John Eberly

ooo.. next we’ll see them make a captcha-style generated image-text that contains squiggly & slanted fonts with lots of noise so that OCR won’t work anymore.

Did you know that there is no such thing as “an accessible web site per ADA standards”?

http://www.webaim.org/articles/laws/usa/

Putting into a jpg thwarts a whole bunch of legimate uses:

– pda’s, which can be used on the road to avoid congestion (especially when taking someone to the airport)

– text enlargement options on browsers for folks with poor vision

– ham radio people who help with public service events

How many years has this been offered? A lot. Then, all of a sudden, no notice.

Typical government officials that decide what is best, rather than consult with the people who are paying the bill.

On reddit this was titled “World’s worst use of a jpeg”. Well, yeah, for what they’re displaying a GIF would have been the more efficient format.

Is there is an OCR that can parse that jpeg into text well? That’s what I would try to do.

nevermind, just noticed your short script. excellent.

HAHA, What nerds we are is right! Interesting though.
Looks like the digg brought it down though.

Yup, it did. The joys of Digg.

A gif would be much more OCR-able. Hence a jpeg does serve their purpose better (but not much).

@Ted,
I mentioned GIF would be the better format because I believe the simplicity of the image favors GIFs compression methods (just like line art), allowing GIF to yield a smaller file size, especially when set to the lowest possible color depth. There’s a lot of overhead to JPEGs that’s wasted on images of text sans texture.
I get what you’re saying about the OCR-ability of the image, which is something I never even thought about, but that’s apparently commodity-level functionality now, right? Basically it requires no investment on the consumer’s part anymore regardless of format, so it would only factor into this absurdly geeky conversation if you were writing an OCR program from scratch.

Man, I can just imagine someone asking now – who let all these reddit and digg geeks in, anyway?

I guess people in need of 911 services should fax or email images to request service, you know, to make it harder for the “bad guys”….

I don’t think it’s that bad. Most sites are not designed to be accessible, it’s a simple fact. If this was the only offense, okay, make the letters bigger and they’ll be readable even in JPEG. If it’s not meant to be accessible, I myself can read it just fine the way it is.

It’s a site put together by amateurs. But as long as it serves it’s intended purpose, it’s fine. I dispute the title “_WORLD’S_ WORST USE OF JPG” — most people have no idea how big the world is, and are used to exaggerating things. I seriously doubt this is indeed the “world’s” worst example.

Substitute “boogyman” for bad guys.

Last night I handed out about 100 fliers, which included the SFD info, to folks at a meeting with Seattle City Council President Nick Licata.

See though, YOU are the bad guy. And they stopped you, so they did their job. The text format allowed the existence of your site, which allows criminals to know they shouldn’t visit their friend who is currently meeting with a SWAT team.

Yeah, but police often attend traffic accidents or burning buildings or other situations that require fire or rescue teams to attend.

I am interested in those “patterns”. Hm? And how could they help anyone? “Good” or “Bad”.

Perhaps patterns such as: Best area to do something unlawful=Area were poor people lives.

Or what?

If they now prevented (HA!) those bad guys (who cant program/make scripts and had to manually extract data in the first place) how could they have found any patterns?

Ah well… ahh… I pity us all.

This is one of those futile attempts (like DRM) to kinda-sorta put data out on the net. Either publish this data or don’t.

The people who made this decision would have done well to Google the phrase “security by obscurity”.

What’s funny is that the SFD had 4 Meg logs some years ago and they would mention exact details of any car alarms that went off. Anybody could see that it was an easy matter for a thief to avoid cars with alarms and possibly target your car parked right next to it.

I’m a radio amateur who volunteers with emergencies that hit metro-Seattle. Both the Seattle Fire website and Seattle911.com will be useful if our group needed to watch a developing emergency to see if we should activate.

So why not turn this into a win/win situation with a compromise?

One approach would be for Seattle Fire to resume text feeds, while Seattle911 agrees to shut down their system quickly when dispatchers detect a suspicions pattern in 911 calls, i.e. an exceptionally high number of bogus calls, suggesting someone is trying to overload the system just before unleashing one or multiple WMDs. Remember, these jerks were once clever enough to take over four airliners and had planned to take over four on each coast.

A second approach would also resume text feeds but have the programming in place so Seattle Fire could shift its site quickly to jpeg feeds or even shut down the system entirely.

In either case, the data would be there except for the rare situations when it might help the bad guys.

And I might add, that this would actually be a better approach than what Seattle Fire is doing now. Resume the text feeds and Seattle911 and terrorists are likely to think they can depend on them, but when they try to put their foul deeds into action, the data they’re depending on will suddenly disappear.

In war, there’s a lot to be said for misdirecting and confusing your enemies.

–Mike Perry, KE7NV

I work for the City of Baton Rouge IT Department.

We actually display are traffic accidents using google maps on our site: http://brgov.com/reports/public/brtrmap.asp

DUC:
I find it very funny that someone who posts:
“Most sites are not designed to be accessible, it’s a simple fact.”

Complained about the generality of the use of worlds worse…
Most website are designed to be accessed. In fact, the WWW is designed by it’s nature(as is the underling layers) to be accessed.

What good is a web site that isn’t accessable?

Yeah, this is stupid. Maybe they are afraid someone will notice a pattern of calls, and some reporter will investigate?

This is completly useless to the ‘bad guys’ Idf the bad guys want the police some place, they’ll cause a reason for them to repson to that place.
I imagine some ‘bad-guy’(Cape, top hat, twisting a handle bar mustache) setting up a trap, then staring at the computer waiting for police to get a random call to where his trap is.
Proable a girl tied to a giant piece of lumber heading for a say.

Have you seen the “new” new jpegs? Even harder to read, and the incidents aren’t different colors anymore, just bold text for active things. Lame.

Have you considered the possibility that it is your site they are attempting to thwart? (and ones like it). Serously.

Also, jpeg is totally the wrong format image file for them to be using – gifs would be cleaner and much smaller for such a limited color range. That would solve the bandwidth problem.

When I read “ADA” I immediately assumed it meant that the victims/patients were upset that their info was being used. I guess that would imply a HIPPA violation. I wonder why the Fire Department can’t just enlarge the granularity of their feed and just report the city block or nearest intersection.

This is another example of a knee jerk reaction by goverment officials that have been trying to manage the terrorist threats of this country. Don’t you people (goverment officials) know that you are buying directly into what the terrorist want: Disruption of normal society. Yes, terrorist will kill and injure people, which I believe is largely unpreventable. If there is a will, they will find a way. However, to disrupt normal people that go about their business very lawfully, they are the one who pay the price. And they are by far the majority. This is best seen when you travel by air these days in the US. It has turned into a very stressful environment since the government has been trying to “protect us”. Ha!!!!!!! I’m not advocated to letting our guard down, but I believe there are less publicly invasive ways of dealing with the terrorist problem. Take it to the source, not the masses.

Quote: “One approach would be for Seattle Fire to resume text feeds, while Seattle911 agrees to shut down their system quickly when dispatchers detect a suspicions pattern in 911 calls, i.e. an exceptionally high number of bogus calls, suggesting someone is trying to overload the system just before unleashing one or multiple WMDs.”

Mr. Picky wishes to know how that would work.

Having units out on false alarms doesn’t decrease their readiness. Once a unit ascertains that the report was unfounded, they’re clear and ready for the next call. Statistically, if you scatter units around the city, at least one of them will be closer to the incident than if they were all back at the fire stations.

You could offer a day(s) old event google map. On you site. since it’s in text still for past day events.
to get your website back up and running. Till you put up “Today” fix.

http://www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/getRecsForDatePub.asp?incDate=10%2F18%2F2006&rad1=des

http://www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/getDatePubTab.asp

Just Leave this page Running all day/night with the updated .jpeg
http://www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/showIncidents.htm

Hey John, Is this same data available from any of the sheriff agencies, such as King County or Pierce County? What a wonderful tool to see what’s happening in one’s own neighborhood, especially for those involved in blockwatch and knowing where the thieves are working! Just imagine the impact of awareness if every homeowner could see what’s really going on!

link to the feed image is broken

here’s a right one

http://www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/showIncidentsSmall.htm

See here for help on getting access to this public record data in the electronic format you require…

http://www.rcfp.org/elecaccess/

and here

http://www.washingtoncog.org/

If terrorists were going to overload your 911 system with bogus calls, do they really need to watch it over the internet? This has been a great site with other public service agencies looking to it as an alternative to overpriced software. It a shame that irrational fear has shut it down.

a reporter from AP Ted Bridis suggests:

Seattle’s Fire Department, as an organization that presumably receives federal money, almost certainly must comply with Section 504 of the U.S.
Rehabilitation Act. Most groups do this by complying with Section 508 of the Act, which proscribes how such groups make their Web sites accessible to people with disabilities. there’s also the ADA to consider but organizations can reach accommodations with individuals and still comply with that federal law.

Here another site that uses Google Map (click on each incident)
Ventura Fire CAD in California.
http://38.101.117.146/fireline/index.html

Check out the site now. It looks like the old site!

John,
I read the news article and looked at your blog, sounds like you are providing a great service for people in Seattle. I hope you get the website back up and running.

I’m not sure why exactly, but I can still get the straight text version.

http://www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/getRecsForDatePub.asp?action=Today&incDate=&rad1=des
If you like, I can send you a screen capture.

Really like these comments, I have to agree with most of them. Keep up the good work.