Etikettarkiv: geolocation

Phishing attempt or real?

Edit: As you can see in the comments below the email was actually legit.

I recently got an email from what appears to be the manufacturer of an app I am using on my Android phone. The app in question is the GeotagPhotos Pro, which records GPS locations and time to a database, then when you take pictures using your digital camera (not the mobile camera) providing the camera’s time is set to the same time the GPS has it will then be able to geotag your pictures after you have downloaded them from the camera.

I have used this software for a few months now and out of the blue I get the following email from what appears to be a legitimate email from the manufacturer:

Dear Geotag Photos Pro user,

recently, we got information from Android Market / App Store about all licences of Geotag Photos Pro. When mathed with users in our database, we were unable to find valid licence for your account. This can be just bug in licence database, so that please if you are sure, that you bought our application officially, please send us your order id. You can find it in orders history in Google Checkout (for Android) or in iTunes (for iPhone). We apologize all legal users for this inconvenience.

If you downloaded our app from another source, than official store (Android Market or AppStore), please consider of buying  official full version. To help you with this, we will make ”licence amnesty” this Wed, April the 6th, when Geotag Photos Pro will be offered with 50% discount – for $1.99 instead of $3.99.

Please contact our support staff, if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Jindrich Sarson
CEO of TappyTaps

I find this deeply disturbing. All the signs of a bad phishing attempt is here, the bad spelling (however the manufacturer is a Czhech company which may explain that in part, but the idea of sending payment credentials from the Android Market and Google checkout is deeply disturbing to me.

I have contacted the manufacturer to ask them to verify that they actually are who they claim to be but if they, as they claim, have a problem with their licencing database they should be able to verify the data with the raw payment data from Google Checkout that they as a seller receives.

There is also no information about this problem on their home page and this leads me to suspect foul business and that this is not legitimate. Otherwise I should think that there would be at least a mention about this…

We will see what comes back…

Geotag your photographs

This is going to be a rather lengthy post again but bear with me. It will also be a bit technical so I will have to explain some of the basic technical points before we start on the really nifty things here. But in the end you will learn how to use your GPS receiver to track your movments when shooting outdoor, you will learn how to download this information and use it to geocode your pictures so that when they are uploaded on sites such as Flickr your photographs will automatically appear on the map in the correct location.

The resons for geotagging

It is a way of organising your photographs that is pretty new actually. Never before has it been so easy to know where a certain photograph was taken and it is a great way of finding other people’s photographs from a certain location.

Hacking in the tent
My good friend Torbjörn hacking in the tent

It also means that if you use your GPSr when you are on holiday you know exactly on which spot you were when you took that picture and it is a great way of sharing information about good photographic spots, not to mention that it sort of becomes a photographic diary, tracking your movements around with your camera and GPSr.

There many be also personal reasons for geotagging, for me it started because I am a map freak. I love maps in all sorts of ways and I spend half a fortune on them. These days I mostly use electronic maps because they are more versatile but when I go hiking I always have a paper map as a backup – you never know when electronic will fail you.

There are two kinds of photographers, those who has experienced equipment failure and those who will.

This is very true.
Fortsätt läsa Geotag your photographs