BigShinyThing

Whoah. This out-Bruckheimers CSI. TechCrunch reports that:

When famous computer scientist Jim Gray went missing a few days ago, the coast guard launched a large scale search that found absolutely nothing. On Thursday, they gave up.

Then Amazon stepped in. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. It’s a tough task — the boat would only be about six pixels in size in an image, and there was a lot of cloud cover obscuring large parts of the area scanned. But volunteers are pouring in to help out.

That’s pretty amazing. But to us, the most amazing thing is the phrase [Amazon] arranged for a satellite sweep of the area [...].

Reality check, folks: this suggests that in 2007, an online bookshop has sufficient clout to book time on Low-Earth-Orbit surveillence satellites. You know, the kind that are handy plot devices for Tom Clancy and the writers of 24. What next? Some crowdsourced triangulation of my cellphone location arranged by eBay’s Special Ops team in preparation for an airstrike using A10s leased from the US Airforce by PayPal?

People, we live in scary scary times. But we hope they find Jim alive.

[UPDATE: OK, turns out the satellite is run by commercial 'remote sensing' business DigitalGlobe, not the military. We're not sure if we find that reassuring, or the other thing...]

[UPDATE 20070208: One of the project members emailed us anonymously to clarify exactly what took place: in his/her words:

Gizmodo got this 100% completely and totally wrong: Amazon didn't "arrange" for anything.

The New York Times piece on the search gets this correctly: a group of very high-powered Silicon Valley people (like Sergey Brin) helped get several other groups like Digital Globe and NASA to do satellite passes. MechTurk was just a clearinghouse for doing the work.

I think the confusion comes from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' blog where he said a few days ago that "Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly." The "we" there wasn't Amazon, it was probably a dozen people at various companies helping coordinate that effort.

Thanks for the email!]