http://www.care2.com/causes/first-amendment-protected-cell-phone-recordings- of-police-are-legal.html The above article raises the issue of how to distribute photographs. If you take a photograph or a video of police doing something illegal then you need to send it out ASAP before the images are deleted and/or your phone is smashed. The usual way of sending pictures involves going to the picture viewer, selecting the picture, selecting that you want to send it, selecting the email or MMS program, entering an address, and then waiting. That's not going to be very useful when bad things are happening. What we need is a program that allows you to take pictures or video and just send them as fast as possible to a suitable server. For sending pictures email will do but you really don't want mail stored in the sent-mail folder (the default for K9 is to send the message twice, once by SMTP and once by IMAP). For sending video a protocol like FTP is necessary so that when a transfer is interupted you can still access whatever was sent. Good extra features would include the ability to scale down pictures and video for fast transmission, you get good quality if they don't smash your phone and low quality if nothing better survives. Also being able to send via Wifi would be a good feature, either a direct upload to a Wifi device that's not obvious (EG a tablet hidden under your car seat) or something like Serval. As an aside it would be an interesting experiment to see how many people can share photographs via Serval at an Occupy event before it gets overloaded. The Serval developers have always considered cases where a police or military organisation opposes users of their software. Serval is on f-droid, so it matches all aspects of freedom. Freedom from tyranny needs to involve Libre software, we just can't trust other software. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
This is a good discussion to be having. Thanks for bringing it up. I like the idea of scaling down smaller photos for fast transmission. A quick solution I just thought of involves something similar to progressive JPEGs (or mipmaps), but applied to a whole photo collection. Say I have taken a series of 10 potentially incriminating photos, and my phone may be confiscated or destroyed at any moment. What I want is for all 10 photos to be sent at 1/8 size, followed immediately by them being sent at 1/4 size, then 1/2 size and finally at full size. So if I have enough time, all of the photos will be sent in full detail. But if I am interrupted, at least I will have transferred a low-resolution version of each photo. The total bandwidth is less than double the full photo size. Also, at risk of being yelled at for suggesting proprietary technology, I feel I should mention that the Google+ app has this feature. (Not the progressive resolution feature, but the automatic uploads.) You can set it so that every photo you take on the phone is automatically uploaded to a special Google+ album that is private to only you, and from there, you can choose to download or publish the photos. It's pretty cool, but obviously we would prefer a free software solution.
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012, Matt Giuca <matt.giuca@gmail.com> wrote:
Say I have taken a series of 10 potentially incriminating photos, and my phone may be confiscated or destroyed at any moment. What I want is for all 10 photos to be sent at 1/8 size, followed immediately by them being sent at 1/4 size, then 1/2 size and finally at full size. So if I have enough time, all of the photos will be sent in full detail. But if I am interrupted, at least I will have transferred a low-resolution version of each photo. The total bandwidth is less than double the full photo size.
Yes, it would probably be best to have configuration options for what resolutions and JPEG compression parameters are to be used for each round of transfers. Once the code is written for sending reduced size pictures in the background it will be easy to have the exact sizes be a configuration option.
Also, at risk of being yelled at for suggesting proprietary technology, I feel I should mention that the Google+ app has this feature. (Not the progressive resolution feature, but the automatic uploads.) You can set it so that every photo you take on the phone is automatically uploaded to a special Google+ album that is private to only you, and from there, you can choose to download or publish the photos. It's pretty cool, but obviously we would prefer a free software solution.
Google+ is a good idea for something to use right now. But one of the long- term issues with it is that you can be compelled to remove pictures as the same password is used for uploading and deleting. I don't think we can rely on people mirroring pictures from Google+. As an aside, is there a good way of mirroring pictures from someone else's Google+ page via a cron job? One advantage of FTP is that it's a standard feature of Anonymous FTP that the person uploading a file can't delete it. So if I uploaded some pictures to a server in the US run by a US resident and citizen who has similar ideas to me and a condition of upload was that copyright was assigned as part of the upload process then no form of coercion that might be applied to me could result in the pictures being removed and no form of Australian legal action could result in the pictures being taken down (the US has more freedom of speech and less regard for foreign laws than most countries). Once pictures are on a Unix filesystem somewhere it's easy to mirror them. For anything that's really worth photographing you want the pictures to be stored in at least two foreign jurisdictions in the posession of people who won't cooperate with authorities. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
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Russell Coker