World's worst use of a jpeg.

Written by John Eberly on

NOTE: This was the top link on reddit.com for awhile

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.

datafeed

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."

I don't really understand the "security concerns", but there are numerous reasons this is a step backwards for usability not to mention a possible violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act:

  1. can't resize fonts for visually impaired
  2. takes 8 times longer to download for people on dial-up modems
  3. blind, PDAs, etc, etc

I am sure if the "bad guys" wanted to, they could download the image and get the text out mechanically anyway. But what could they really do with this information?

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.Seattle911.com

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

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