Los
Angeles, roughly 1st and Spring streets.
Mistakes could have the effect of masking real crime spikes as well
as creating false ones.
...
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-geocoding-errors5-2009apr05,0,5966285.story
***** Moderator's Note *****
On first glance, this seemed unrelated to telecom. Then, I wondered if
the E911 system relies on this or a similar technology to map
telephone customer's addresses to route-finder software in
emergency-response vehicles. Comments?
Bill Horne
Temporary Moderator
------------------------------
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End of The Telecom digest (2 messages)
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