Mongolia is changing all its addresses to three-word phrases
qz.com
qz.com
glorified.bodily.passage is in some farmland in the Netherlands, near Wijk en Aalburg: https://map.what3words.com/glorified.bodily.passage
beats.member.daily is in a gated community on Long Island: https://map.what3words.com/beats.member.daily
tugging.bunny.organ is a farmhouse or suburban house in Hungary: https://map.what3words.com/tugging.bunny.organ
pigs.pigs.pigs is a vacant lot in Loveland, Colorado: https://map.what3words.com/pigs.pigs.pigs
inflamed.flesh.massaged is some farmland near Stoke-on-Trent in England: https://map.what3words.com/inflamed.flesh.massaged
It's a lot worse in Spanish for some reason.
https://map.what3words.com/under.water.loans is south of London
https://map.what3words.com/shame.without.regret is in Norway
https://map.what3words.com/regret.without.shame is in Alaska
https://map.what3words.com/winter.winter.winter is near Chicago
https://map.what3words.com/summer.sunshine.happy is in Beijing
https://map.what3words.com/forgotten.previous.husband is in the middle of the south Atlantic ocean
https://map.what3words.com/imaginary.future.partner is somewhere in Russia
etc.
You could literally direct the packet to your front porch, balcony or whatever else place is best for you to accept it.
surely.trim.organ stuff.small.organ tickle.long.organ milk.long.organ milk.needy.organ
glorified.body.openings
stiff.little.finger stiff.large.organ
take.fine.compost
wrong.wrong.wrong
Unless What3Words' database is going to be fully accessible with no restrictions for everyone, this really looks like a bad idea.
I guess they might have to break some treaties or something to do that, but a country isn't going to be beholden to a small foreign company for much of anything.
Mongolia has expressed limited sentiments towards joining TPP but they try to remain neutral between the various regional and global factions, and being a member of TPP could irritate their Russian and Chinese partners.
Mongolia depends on foreign aid. They'll think thrice before angering Uncle Sam, justified or no.
I don't disagree with what you are getting at, but there is a difference between it being in their best interests to maintain their relationships and the company having enormous leverage over them. I think even if What3Words were a US company, the US gov. wouldn't do a whole lot about it if Mongolia just decided to stop paying them and use the locations anyway.
https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO14...
Packing bits into phrases is also useful for passwords (https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/), but in my experience the increased difficulty of correctly remembering phrases from a large wordlist outweighs the additional entropy.
4 words chosen from a 2800-word list would convey the same amount of information, and be less prone to confusion.
It looks like they're not attempting to make the triplets have consistent meanings between languages, which makes sense -- 40,000 word correspondences between 10 languages would be exceedingly difficult! logs.broker.remote is sweight.saum.zulässige is lodos.pasado.ninguno, none of which are the same meanings.
Another improvement would be a hierarchical system-- you can specify a more coarse location using more common words -- picking from a wordlist of 500 for a 4km^2 specifier, 2000 for for a 16 acre plot, 10000 for a 500m^2 area.
I saw a paper with a nice method for generating passphrases. Unfortunately, I can't find it. (Can anyone help me?)
First, you generate random data with enough entropy for a passphrase. Then, instead of encoding it in a sequence of words that is as short as possible, you encode it in many (say, a million) sequences that are a bit longer. Each sequence thus encode the same data. Now, you feed all these sequences through an algorithm that gives each sequence a score depending on how close it is to being a natural-language phrase. Finally, you present the user with the sequences, ordered by their score, and let the user choose any one of the to use as passphrase.
You can see multiple alternative mnemonics using `abbrase.py -m` -- it hasn't been implemented in the web version yet. It does give better results, from "wave several ominous silence" (default based on heuristic score) to "waves sever ominous silk" or "wavy seven omitted silver" (human-chosen mnemonics).
DiceWare[1] doesn't do the filtering you're talking about, but it does provide a method of generating passphrases by converting entropy into words. PGP Word Lists[2] use a packing technique as well, with even/odd words for error detection.
I haven't seen the paper you're talking about, but I'm highly suspicious of using an algorithm to score phrases by how close to natural language they are without a proof of security.
If you score natural-ness using, for example, comparing overlapping 2-word patterns to a database, then that database becomes a Markov chain database we can use to generate passphrase guesses, greatly reducing the entropy. Generating and discarding the patterns database from natural language material for each passphrase generation helps only inasmuch as two source databases from the same language are likely to differ. Maybe that's not the method used to test natural-ness, but I suspect that the better the natural-ness scoring function is, the better the corresponding passphrase generator will be. And remember, the user is going to decrease entropy even further by choosing their passphrase.
You can mitigate this by decreasing the number of passwords generated for the user to choose from, but this means less natural phrases. You can also mitigate it by increasing the passphrase space (that is, more words in your passphrase) but that decreases memorability.
Personally, I use 5-word DiceWare passphrases for most things, and 6-word DiceWare passphrases for the most important stuff. The proof of security for DiceWare is simple enough that you can do it yourself and be confident in it. The intent is not long-term memorability--in the age of leaked passwords stored or transferred in plaintext, password reuse is foolish, and I've yet to come across a scheme that allows me to memorize 30+ passwords. Instead the idea is short-term memorability so I can copy the passwords manually from my password manager. In practice the memorability is completely adequate for this purpose.
And even at 5 DiceWare-generated words, that's 2.8x10^19 possibilities, or a little under a year for an attacker with 1 trillion guesses per second capabilities.
To clarify, all the phrases to be scored represent the same random data. They are just more or less difficult to remember. The natural-language algorithm is just there to help you find one that is easy to remember, and is not security critical. The algorithm is assumed to be known to be known to the attacker in any case.
Ocean squares (and Antarctica) don't appear to be localized -- log2(25000^3) = 43.82 > log2((land area of earth - area of antarctica) / 9m^2) = 43.8.
I guess people looking at several addresses won't be looking at the words, they will have to have a resolver and look at them that way.
Sure, this system doesn't make that much sense in a place like London or SF.
The history of post addresses is quite interesting in it's own right :)
Imagine if America switched to three Chinese characters for an "easy to remember" address system.
In China numbers are often used inside of roman character email addresses, or domains, because roman characters are only convenient for westerners, much less English words.
See 1688.com (alibaba.com), or use of QQ numbers for email addresses.
I agree with your original point that it is strange that the Mongol Post would want to use English words for addressing.
Edit: they support other languages; I assume they would add Mongolian to the list.
This sounds pretty unlikely even for China, since it's almost impossible to unambiguously name any particular character. When speaking, you would generally identify a specific character using a four-syllable phrase like 安静的静 (literally "the jìng of ānjìng [quiet]"). Why can't you just say jìng? Well, here are some other characters with the same pronunciation:
竟 境 镜 敬 竞 净 径 靖 劲 痉 胫 婧 獍 靓
There are a few characters with unique pronunciations, like 给 or 谁, but those are very much not the norm.
The chinese version of what3words would be overwhelmingly likely to use words, not characters.
A word with one letter difference from my house (in the English midlands) puts the address in the middle of mountains in western China.
It's annoying enough when a parcel gets delivered to an address near me because the delivery driver can't tell where my road ends and another one starts. But I'm not going to China to pick up my next Amazon order when someone miskeys.
Of course that implies that the delivery service knows the supposed country of destination and that it cares. So I guess, should this way of addressing places catch on, we should probably make it a four-word phrase and also include the state with it.
Outline is not time invariant. If I turn a duplex into a single family, or build out, then the shape changes. If I live in Coober Pedy and build out underground, then do I use the surface outline or the underground outline?
If I relocate the house a few meters away, the address definitely changes.
Really, this is best for the billions of people who have no address. Most likely it will boot-strap, so in 100 years the name "X.Y.Z" will refer to the ghost of the place that once was, but everybody local knows what it now means, as will the databases. With a layer of apt. #1, #2, etc. on top of that.
It depends on being better than the current system (which is description based), and better than the alternatives (like putting up street signs everywhere).
"tapiku norami"
But the cool thing is that they were basically real gps coordinates just encoded as letters, so returning them to the original was trivial. I think a couple of letters were avoided to avoid confussion.
Unfortunately I cannot remember the name and they did a terrible SEO job...
"lower.life.expectancy"[1] is some patch of land in Colorado. I can't help but notice the two man-made pits containing unknown substances a few hundred meters north.
http://qz.com/561727/an-address-for-every-place-in-the-world...
Also:
"Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another."
For everything else and stuff Amazon doesn't ship I use Aerocasillas or a PO box at the post office. Aerocasillas are pricey but they do their job and fast, something arriving at their address in Miami on Monday is usually available to pickup by Friday. The post office recently didn't tell us about a package my sister sent until after they'd sent it back lol.
> the Stade de France is at reporter.smoked.received
The phrase they mention goes to some place in Trenton, Missouri[1]. It seems they meant reporter.smoker.received[2].
So if what you're writing on the envelope is
Bob Smith
reporter.smoked.received
France
Are we sure? They could do something like a Levenshtein distance correction, but they also might not have.
The odds of such a similar name being located in the same city are low, so they'd probably notice the discrepancy, but there's still a lot of room for error in communicating the words, since they're not normalizing singular/plural or tenses.
(Also, dialects make a difference. My dialect has "pen/pin" as a homonym. Rhoticity adds another layer of complications.)
Then again, we already have homonym problems. For example, "Greene St." vs "Green St." Newark, Jersey City, NYC, and Brooklyn each have one or the other, within a span of a few miles. For the ambulance problem, E911 system in the US has a rough idea of where you are calling from, and can help disambiguate.
Which means we know it's possible to build a system on top of similar names. But the first step is to get some names.
Weird is memorable, and more meaning acts like a checksum to reduce errors.
One thing that I don't quite understand is two locations very near each other have completely different sets of words. I would have thought there would be some sort of hierarchy of words (sort of like geocoding a lat long where it defines a box and the precision of the geocoding gives you larger or smaller boxes).
I wonder too if there are going to be collisions of words and locations that aren't going to make people too happy. Though they must have thought through that too.
Either way it is an interesting idea.
If you don't like the 3 words it gives you, just offset the location by a foot or two until you find a set of 3 words you like.
> If you don't like the 3 words it gives you
After trying some locations, I think they should have purged their dictionary of obviously negative words. Ending up with `glorified.bodily.passage` is just bad luck and can't be avoided, but `snored`, `brainwashed` or `grieved` are just bad in any context.
Also, some ground offset in meters (grazed.across.like.7) or the ability to go beyond 3x3 meters like a fractal would allow you to specify individual drawers or even pencils inside them.
MGRS is (approximately) a dense encoding of UTM coordinates, at similar precision it's a lot less memorable than 3 words:
4QFJ 12345 67890
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system )
But it does have the property that coordinates are easy to compare to each other. Less precision can be used just by dropping digits:
4QFJ 1234 6789 - the 10 meter zone that the 1 meter zone above falls inside
4QFJ 123 678 - the 100 meter zone
"The result is that if you enter athree-word combination slightly incorrectly and the result is still a valid w3w reference, the location will be so far away from the user’s intended area that it will be immediately obvious to both a user and an intelligent error-checking system."
I'm skeptical of just how well that'll work, personally. Witness the example of the truck driver who drove to Gibraltar, England instead of the one next to Spain.
a) suppose I am in Apt #312 in Bellevue Mansion, Whatever Street 23, San Jose, California.
Apt. #311 is on a wildly different set, so how can I find out we are neighbours? Or how can I explain to someone where Whatever Street #21 is?
b) what if I have the same 3-words square, but you are on floor #7 and I am on floor #11?
hellow.world.hola Floor 7 Apt 781 City, Zip, ST, Country
I kinda feel like any arbitrarily-ordered locational identifier will always feel clunky compared to an ordered grid system.
This system is an improvement for locations with no road names (so it's not any harder to give directions) or with ubiquitous GPS (where you can directly convert). The number of places with road names but not ubiquitous GPS is on the fast decline.
I.e. - I really do not understand why "Hi Ibrahim, I live at Alpha-Unicorn-Honey, just drop here when you are in the area" would beat "The train stops at Nadira, from there you walk 2 miles in the direction of the sunset, when you reach a rock looking like a kneeling woman you turn in the direction of the face and walk anoter mile - and there is my hut".
So far the only place where I believe this system would help is in large Japanese cities (Tokyo) etc. because they don't have "named" streets, most of the time, and at the same time most people can be expected to have access to technology.
(Maybe it's the same in China, but never been there so I don't know how it is)
I sincerely doubt that people living on the outskirts of the Gobi desert will routinely exchange their three-words coordinates over whatsapp and then get Google Maps or whatever to guide them to the desired destination.
You misunderstand. It's not trying to be better at directions, it's trying to be better at unambiguously specifying a location. If you're mailing something to someone where there are no roads, then this gives you a way to address them with more precision than you could do before. You just need a postman with a $40 smart phone with GPS (or a look-up-table).
You should really think about this as "easy to remember and communicate GPS coordinates".
Kind of a big difference. With DNS you only have to pay if you want a domain. I can freely do a DNS query to resolve "flamingmongoosefarts.com", but with What3Words I (might not) be able to freely determine where flaming.mongoose.farts is.
"You shall not use the API for any application that replicates or attempts to replace the essential user experience of the Service or use the API to create a Product which functions substantially the same as the API and offer it for use by third parties. You must not pre-fetch, cache, index, copy, re-utilise, extract or store any what3words Data"
Spoiler: Every citizen gets a parcel of land in Mongolia where they can put up a yurt. These yurt neighborhoods are nearly impossible to navigate if you don't live there (IIRC)
http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generato...
> Users can look up these three-word locations, which have been translated into Mongolian, for free on the What3Words website or app.
So do you live at peak.pique.peek, or peak.peek.pique? Or is it... What floor? Oh, you're on the top floor? So you leave on the peak of pique.peak.peek?
Even Vonnegut's idea of reassigning everyone new last names in Slapstick made more sense than this.
Users can look up these three-word locations,
which have been translated into Mongolian,
for free on the What3Words website or app.
ample.estate.racing
хангалттай.хөрөнгийн.уралдааны(that is, they are arguing that most people will have an easier time remembering words from their native language)
If you read eg cyrillic you're going to find it very much easier to read and remember cyrillic words. Thus, presenting cyrillic to those people benefits them. That's why translating from English to local languages is a good thing.
Which is kind of interesting in its own right, since you can then refer to the same physical location in different ways depending on which language you use.
This calls for some kind of geographic cross-lingual poetry.
This is a such a stupidly simple problem that it's become a pet peeve of mine whenever I see a place that hasn't been bothered to figure it out.
Here's 2 perfectly workable schemes that are used the world over (this is a free service I put into the public domain for the betterment of all humanity).
Scheme 1
1) Divide your country into postal zones, assign each one a number or an alphanumeric or whatever. Call these "zip codes" or "postal codes" or whatever the hell you want. Bonus, when routing mail, you route them only between these zones at the national level, and then let local offices handle the last mile figuring out of where something is supposed to be sent.
2) Name (or for goodness sake at least number) each road -- or do both. If your language or culture is unable to come up with enough interesting names for all of the roads in your country, it's okay, you can reuse names in different postal zones so long as a road doesn't cross between zones in which case you get to only use it once.
3) Number all of the land plots along a road. Final delivery from the postal system is to the land plot number. This works because every nation on the planet has some kind of system to track land ownership, and it's usually some kind of number.
4) Final delivery of mail is handled by people who subdivide that land plot. Addresses may contain some identifier of subunits on that landplot, but the postal delivery organization doesn't have to care.
Addresses are now of the form:<zip code>:<road id>:<land plot id>:<sub-unit id (optional)>:<Name to deliver to optional>
Some examples:
1543:Genghis Khan Street:16B-321:Unit C AZJ542:5123:1313:Mr. Altangerel District 213:Morinhuur Rd.:2116:Apartment 116:Anun Chinbat
The country can figure out if they want to use numbers, names, alphanumerics, whatever. But this isn't rocket science. This is the typical addressing scheme used most places that haven't completely lost their minds, just the fields are usually ordered the other way round.
Scheme 2
1) Divide the country into zones.
2) Divide those zones into zones.
3) Keep doing this until zones are guaranteed to be small enough to track the smallest allowable land plot. This is where the mail gets delivered by the formal system. Routing works by going up and down the hierarchy.
4) Final delivery of mail is handled by people who subdivide that land plot. Addresses may contain some identifier of subunits on that landplot, but the postal delivery organization doesn't have to care.
Addresses are now of the form:<Major subunit>:<Minor subunit>:<Local subunit>:<sub-unit id (optional)>:<Name to deliver to optional>
This system works well where roads aren't guaranteed and/or the country can't be bothered with naming the roads because of reasons. This is also a surprisingly common system in many places, but often gets eventually replaced with the scheme above.
AB:612:AJR 14-23:District 9:Khorkhog Place:Apartment 612-F:Mr. Tsedenbal Bayar:Damdin:Bogd:Yurt 5
Again, not rocket science. Easier to remember than coordinates and precise enough for mail delivery. Postal areas can be aligned with existing administrative zones, or whatever.
I remember being in Ireland and getting pretty annoyed trying to find anything because all anybody had for addresses outside of the big cities were coordinates. Yet nearly every road had at least a number, and Ireland is already pretty well divided into various administrative districts. So why the hell were we receiving nonsense like coordinates?
Asked the locals and the answer was some sort of tie up between the government and the postal system had delayed it forever. This was in 2013.
That's correct, a developed country, in the 21st century, couldn't be bothered to figure out a proper addressing system. (Apparently this has since been fixed, but seriously, why the fuck did it take that long?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...
Things not to do:
- Make your postal codes proprietary or under copyright or some other stupid nonsense.
- Use a system with such low precision that it ends up going free-form text for local delivery. I'm aware of parts of England with such nonsense.
- Change the scheme over and over again. Pick one, implement it and be done with it.
- Use a system that doesn't aid in navigation at the local level. If I'm at local subunit 241, I can expect to find 240, 242, 243 and such nearby, while 893, 1023 and so on should be far away.
- Use land plot numbers that don't make any sense. In many places odd numbers will be on one side of a road and even will be on another. In some places, it's a different scheme. These schemes make sense and aid in navigation, random numbers don't.
- Don't use this kind of word-based scheme, it'll end up full of dick jokes and racial slurs without anybody knowing it, and it means entire swaths of the Earth will have to be nonsensically renamed over and over again due to regional slang phrases about people's mothers.
Again, this is free advice for anybody trying to start a national postal system, because apparently, here in the future of the 21st century, some places haven't bothered to sort themselves out yet.
The idea of what 3 words is that it's easy to remember. Your suggestions are not. That's a massive weakness.
It turns out it's a terribly designed addressing system, replacing the numbers with words doesn't make it less terrible, only more memorable.
Assume your magic navigation device goes down, but you can call the destination you are going to and have them give you directions without using street names or designators, only landmarks. Try it from varying distances away. Instead of "turn left at Main st." you'll get "turn left at the second red building, I think, maybe the one with the white window shutters...you don't see one with white window shutters? well they have a restaurant next door with a neon sign...okay after that take the 3rd left, or is it the 4th?"
Or try to figure out not only which building you need to go to in a dense urban core, but which side of the street the building is on? While the coordinates you got put you within 3 meters of the building, the magic map device you're using can't get a lock on more than 2 GPS satellites at once and you're now 30 meters away from your destination.
Okay, so now you make it, and it's a 30 story building with 300 apartments. Which one is it? The coordinates get you near the base of the building, but not to the unit itself?
But that's okay, nobody's bothered to do something sensible like put numbers on their doors, or label the streets so when your app doesn't work you can still locally navigate. You can always wait around for a postman to arrive and ask him.
I have some bad news for you there.
http://www.prai.ie/land-registry-services/ : "By international comparison, Ireland has a very extensive and well developed system of land registration.
...
93% of the total land mass of the State and almost 90% of the legal titles in Ireland are now registered in the Land Registry."
It's not 100%, and we can infer that most countries are worse off than that. Some, the well-planned, have full cadastral systems. Most have a title registry, but the plots will be defined by a picture of a hand-drawn map of each without proper coordinates. Some countries don't have a workable land registration system at all. The US doesn't have a national one and instead delegates it to states, leaving the USPS to invent ZIP codes and build its own system.
doesn't sound very Chinese government to me. This has a hefty smell of bollocks to me.
Turns out I was confusing that with Tibet. Embarrassing to say the least...