An insider account of the security holes that left Google Maps exposed Hacking and Exposing Google Mapsis the story of Bryan Seely, the well-known ethical hacker who discovered the vulnerabilities in Google Maps. Written by Bryan himself, this detailed story draws from his firsthand experience to define all the parties involved, outline the background information, lay out the timeline of events, and explain the technical solutions that sew up the holes in Google Maps. Engaging and revealing, this book provides expert insight into the vulnerabilities and hacks that could affect other map directories like Yelp, Bing, and Apple Maps. Bryan discusses his struggles in convincing the Secret Service, FBI, and Google of the threat, and divulges the shocking details of how criminals have forged a stronghold in Google Maps and other directories by means of mail fraud, wire fraud, and more. Google Maps for mobile is one of the most popular mobile apps, but security has become a growing concern, with the satellite imagery offering potential terrorists a valuable tool for choosing targets and planning attacks. This book describes the vulnerabilities that hackers exploit, from the man who was the first to discover them in the Google Maps directory. Understand Google Maps' critical vulnerabilities Discover who is taking advantage of the situation Learn how victims are fighting back Explore the technical fixes that lock it down tight Data security is increasingly on everyone's mind, and this book tells a riveting, real-life tale of what happens when it goes wrong on a massive scale. Hacking and Exposing Google Maps is a witty, absorbing, informative story and cautionary tale, with in-depth technical know-how for preventing future attacks.

Have a Google Maps mashup that you'd like to expose to millions of users on maps.google.com? New to the mapping craze, but have an idea for a killer map–based application? Want to learn how to create GeoRSS and KML feeds with your geotagged content, exposing your customer to new ways of exploring and navigating your content? Google Maps Mashups with Google Mapplets Is the first book to cover Google's Mapplet technology Shows you how to create Google Maps–based applications and publish to maps.google.com Provides a single–source resource and practical guide to Mapplets and mashups Teaches you how to mash up Mapplets using location–specific data Includes examples of real–world applications

Want to find every pizza place within a 15-mile radius? Where the dog parks are in a new town? The most central meeting place for your class, club or group of friends? The cheapest gas stations on a day-to-day basis? The location of convicted sex offenders in an area to which you may be considering moving? The applications, serendipitous and serious, seem to be infinite, as developers find ever more creative ways to add to and customize the satellite images and underlying API of Google Maps. Written by Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson, authors of the popular Mapping Hacks, Google Maps Hacks shares dozens of tricks for combining the capabilities of Google Maps with your own datasets. Such diverse information as apartment listings, crime reporting or flight routes can be integrated with Google's satellite imagery in creative ways, to yield new and useful applications. The authors begin with a complete introduction to the "standard" features of Google Maps. The adventure continues with 60 useful and interesting mapping projects that demonstrate ways developers have added their own features to the maps. After that's given you ideas of your own, you learn to apply the techniques and tools to add your own data to customize and manipulate Google Maps. Even Google seems to be tacitly blessing what might be seen as unauthorized use, but maybe they just know a good thing when they see one. With the tricks and techniques you'll learn from Google Maps Hacks, you'll be able to adapt Google's satellite map feature to create interactive maps for personal and commercial applications for businesses ranging from real estate to package delivery to home services, transportation and more. Includes a foreword by Google Maps tech leads, Jens and Lars Rasmussen.

Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps explores the mundane act of navigating cities in the age of digital mapping infrastructures. Noone follows the frictions routing through Google Maps’ categorising and classifying of spatial information. Complicating the assumption that digital maps distort a sense of direction, Noone argues that Google Maps’ location awareness does more than just organise and orient a representation of space—it also organises and orients imaginaries of publicness, selfsufficiency, legibility, and error. At the same time, Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps helps to animate the ordinary ways people are challenging and refusing Google Maps’ vision of the world. Drawing on an arts-based field study spanning the streets of London, New York, London, Toronto, and Amsterdam, Noone’s encounters of "asking for directions" open up lines of inquiry and spatial scores that cut through Google‘s universal mapping project. Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps will be essential reading for information studies and media studies scholars and students with an interest in embodied information practices, critical information studies, and critical data studies. The book will also appeal to an urban studies audience engaged in work on the digital city and the datafication of urban environments.

As enlightening as The Facebook Effect, Elon Musk, and Chaos Monkeys—the compelling, behind-the-scenes story of the creation of one of the most essential applications ever devised, and the rag-tag team that built it and changed how we navigate the world Never Lost Again chronicles the evolution of mapping technology—the "overnight success twenty years in the making." Bill Kilday takes us behind the scenes of the tech’s development, and introduces to the team that gave us not only Google Maps but Google Earth, and most recently, Pokémon GO. He takes us back to the beginning to Keyhole—a cash-strapped startup mapping company started by a small-town Texas boy named John Hanke, that nearly folded when the tech bubble burst. While a contract with the CIA kept them afloat, the company’s big break came with the first invasion of Iraq; CNN used their technology to cover the war and made it famous. Then Google came on the scene, buying the company and relaunching the software as Google Maps and Google Earth. Eventually, Hanke’s original company was spun back out of Google, and is now responsible for Pokémon GO and the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Kilday, the marketing director for Keyhole and Google Maps, was there from the earliest days, and offers a personal look behind the scenes at the tech and the minds developing it. But this book isn’t only a look back at the past; it is also a glimpse of what’s to come. Kilday reveals how emerging map-based technologies including virtual reality and driverless cars are going to upend our lives once again. Never Lost Again shows us how our worldview changed dramatically as a result of vision, imagination, and implementation. It’s a crazy story. And it all started with a really good map.

Have a Google Maps mashup that you'd like to expose to millions of users on maps.google.com? New to the mapping craze, but have an idea for a killer map–based application? Want to learn how to create GeoRSS and KML feeds with your geotagged content, exposing your customer to new ways of exploring and navigating your content? Google Maps Mashups with Google Mapplets Is the first book to cover Google's Mapplet technology Shows you how to create Google Maps–based applications and publish to maps.google.com Provides a single–source resource and practical guide to Mapplets and mashups Teaches you how to mash up Mapplets using location–specific data Includes examples of real–world applications

Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers, Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care. Bernard Harcourt guides us through our new digital landscape, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society—a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual. We are not scandalized by this. To the contrary: we crave exposure and knowingly surrender our privacy and anonymity in order to tap into social networks and consumer convenience—or we give in ambivalently, despite our reservations. But we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. If we do not wish to be trapped in a steel mesh of wireless digits, we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to resist. Disobedience to a regime that relies on massive data mining can take many forms, from aggressively encrypting personal information to leaking government secrets, but all will require conviction and courage.