Trap Street | Hacker News Reader

Trap Street

en.wikipedia.org

74 pointsnetgusto21 comments

See also "Canary Traps"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap

Apparently this is common practice in the movie industry - cast members are given slightly different versions of the script so that any leaks can be traced back to a unique individual.

If you think that one through it seems like doing this for a movie would be a logistical nightmare. Most actors are pretty good about learning their lines, which means you’d couldn’t just put random changes in because otherwise their time would be wasted. I’m guessing that it’s only used for pivotal plot changes like the Roddenberry incident describe on Wikipedia. Seems like the path used these days is extreme lawsuit threats built into their contract, something you’ll see just about every Marvel star joke about during interviews.

When giving an actor a script that deviates from the proper script, you can choose to only allow deviations in the portions of the script that don't directly involve that actor.

There is more in a script then just this actors lines. You could slightly change Lines of other characters in the scenes or you could change the descriptions of the scenes in slight ways. You would still give the correct lines to each actor and make it obvious who shared their script.

… Which I hope was trying, apparently without success, to get across. It just seems like a ton of work and maintenance.

I wonder if it is automated with a thesaurus or some NLP

Previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992748 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10418586.

See also "Paper Towns"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement

Thank you! Google Earth / Maps’ Argleton came to mind. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argleton

I particularly like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agloe,_New_York since it turned into a real town behind the authors' backs.

Back in the 90s one of these really screwed me up when I was trying to find my way to a new and super out-of-the-way neighborhood using my trusty Thomas Guide, which at the time was the gold standard for maps in Southern California. I’d got lost and was scrutinizing the map street by street to find my way again. The moment I realized I’d “passed” the trap street I went back to make sure I didn’t get lost again. Did this three times before I decided it was a bug on the map, not knowing about trap streets at the time. I still get stressed thinking about that trip.

I was considering commenting about the possibility of this happening, but thought maybe they'd just do it on streets nobody would want to go through. Thanks for the story!

I have noticed apparent typos on memorable page numbers in fiction and non-fiction books (ie. 13, 69, 100, 123, 222, etc.) that must be intentionally edited in for this purpose, but I have not kept a list.

I went looking online and apparently this is semi-notorious in reference material (calling the trap a "mountweazle," [1], [2]) but (in a brief search session) I could not find mentions for ordinary books.

Edit: This quickly led to another (limited) set of examples on Wikipedia [3] and then on to the fiction of Jorge Borges [4] where I think I'll spend the rest of my Sunday.

[1] http://wmcz.com/legal-ideas/using-traps-to-snare-copyright-i...

[2] http://www.youblawg.com/ip-technology/5-copyright-traps-you-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry#In_fiction

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...

This kind of thing goes back to '91 at least with Feist v. Rural when Feist copied telephone entries from Rural's directory which included some fakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

This turned out to be one of the more interesting IP decisions IMHO. The Supremes decided that a list cannot be copyrighted if it’s organized in a simple and obvious way, like a phone book.

Which means that if you went to a bunch of trouble to license a ton of local phone directories, as you’d have to do back then, in order to create a national listing, your achievement would be worth exactly nothing. While I’m grateful to the Supremes for the decision as a dev, I can certainly empathize with Rural (the losers) as a businessperson.

I'm pretty sure this little accident happened as a result of a trap street near where I used to live:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-22158829

The 'trap' was that on google maps it was made to look like a regular street when it clearly wasn't.

I've found many errors in Google maps over the years. I'm not convinced any of them are traps, they are just the result of not actually surveying the areas they claim to map.

Or the data is just old. Years ago, the junction between Route 1 and Route 36 in Iceland was very visibly wrong on Google Maps. If you pulled over and looked over the bushes, about a quarter mile south of the intersection, you could see the old Route 36 that was still in Google's road network, with crumbling asphalt and all. And if you looked at satellite imagery, of course there was no trace yet of the newer and more efficient fork.

Digital cartography is hard. Even without various intentional errors and distortions (many maps contain intentional dimensional non-linearities for "strategic reasons", ie. so that they cannot be directly used for directing artilery fire) the input data is full of various unintentional noise and non-sense because of the processes that were used in acquiring and digitizing that data in the first place. Processes ranging from digitizing paper maps of generally unknown accuracy with digitizer to just guessing positions of things from sharpie marks on hand-drawn map created by who knows who in the field. Trying to make some sense of such data was my first real IT job.

Something similar: vendors of stock price data are said to add extra ticks in order to catch people who are illegally reselling it.

Meet me in the trap, it's goin' down.

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