iPhone developer/hacker Jonathan Zdziarski is hard at work again. This time around he’s built an amazing app that will help revolutionize how folks receive alerts about missing children, how people can send in sighting reports, and more. He’s doing it all with the new AMBER Alert iPhone app.
Zdziarski assists law enforcement agencies in forensic examinations of iPhones or iPod touches at no cost. Many of these examinations involve crimes against children. After having witnessed enough of these terrible and ghastly crimes against children, he wanted to do something about it.
“I decided to approach the AMBER Alert folks about it, and they liked it…So over the weekend, I worked with one of their engineers to put it together. It went from idea to finished product in about 24 hours.”
An overview/description of the app from Jonathan:
AMBER Alert is the official iPhone AMBER Alert notification tool for AMBERalert.com. AMBER Alerts are issued whenever a missing child case is granted AMBER status and has been used to aide in the recovery of missing children. The iPhone application provides a real-time feed of recent alerts including victim photos and information, suspect photos and descriptions, vehicle photos and descriptions, and a reporting mechanism allowing you to report a sighting.
The iPhone’s GPS is used to include your current GPS position with your sighting report, allowing AMBERalert.com to create a geographical search radius based on the number and pattern of reports in a specific location. This provides for smarter policing and can help filter false positives. The information is forwarded to the appropriate state patrol barracks where it can be responded to in a much faster fashion than traditional phone call screening.
Well done, Jonathan… Well done. For more details on the AMBER Alert iPhone App visit Jonathan’s site, or hit up AMBERAlert.com to sign up for live alerts for use together with the new iPhone App.
[Via: arstechnica]