Tag: what3words

SURVIVAL: Some apps you should have on your phone.

Published on by reinkefjLeave a comment

https://theprepared.com/everyday-carry/reviews/mobile-apps/

Best survival apps for your phone
 UPDATED 4 WEEKS AGOBY GIDEON PARKER

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Your phone / mobile device is one of the few things you’re almost guaranteed to have nearby in an emergency. This list covers third-party apps worth downloading and lesser-known features built into Android and iOS phones.

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  • Citizen (iOS, Android, free) is a crowdsourced incident alert system. If you or others see something such as a fire, police interaction, or terrorist attack, spread the word or even livestream video to notify other app users.

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  • Signal (iOS, Android, free) is an all-in-one app for text, voice, and video. SMS text messages (ie. normal/classic texting) are terribly insecure, and most other apps like Telegram and WhatsApp aren’t much better. Signal is the trusted, encrypted king endorsed by security experts like Bruce Schneier and Edward Snowden.

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And, of course, I recommend what3words to give you a very precise location description.

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TECHNOLOGY: WHAT3WORDS may not be suitable for the task? NOT-RECOMMENDED!

Published on by reinkefjLeave a comment

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/05/03/1538256/what3words-sends-legal-threat-to-a-security-researcher-for-sharing-an-open-source-alternative

What3Words Sends Legal Threat To a Security Researcher For Sharing an Open-Source Alternative (techcrunch.com) 133
Posted by msmash on Monday May 03, 2021 @11:38AM from the how-about-that dept.

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A U.K. company behind digital addressing system What3Words has sent a legal threat to a security researcher for offering to share an open-source software project with other researchers, which What3Words claims violate its copyright.

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But security researcher Andrew Tierney recently discovered that What3Words would sometimes have two similarly-named squares less than a mile apart, potentially causing confusion about a person’s true whereabouts. In a later write-up, Tierney said What3Words was not adequate for use in safety-critical cases.

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Maybe Google’s system is better?

40.48453468598731, -74.42346811440515

As opposed to:

safety freed solo

AKA https://w3w.co/safety.freed.solo

WhatFreeWords should NOT be suppressed.

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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210430/22510246716/what3words-sends-ridiculous-legal-threat-to-security-researcher-over-open-source-alternative.shtml

What3Words Sends Ridiculous Legal Threat To Security Researcher Over Open Source Alternative
(Mis)Uses of Technology
from the never-use-what3words dept
Mon, May 3rd 2021 10:47am — Mike Masnick

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The only proper response to this is never, ever use What3Words for anything that matters. Beyond not giving in to censorial, abusive bullies, their legal reaction to a security researcher doing reverse engineering work to help find potentially dangerous problems with What3Words screams loudly to the world that What3Words has no confidence that it’s products are safe. They’re scared to death of security researchers being able to really test their work.

Both of these reasons means that What3Words should be remembered as little more than a failed.dumpster.fire rather than the cool.mapping.idea it could have been.

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CLOUD: Google is “blind” to what3words addressing

Published on by reinkefjLeave a comment

https://what3words.com/ 

When I search for “where is what3words shed.varieties.menu”, I get send to the what3words website.

Doesn’t Google understand that shed.varieties.menu is a location using this universal addressing scheme.

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I guess not!

So much for google being the all-seeing all-knowing tool.

Argh!

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