A nice idea for the gps

Richard Franks richard.franks at drdc-rddc.gc.ca
Thu Nov 16 23:48:38 CET 2006


On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 22:54 +0100, Koen Kooi wrote:
> I just read an interesting article[1] about using the gps in combination with the
> addressbook. Slashdot has a discussion about the obvious drawbacks.
> What are your thoughts about this?

Ha! My friend had this exact same idea a few years ago, at which point
we bemoaned the lack of programmable mass-market phones ;-)

But for me Security is not about Secrecy, it's about Control. If I can
easily and reliably opt-in or out of a system like this, then why not?

Going a little off-topic - say Bob writes a GPS application which does
something similar to that idea, where would it be downloaded from? His
own server? OpenMoko.org/com?

Say furthermore that he wrote a little web-app so that you could
customise the behaviour for different friends or locations, would that
have to be on his own server too, or could we have a known
secure/trusted server to do that from?

For example, if I order my phone and it's gonna take 2-3 weeks for
shipping, or it's just out of charge... it'd be awesome to have the
ability to queue installation and configuration options for a variety of
third-party applications, all in one place -- if there was a
standardised application-layer option mechanism (in XML?), then this
could be both powerful and easy.

I'm thinking in terms of having to visit different sites for different
applications to tweak different things - such fragmentation is a bad
thing from the end-user and security vantage points.

Richard




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