Crime Mapping News has a nice two-page writup on how the Santa Monica Police are using a GPS-enabled camera to keep track of graffiti abatement (see pages 2 & 3). The cameras (made by the company I work for, Ricoh) include a drop-down menu to tag images with meta-data, including things like gang affiliation associated with a particular graffiti tag. The images can then be downloaded wirelessly from any city Wi-Fi station and be viewed in aggregate along with other GIS information.

The Bots have put up a public-domain database of full MP3s from G.W. Bush’s speeches, debates and other statement. It’s mostly laid out for cutting up into remixes (like their latest song, Fuzzy Math) but they’re also providing the full linear speeches for whatever people want to do with them. In a couple months they’ll be sponsoring a contest for best use of the database — I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

(Props to Lawrence Lessig for the link.)

• Number pages that can be stored on a Sony Librié with a 512M memory stick: 261,000
• Reading speed required to finish that many pages, reading 24-hours a day, before the 60-day eBook “rental” time expires: 600 wpm.

I don’t think this has appeared in the wild yet, but no doubt it will soon. It’s an exploit that allows someone to execute arbitrary code on OSX just by visiting a website, regardless of browser, by using Javascript to download a disk image and then using Javascript to open help://Volumes/Rootkit/Rootkit.script. The browser passes the request on to the Help Viewer, which will gladly execute code. The exploit is being discussed on the MacNN Forums and has been summarized on TidBITS.

No solution from Apple yet (though apparently they’ve known about it for two months already — sheesh), but a stop-gap solution is to install MonkeyFood Software’s free MoreInternet and then set the helper app for type “help” to some innocuous program like “chess.”

On the minus side, it’s sad to see OSX suffering the same pain I’ve teased Windows users about all these years. On the plus side, I’d been meaning to play more chess anyway…

UPDATE: In flaming about the above exploit, the MacNN folk found a variation that doesn’t have a full work-around, though you can make it harder for an attacker to get the payload to your machine. See the top of the thread for details.

This is cute — download a special version of open-source software like Evolution, Gaim, The Gimp, Nautilus, or Rhythmbox from The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project and they’ll randomly sample usage paterns to try to automatically detect bugs that make software crash. Unlike the usual “this application has unexpectedly quit, shall I email a crash log to the developer” kind of thing, this one collects sparse data from both crashes and normal use, enabling an automated classifier to tease out what the differences were.