Early Wednesday morning I received three nearly identical e-mails. Each had the appearance of SPAM, but not your typical SPAM. In place of the usual advertisement composed of bad spelling and poor grammar was a well written message crafted to look like an invoice and accompanied by an HTML attachment. Inspecting the contents of the attachments revealed that each contained identical JavaScript code, which was clearly malicious. The JavaScript had an appearance similar to that of obfuscated shellcode, with a string of hex values being unescaped and written to the HTML document: Read more about You've got mail-ware!
Recently I described my effort to add GPS data recorded during a road trip and a canoe trip to Google Maps. I had written some JavaScript to import my data into a map, with a few options for customization, but felt that there was more that could be done with the data from the canoe trip. I had a number of photographs from the trip and a desire to map them, along with the GPS data, at the positions at which they were taken. Although the photographs did not contain any meta-data providing the GPS coordinates for the location at which they were taken, they did contain meta-data indicating the time at which they were taken. Since I had a GPX file full of time associated geographic positions, I decided to fuse the two together.
After watching a recent episode of Hak5, which showcased Google Maps GPS Mashups, I was inspired to finally do something with some of my own GPS data. I had GPS data from a canoe trip taken last year and a road trip from a few years ago stored on my handheld GPS with which I had always planned to do something, but just hadn’t had the motivation until now. While a little simpler than the project described on the show, my initial goal was to draw the GPS track data in Google Maps annotated with waypoints drawn as map markers. The markers would be used to mark specific locations with descriptive text and images.
