[SGVLUG] interesting lost camera story...

[Claude Felizardo]

Eye-Fi.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye-Fi

I think I remember reading the original story - nice to see the update.

I have two of the 8 GB cards and they mostly work pretty well.  I can
take pics at home and they show up automatically on my desktop within
seconds or on my TV via TiVo within a few minutes unless I force a
refresh.  I use that feature a lot during parties or we have friends
over.  Movies take longer as my bandwidth is limited by DSL upload
speeds.  Yes, that means everything goes through Eye-Fi's servers but
that's required to do the geotagging.  I could have it go directly to
my iPhone rather than their servers but then I'm not sure if it can
still geotag.  The idea is when the camera takes a picture, the Eye-Fi
SD card records the IDs of any access points it saw at the time.  It
does not have to connect to the WAP, just see the broadcast beacon.
Later, when it's in range of a WAP that it can connect to, it uploads
the pics to their servers.  If the WAP that was saved with picture is
in their database, they update the EXIF fields with the registered
location of the WAP.

On a trip to Yosemite, while I couldn't get the card to connect to the
WAP in the hotel due to the interactive nature of click-through web
pages, it did tag several pics around valley where I was not expecting
wireless - must have picked up a signal at a ranger stations, etc.
When we get home, we just leave the cameras on for a while so it can
automatically upload pics and movies, no cords required.

As for privacy issues, yes, you should strip the geotag info from pics
you post to say Facebook though I think the last time I checked it was
being stripped.  There's a bunch of things you can configure such as
what WAP's the cards are allowed to connect to, if you enable hot-spot
access at say McD's, etc.  Works with most recent cameras as long as
it can handle the larger capacity cards ( > 4 GB? )  SD only last I
checked.  Some cameras have direct support with menu's to allow you to
configure the card w/o having to use their software.

Claude


2011/10/12 matti <mathew_2000 at yahoo.com>:
>
> keywords: camera, theft, pictures sent via wi-fi...
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-adv-camera-20111012,0,2677636.story
>
>
>