A jpeg is good for a lot of things, but a live data feed is not one of them. In fact it might be violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Seattle Fire Department has been hosting a live html feed of the latest 911 calls to the Seattle Fire Department. Many people have found this information useful for various reasons, eg. avoid areas of major accidents/activity. I have been using this data as a feed for seattle911.com, which is a classic google maps mashup that displays the 911 call data on a map of the Seattle Area. I host the site at my own expense, without any advertising.
Last night, I noticed www.seattle911.com was suddenly broken. After 30 seconds of investigation, I found out that they swithced their data feed from text to a jpeg.
See it in action for yourself.
Here are their reasons for switching the feed to a jpeg, I found via a message board at psrg.org
“The following message has been posted to our web site: “PLEASE NOTE: To address security concerns raised by the public safety community, Seattle Fire Department now displays current incident data as an image within your browser rather than as plain text. The information displayed in the image is updated every minute and then automatically refreshed to the screen. Historical incident information will continue to be displayed as text, just as it has been in the past. We are sorry for any inconvenience this action has caused. Our intent is to enhance the safety of personnel and the public but still provide information about current emergencies in our community. I’ve posted the above on the real-time page.”I know this does not address your specific concerns but it is the reason for the change.”
When I questioned the safety concerns, he responded:
I cant go into details but putting the information in text (data) format allows people to pipe the data into other computer programs to instantly analyze patterns. An image makes that very difficult (although not impossible). We don’t want to make it easy for the “bad guys”.
Rob Bruce Miller wrote: Starting today, SFD implemented a change, which When I questioned the safety concerns, he responded: “I can’t go into details but putting the information in text (data) format allows people to pipe the data into other computer programs to instantly analyze patterns. An image makes that very difficult (although not impossible). We don’t want to make it easy for the “bad guys”.”
I think this might be a case of “we try to make it harder for the bad guys, who will still be able to do what they want, but in reality we just hurt everybody else’s fair use.”
- can’t resize fonts for visually impaired
- takes 8 times longer to download for people on dial-up modems
- blind, PDAs, etc, etc
If you want to show your support or opposition to this change, here are few email addresses:
Nick Licata, City Council Person who oversees Public Safety: nick.licata {at] seattle.gov
Gregory Dean, Seattle Fire Chief (through his assistant): debbie.brooks [at} seattle.gov
Here is a screenshot of seattle911.com before the lost data feed.
I am not really concerned about losing the feed for my site (it is less work for me anyway), but this change does nothing but hurt those who were using the feed for legitimate purposes, and does nothing for preventing the so-called “bad guys” from using the information.
UPDATE 1: Just to prove how silly this idea is, I used this one line to extract all data from the new “jpeg” method. If I can do this, I am sure the “bad guys” could as well.djpeg -pnm -gray text.jpg | gocr -
UPDATE 2: I like reddit.com. Here is a link to the comments over there. This page was the number one link at reddit for awhile last night which sent over 20,000 unique visitors here over a 24 hour period.
UPDATE 3: This topic was covered by the Seattle PI, Seattlest and many more.
UPDATE 4: This post has been picked up by Slashdot. Also, the jpeg thing can be thwarted by one line curl "www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/sfdIncidentList.jpg" | djpeg -pnm -gray | gocr - Credit probablycorey from reddit for piping it in via curl. I probably would have made it 2 lines. Silly me.
UPDATE 5: Article at Programmableweb.com
UPDATE 6: A link to a Washington State law regarding this topic. Credit amemily (462019) from Slashdot.
UPDATE 7: A lawsuit related to this issue.
UPDATE 8: An interesting perspective on Open Source Intelligence.
UPDATE 9: An article in my home state newspaper - Lincoln Journal-Star
John | 12-Oct-06 at 4:58 pm | Permalink
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.
Dan | 12-Oct-06 at 5:25 pm | Permalink
Did you know that there is no such thing as “an accessible web site per ADA standards”?
http://www.webaim.org/articles/laws/usa/
Bruce | 12-Oct-06 at 5:32 pm | Permalink
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.
john.eberly | 12-Oct-06 at 5:37 pm | Permalink
Dan, I was not aware of that. I guess it makes sense, or every poorly designed website could be sued.
But the fact remains, this change makes it very hard if not impossible for people with disabilities or other legimate uses as mentioned above to access the information, and does absolutely nothing to prevent “bad guys” from using it.
esteban | 12-Oct-06 at 7:18 pm | Permalink
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.
john.eberly | 12-Oct-06 at 7:21 pm | Permalink
esteban, that is immediately what I thought as well. Nerds, we are…
Mike | 12-Oct-06 at 8:25 pm | Permalink
Is there is an OCR that can parse that jpeg into text well? That’s what I would try to do.
Mike | 12-Oct-06 at 8:26 pm | Permalink
nevermind, just noticed your short script. excellent.
Dave Davis | 12-Oct-06 at 9:06 pm | Permalink
HAHA, What nerds we are is right! Interesting though.
Looks like the digg brought it down though.
Sean Teller | 12-Oct-06 at 9:07 pm | Permalink
Yup, it did. The joys of Digg.
Ted | 13-Oct-06 at 12:48 am | Permalink
A gif would be much more OCR-able. Hence a jpeg does serve their purpose better (but not much).
esteban | 13-Oct-06 at 1:13 am | Permalink
@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.
esteban | 13-Oct-06 at 1:15 am | Permalink
Man, I can just imagine someone asking now - who let all these reddit and digg geeks in, anyway?
www.techtagg.com - See Tech Taggers view on this story! | 13-Oct-06 at 3:11 am | Permalink
World’s worst use of a jpeg…
"A jpeg is good for a lot of things, but a live data feed is not one of them. In fact it is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act."…
Alan | 13-Oct-06 at 6:37 am | Permalink
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”….
Duc | 13-Oct-06 at 7:52 am | Permalink
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.
john.eberly | 13-Oct-06 at 9:02 am | Permalink
Duc,
I understand your point about the title. My point with the title is that we in the states (since 9/11) are constantly being told by our government that we made that decision in the name of “security”. This change does little to nothing to actually prevent “bad guys” from getting the information. It only hurts those using for legitimate purposes.
I apologize to all my friends in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, South America, and Antarctica for the use of “World” in the title. If I would have named it “Seattle’s worst use of a jpeg since Tuesday” we probably wouldn’t even be having this talk.
Now that I read that title, I kind of like it.
jflores | 13-Oct-06 at 9:02 am | Permalink
Substitute “boogyman” for bad guys.
Bruce | 13-Oct-06 at 10:22 am | Permalink
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.
Naseda | 13-Oct-06 at 10:55 am | Permalink
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.
john.eberly | 13-Oct-06 at 10:59 am | Permalink
The site was fire and rescue calls only. No police data.
And no, they did not stop me. I have already written a one line shell script to get the data and I could go back online with my site. But I do not want to do that right now, because that does not resolve the fact that this change is bad for all those people with poor vision who do not use my site but go directly to the source and rely on screen readers or increased font sizes.
Matt | 13-Oct-06 at 11:32 am | Permalink
Yeah, but police often attend traffic accidents or burning buildings or other situations that require fire or rescue teams to attend.
Barabbas | 13-Oct-06 at 12:08 pm | Permalink
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.
john.eberly | 13-Oct-06 at 1:19 pm | Permalink
Well…. a reporter from the Seattle PI just called me.
They are working on a story on this topic that most-likely will be published tomorrow.
john.eberly | 13-Oct-06 at 2:53 pm | Permalink
Here is a nice write-up as well.
Seattlest.com
Jason | 13-Oct-06 at 3:05 pm | Permalink
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”.
Constructive Interference » Seattle Realtime 911 b0rk’d | 14-Oct-06 at 12:49 am | Permalink
[…] At least, it was handy until last night. Apparently, the usual simple text page has been replaced with a JPEG version. This not only takes significantly longer to load (> 1MB instead of a couple of hundred KB), but the graphic is so large that it won’t display properly on my mobile phone (so no more “I wonder why that fire truck is going towards my place?” as I walk home…) […]
john.eberly | 14-Oct-06 at 1:14 am | Permalink
Here is the article on the PI
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/288661_fireweb14.html
Don | 14-Oct-06 at 3:27 am | Permalink
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.
Mike Perry | 15-Oct-06 at 6:07 pm | Permalink
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
ProgrammableWeb.com » Blog Archive » Mashups for Terrorists | 15-Oct-06 at 10:45 pm | Permalink
[…] The incident raises a lot of good questions and issues about the availability and use of public information (as well as accessibility questions for those who are unable to read the images). John Eberly has written more about the incident in the excellent blog post: World’s worst use of a jpeg. Shown below is a screenshot from the new Seattle Fire Department Real-Time 911 page. Note that the big table of text on the page is one big jpg image. […]
Steven | 15-Oct-06 at 11:19 pm | Permalink
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
Geekoid | 16-Oct-06 at 12:35 am | Permalink
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.
Deanna Joy | 16-Oct-06 at 1:43 am | Permalink
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.
World’s worst use of a jpeg. | John Eberly’s Geek Blog « The other side of the firewall | 16-Oct-06 at 10:03 am | Permalink
[…] World’s worst use of a jpeg. | John Eberly’s Geek Blog: OCR in one line (from jpg to text). […]
J Cunningham | 16-Oct-06 at 10:08 am | Permalink
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.
John Eberly | 16-Oct-06 at 10:14 am | Permalink
J Cunningham
Yes, of course they are trying to prevent my site and similar ones. But they are not, if you would have read this article to the end, you would see it is easily thwarted.
They are using a jpeg because they are trying to produce a bad design. The more “fuzzier” they make it, the “harder” they believe it will be.
Lee Salzman | 16-Oct-06 at 2:57 pm | Permalink
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.
Magnetbox» Blog Archive » links for 2006-10-16 | 16-Oct-06 at 5:02 pm | Permalink
[…] Google Maps mashup called a terrorist threat The fire department claims that the Seattle911.com mashup, which shows the real time locations of all fire calls, would make it easier for terrorists to plan an attack since it maps all locations of crews. (tags: politics google map) […]
Curtis Boyle | 17-Oct-06 at 1:23 pm | Permalink
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.
David Ramos | 17-Oct-06 at 7:28 pm | Permalink
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.
Labnotes » Rounded Corners - 49 | 18-Oct-06 at 9:54 am | Permalink
[…] First degree clueless. John Eberly: “Last night, I noticed www.seattle911.com was suddenly broken. After 30 seconds of investigation, I found out that they swithced their data feed from text to a jpeg.” Their justification: “We don’t want to make it easy for the “bad guys”.” Like any useful-thwarting DRM ambition, this one is broken in one line of code (check update 4 at the bottom of the post). […]
Brian - San Diego | 19-Oct-06 at 11:08 am | Permalink
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
John - Puyallup | 19-Oct-06 at 1:42 pm | Permalink
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!
Cono | 10-Nov-06 at 7:15 am | Permalink
link to the feed image is broken
here’s a right one
http://www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/showIncidentsSmall.htm
John Eberly | 10-Nov-06 at 11:10 am | Permalink
Thanks Cono, I have updated the link.
Kimo Crossman | 09-Dec-06 at 2:14 pm | Permalink
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/
GRegg | 24-Dec-06 at 8:43 pm | Permalink
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.
Kimo Crossman | 03-Jan-07 at 7:58 am | Permalink
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.
Anonymous | 11-Jan-07 at 10:47 pm | Permalink
Here another site that uses Google Map (click on each incident)
Ventura Fire CAD in California.
http://38.101.117.146/fireline/index.html
Enigma | 31-Jan-07 at 10:52 pm | Permalink
Check out the site now. It looks like the old site!
John Eberly | 01-Feb-07 at 9:12 am | Permalink
Thanks Enigma and all of the other people who have contacted me. It appears that the seattle 911 feed is back to text. I plan on re-started seattle911.com as soon as I can get to it.
Kellie | 08-Feb-07 at 9:44 am | Permalink
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.
Jeremy Smith | 14-Apr-07 at 6:12 am | Permalink
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.
John Eberly | 14-Apr-07 at 10:18 am | Permalink
Thanks for the info Jeremy. Awhile back they switched back to the original text feed. I have been wanting to write something about it, but I haven’t done it yet.
So www.seattle911.com is back up again.
Web 2.0 Announcer | 11-Jun-07 at 3:54 am | Permalink
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Mashups for Terrorists | 10-Feb-08 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
[…] to read the images). John Eberly has written more about the incident in the excellent blog post: World’s worst use of a jpeg. Shown below is a screenshot from the new Seattle Fire Department Real-Time 911 page. Note that the […]
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