Data Privacy & Pictures with Geo Tagging

There is this news of a very weird fellow in US who did not act nice to someone else's food and then had the gall to take picture of it and then post it online. Good thing was that the perpetrator of this act was located and report suggests that the management intends to fire him. It is not the news that interesting but how the users located this guy. As it turns out, there is this thing called Geo Tagging.


Digital cameras have long been in the process of being ditched in favour of Phones with good cameras. They are handy and are much readily available when you need to capture 'that' particular moment. In today's world of smart phones, camera usage, its quality and functionality is increasing day by day. One of the feature is Geo Tagging.


With this feature, whenever you take a picture, the software applies the Latitude and Longitude information obtained from your smart phone's repository of GPS coordinates  which is gathered by various apps for example Google Maps, Google Sky, Navigation etc. When you upload these photos on a picture portal like Picasa, this information is maintained in Exif area of the image file. Exif also maintains information regarding the camera, lens settings, ISO etc as Meta Data of that particular image.


The thing about Exif area of the image is that it can be utilized. Digital cameras have been maintaining this information for a quite a while now. Most of the data in Exif is informational material and is really helpful. Some of it might be useful in a way not really intended, The guy in the above referred news was located by GPS location maintained in Exif.


So why am I telling you this? Because we live in Pakistan and its a very interesting country :p We all take pictures and post them on online social sites like FaceBook and Twitter etc. The males in our society are a touch more interested in female info. So if you are at your home and you took a very beautiful picture of a bee sitting on a flower and shared it with your friends and the 'whole god damn world' (assuming you are not aware/ concerned with privacy) then someone can extract the information from that picture and can actually locate your home. Totally fine with me if you are comfortable with that scenario and the perverts that lurk out there.


So what can be done?


1 - Disable the Geo Tagging feature of your smart camera. This will ensure that no GPS location is fed in Exif area of the file.
2 - You can dig out the Exif area through editors in which case you might be compromising on the data quality.
3 - Use Exif software to edit out information. A good read and tool is here to remove Exif info.
4 - Use security settings of your social site to maintain privacy.


Any other idea? Please share.
Regards

PostMan's Law of Lifts - IV

More people will stand in front portion of the lift closer to the door than the back.



Related Post
- PostMan's Law of Lifts
- PostMan's Law of Lifts - II
- PostMan's Law of Lifts - III

PostMan's Law of Car Wallpapers

There will be a Ferrari and a Porsche in collection.

And You Think You've Seen It All - II

Yup. that's right. These are fan blades hanging by wire to let them dry.
Never had seen that for sure.
Thanks to 'someone' for forwarding.




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'And You Think You Have Seen It All - I'

PostMan's Law of Women's Clothes

Every woman is cursed. They just cannot find new clothes in their wardrobe.

Coke Studio 5: 'Ishq App Bhi Awalla'

Ok I am totally floored by the song. It is so melodious. I keep swinging to it. 


Meehsa Shafi looks absolutely smashing in that dress. Really gorgeous.


The Chakwalis felt some what out of sync but this could be due to 'occasion fright' probably. Misha's voice provided the necessary calmness to it. Back up vocals of Zoe and Rachael Viccajis was excellent.


Where was Farhad Humayun on drums? He missed something phenomenal I tell you.


Too bad for the rest of the artists appearing in this episode after this song. No matter how good, they just could not match the finesse of this one.


A delightful treat from Coke Studio. The Chakwalis are in big time.


Thanks

'Larr sha Pekhawar Ta'

Cracker of a song on Coke Studio Season 5's first episode. Excellent stuff on guitar and rubab in this Humayoon Khan's song. But there is one thing I totally hate and that was visible in the BTS of his song as well. When Humayoon enters in the studio, he raises his hand for salam and that is basically his palm in a vertical position near his chest facing the intended recipient. Totally like 'dude.. stay away'. I totally hate this form form salam gesture as it is getting very common in Peshawar. I am from that place too. Similarly, the gesture of hug when one meets someone, now its just resting of the hand on the shoulder of other person and not the hearty hug that is one supposed to do.


Perhaps I am just being silly here but some gestures are meant to be filled with emotions. Don't do it.

Totka To Make Children Walk

"You daughter is afraid of walking. You will have to do a totka", our maid's mother stated.


A totka is a household creative solution for variety of issues based on folklore and old wives tales.


My daughter started to walk at the age of 1. She had couple of incidents in which she fell while trying to walk and got afraid of this activity. So much so that she started to cry whenever we would let her stand independently. She would readily move around the house holding a hand but not independently. We tried every trick in our books but to no avail. Watching our dilemma, our maid's mother stated that she had a proven totka to make children walk, that they employ this totka on every child in their social circle. Hearing the solution, my wife and I just laughed. Who the hell does that we said. Illiterate people! And so 3 months passed further.


Now we really were in a quandary as to what the solution could be to take the fear out of her of walking. One day, we both laughingly agreed to use the totka as the last option available and see what happens. We were laughing when we were using the totka, we even feigned the same accent that our maid's mother uses and in their language. It was not going to work so what the heck, let it be fun.


And the totka. According to her, we were to tie a rope around the legs of our daughter - not tightening it but a symbolic gesture of legs being tied. Three twirls around the legs with that rope. Then we were to take a knife, my elder daughter was to be asked 'Shall I cut the rope?' and she was to reply 'Yes, cut the rope' and the first twirl would be cut. Three times this activity of question-answer and cutting the 3 twirls of rope. 'She will start running after this you will see', the maid's mother had claimed.


An hour passes...


My daughter gets up and starts to walk. She walks and walks all by herself so much so that she did not want to go to sleep that night out of excitement. We laughed before the application of this totka and laughed when we saw the result. This is totally bizarre. Had I heard it from someone else, I might have doubted it but I did it  myself and I saw the results.


Truly unbelievable.

PostMan's Law of Lifts - III

People in an elevator will stand facing the door.


Related Post
- PostMan's Law of Lifts
- PostMan's Law of Lifts - II

PostMan's Law of Junk Paper

It will accumulate by itself.


Corollary to PostMan's Law of Junk Paper
You will be shredding the paper yourself after sometime.

PostMan's Commandment on Morality

Thou shall not link morality with the length of garment.

PostMan's Law of New Password

In first couple of days, you will have hard time recalling the newly changed password.

Colour Blind

I: (to my 5 year old daughter) hey wow! Your mother placed a new fruit soap. Orange!
She: Its Peach.
I: How can you tell?
She: Orange is dark. Peach is light.
I: uh huh.


Men just can't get it.

PostMan's Law of Dupattas

A Pakistani woman will have a stock of dupattas - new and of those belonging to discarded clothes.




- Dupatta - Wikipedia

Designer of Porsche 911 Dies

How can I not mention about the car that has attained iconic status in the history of automobiles? My salute to you sir. This car, somehow, commands the respect that you perhaps might not have fathomed but your dedication to the design and stability resulted in it being so. There is not a single person on earth, who if collects automobile pictures, does not have a picture of Porsche 911 - apart from the wish of actually owning one.


Regards
-PostMan-
______


Courtesy Yahoo!

For a rich kid kicked out of design school, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche created one of the greatest legacies in automotive design with the Porsche 911 — one that will survive far beyond Porsche's death today at the age of 76.

The son of company founder Ferry Porsche, F.A. or "Butzi" as he was known spent most of his career at his eponymous firm Porsche Design, where he oversaw the styling of thousands of products from watches to yachts, many with the tag "Designed by F.A. Porsche."

But it's the 911's emergence in 1964, when Butzi Porsche was just 25 years old, that made him a historic figure. While his father and grandfather had been famous German engineers — the original Ferdinand Porsche engineered the first Volkswagen Beetle — F.A. Porsche chose to study design. A year after enrolling in a prestigious school, Porsche was in his own words "kicked out," and took at job at his father's fledging car business in 1957.

At the time, Ferry Porsche had created the successful Porsche 356, but needed a follow-up model. He set the car's basic layout —a rear engine, a short wheelbase for agile handing — but pushed the designers and engineers to fashion a more sporting look than the men who built the Beetle had produced so far.

Prowling the auto shows of Europe, F.A. Porsche formed an idea of how the car should look as a smooth, curving fastback, rejecting the flat angles popular in American cars of the era. "I just think you start creating edges when the body of a car is bad…they are lines that support something that ties the designer down," Porsche would say years later.

The new car's design spurred a dispute with the older designers in Ferry Porsche's shop, to such a degree Ferry went around them, taking his son's blueprints to the body fabricator. The first production-ready model, called the 901, appeared at the Frankfurt Auto Show in September 1964, and after Peugeot objected to the name, Porsche changed it to 911. Despite the timelessness of the 911's shape, F.A. Porsche believed his greatest design came a few years later, with the Porsche 904 race car.

When the company went public in 1971, the Porsche family withdrew from management roles — although F.A. Porsche would remain a presence on the company's board and in its design studios. "He established a design culture in our company that has shaped our sports cars to this very day," said Matthias Müller, President and Chief Executive Officer of Porsche AG. "His philosophy of good design is a legacy to us that we will honor for all time."

PostMan's Law of MS Excel

- There will be a typo.
- You will play with borders and colours in the spreadsheet that you often work with.

PostMan's Law of Multiple Cars

Buying a new car in addition to the presence of the older one will result in lesser attention being paid to the older car.

PostMan's Law of Children & Blankets

Children aged 1 to 3 hate blankets during sleep.

PostMan's Law of New Car

Will smell damn great.

BCP or DR?

My wife keeps a diaper and wet tissues in the glove box of our car for our 1 year old. Does that fall under Business Continuity Planning (BCP) or Disaster Recovery(DR)?