In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Slashdot discusses a story named College Student Finds GPS On Car, FBI Retrieve.

Their summary: "A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do. It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back ... His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals saying it's legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect's car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway. ... 'We have all the information we needed,' they told him. 'You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring.'"

Still having quite a lot of geonews catching up to do, here's the geospatial-related stories discussed over Slashdot during the past week.

• GPS Tracking Without a Warrant Declared Legal in the U.S.
• Can an Open Source Map Project Make Money?, discussing the relation between Bing Maps, MapQuest and OpenStreetMap
• Garmin Recalls 1.25M 'Fire Risk' Satnavs
• Brazil Using Smartphones For Planning the Future, their summary: "Brazil has bought 150,000 LG smartphones and has embarked on the world's first fully digital national census. Can they succeed when the US recently failed to go digital? The Brazilians say that the digital census has several advantages over paper and pen methods. They say that the data is more accurate since GPS data will pinpoint the exact location of a household. The GPS data is cross-referenced with satellite images to ensure that responses are correctly geo-tagged. The recently begun census will underpin future publicy-making decisions."