Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps? | Hacker News Reader

Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

bbc.com

1,008 pointsvanusa637 comments

Not really related to the article at hand, but I've been on a bit of a Google Maps binge the past couple weeks. I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them.

Another strange thing I found that might not be super well known (I didn't know about it) is that all GPS data in China is offset by a nonlinear psuedo-random amount. If you turn on the satellite view in Google Maps and look at various cities in China, you'll see that the road and business overlay is off by anywhere from 50m to 500m. And the strangest thing is that it's not a consistent offset from place to place.

Turns out this is very intentional, and China uses a different geographic coordinate system than the rest of the world. WGS-84 is the most common coordinate system, but China uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02 is an algorithm that obfuscates the results. So applying any GCJ-02 coordinate to a globe using WGS-84 coordinates gets distorted like a funhouse mirror.

It's easy to find open source libraries to convert WGS-84 to GCJ-02 and vice versa. But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I suppose? I've read that if you open Google Maps within China the mapping data is correct, but have no way to test that.

Recently, I discovered Street View sometimes captures car crashes:

https://goo.gl/maps/kJdgWQUU3eUMReUE8

https://ibb.co/x18fy3s

Two years ago when I saw Google car in front of me about to pass, I sure as hell opened the window and give it a bird, Maverick style. And sure as hell some 6 months later punching the address of my encounter, there I was in my car, with blurred face showing a middle finger that was surprisingly not blurred. So I showed it to all my friends all proud and stuff. Sadly a few months later the photo was replaced by I guess another drive-by. I imagine for many reasons since they already have a car in place, I'm sure they take few takes when passing by and someone must have reported me.

Well they knew the photo had a face, so maybe their algorithms simply prefer photos without people. There's plenty of reasons why you should prefer a photo of a location without a person, even if blurred - this being one of them!

Nitpicky, but useful for anyone interested in spatial data: WGS-84 is not a "GPS standard" but rather a geographic coordinate system and is usually paired for consumption with a projection like wgs 84 web mercator to view those 3d coordinates on a 2d plane. Super interesting stuff and reconciling these standards across the globe is a really fun problem, and one you'll likely run into if you ever find yourself dabbling in remote sensing pipelines.

I don't know if I would call it nitpicky for this example :P Thanks for correcting me, I've edited the comment.

I’m also working in the field and the Friar thing that came to mind was https://ihatecoordinatesystems.com haha

I hate them too. It's the worst to have to reproject an image or GeoJSON and overlay it onto a map. Very satisfying one you've managed to do it, but it's a pain nonetheless, at least if you don't work in the geospatial field and rarely use tools like GDAL.

An interesting tidbit is that our world is not a sphere, but a spheroid. This makes 3d -> 2d transformations very local.

My memory says that US government GPS at one point intentionally introduced reduction in accuracy/resolution as well, but they stopped, which was part of what led to the commercial GPS revolution (along with cheaper tech of course).

Let's see... Wikipedia seems to confirm:

> During the 1990s, GPS quality was degraded by the United States government in a program called "Selective Availability"; this was discontinued on May 1, 2000 by a law signed by President Bill Clinton.

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

Interesting to note that the removal of selective availability enabled the creation of Geocaching ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching#History ).

It also enabled the modern mobile navigation industry. I was working on automotive navigation systems in the early 90s and SA was a killer for the product, options were various dead-reckoning and inertial sensors or differential GPS, both of which ended up being cost-prohibitive. But you can't do usable route guidance with a 100m CEP in an urban area.

With modern high powered CPU's, more detailed maps, and particle filters (which require all that cpu), dead reckoning has become much more viable.

I suspect you could go hours driving round a city with the GPS and WiFi location turned off before losing your position - simple wheel speed, gyro and compass is sufficient for most stuff.

You'd also need to account for slope.

I’ll be overjoyed the day that the compass in the vehicle can tell my phone what direction the vehicle is pointed to avoid making a left instead of a right out of a driveway. Yes, there are solutions to these problems in theory, but in real-world application today they’re still pretty lame / inaccurate, and the solutions still seem far away (try getting a few auto mfgs to agree to a standard way of communicating a compass heading to a phone over CarPlay or Android Auto)

I've used a phone that didn't have a built in compass and one that does. The one that has an actual compass knows which direction I'm facing even without moving. The one that didn't would usually have no idea until I started moving.

They make external GPS units that plug into your car and connect to your phone wirelessly for example Garmin GLO that are supposed to improve accuracy although I haven't used one myself and thus can't vouch for it.

The built in compass in a phone is pretty inaccurate for driving because it can't compensate for the unknown shape of the body shell of the car it's in.

When turn-by-turn directions specify traveling 1 mile down a very steep grade, do they mean 1 mile along the slope, or 1 mile along a flattened map?

Only the former would match the car's odometer, of course.

Hmmm. What about the sensors on my phone? For a while now I've wanted to know my realtime speed in the underground sections of the local rail/metro network.

I suspect the most accurate measurements would be done using wideband SDR, iff I were able to acquire absolute position references for the signals I was seeing. Not likely, especially for something I might like to let others play with and/or generalize.

Everywhere I read about the subject the general consensus is that using accelerometer and gyro data from the average phone is a fool's errand. I have zero experience with the field so I wouldn't know if failure was incorrect signal processing or just had sensors.

Without wheel speed sensors, distance and speed errors quickly accumulate.

With a particle filter and enough computation, that error can be eliminated after the fact. Ie. At the time you won't know where you are, but after you get out of the metro and the particle filter reconverged you'll know where you were with more accuracy at some point in the past.

Ah. I see. Thanks very much for that insight - so that's why it's possible, but not generally interesting and/or widely pursued.

There were already workarounds in place before they switched off SA - the introduced error was consistent within a given area, so provided you had a fixed location that broadcast its coordinates, you could correct for the error. I believe there were products and possibly even standards that did all of this; would have been even easier in today's world of mobile internet. I have suspicions that this was a large reason for disabling SA - your enemy can work around it, so it's not much use, but if you get your enemy hooked on it without the work-around, you can turn SA back on in a war situation.

Also, WAAS https://www8.garmin.com/aboutGPS/waas.html

When I was a civil engineer last century gps accuracy was an issue because people wanted to use gps for surveying. They came up with a system that would use 2 receivers and a radio between them to get much higher accuracies.

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/natureofgeoinfo/book/export/...

I think the US Government can also shut it off at a moments notice.

They could, but multiple governments now publicly broadcast from similar constellations, so it wouldn't have nearly as much benefit for them to do so.

Modern dirt cheap receivers can pick up European, Chinese, Russian, etc. constellations for location just as well as the American one.

Always wondered about this, can overlapping systems be used simultaneously for higher reliability or precision?

Surprisingly the answer is most often no, however in poor signal areas like in a city or under canopy the answer is yes as you are more likely to get a signal from the remaining bits of sky view.

The other benefit is when doing PPP the convergence time is dramatically shorter with multi constellation.

When doing RTK most receivers will use only GPS, as it is generally the most accurate, but it can and will use GLONASS occasionally. I have never seen one use beidu or Galileo

Those two radio systems are still used. Just that many states have CORS sites that post correction information.

There are two frequencies (sometimes three) transmitted by the satellites. Using two frequencies allows certain atmospheric delays to be accurately estimated. Trouble is only one code is available for civilian applications. The trick with two receivers is to solve for the phase of secret signal (rather than decode it) by solving an integer least squares problem. This allows accuracy of the order of +/- 5cm

There are multiple civilian frequencies available now, and cheap receivers for 'em. I have a pair of F9P's running at present, and just received some GT-U12's for testing.

Mobile phones use dual frequencies now. Some use the Broadcom BCM47755 chip, but the most common ones are various Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs.

https://www.broadcom.com/products/wireless/gnss-gps-socs/bcm...

https://www.euspa.europa.eu/newsroom/news/qualcomm-launches-...

https://www.gpsworld.com/qualcomm-launches-3-dual-frequency-...

What is the accuracy of GPS surveying?

I briefely looked through the pdf, and probally missed it?

I live in the Bay Area, and homeowners are concerned over a few inches.

(There's a huge need for cheap surveys. Until GPS gets it to under a inch, traditional surveys will off pipes, and landmarks, is here to stay? Or, am I wrong?)

Civil and mining engineers have been making use of centimeter-accurate GNSS configurations for years now. The equipment necessary costs a few thousand dollars, more if you need even more precision. Most major civil and mining engineering projects use self-guided earth-moving equipment, not feasible without this technology.

The problem for homeowners is that surveys aren't enough. The vast majority of land titles are not registered in precise coordinates; they're registered in terms of landmarks, benchmarks, and so forth. This is changing at a glacial pace, but for now, the tech isn't the problem.

RTK has an accuracy of around 1cm. Its widely used by surveyors (and other things like agriculture, construction machine control, etc).

As I recall, it was due to plane crash and US h̶a̶d̶ decided to make precise GPS available to public

After KAL007 was shot down by the Soviet Union in 1983 Reagan announced the fuzzy GPS signal would be publicly available. The US government didn't turn off Selective Availability until the late 90s.

That's weird though as a reason. KAL007 was so far off course that the distortion of SA wouldn't have mattered. It only distorted location by a couple hundred metres at most.

I read the GP as saying that SA GPS was originally made available as a result of the KAL007 crash, so presumably they didn’t have access to GPS at all on the flight? Then much later the SA restriction was removed, unrelated to a plane crash.

Exactly.

Though KAL007 deviated from course not because of some INS fault but just because autopilot didn't switch into INS following mode at all. Most likely crew just forgot to flip the switch, so GPS availability wouldn't have helped anyway.

Being out in the middle of the ocean with only INS supposedly keeping you on track is different than a GPS receiver that you can look at and see that you are not where you should be. Obviously the same thing would happen if no one was paying any mind to the cockpit instruments but at least a GPS receiver offers a solid reference to compare against. I really can't imagine how nerve wracking it would be trying to fly a plane without INS or GPS over an ocean. Your navigator would do their best to keep track of location but you'd probably end up way off course by the time you saw land.

Circa 1999, I was a member of a search and rescue team through the explorer scouts. We got to carry milspec GPS devices on a hike once, because the forestry service wanted accurate maps of some trails. We were under strict orders not to deviate from the trail or tamper with the devices. Very fun cloak&dagger atmosphere for what was otherwise a lovely walk in a park. Hilarious that the need for such missions was obviated a few months later

I love walking around with purpose. Like when my car didn't have a tire iron in it, so I walked home and walked back in ratty clothes with a tire iron through a couple miles of nice neighbourhood.

That's really cool. So your tracked tracks (so to speak) helped inform maps of the trails you walked?

Yes, when it first came out, it was a boon for cruising sailors such as myself who were using radio-based Loran up to that time. If I remember correctly, the civilian resolution was originally 50 meters, then lowered to 10 meters. I believe it is 1 meter today.

I've heard that just before Operation Desert Storm began in 1991 the reduced accuracy that affected civil GPS was temporarily turned off. This was a result of not being able to procure enough military grade GPS devices for army vehicles etc. If this is true it may also have had an effect on the decision to completely turn it off.

This is different but related. China has no ability to influence GPS accuracy within its borders. What they do is manipulate all of the authoritative maps available so that GPS coordinates won’t map cleanly to the digital waypoints in the map. The GPS locations are very precise, they are just off by as much as a quarter mile in varying directions depending on where in the county you are.

Can OpenStreetMap or someone make non-authoritative maps, or is this impossible without the cooperation of people on the ground who cannot operate safely within the borders of China?

At one point we spent some time reverse engineering the Chinese coordinate system, it’s actually quite fascinating. So terrible though.

But OSM actually doesn’t use that system! They use the normal coordinate system, which makes them unique across mapping services (and also a good tool to use to RE geojson away from chinas system).

It's "impossible".

Private, independent geographical surveying is illegal in China. [0] So technically you can't do it even in the local coordinate system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

But I guess to OPs point, you could make a non-authoritative map based on satellite imagery, it just wouldn’t be legal to use in China.

OSM has an extensive article about mapping in China. Generally it's not allowed. Still, in the bigger OSM is quite accurate. :>

Anything that can be seen from a satellite is quite accurate, that's true, but oftentimes things like number of lanes, type or direction of the roads is unknown, footpaths in rural areas are very spotty. Basically anything that requires local human verification (addresses, business location, etc) is off limits and accuracy in those points comes from pre-ban times (or illegal activity).

> This is different but related. China has no ability to influence GPS accuracy within its borders.

FYI: And even far outside of them too

I don't think so Tim.

https://spacenews.com/pentagon-report-china-amassing-arsenal...

The current ASAT weapons can only hit targets in low earth orbit, and the GPS sats are way above that. Anything that high up that is military run also likely has capability to maneuver to avoid something shot from the surface (which will take a lot of time to get up that high even if it has enough energy).

"China already has operational ground-based missiles that can hit satellites in low-Earth orbit and “probably intends to pursue additional ASAT weapons capable of destroying satellites up to geosynchronous Earth orbit,” says the Defense Department’s annual report to Congress on China’s military capabilities."

The problem with defending a satellite is the missile really only needs to get kinda close. And yeah, relativistic speeds and distances in space are huge, but I would find it hard to believe we could defend our satellites in any meaningful way against a nation-state level threat.

At this point, destroying the positioning network/s would be mutually assured destruction. Pretty much every country relies on those networks equally for controlling their own vehicles and weaponry.

Some of those systems do. Not all.

" It is an Inertial Guidance System with an additional Star-Sighting system (this combination is known as astro-inertial guidance), which is used to correct small position and velocity errors that result from launch condition uncertainties due to errors in the submarine navigation system and errors that may have accumulated in the guidance system during the flight due to imperfect instrument calibration. GPS has been used on some test flights but is assumed not to be available for a real mission. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)

Tomahawk missiles are also fed a navigation package before launch which allows them to navigate without additional signals (I'm sure accuracy goes up if they do have GPS available). I believe it's something akin to terrain maps that it can use to navigate to it's target.

I would argue that any nation that is reliant on those public networks to be effective are going to lose within minutes of an actual conflict.

I believe it's already established that the Russians are capable of completely blocking out GPS signals.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/vladimir-putin/russia-spoofing-...

So no, I don't think we'd be facing mutually assured destruction.

Now the impact on civilian life if some nation decided to start the space wars? Catastrophic. We'd basically block off space for the next 100 years because of deadly debris in orbit :/

And the debris created from a kinetic weapon would indiscriminately destroy other satellites at those altitudes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

IIRC civil GPS chips won't work above a specific altitude or when moving above some speed limit. I think the idea was to prevent people from guiding missiles using those chips.

Seems this is an ITAR restriction and only applies to chips exported from the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Rest...

I've found that the maps match the GPS of my phone exactly, but the satellite pictures are shifted.

Does that mean: 1) My GPS module also gives out obfuscated coordinates when in China or 2) Google uses shifted satellite images?

> I've found that the maps match the GPS of my phone exactly

I can use OpenStreetMap fine in China. But that's not Chinese data.

If a Chinese person sends me a location marker on WeChat, the marker will show up (for me, in WeChat) at some other, unintended, location; I can't use that feature at all.

I wish I had saved some of the links I had found, one source I read said that the non-satellite map data was actually correct, and it was the stitching of the satellite imagery that was incorrect. I had no way to test this and no other source mentioned this, so I ignored it. But it's funny you mention this, #2 might be the case.

robotastronaut also corrected me that it's not actually the GPS that is being obfuscated, but the map coordinate system. So your GPS device is probably receiving correct results, but on an improperly projected map.

> one source I read said that the non-satellite map data was actually correct, and it was the stitching of the satellite imagery that was incorrect

The opposite is true: If you look at areas like the Macau-Zhuhai border or Hong Kong-Shenzhen, you'll see that the satellite imagery is continuous but the mapping data has discontinuities at the border (some zhuhai streets are halfway across the water to Macau!)

Neither. The satellite images are accurate, and so is your GPS readout. What's shifted is the official data that the government provides (eg. location of roads).

more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964450

Have you checked out South Korea?

South Korean on GMaps feel likes a snapshot of 2009. Whereas the rest of Google Maps has switched to something vector based, South Korea still has tiling based map images with different images for different zoom levels and the place names just baked into the image. Any idea why? Apple Maps is great in comparison.

It's a similar law to what's discussed here. The justification is protection from NK.

Could it be a licensing issue?

Naver Maps has really good street view and very accurate maps in SK.

https://map.naver.com/

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/google...

My reading of the situation is that it's a convenient "national security issue" which happens to favor SK companies and insulate them from having to compete head-to-head with Google Maps.

Turn-by-turn navigation also doesn't work using Google Maps. Meanwhile SK navigation apps like Naver Maps or Kakao Maps have really poor navigation features if you compare to what you'd have using Google Maps on an American road.

The end result is that consumers suffer, since artificial market protection leads to an inferior product and no real need to improve and compete by players on the local market.

Some more info: https://ogleearth.com/2012/07/constraining-online-maps-the-c...

>Why is Google’s Korean map behaving this way? In short, because of Korea’s Spatial Data Industry Promotion Act from 2009, specifically Article 7, which states that:

>Spatial data business operators may produce and distribute any processed spatial data. In such cases, processed spatial data shall not include any spatial data on any military base provided for in subparagraph 1 of Article 2 of the Protection of Military Bases and Installations Act nor on any military installation provided for in subparagraph 2 of the said Article.

>And considering the existence of the most heavily militarized border on the planet between North Korea and South Korea, this means a substantial part of South Korea is riddled with military installations.

>By limiting the maximum resolution of its Korean imagery on maps.google.co.kr, Google appears to have satisfied Korean regulators that it is obeying the relevant Korean laws. Thus, Google avoids having to blur or otherwise censor the satellite imagery base layer for Korea — something which it has successfully managed to avoid in China, India and elsewhere.

Write up about Apples courser application

https://ogleearth.com/2012/07/apple-censors-ipad-maps-app-ov...

When I last went in late 2018, it was not corrected for on the satellite maps. Google maps was still usable for walking directions, however.

Indeed, there's a Half As Interesting video talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Di-UVC-_4

See the explanation on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

My understanding is that all agreements with Chinese map data providers require that map software implementors only display data projected into the "obfuscated" coordinate system, and the agreements forbid un-projecting back into "real world" WGS-84, regardless of how simple the algorithm is. So, it's more of a business agreement and less of a political thing, but with China there isn't much of a difference.

What I learned a few years back about this is the official (un)obfuscating implementation was distributed to licensed companies in binary .dll/.so/.a , and not allowed to be redistributed or reverse-engineered. Licenses are only given to local companies, and foreign companies may only buy service from them. That's why if you reverse engineer Google Map or Apple Map app, they all make real time API calls to do the conversion on servers. Those contracts may also limit the end user who can consume these APIs to be in China, hence foreign users will see the shifts of roads/etc.

The open-sourced implementation one may find on the internet are probably thru sth like curve fitting by sampling many data points. It may have good enough approximations but may not work one day if the gov agency decides to change the algorithm. Changing algorithm is a backward compatibility hell but not a big problem for the industry actually, because most Map apps are owned by big corp which has resource and motivation to comply.

> distributed to licensed companies in binary .dll/.so/.a , and not allowed to be redistributed or reverse-engineered

Such irony in CCP using licensing to protect their IP

only if you have misconception about what ccp and other one party states actually are

> you have misconception

and what's the "correct-conception"?[1]

I'm curious because I get what parent means in terms of intellectual property issues in China but I don't get what do you mean from your comment, especially the fact that you include "other party states" - is it some sort of general rule that you're hinting at?

[1] funny, I just realised that there is no antonym of "misconception"

Not really funny, as nouns in general do not have antonyms.

Generally nouns prefixed with mis- do; sometimes you just remove the mis- part eg. understanding vs misunderstanding, management vs mismanagement etc.

You make my point. Your examples are not pairs of antonyms. Management is not the opposite of mismanagement.

Verconception? - truth, 7 hits on google. Orthoconception? - straight, also 7 hits. Benconception? - good, 80 hits off topic. What else...?

At least in science education, misconceptions are so vastly more common than correct conceptions, that it makes sense there's a compact negative form but not a positive one. /s

If you think you know better what the CCP is, why don’t you educate us?

Hey, I'll bite: they are a thousands-year old country who has seen nations like the US and protectionist strategies like IP law come and go for centuries. They probably know what the US is going to do before the US knows what they're going to do, and certainly before the US knows what CCP is going to do.

> they are a thousands-year old country

china, the ethnicity, is indeed thousands years old. CCP, however, is barely over 70 yrs old.

Nickpicking: the CCP foundational congress was held on 23 July 1921, making it 100 years old in a couple of month. The Red Army was founded on 15 July 1927, which is why it is generally assumed (seriously or not, I don't know) that China aims at reuniting with Taiwan before 2027.

But the CCP has been controlling mainland China for a little bit over 70 years, indeed.

to be even more correct, china isn't one culture or one ethnicity. it covers a huge area, and especially before modern times, it was composed of a lot of different cultures and ethnicities, with a shitload of different languages and customs. CCP and other earlier powers (Emperors?) just brought them all, or large chunks, under a common flag.

Most importantly, a common writing system, common to a huge area. One that mathematicians successfully took inspiration from and repeated the success of universality at an even greater scale.

Think bigger. There is cultural knowledge going back further than any particular political or economic system. China has seen those come and go within its own borders, too.

It is fun to see such a discussion - I've been working on my own implementation of de-obfuscating Mars Coordinates since January 2021 with very good results. And Yes, some curve fitting is involved.

At the end of the day they may obfuscate coordinates and blur maps, but the truth will eventually come out.

R tree

"they all make real time API calls to do the conversion on servers"

Can't imagine why anyone would want that to happen.....

You seem to be implying surveillance. I think the actual answer is "because if the library were downloadable, the algorithm used for military physical security would be quickly reverse-engineered."

Openstreetmaps works correctly.

> But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I suppose?

Or whoever is in charge of importing the data simply doesn’t know that different coordinate systems is a thing. You’d be surprised how many GIS professionals are oblivious to this, especially ones in charge of things that tend to spill large amounts of oil into the environment when they get it wrong: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/london-club-warni...

I learned earlier today that the little google street view man nopes the fuck out of Kabal.

Really silly question - but can't they correct for this without the GCJ-02 by just correlating the mutual of the map information with the satellite information? It seems like if you can have all the information provided to you, just randomly warped by some deliberate obfuscation you could 'trivially' (aka primitively) correct for it by using the available data of the satellite and the maps by feature matching and non-rigid registration?

edit: updated silly question after reading more on this

Circumventing the obfuscation is a crime.

In China? Is it a violation of the data source license?

> Turns out this is very intentional, and China uses a different geographic coordinate system than the rest of the world. WGS-84 is the most common coordinate system, but China uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02 is an algorithm that obfuscates the results. So applying any GCJ-02 coordinate to a globe using WGS-84 coordinates gets distorted like a funhouse mirror.

A lot of countries use their own coordinate systems, that make their countries look flat on a x/y plane. Eg. my country - slovenia.

Usually those coordinate systems are easy to calculate to wgs84 or web mercator projection[0], compared to the chinese solution

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection

> But Google Maps doesn't do it, for political reasons I suppose?

FYI: Google has never really quit China. It has running offices in Beijing, Foshan, and, recently, Shenzhen.

I can't wait for the BBC to publish an article about the inaccuracies in China ...

Isnt it that all google services are not available in china, so it might not be possible to use google maps inside china.

When it still was available they had a license, but only when using Google Maps in China.

Can confirm, the map in China is correct, but completely useless. Most addresses are not recognized or easily mistaken for other similar ones. Plus, the entire layer of business and POI listings that give GMaps its competitive edge are not there. It feels like using a foldable paper map.

All Google products except the Google Translate App are blocked in China. So no Google maps.

I spent 2 months cycling China from Hong Kong to Beijing. Despite only using Chinese characters, Baidu maps worked very well for me. I copied the characters I needed (Hotel, supermarket) into it from the translator.

Here's my journal https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/5000years

Really nice photos, must have been quite the trip!

Regarding the “foreigners can’t stay here”, from what I know, this is because it requires extra work for hotels, they need to report your stay to the local police station, so usually smaller hotels, or the ones in non touristy cities just don’t do that. (And I believe that any tourist, needs to report their address to the local police station within a few days)

Something similar happens in Cuba as well.

There are cheaper places where only locals can go (and till some years ago, also the other way around was true)

Wow, I travelled in Cuba in 2007 and I was completely unaware of this. I was aware of the double economy and how there are some buses that the locals don’t use and vis-versa (same is true in my country; in both cases it is more about price and convenience then access). But hotels for locals only completely missed my attention.

Any info on how you setup your Cuba trip?

I simply flew there from Spain

Yeah I got into one with my Cuban gf and they didn't like my presence so I had to "hide".

They work very well via VPN. I used Google's navigation in Shanghai.

Thanks for posting it. Very interesting to read.

>I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them.

Yes, Israel specifically has favor from the US government that satellite imagery of that country is allowed to be blurred:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment....

The BBC article in the submission mentions this restriction and the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@42.4300052,130.6278764,3096m/... China's roads appearing to cross into Russia.

https://goo.gl/maps/oDwCuGhxxZVSj7nJ6 Hong Kong/China border bridges

> China uses GCJ-02, sometimes called Mars Coordinates. Part of GCJ-02 is an algorithm that obfuscates the results

Why would a space agency use a coordinate system to obfuscate results on another planet?

Tangentially related but where does this come from and why is it so widely repeated (as in this article):

> ...Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world

I've seen this claim (both in the "one of the most..." and "the #1 most..." forms) many times and I don't know where it comes from. What am I missing?

Here[0] wikipedia says Gaza Strip has ~5,046/sqkm. I thought maybe Gaza City was meant, it's density is 13,000/sqkm[1]. Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of cities by population density[2], and I haven't been able to find any "most populated places" lists that list anything below 15,000 people per square kilometer, which Gaza city is well below.

Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something? I hope it's me because if it's the former, that says something really bad about their fact checking and would suggest that BBC is not a reliable/trustworthy source, at least on this topic.

    0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
    1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_City
    2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density

You're probably missing this listing:

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

Where Gaza listed as its own country, it would be one of the densest, since it's basically a city and its urban sprawl and nothing more (like the other densest entries on the list). Of course, Gaza is itself arguably only part of Palestine, but the West Bank itself is pretty dense (see how high Palestine ranks on that list).

That sounds like "technically correct with caveats".

So does OPs entire post. Gaza is, by all reasonable accounts, among the most densely populated areas in the world. There's no real reason to start questioning the credibility and trustworthiness of a news organization over the fact that Gaza is referred to as such, it's a very bizarre thing to fixate over.

Your point about my argument regarding BBC's credibility based on this one point is fair, I can see how my argument can reasonably be considered overstated.

Your point about "fixating" (assuming you're referring to me) is not fair. If you want to accuse someone of being fixated on this point, please direct your critique at the BBC and other media outlets who repeat the phrase about Gaza and only Gaza (not all of the other more populous places) constantly.

Perhaps you are overly sensitive to this issue? I've more often heard the phrase from the BBC in regard to Singapore or Hong Kong.

In this case it makes perfect sense to mention how densely populated Gaza is because the reader probably doesn't know much about Gaza other than it's occupied by Israel. Every other area with the population density of Gaza looks very different on Google Maps.

See OPs above comment and you can see where his standpoint is so it's not that surprising.

Looking at the country list, I see Israel is the #5 most densely populated country in the world. And Bnei Brak is the #5 most densely populated city, far more densely populated than Gaza. Bnei Brak was hit by rockets this week.

Can you link me to some articles that refer to "Hamas firing rockets on Bnei Brak, one of the most densely populated cities in the world"? Or "on israel, one of the most densely populated countries"?

If not, my question for you is: why do we see this phrase so commonly in reporting on Gaza but not on other more densely populated areas?

Same reason that this conflict always gets the same optics in international media — jewish lives are worth less. At first, as you don't want to believe it, you argue, you investigate, you really try to find any sane reason that while these things are happening on ground with you and your family, everybody else still sees a different picture, and then you just come to realisation that there's no other explanation for it.

But more Palestenian lives are being lost. Purely from a numbers perspective if you put aside all other variables or blame, wouldn't that explain why one side is being criticized extra right now?

How about criticizing Hamas, a terrorist organization, for shooting rockets at civilian populations of a country with one of the most advanced armies of the world?

How about criticizing Hamas for shooting these rockets from civilian centers?

Seems like the media is willfully ignorant here.

Then you have nonsense like: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/17/5912189/yes-gaza-militants-hid...

Clearly this smells foul.

> How about criticizing Hamas for shooting these rockets from civilian centers?

How about criticizing Israel, a country with one of the most advanced militaries in the world, for bombing civilians that can't defend themselves, in retaliation for very basic level attacks by a terrorist group Israel is perfectly capable of defending itself from?

Hamas are the bad guys, Israel are even worse because they could show restraint and not murder civilians, not evict Arabs and resettle their lands with Jews and all the other war crimey shit they do, yet they still do that, under a very corrupt leader that mostly stays in power with nationalistic and proto-fascistic rhetoric.

How about criticizing both Hamas and Israel for shooting rockets at civilians? Blame can go both ways.

On top of that, many people, me included, criticize Israel for illegally occupying Palestinian territory, stealing houses from Arab Israels, and generally treating Palestinians as second-rate citizens and worse. There's simply no excuse for that.

Imagine yourself in a situation like that. Whatever you do, whoever you complain to, the situation only gets worse. You're helpless against enormous injustice. While I don't condone violence, I do understand why people resort to violence when everything else fails.

> How about criticizing Hamas for shooting these rockets from civilian centers?

Looking at google maps it sure seems that the IDF does the same, keeping their headquarters in the middle of densely populated center of Tel Aviv. Between a large hospital and a shopping mall.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Israel+Defense+Forces/@32....

If you are gonna both-sides this, you should commit to it.

Are you asking Hamas to walk out into the desert and build a base there? This is equivalent to the Revolutionary War-era Brits telling the colonists to fight fairly instead of hiding in the woods. Fighting fair is for fair fights. In unfair fights, people use the tactics available to them. If Hamas were to build a purely military base, it would be leveled and everyone on it would be dead within two days. One might suspect at that point that they weren't seriously trying.

It is not the Palestinians' job to submit quietly to gradual but violent displacement by an occupying outside force. It is also not the Palestinians' job to make a big show of getting murdered in an open field with honor. Those are not the requirements for a people to be defended from ethnic cleansing.

> Purely from a numbers perspective if you put aside all other variables

Why would you put aside variables that are more important to casualty numbers? It's not a symmetrical situation.

One side tries to increase casualty numbers on both sides of the conflict.

The other side tries to decrease casualty numbers on both sides of the conflict.

How would comparing casualty numbers in this situation tell you anything about the conflict?

Bombing civilian buildings is not a way to decrease casualty numbers on both sides of a conflict. The more peaceful alternative to bombing civilian buildings is not sending leaflets and then bombing civilian buildings, it is declining to bomb civilian buildings.

Using slightly less violence than is available to you does not make you the good guy, especially when the violence you use is drastically higher than the violence that is even possible from the other side.

> civilian

Citation needed. If a building is used for warfare, it is not civilian building.

> If a building is used for warfare, it is not civilian building.

Citation needed! Show that all the buildings Israel has bombed were being used for warfare.

First of all, Israel's goal is not to decrease casualties: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/an-eye-for-a-tooth/

Second of all, even if I accept your premise, that "One side tries to increase casualty numbers on both sides of the conflict. The other side tries to decrease casualty numbers on both sides of the conflict.", then clearly it's not working, right?

Regardless of motivations, the outcome is Palestinian lives are being lost at a disproportionally higher rate than Israeli. That must be understood.

The standard Israeli response to this is "Hamas uses human shields." OK....so you know this, and are still shooting missiles. That means you are knowingly killing human shields.

OK, so maybe these human shields are protecting military equipment. Military equipment that is primitive and is completely neutralized by the Iron Dome.

The point I'm making is that even if you accept ALL of Israel's narratives about Hamas, about IDF's strategy (which have all sorts of other problems, such as when they get caught sniping civilians and medical personnel), you still wind up in a situation where you have a massive power differential and one side knowingly killing civilians.

> That means you are knowingly killing human shields.

That means that you decrease amount of your citizens that will end up dead.

> Military equipment that is primitive and is completely neutralized by the Iron Dome.

It's not. IDF and official Israelis obviously want everyone to believe that, but in reality, Iron Dome is not limitless, and can simply run out of ammunition, if Hamas launch sites are not counter-attacked. Which means a couple of thousand, or tens of thousands, of dead israelis in a few hours.

This is a war where one side, Israel, attempts to minimize both sides casualties, while the other side, Hamas, tries to maximize both sides casualties, including their own people. Purely from intentions perspective, it's clear who should be criticized.

I'm sorry to hear you're living through violence. That sounds horrible, and I hope you and your family are safe.

I see you conflating criticism of the actions of the Israeli government with opposition to Jewish lives. They are not the same. I oppose the Israeli government's policies and actions towards Palestine, but that does not mean I wish harm on you or your family, nor does it mean I don't see and value the Israeli lives lost during this conflict. There ARE other explanations for it.

> I see you conflating criticism of the actions of the Israeli government with opposition to Jewish lives.

No. I'm saying that putting israeli government under a completely different set of standards than any other country in the world cannot be explained with anything else rather than pure anti-semitism.

What different standards do you mean?

I've never, in any other conflict, witnessed a public opinion on the side of the aggressor. I've never, in any other conflict, seen an army that's not fighting overseas, but is desperately trying to prevent massive loss of life in it's own population, accused of "disproportionate" response — even though it would take measures to prevent any casualties that are completely unprecedented in world practices and makes achieving it's goals (see above) significantly harder. I've never in my life seen calls for genocide of entire nation (that's exactly what "from the river to the sea" means, if you're not aware) widely supported through out the world.

Every time this conflict happens again, I can't help but realise that if it was not for IDF, my family would have long have been brutally killed, and all those first-world liberals who're so busy fighting for their causes wouldn't even mind.

Yes, the coverage of the conflict is one-sided and popular opinion is on the side of the Palestinians. The reason for that is that the conflict itself is one-sided. Gaza is occupied by Israel.

Further, Israel has the overwhelming advantage in military power and the Palestinians suffer the overwhelming majority of casualties every time there is conflict.

In the 2008-09 war, the total number of Israeli citizens killed was 13, 10 of whom were combatants and 3 non-combatants (according to the IDF, see [1]). The total number of Palestinians killed was, depending on the source, between 1166 (IDF estimate) and 1440 (Palestinian ministry of Health, Gaza) [1].

The IDF protects your homes and your families, yes. It also crushes the lives and obliterates the houses of the Palestinians. Public opinion is against Israel not because the IDF protects Israeli citizens, but because the IDF kills Palestinians.

Finally, the IDF can protect your families and your homes, but there is nobody to protect the lives and homes of the Palestinians. Public opinion is their only shield and it doesn't stop bombs.

My comment is by way of explanation, not by way of accusation.

____________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_War_(20...

How do you explain the same exact global reaction in 2006, when Hezbollah started a war by kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers on the border and firing missiles into Israel? Massive protests, 'Israel is committing war crimes/genocide', followed by international condemnation.

OP that you're responding to is exactly correct - there is zero outrage against the Syrian or Yemen Civil war (where Iranian-funded troops have starved thousands of people to death). Same goes for the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Same goes for Ethiopia vs Tigray.

re: outrage at Israel and not at Syria, etc.:

1. Israeli bombings, unlike actions in Syria and Yemen, are directly funded by the United States, which makes them a highly relevant issue for Americans and for people concerned with America's role in geopolitics.

2. Visibility. Israel is given extreme favor in US political circles, but that ironically works against it in this case. Their struggles are highly visible, but as a result, so is their aggression.

3. We're working on it. International solidarity protests have seen a dramatic rise in recent years, but we can only learn so quickly.

Will start with point 1: Take Europe instead of just the US - protests in Europe against Israel with no equivalent against Iran or Russia, both of whom funded and sent troops to Syria where Assad has committed actual genocide leading to displacement of millions. Europe trades with Russia and Iran and could apply economic pressure. Where were the mass protests in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe or nerve gas attacks against civilians? No calls for the end of Russia or Iran as countries. Why do you think this is?

> Take Europe instead of just the US - protests in Europe against Israel with no equivalent against Iran or Russia,

The protests are because people are upset not simply at Israel, but at their own governments for not devoting energy to constraining Israel.

> Take Europe instead of just the US - protests in Europe against Israel with no equivalent against Iran or Russia, both of whom funded and sent troops to Syria where Assad has committed actual genocide leading to displacement of millions.

The reason for this is that most people around most of the world see the US as the greatest threat to world peace and the prosperity of nations, with China probably second and Iran and Russia very distant contenders. This is certainly true in the Arab world, but in Europe also.

Remember also that the US, under president Trump, went back on a peace deal with Iran, leaving the EU in a very difficult position, between the US rock and the hard place of even more strife in the Middle East. And for many of us, the Middle East is next door, not half a world away as it is for the US. I appreciate of course that Israel is in the Middle East but that's exactly the point. For Europeans, a large region right at our doorstep full of people armed to the teeth and chomping at the bit to kill each other, not to mention that at least one of them is a neuclear power, is a very pressing matter.

Or, if you want a different perspective, Europeans see Israel as closer to European culture (you're even in Eurovision!), a secular democracy with an educated and modern population that can be influenced by international politics and by the popular opinion in European countries. So it makes sense that they would try to influence you.

While I agree that there should be more outrage about other tragedies, "Better than Syria" is not the standard that I want to hold my country to, so I don't engage in such arguments. We (Israel) consider ourselves to be a western nation, with western ideals and standards. And so it is reasonable that we'd be called out if we fail to live up to the standards of the crowd we want to hang out with. I'd be disappointed if we started to be grouped along with Syria and Yemen.

I wasn't referring to Israeli actions vs Syria, which are clearly not comparable, but the difference in reactions. If you think that the protests calling Israel an illegal state are just trying to hold Israel to a higher standard then you are clearly misinterpreting what is happening. They're chanting "From the river to the sea" not "Hold yourselves to a higher standard".

Just to clarify, my comments here are no endorsement of calling Israel an illegal state in any way, shape or form.

Fair enough, I think there are a lot of protestors (in real life as well as on Twitter) that have entirely unrealistic goals, hoping for an ideal situation but not really thinking through what the ramifications of their plan would be. I've seen this among "Greater Israel" Israelis as well - I once had a long chat with a settler in the Jordan Valley region about how he envisions annexation working out, the best he could come up with was "all the Palestinians will voluntarily move to Canada, which will take them in because Trump is going to broker a deal". Not exactly the strongest answer to accusations of ethnic cleansing.

To be clear, anyone hoping for "from the river to the sea" is not in touch with the reality in the region. The only way that could happen is with a terrible war that would make the current war look like a small scuffle. I'm pretty sure there's no diplomatic path from where we are today to a one state solution of any kind that doesn't take several generations, and we're not moving in the right direction.

I don't remember the reaction to Hezbollah's attack. I remember the incident, but not the reaction in the news. If you felt that was one-sided, then I will defer to your opinion and accept that I don't have an explanation for it, other than the fact that news organisations are very often prejudiced and their reporting is dictated by their political affiliations.

Regarding Syria, Yemen, Armenia and Ethiopia, perhaps you are right that the atrocities committed there are not given the same atttention in the news (it depends on where you are; in my country, Syria received the same amount of coverage, mainly because we received a large number of refugees from the war).

However, even if those atrocities were given the same attention as the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinians, that would not necessarily mean that the latter atrocities would somehow be considered less severe, or that public opinion would turn against the Palestinians. Is that what you would expect?

I should also say that the Palestinian issue has been going on for more than 40 years now without resolution and it's natural that there is more attention paid to it, if nothing else because everyone would like to see the end of it.

In any case, realistically speaking, the occupation is a cause célèbre and there's nothing anyone can do about that, except perhaps ending the occupation.

Some of the things you're saying are true, but I think you need to make an effort to put yourself in the mindset of the other side. I live in Tel Aviv, I am sympathetic to the way you feel and know many fellow Israelis who feel the same way. But it's not an absolute, universal truth that the Palestinians are the aggressor. Just as convinced as you are that they are evil, bloodthirsty people hellbent on killing you, many of them are convinced the exact opposite - that you are all of those things toward them.

I say this to everyone reading: if you can't understand your enemy, if you cannot fathom why they act the way they do, if you cannot get into their heads and hearts and empathize with them, you ought to wonder if you simply lack imagination or are living in a bubble.

If you lock a dog in a cage and starve it, who's the aggressor when it eventually bites you?

looks like you hit a nerve by correctly diagnosing the situation.

Since this question revolves around words and their effect…

"most populated" > "crammed" > "jailed" > "the new warsaw ghetto"

there must be a word that describes your question of why:

The word you're looking for also describes what's enabling the cognitive dissonance of putting Gaza in the same category as a Singapur, a Tokio or Hong Kong without blinking: Economic powerhouses that draw talent from developing and developed nations worldwide vs. a town with an economy that only consists of NGOs, the Hamas and UN-Organizations (The wage gap between ordinary gaza citizens and those working for the state is 50%).

But instead of owning that word, it's easier to just keep uttering "Israel is bombing one of the most densely populated places in the world".

What's the phrasing you'd prefer? "Children were once again murdered in cold blood in Gaza, a metropolis that could be just like Singapore, Tokyo, or Hong Kong given its dense population and prime geographic location, were it not under constant military oppression from a country whose illegal nuclear weapons program is more successful than that of North Korea"?

I think a lot of people would find that uncomfortably partisan, so news organizations tend to self-censor, unfortunately.

Whatever criticism Israel may or may not deserve over its current bombing campaign, you aren't going to convince anyone if you misuse phrases like "murdered in cold blood". That's just not what those words mean.

Can you explain why I am misusing the phrase? I believe it to be objectively accurate.

Again, that phrasing might make people uncomfortable. as I wrote above. I understand that, and I understand why people desire to censor it. But I don't believe it's incorrect, which is another thing entitely.

You can have your beliefs, but that doesn't make them facts.

Meanwhile a cleptocratic regime is firing missiles at civlians using as launching pads hospitals, kindergartens or office buildings housing international journalists.

>office buildings housing international journalists.

Weird how those journalist agencies themselves missed that.

What's the slow colonisation with settlements about? Liberation of land controlled by evil terrorists?

Also as far as Israel is concerned there is no recognised regime or other such government there. It's apparently a stateless area with stateless people to be slowly ethnically cleansed.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-57136883

"Israeli PM Netanyahu defends Gaza press building bombing

Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that destroying the Jala high-rise block in Gaza on Saturday was justified."

> Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that destroying the Jala high-rise block in Gaza on Saturday was justified

There’s a pretty big difference between a politician (even one less flagrantly corrupt than Netanyahu) making a claim about their conduct of war and that claim being true.

I agree. I unsuccessfully tried finding an article I read a couple days ago that contained quotes from the head of the BBC office declaring that Hamas had no presence in the building. They said they actively check to the best of their ability because Israel is known to bomb media buildings and blame it on Hamas' presence. They also stated Israel has provided no proof of its claims.

I'd like to think I would have resisted responding, but I see another response that doesn't answer your question, so, oh well-

The dictionary seems to use "murder" for premeditated killing. Even if you think Israelis are the devil incarnate, killing children doesn't serve their interests. You have to go pretty far into conspiracy territory to believe they secretly want those children to die, and then turn around and explain to everyone how they try to prevent those kids from dying. It certainly serves Hamas's interests more than it serves Israeli interests.

Google's dictionary returns "without emotion or pity; deliberately cruel or callous" for cold-blooded. See above. Any reasonable pro- or anti-Israel position would concede that Israelis would be happier without civilian casualties.

> You have to go pretty far into conspiracy territory to believe they secretly want those children to die

Not really: it's well-reported that Israeli policy reasons about Arabs primarily in demographic terms. A stated Israeli priority is to keep low the number of Arabs in its territory. It's not even a secret.

You might find this so abhorrent and morally indefensible to be unlikely, but really it's just another day in the Middle East.

You are arguing that bombs killing less than 0.02% of Palestinian children is going to solve Israel's demographic problem and Israel would like to do that despite all the abuse they will receive from the rest of the world for doing so? Like, fine, assume absolute evil, why not, but evil and stupid simultaneously? Hence "conspiracy territory".

> You are arguing that bombs killing less than 0.02% of Palestinian children is going to solve Israel's demographic problem

No I'm not, I'm just pointing out that this sort of attitude is obviously a natural result of their stated intent.

> evil and stupid simultaneously?

Stupid is a given, considering Occam. Asymmetrical warfare in general has been "propaganda-stupid" ever since Jewish tradition popularized David and Goliath. Yet armies still routinely engage in it, because propaganda is only one dimension of a conflict. Being stupid, however, doesn't exclude being anything else.

Is it a conspiracy theory, then, that the US engaged in the premeditated killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deliberately obliterating an area much wider than the legitimate military targets in those cities - that they in fact wanted a large number of civilians to die - and then turned around and argued (almost certainly correctly!) that they were actually trying to minimize civilian casualties by not bombing Tokyo or mounting a land invasion? Is it improbable to believe that an entire chain of command authorized those deaths without emotion? Does it require believing that Americans, as a whole, are the devil incarnate for such a thing to have happened?

Like I said, maybe the words make people uncomfortable. But I don't think they are untrue.

What do you call it when a military air force with enormous reconnaissance capabilities bombs civilian targets and civilians, including children, die?

I don't understand your argument. You want to point out that this is terrible, and in an ideal world, no one should be bombing anyone? Of course! That doesn't mean you should say, e.g. that Israelis are cannibals just because cannibalism is bad.

How is it not cold blooded murder then? The bombing is a killing. It is deliberate. It is done with ample preparation time and not under fire. You said it was misuse of the term. What keeps it from being proper to not call it cold blooded

The nations can do what they want special pleading is the only argument I can see against murder but it would be an inconsistent one. Fiven the sheer number of state acts called murder completely unchallenged as such. Since WWII at least "at war" isn't an excuse for murder. While they may have called retaliatory executions for partisans war it was never called anything but murder in WW2.

> While they may have called retaliatory executions for partisans war it was never called anything but murder in WW2.

You’re completely unaware of the indiscriminate aerial bombing that typified WW2, or you’re entirely dishonest.

We like arguing in hypotheticals here on HN so lets bring a modified trolley problem into the discussion:

This modified version has the trolley heading steady on course to the next station, there is nobody on the track and nothing will happen if you leave it alone. However you stand next to a lever, and if you pull the lever you will divert the trolley and it will hit 200 people (some are criminals but most aren’t). You have ample time to think it over. If the trolley passes, you still have the option to pull the lever and the next trolley will hit those 200 people. You know full well what happens if you pull the lever. You also know you will not be punished if you do.

Say you are an observer in this modified version, and you observe me pulling the lever. 200 people are now unessisary dead because of my action. Do you consider me a cold blooded murderer?

This is not a good-faith simplification of the situation in Gaza.

I know its not, that was sort of the point here. I made sure to qualify this with arguing in hypotheticals before coming up with the scenario.

Starting this sub-thread with a debate about what makes a cold blooded murder is another way of taking the debate into arguing hypotheticals and is not a good-faith tactic. What I did here is simply taking the bait and continuing to the logical next step.

@dang there is something odd going on here.

The comment I'm replying to from user woodpanel says (in part):

""most populated" > "crammed" > "jailed" > "the new warsaw ghetto"... The word you're looking for also describes what's enabling the cognitive dissonance of putting Gaza in the same category as a Singapur, a Tokio or Hong Kong without blinking... a town with an economy that only consists of NGOs, the Hamas and UN-Organizations"

This dead comment[1] from user idownvoted says:

"You're missing the intention of those pushing this claim: Painting Israel as running a prison intentionally bad, or vice-versa making Gaza the new Warsaw-Ghetto.

If other commentators can't note the rediculousness of putting Gaza next to Tokio, Singapur or Hong Kong, I will: A place with virtually no economy outside of NGOs, the Hamas and UN-Orgs vs. economic beacons that draw talent from all over the world."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27188683

Don't look directly at the hasbara.

Of course, I'm a typical German troll farm run by the mossad. You clearly have incorporated the word I was hinting at.

Why not own it?

> Looking at the country list, I see Israel is the #5 most densely populated country in the world.

You're looking at the second table, which includes only the 100 most populous countries. If you look at the main table, which includes all countries, Israel is #17.

Good point, thank you.

> And Bnei Brak is the #5 most densely populated city, far more densely populated than Gaza.

This is only because the term "city" is used inconsistently around the world. Bnei Brak is part of the district of Tel Aviv, and most geographers would consider it part of the Tel Aviv-Yafo urban agglomerations[1].

The absolute size of an area puts a ceiling on the density - roads etc take up space, and the larger the area the more likely it is to include freeways, or hit geographic features that limit density.

It would be better to think of it as a 7 sq km district, and as such its density (29,345 people per square km) isn't particularly high[2]. Looking at districts with similar geographic size Imbaba in Cairo is 8 square km and has a density of 177,038 per square km, or Güngören in Turkey is 8 sq km and has a density of 41,349 people per km. If we look at similar populations (204,639) then Manhattan Community Board 7 (population 207,699) has a density of 42,387 people per sq km, or Zaveri Bazar (pop 202,922) has a density of 114,001 people per sq km.

So yes, Bnei Brak is dense, but not especially so by comparable urban area standards.

[1] https://www.intechopen.com/books/urban-agglomeration/charact...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_districts_by_popu...

Bnei Brak is part of the "Tel Aviv metropolitan area" but it's not part of the city of Tel Aviv, in the classic meaning: it has its own municipality, budgets, taxing system, etc. Counting it as the same city in any meaning would be wrong as the two have very different goals re: neighborhood design, density, commercial business focus, events, city services, etc.

It's part of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Aviv_District

Many "cities" have political structures similar to what you describe.

> If not, my question for you is: why do we see this phrase so commonly in reporting on Gaza but not on other more densely populated areas?

One difference is that most of its residents aren't allowed to leave, from my understanding.

On top of that, most of its residents, whether they are allowed to leave or not, are also stateless, which essentially locks them out of much of the developed world.

Because most people are stupid, and this level of truth-bending will not be punished.

It must just be something that gets repeated without verification at this point. For comparison Gaza City has a slightly higher population density than NYC (but less than Hoboken, NJ) while the entire Gaza Strip has the same population density as Boston (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...).

> For comparison Gaza City has a slightly higher population density than NYC (but less than Hoboken, NJ) while the entire Gaza Strip has the same population density as Boston

Comparing Gaza to Boston is a bit misleading. Boston is closely integrated into an entire metro area, and the city limits of Boston are artifacts of history. Comparing to NYC is even less meaningful, because NYC is part of an integrated tri-state area and also the geographical center of a larger connected megopolis that contains 1/6th of the population of the entire US.

Gaza, on the other hand, is a strip of land the size of Queens (New York), and it is entirely cut off from everything around it (both land and sea). People who live in Gaza never leave, and nobody else enters. There's no "commuting" to or from Gaza.

I’m sorry if I came across as trying to minimize the dire situation those who live in Gaza are in. You’re right - people in NYC don’t have a foreign power controlling their airspace and shoreline as well as the numerous other differences. I was responding to the idea that it has a higher population density than most other cities and giving some comparisons solely on that metric.

The closest comparison that leaps immediately to mind would be Hong Kong.

But I think the underlying theme is that descriptive words can editorialize - which is pretty obvious.

So maybe the wordsmiths in the media could select a more descriptive adjective than most dense.

> People who live in Gaza never leave, and nobody else enters

The border crossing with Egypt is (or was) open earlier this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing

Can you find a single reference stating that it's the most dense city or area in the world? I tried looking for one but failed.

There are well over 10,000 cities in the world and Gaza City is likely among the top 500 for population density, which would put it in the top 5%.

Do you generally call things out as being untrustworthy for claiming that the top 5% is among the highest in a rank?

Here is a single reference: https://www.middleeastobserver.org/2016/07/12/pcbs-reports-g...

"Do you generally call things out as being untrustworthy for claiming that the top 5% is among the highest in a rank?"

The reason I consider this claim "misleading" is that I never see the "one of the most densely populated..." phrase on stories about Paris, Kathmandu, Seoul or any of the hundreds of more densely populated areas, yet I constantly see it in reference relatively much-less-densely-populated Gaza. When I start seeing news stories that read "The mayor of Hoboken NJ, one of the most densely populated areas of the world, opposes a measure that would increase affordable housing..." then the phrase won't make me scratch my head anymore.

Why does this phrase always come up in relation to Gaza and not the hundreds of other cities/regions that are more densely populated?

If we're trading references, can you show me some where the BBC refers to Paris as "one of the most densely populated places in the world?"

Are Paris, Kathmandu, Seol, or Hoboken under blockade by a government that claims their land but makes the people on that land stateless, and also periodically bombs their urban infrastructure?

It's possible that the density of gaza is in some way relevant to the current events taking place there in a way that it might not be for the other places you've listed.

There are plenty of stories where this would be relevant. "Many refugees are landing in suburbs of Paris, one of the most densely populated..." "...rural Korean population is flocking to Seoul, one of the most..."

Anyway it's clear that Gaza is a densely populated area. I still consider the highly selective use of the "one of the most" phrasing curious. For the record I think it's bad to drop bombs onto (or fire rockets into) civilian areas even if they are only sparsely populated, for what it's worth.

> There are plenty of stories where this would be relevant. "Many refugees are landing in suburbs of Paris, one of the most densely populated..." "...rural Korean population is flocking to Seoul, one of the most..."

I mean, is it? The suburbs of Paris and Seoul are relatively unbounded in size, if nothing else. Gaza has a hard line on how many sqmi it is in a way very few other jurisdictions do. The density of Gaza is particularly relevant because the situation makes that density a problem in ways it isn't really for Paris or Seoul, as they are not being bombed, blockaded, or subject to limitations on when they even have power or water.

That’s very disingenuous - there are zero territorial claims against Israel in Gaza Strip. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, dissolving all settlements in the area, back in 2005.

The blockade is simply an ongoing state of war between Gaza and Israel. Gaza also borders with Egypt.

Israel recognizes no government in Gaza (neither the Palestinian Authority, which has no power there, nor Hamas, which they recognize as terrorists not a government), claims control over entry and exit to the territory of goods and people, including by sea, and claims the right to enter the territory at any time to carry out military activity.

Israel also does not recognize a Palestinian state in general to be at war with to begin with. There is some lip service to an eventual two state solution that gets less and less paid to every year, but as it stands there's no one to be at war with, as far as Israel is concerned. There's just a bunch of stateless people stuck in a postage-stamp-sized jurisdiction that they've left in a lawless state.

"Disengagement" is not devolution is not autonomy. The idea that this is a war is a convenient PR fiction.

Were you using the term "claims control over entry of goods into the territory" instead of "claims their land", there would be much less to argue about.

"claims their land" sounds like Israel would like to annex Gaza and make it part of Israel - which is ridiculous and patently false.

Is it? Certainly, there are political factions within Israel that claim it should be part of Israel -- that's why there were settlements to remove in the first place. It would be ridiculous to deny that, honestly. Those factions seem to continue to grow in influence every year as well.

The idea that Israel should be one state that covers the entirety of the former mandate of Palestine seems to actually be pretty popular in Israel right now. It may not be the official policy, but it is a very real possibility.

Regardless, if a country exerts every measure of control over a territory it can including entry and exit from it along international borders, it's really hard imo to argue that it sees it as sovereign in any way. Israel clearly does not see Gaza as an independent state. So if it's not an independent state what exactly is it a part of if not Israel.

Or, to put it a little bit more snarky: you can't neglect your way out of an occupation. Neglect is, in fact, a weapon in cases like this.

Does Egypt also claim their land?

Not as far as I know?

Egypt does control access in and out along their own border, as every country does, but afaik the nature of that control is at least somewhat dictated by agreements between Egypt and Israel.

As far as I know Egypt does not do any of the other things I listed, like controlling what can go in and out of Gaza through borders that aren't their own, nor do they make military incursions into it or bomb it.

Also, and I think this is actually pretty key to the idea that Israel believes the land of Gaza to be part of Israel, if Egypt were to invade Gaza do you really believe that Israel would allow that to stand? If Israel truly considered Gaza a state not under its jurisdiction, Egypt annexing Gaza would likely be a welcome outcome.

> Does Egypt also claim their land?

Nope. It (or rather the United Arab Republic, of which modern Egypt is a successor but not the sole successor) temporarily occupied it (officially, pending resolution of the Israel/Palestine issue, but terminated early by force) from 1959-1967 without claiming it.

There was some ambiguity about Egypt’s stance between 1967-1978, but after 1978 they unambiguously had no claim, even administrative, over Gaza.

> "claims their land" sounds like Israel would like to annex Gaza and make it part of Israel - which is ridiculous and patently false.

It very much is not. A recent a Netanyahu election ad showed a map of Israel without Gaza and the West Bank cut out, overlaid with the words “one state”. Among other examples. https://twitter.com/jewish_worker/status/1394036492213833728...

They’re referring to the fact Gaza/Palestine is one of the densest countries in the world.

Gaza is also completely surrounded by sea and another country, so it’s an incredibly dense place with no room to grow. Seoul and Paris are also dense places, but you can keep walking and eventually you see it thin out without a clear border on city limits. Put a fence around Paris city core and fire a missile on the city center—news will talk about one of the densest places on earth being blown up.

Gaza actually has borders with two countries.

> If we're trading references, can you show me some where the BBC refers to Paris as "one of the most densely populated places in the world?"

"Tricks from the most densely populated city... Paris is one of the most densely populated city in the EU with relatively few green spaces."

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p06sbtzz/tricks-from-the-most...

> The reason I consider this claim "misleading" is that I never see the "one of the most densely populated..." phrase on stories about Paris, Kathmandu, Seoul or any of the hundreds of more densely populated areas, yet I constantly see it in reference relatively much-less-densely-populated Gaza.

War in dense urban areas is a special kind of hell.

And it's not particularly rare to note dense population when it is especially relevant.

> Officials in Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, have said the country is overwhelmed with the Rohingya population that has emerged in the Cox’s Bazar area.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/stateless-persecuted...

> At first, Rwanda’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana, refused, protesting that Rwanda was among the most densely populated countries in the world

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/sep/12/americas-secret...

> For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/americas-war-o...

> Withholding of more precise data raises eyebrows as rights groups remain sceptical of geographic coordinates in densely-populated areas.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/27/us-led-coalition-a...

From your examples only Bangladesh is referred to by reporters (not as a quotation) as one of the most densely populated in this case “countries” (which is much easier to count than “places”) in the world. (“Most densely populated places” means something different as of course cities are “places” and the definition of place is highly debatable as this thread shows.)

Kudos & good examples. I still think this meme is attached particularly to Gaza but clearly it’s not exclusive.

> From your examples only Bangladesh is referred to by reporters (not as a quotation) as one of the most densely populated in this case “countries”

Not true. Only is a quote (the Rwanda one) and two of the four quotes are not about countries (Raqqa - a city, and "densely-populated areas").

I partially deal with your quibbles on the definition of "place" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27190788

But I think it's fair to compare similarly geographically sized areas, preferably with somewhat similar political status (ie, there's a big difference between a very dense city surrounded by countryside to support it, vs a city state with no surrounding support area)

It's hard to find many places as big as the Gaza Strip (365 sq km) that are as densely populated (5610 people per square km).

Dhaka is the most closely comparable city: 306 sq km with a density of 29,069 ppl/sq km. But a city isn't comparable to a territory like the Gaza Strip. That is more similar to islands, enclave or isolated country.

On Wikipedia's list[1] Singapore (722 sq km, 7,894 ppl/sq km), Hong Kong (1106 sq km, 6781 ppl/sq km), Bahrain (778 sq km, 1,982 ppl/sq km), and Malta (316 sq km, 1,633 ppl/sq km) seem the obvious comparisons.

The Gaza strip obviously sits right up there amongst them. It is difficult to argue it isn't one of the most densely populated places in the world looking at comparable "places".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

Since the original post is about Google maps, lets use that as a tool for a moment:

Gaza city and Tel Aviv have about the same population size according to Wikipedia (about 590,000 and 460,000 respectively). The Tel Aviv metro area is about 1,500 km² which is almost 3 times larger then the entire Gaza strip (365 km²). The Tel Aviv urban area has about half the population size of the entire Gaza Strip while the Tel Aviv Metro area has almost double the population size as the entire Gaza strip. Both Tel Aviv and Gaza city border the coast, both are somewhat bounded by borders to the East.

So Gaza and Tel Aviv should be somewhat comparable when we look them on a map. However if you take a look at this:

First Tel Aviv: https://www.google.com/maps/@32.0703502,34.8333795,11.38z

It looks pretty normal, a dense urban core with some sprawl around it.

Now lets look at Gaza City with the same zoom level: https://www.google.com/maps/@31.5083142,34.4330704,11z

Now this looks odd. There is only the dense urban core and then some nothing and then some borders. This is not how cities grow naturally.

Look at a zoomed in level of Gaza City: https://www.google.com/maps/@31.517549,34.4848539,13.55z

And the same zoom level of Tel Aviv: https://www.google.com/maps/@32.0641297,34.8076298,13.55z

Notice how abruptly the Gaza City ends, while Tel Aviv looks like a city. Clearly there is something going on there. Looking at the map alone I would not guess that Gaza City was a city the same size as Tel Aviv. I think it is worth reporting this fact given the anomalous nature of Gaza.

Another—and a more important—reason this is worth reporting is precisely the fact that Gaza is a densely populated area that is abnormally bounded in growth. This makes Gaza unique (except maybe Singapore and Hong Kong; but I do recall news media like mentioning those as being densely populated as well).

If Hoboken NJ was blurry on Google Maps they would also describe it as "one of the most densely populated areas of the world" because it's fucking weird that a place with such a population density would be blurry on Google Maps.

Gaza would have ranked 5th on population density, or 3rd if you remove places with tiny population (i.e take a "pop > 1MM" threshold).

It's basically after Singapore and Hong-Kong.

Can you walk me through your thinking here? I don’t quite follow. I am listening and open to being wrong.

Thinking? I didn't do any. I divided the #pop by #area in units I can relate to (Km^2), then looked at the table and figured out it would be #5.

Ok I think I’m able to piece back together what you’re talking about: it sounds like you’re ranking Gaza on the list of most densely populated “Country (or dependent territory)” but excluding cities. The article refers to it as one of the most densely populated “places” in the world.

What’s the reason for excluding cities when ranking the most densely populated places in the world? When I imagine “the most densely populated places in the world” I think first of cities, I assume most people do.

They are not removing cities blindly, they are only including cities with more than 1m people. That removes places like Pateros which, while incredibly dense, are not particularly populous.

Avip is not including cities when s/he ranks Gaza #5, s/he is only including countries. If I asked you "what's the most densely populated place in the world?" you would probably answer with the name of a city. Avip is excluding cities from his "densely populated places" ranking. This doesn't make sense to me. If you say "world's most densely populated places" of course I'm going to think of cities, as anyone would.

Because Gaza is, for all intents and purposes, a city-state, like Singapore or Hong Kong. It’s not really one part of a larger nation, so it doesn’t make sense to compare it to places that are.

It’s also being blockaded by its neighbors, so there is no freedom of movement in or out. If rockets are fired at Bnei Brak, the residents there can flee to the rest of Israel. If rockets are fired at Gaza, the residents have nowhere to go.

> If rockets are fired at Bnei Brak, the residents there can flee to the rest of Israel.

When rockets rain down on their homes, citizens of Bnei Brak can flee from their homes in car or on foot, go ??? somewhere (where exactly?) and hope they’re not blown to bits along the way. Wow, those privileged Israelis. The very lap of luxury.

Israel isn't big, but there are plenty of less likely (and less dense) targets than the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. Israelis can also leave the country. That's not "luxurious", but those are privileges that residents of Gaza don't have.

I'm not sure why you're responding so aggressively; you asked why Gaza is singled out as densely populated, and that's the answer.

I’m responding with derision because you’re so casually hand-waving away attacks on Israel as no big deal or not the same because they are “able to flee” (you still haven’t specified where is the safe place they can flee to). Have some empathy for Israeli civilians, just as you have empathy for Gazan civilians.

As for the technical question of “most densely populated“ or “more densely populated“ I don’t know why people keep bringing up stuff like supposed “ability to flee“ “bordered by other countries or by the sea or surrounded by countryside“ when arguing about population density. None of these things change the population density. Otherwise I could say “Hawaii is extremely densely populated by virtue of the fact that it’s really really really far from continental mainlands“ which makes no sense.

The fact of the matter is that Israeli civilians have options that Gazan Palestinians do not. I'm empathetic to them as well — it's horrible that anyone has to fear being killed in a conflict. But there is absolutely a disparity, and it's not "hand-waving" to note that it exists without qualification.

That disparity, by the way, is exactly why it doesn't make sense to compare Gaza to cities with regard to population density. It's technically a city, but that's really not an apples-to-apples comparison. For all intents and purposes it's a country/territory, by which standard it is one of the most densely populated in the world.

Gaza is not technically a city. I encourage you to learn more about the fundamentals and history of this situation before making broad assertions about it.

Curious that you keep trying to compare its density to cities rather than other territories, then.

Anyway, we’re clearly talking past each other. Have a nice day!

It's maybe worth noting that objective metrics of population density are generally by land area and subjectively, density is about floor space or even volumetric. Building size could have a big impact on what is perceived as population dense.

Articles citing articles citing articles... aka cliche. They're not really wrong. The definition of "place" is just arbitrary, so it's always "debatable.^"

Bnei Brak, incidentally, is also often described as the densest place in the world. It's just in other contexts that don't interest an international readership. It was mentioned often, in covid related contexts.

^Meaning, pointlessly debateable.

> Neither of these come close to ranking on wikipedias list of cities by population density

> Is the BBC just plain wrong here or am I missing something?

What you're missing is that you don't have to be anywhere near that list to be one of the most densely populated places in the world. Most of the world is empty.

This link title is extremely misleading to the point of being disingenuous and provocative. The title of the linked article is “Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps?”... because the entire Israel / Gaza / West Bank region is blurred in the exact same way. There is no preferential blurring of Palestinian areas. The clear answer is to prevent actors on both sides from using Google’s satellite imagery to plan attacks against one another. But please continue the breathless hot takes.

Israel can get all the detailed imagery it needs by just launching a reconnaissance aircraft or drone.

So on that basis I would say it only stops the Palestinians from getting imagery of the area.

Now considering the fact Palestine only has rockets and not missiles, I doubt that imagery is of much value to them.

Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the world from seeing what is going on.

If that was the case why stop now? And why did they let parts unknown film in Palestine in 2013. The episode wasn't very pro Israel either. This a little to conspiracy theory for me.

I have learned to demand a very high standard of evidence for conspiracy theories, so...let's see the evidence that there is some conspiracy between Google and Israel to hide what is happening there. For that matter, I am not even sure what you think Israel is hiding -- Netanyahu is not at all shy about settlements, the IDF calls people up to tell them when a bomb is going to be dropped on their building, and there are reporters and international observers all over the Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The article makes this very clear. There is no google-israel conspiracy. The limits on satelite resolution were dictated by the US government.

And the US government is dictated by a Israel-first policy. At least in view of the UNSC vetoes [0] and the weapons it supplies.

[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/43-times-us-has-used-veto...

The idea that a country might pass internal laws specifically to favour a foreign country is incredible, and gives the measure of how much the US is subservient to Israel's interests.

Beside the bipartisan powers-that-be in the US government, the media landscape is obsequious and willing participant too; see 'peace propaganda and the promised land (2004)' [0]. For instance, it didn't make it to the Paper of Record's newsworthiness that the NSA shares, per the Snowden revelations, US citizen's data with Israel [1][2]; to their credit, though, they lightly lament at occasionally getting used as an accessory to the war machine, outside the traditional route [3].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-2tEmqM1_E

[1] https://www.haaretz.com/report-nsa-sharing-u-s-citizens-data... It is hard to miss how the Israeli newspaper Haaretz is a lot more no-nonsense in tone and coverage than, say, the NYT.

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/world/middleeast/israel-g...

They are hiding the scale of it. Destroyed houses, trees, farms in Palestine. It is a map, it shows the scale immediately

I'm not sure about the immediate part. My area only updates every few years on Google maps, they don't exactly provide real-time data (and never meant to)

We don't have any evidence.

We do know that Israel has launched 1000 to 1500 missiles up until 10 pm pacific time.

Netanyahu has been blatant over taking back "theiir" land lately.

Netanyahu is in a very close political race.

I won't say what I thinking though out of respect for the rules.

I have learned to demand a very high standard of evidence for conspiracy theories,

Not a conspiracy theory at all - but rather a very sensible inference based on how state actors behave in the modern age.

I am not even sure what you think Israel is hiding

Blurry images make it much harder to assess, and verify the extent of the "unintended" casualties and property damage the current IDF campaign is causing (the term is in quotes because that's the language they rather gallingly use, as if they expect you and I to take it face value).

> Call me cynical, but I suspect the more important reason to keep these images blurred might be to stop the rest of the world from seeing what is going on.

No, not cynical. I will call it for what it is - baseless conspiracy.

It's certainly not baseless - and you provide no evidence that it is baseless, instead of finding the evidence claimed for it and then somehow proving it's not credible; ironic that your response is baseless.

The burden of proof is on the accuser.

I’m curious how Palestinian people live. I’d like to see the condition of their dwellings, infrastructure and resources eg water, roads, rail, ports, public spaces. I just want to get a feel for the place, like I can almost everywhere else. How can I do that?

Come and visit. As far as I understand, foreigners do not have much trouble visiting the West Bank.

Tourism in the State of Palestine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

Not much trouble slipping into Palestine for a foreigner, but you do get interrogated on your way out of Israel right at the airport and if you say you went to the occupied territories you may get sent to the little room for further questioning, search or seizure of your belongings, notebooks, laptop, phone, etc. You might also get put on a list for secondary screening or outright ban if you want to go back. So think it though if you want to go to Palestine -- it is indeed considered a theatre of military operations by the occupying power

Street View is available in the West Bank area, for example in Ramallah and Jericho

How would Gaza compare with Ramallah and Jericho?

Parent provided some (albeit weak) basis for the conspiracy. Israel trying to hide the damage it is inflicting is a credible motive. Cynicism is a justified qualifier for the claim, baseless conspiracy isn’t.

It's why they target news agencies such as AP. Now you can't get pictures on the ground. So we all have to rely on is low resolution maps to judge damage. "Security measures", or so they say.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....

And plausible deniability only goes so far - shallow thought, propaganda only goes so far until it meets adequate critical thinking; reminds me of Jordan Peterson in his last book Beyond Order - it's the intelligent ideologue that's the most dangerous.

Yes.

Because no one there has a smart phone. Because they actually killed the journalist. /s

Of the course the obvious explanation is the correct one, the building housed military targets (Hamas operations etc) and it was destroyed.

IDF couldn't provide any evidence of Hamas' existence in that building, it was all over the media yesterday.

https://twitter.com/haaretzcom/status/1394287848950427649

IDF provided the evidence to US intelligence, and apparently that hasn’t made its way to the US state department yet.

That is absolutely ridiculous. The US state department is on top of things. There is no way they do not have this information if it exists.

More info was sent: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/SJA7sEZYd

"Blinken: U.S. received more info on Gaza tower bombing

American top diplomat says he cannot comment on further information received through intelligence channels on the destruction of the building that housed Associated Press, Al Jazeera offices"

I wouldn't say IDF couldn't provide. Classified evidence takes time to compile when being passed to foreign countries. If this was truly a Hamas operations office, it changes the whole picture.

The postman was late. It doesn't mean there's no evidence

https://twitter.com/haaretzcom/status/1394631387265777666

I'm thinking as democracies we should not rely on secret evidence. I'll buy it when it's public, until then the burden of proof remains on them. It's okay not to kmow.

I don't understand. AP claims to have been using the building for years, and they didn't know that there were Hamas operations with them?

Not only that, but what is your proof to call it the correct explanation?

Don‘t discount a conspiracy just because the conspirators are incompetent. In fact, the opposite is usually true. Your average conspiracy usually has multiple layers of incompetents. If a conspiracy looks flawless, it is usually because there is no conspiracy.

Targetting a news organization might be a multi-purpose action, including to limit the amount of photos from the area. The fact that this action has resulted in even worse optics then the photos would have provided, and the fact that people on the ground are still a source of visual evidence for the destruction does not mean that there is no conspiracy, just that they are bad at it.

Given the absence of evidence of any Hamas activity in that tower, and given the clear motive improve the optics of IDF, I would say that both explanations hold at least the same ground.

I'm not seeing any shortage of pictures from the ground. I mean, I agree that targeting news agencies would be a step you would take if you wanted to prevent images from the ground but you would have to be far more sweeping in your approach. If the goal is to prevent news images from making their way out of Palestine this may be the most abject policy failure the world has ever witnessed.

The facts remain; Israel did bomb the offices of Al Jazeera and The Associated Press.

That action looks a lot like Israel targeting news agencies and the two news agencies involved have both raised their concerns about that unprecedented action by Israel.

> That action looks a lot like Israel targeting news agencies and the two news agencies involved have both raised their concerns about that unprecedented action by Israel.

They might be targeting those news agencies, but not for the purpose of suppressing images on the ground, which is what we were talking about. It's just implausible given the totality of evidence that that is the main concern. You can't just look at that one action to draw a conclusion when there is a massive amount of other contravening evidence.

More like they bombed a building which has offices of Al Jazeera and the AP among other things.

> you would have to be far more sweeping in your approach

Would you or could it be seen as deterrence?

> this may be the most abject policy failure the world has ever witnesse

I mean there are a lot of opeds in Hebrew (some lamenting this supposed failure) and Arabic press right now saying exactly that, so I wouldn't rule it out entirely.

> Would you or could it be seen as deterrence?

Given we are still seeing plenty of images out of Palestine and Gaza, even from news orgs, the current approach is plainly and objectively insufficient to the purported goal.

> Now considering the fact Palestine only has rockets and not missiles, I doubt that imagery is of much value to them.

A high resolution image would be very useful to anyone who is planning a terror attack with suicide bombers, for example.

Just worth mentioning, street view is available and updated regularly within Israel main cities.

not without controversy, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_in_Israel#I... "There was much controversy surrounding bringing Street View to Israel. The main one was the fear that terrorists could use the feature to plan attacks. Palestinian militants have previously admitted to using Google Maps to help plan attacks."

I don't know the technical distinction between rockets and missiles. Hamas has some guided explosives that other people that know more about this than I do call missiles. They used to only have unguided rockets - not anymore, for at least 6 years.

"The Russian-made Kornet anti-tank guided missile, often called ATGM as an acronym, is accurate and effective. It has a range of around 5.5 kilometers and has been used by Hamas and other terrorist groups for years. In 2015, Hezbollah fired several ATGMs against Israeli Humvees on the border."

https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/what-do-hamas-an...

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/why-anti-tank-missiles-pos...

Rocket is unguided. Missile is guided.

ATGM are missiles, but they are close range and used to attack vehicles (armored usually) - they are not useful for attacking long range or building/bases.

There was a post about this last week where someone said the reason is to prevent the widespread confirmation of Israels nuclear program. Everybody knows they have nukes, but officially the US denies knowing.

These images would provide fairly strong evidence of Israel's capabilities, hell Israel has spent years trying to claim satellite images of Iran prove they have a nuclear program.

here you go, all the nukes are right in here - https://www.google.com/maps/place/Negev+Nuclear+Research+Cen...

It would surprise me a lot if there were no people inside both Israel and Palestinians that has the resources and international connections to buy high resolution imagery or simply direct access to satellites. Given a few millions in capital and a few shell companies, finding a commercial entity willing to lend access to a satellite for a few hours seems likely, unless control over satellites are much more militarized than I might think.

>finding a commercial entity willing to lend access to a satellite for a few hours

The vast majority of satellites aren't made for this kind of mapping as far as I know. Of the ones that are most aren't private commercial projects. Wikipedia lists 6 such projects and i doubt their time is cheap enough to make it worthwile for Palestinian resistance. Israel is another matter but they'd probably just knock on the US door for those.

I think that you are right that the cost is too high compared to other cheaper alternatives, like reconnaissance aircraft on the Israel side. Keeping the images blurred removes the free option so military on each side has to spend resources on the problem. I am however skeptical that it fully stops anyone from getting access to mapping data.

I am a bit surprised however that there would not be more satellites that is commercial operated. I keep hearing about old weather satellites that gone past their period of commercial operation in favor of newer ones, and the old ones still having decent cameras and other sensors to provide maps of buildings and structures. With about 6000 satellites currently operating around the earth there should a pretty steady stream of old ones being replaced, and I would think many of them do get reused for new purposes.

>so military on each side has to spend resources on the problem.

I don't think Israel has to spend much if any. I think the blurring happens based on their request and i'm sure they still have access to unblurred satellite imagery. The only ones that could be hampered by this are the palestinians

If you read the article, it clearly states that high-resolution images are now available and permitted by US law:

> "As a result of recent changes to US regulations, the imagery of Israel and Gaza is being provided at 40cm resolution," Maxar said in a statement.

IDF doesn't need Google maps to plan any attacks. They have an arsenal of remote surveillance methods including 24/7 monitering by both low and high altitude drones, not to mention frequent flyovers in upgraded F-16s.

> But please continue the breathless hot takes.

This part of your comment doesn't belong on HN.

You’re right, my last line was itself provocative and unhelpful. Unfortunately I’m unable to edit now. But my point is that what also doesn’t belong on HN are (a) a blatantly editorialized clickbait title and (b) a comment section full of knee-jerk reactions seeming to take the title at face value.

But to your point, indeed the IDF are not going to be planning their air strikes via google maps. The violent actors on the Palestinian side are more likely to “benefit” from publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery of Israel than vice versa. However as others have noted below, US law (kyl-bingaman amendment) apparently requires blurring of high-res imagery of Israel, so Israel was going to be blurred no matter what.

Which ironically brings us back to the question, why is Gaza blurred as well? Google doesn’t have to do that.

My initial assumption is laziness backed by armchair altruism. It’s easier to just apply a blanket blur policy to the entire Israel-Palestine region to comply with aforementioned KB amendment given the dynamic nature of the borders. Given that blurring is, at least at face value, considered a good thing for security, I could see the people in the room thinking “it’s easier for us and it increases the security of the entire region. We get ahead of any possible claim that google maps is enabling attacks on Palestine while protecting Israel. Problem solved.”.. without thinking through the potential negative externalities.

But as you’ve raised, blurring Palestine doesn’t meaningfully prevent planned attacks on Palestine, except if they’re carried out by rogue Israeli actors without state resources. In my understanding those are not as common. So then it raises the legitimate question, “does the negative externality of ‘preventing the world from easily accessing satellite imagery of Palestine and thus understanding the extent of urban destruction’ outweigh the positive benefit to general Palestinian security”? From an objective perspective, possibly, but from Google’s perspective, not blurring would be a much more politically charged move requiring nuanced explanation, so they’re not going to risk it.

In the end it’s very “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” much like every other aspect of the broader conflict.

Israel lobbied for the KBA.

Your opinion is a bit of wishful thinking when compared against policy reality and whose side has favor written in law.

As mentioned in the article, Israel specifically is protected -- "U.S. law mandates U.S. government censorship of American commercial satellite images of no country in the world besides that of Israel.":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment....

My fault - it was a hasty decision to correct what was (perceived) as an error (based on what was perhaps a faulty, because hasty, reading of the title earlier). There's a lot going on in that region at the moment, and a lot of news to catch up on - that's where the haste came from.

The clear answer is to prevent actors on both sides from using Google’s satellite imagery to plan attacks against one another.

I somehow doubt that the motive is as clear as you suppose - but that's an entirely different matter.

Usually what I do in these situations is jump to Yandex maps, but they're the pulling the same censoring in Gaza and surroundings.

Here's a French prison blurred out on Google Maps, but uncensored on Yandex:

https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Prison+%22La+Sant%C3%A9%22/...

https://yandex.com/maps/org/tyurma_sante/117105575064/?l=sat...

i am guessing that the israelis approach governments or corporations with the request to reduce the quality of imagery of israeli territory in order to hinder hamas' OSINT efforts, and include the caveat that gaza etc be blurred out as well to preserve the appearance of neutrality; obviously the israeli state has access to high quality imaging outside of google maps et al

Wikipedia (of course!) has a list of locations intentionally blurred on public satellite map services:

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

That's interesting - the one in Antarctica, for example, really tickles the fantasy, doesn't it.

Whoa that is pretty interesting.

If they were truly hiding some secret villain's lair, why wouldn't they cover their tracks by making it look like any other expanse of white snow?

Why not do both

This declassified video is maybe relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ujx_pND9wg

Not really. The reason seems pretty straight forward to me, "The vast majority of Antarctica is also in low resolution due to the bright, often featureless, ice and snow making high-resolution imaging both difficult and largely unnecessary".

That's where they activate the portal duh. Don't tell anyone, lives depend on it, human and non-humanoid.

Is it possible to have real-time live-feed of the entire planet? If cost isn't an issue, would something like that be possible?

https://planet.com

(planet customer, no other affiliation)

>contact sales

thank you company, I'm gladly calling to check your services now

I think OP was asking more for a live-stream type service, where this appears to be static imagery.

This is the best that's currently available.

No doubt, a great resource, was just trying to help get to the meat of the comment :D

https://zoom.earth/

not quite real time (I'm not sure if that's even possible) but this is quite up to date. I used to to check out the smoke from last year.

edit: you get pictures every 10 minutes of the whole globe, but the resolution is pretty bad, good enough to check the cloud coverage though

There is also https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/ which seems to be a bit higher resolution, I think they are imagin the whole earth every other day.

The two Sentinel-2 satellites together cover all land area of the Earth every 5 days, but are only 10-meter pixel resolution.

> 10 days at the equator with one satellite, and 5 days with 2 satellites under cloud-free conditions which results in 2-3 days at mid-latitudes

https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/sentinel-2

YMMV, but I just checked my neighborhood out and the satellite image is ~5 years old.

Once you pass a certain zoom (looks like zoom 11.5 here) the imagery is no longer recent. You can see the copyright statement change to "Microsoft", where it presumably just loads data from Bing maps.

At lower zooms, where the copyright is something like "GOES-East", that's more real-time data because it comes from geostationary satellites that can take (low resolution) images every few minutes.

The imagery on here is 5-10 years older than the imagery on Google Maps for much of Quebec, not sure about other areas.

>but this is quite up to date.

It's up to date zoomed out, but zoomed in seems to be similar to what google maps provides. The picture of the area I live is the same 10 year old picture on google maps, complete with a house that hasn't existed in almost as much time.

Maybe Starlink satellites should also feature a camera? They've already got the connectivity. You'd need a large constellation and this one seems like it will become huge.

At 1 px/m², the Earth's surface is 5×10^14 pixels, so with the full constellation of 10,000 satellites and 1 fps that'd be 5×10^10 pixels/satellite/second (about a terabit/satellite/second uncompressed). If you can shoot 30 images per second, you'd need a 1.6 gigapixel camera.

It's technically possible but not feasible.

"It's technically possible but not feasible."

Not to mention that earth imaging satellites require approval by the government and, I believe, compliance with international regulations.

Why downvote?

It's really frustrating to see people downvote a factual statement (as opposed to opinion) without giving any sort of correction to that information. If I'm wrong - show me! I don't need this sort of crap after working all day at a job I hate where my voice is basically worthless and a legitimate debate can't take place.

It would be quite useful at lower resolutions too, I think.

Edit: The uncompressed bitrate comment is a bit like saying 1080p network video streaming will take decades to become feasible, because the incompressed bitrate is 1.485 gigabit/s...

The obvious first bandwidth issue here is through the optical sensor, which is definitely pre-compression, no?

They could do something like Sentinel's 10m/px, but looking at those images [1] I don't see the advantage of updating that more often than the once every few days we already have from Sentinel.

To make near-realtime interesting you need something closer to 1m/px where you can clearly make out cars. But at that point the optics and camera take more mass than a normal star link satellite. They would become earth observation satellites with an internet uplink, not the other way around.

1: https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/

Yeah, I guess it would require a breakthrough in optics/lenses to become feasible. Sentinel-2 is ~1000 kg, and each Starlink satellite is approx 250 kg.

Clouds would be a challenge.

Not really feasible at a usable resolution. The number of satellites required to do this as well as the data bandwidth needed far exceeds our current capacity.

In addition to cost, there are various national laws that restrict satellite imagery with resolution better than various thresholds.

Which the article indicates, at least as it relates to the US and her companies, is no longer the case:

> In July 2020, the KBA was dropped, and now the US government allows American companies to provide far higher-quality images of the region (so that objects the size of a person can be readily picked out).

That's one such agreement between two governments; there are numerous other laws and agreements that would impact anyone attempting to provide real-time imagery of substantial portions of Earth.

I thought the KBA was an amendment to US statutory law, not an 'agreement' between nations? What are the other laws and agreements to which you're alluding to, but weren't referenced in the article?

KBA wasn't dropped, it still applies. The law is still on the books.

KBA gives the regulator (NOAA) the authority to set a resolution limit for images of Israel. They are supposed to set it to be the best resolution commercially available from non-US providers. In 1998, NOAA set it at 2 metres. In July 2020, NOAA dropped it to 0.4 metres. NOAA had been dragging their feet about that – in 2018, evidence was presented to them of commercial availability of sub-2m resolution images of Israel from non-US providers, but they didn't accept it. Their argument apparently was that even if sub-2m resolution was commercially available, it wasn't "commercially available enough". One factor that changed their mind this time is widespread resale of foreign imagery by US resellers (the KBA only applies to sale of US-acquired imagery, US companies are legally free to resell foreign-acquired imagery.)

KBA still limits US providers to a 0.4 metre resolution of Israel. When foreign commercial providers start offering better than 0.4 metre resolution of Israel, NOAA may drop the limit again. But they may drag their feet that time too.

I appreciate the clarity and correction offered!

How far into the atmosphere does a nation's air space stretch? Would I be breaking a country's law by picturing said country from orbit?

That's an unsettled question. I think most would agree that a nation's airspace extends at most up to the Kármán line, which is 100km above sea level (except in the US, where it's 80km or 50 mi). But there is no international treaty or anything that settles this.

In practice, as a satellite operator you are bound to the laws of the country where your company resides, the country where you launch from, the countries where your ground stations are, and any country that has political sway in any of the previous ones.

The short answer is no. High-resolution imagery comes from low-orbit satellites, which make a complete orbit about every two hours, and image long, narrow strips with each pass, taking days to image the whole planet. There are many of these satellites: commercial, non-military (publicly-accessible) governmental, and governmental (secret), of varying resolutions. These are also supplemented by aerial (plane) imagery.

The net result is that updated-daily imagery exists, but real-time does not. While I'm not privy to the capabilities of the US military, the kind of real-time planet-wide surveillance that movies like Enemy of the State suggest doesn't exist planet-wide.

The highest-resolution images on e.g. Google Maps are from planes, rather than satellites, and aren't imaged anywhere near daily. The only way to have constant, real-time imaging of a fixed location is with a geostationary satellite, which will be so far away (22,000 miles) that the resolution will be low.

Given an unlimited budget, a huge constellation of hundreds or thousands of satellites could come close to real-time planet-wide imaging, but even then, you'd be getting views at different angles as various satellites took images, and you wouldn't ever have a clear directly-overhead view of people walking around.

Couldn't starlink do something like this theoretically? Seems like it checks several of the boxes.

A fleet of drones that stay airborne can provide real-time feeds of a regional battlespace for military use. Cheaper, lower latency, higher quality data - but vulnerable to enemy airpower.

Even though it would be neither covert nor cost-effective, couldn't you use a constellation like Iridium and add some auto-compositing capabilities?

The resolution and angles for your point of interest will change but you should be able to keep a near-constant coverage.

And even with such a budget: geostationary satellites over the poles are not possible[1] and really hard anywhere but over the equator, really.

So that means most of the south and north part of the earth cannot be covered with such a constellation; they would need to be orbiting satellites, which makes "real time" even harder, because it would require an enormously complex choreography to ensure there's at least one satellite covering each square meter, at all times.

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71582/is-it-poss...

But, we could always construct a dyson sphere around earth and rely on the rigidity of the structure to provide accurate polar images.

That said, it would be really difficult and quite likely not at all worth it.

> But, we could always ...

That's a very bold claim with no support provided.

Should be feasible at very high altitudes where gravity is low.

On the other hand, I think it should not be feasible. How many kilograms of raw materials would be required? And at what altitude? I don't think there's enough propellant on earth to lift that much stuff.

Pun aside, this is the more in the realm of "theoretically possible" rather than possible right now. And people don't consider sun-sized Dyson spheres impossible, so a planet-sized one should be a piece of cake.

Though the live imagery would now need night vision cameras, as we blocked out all our light with our camera support. But one has to take the good with the bad ;)

Hey, you asked me to solve your mouse problem. How was I to know you were allergic to cats!

I think most accepted approaches to constructing a sphere involve first building a series of structural components to form a stable net - as such we could stop the process when we've got just enough structure in place for stability and not so much that we need night vision cameras buuuut... I typed that before buying a bunch of night vision stock so please disregard the first portion of this paragraph - we would absolutely need night vision cameras from every angle.

Molniya orbits[0] can provide continuous coverage of the poles if you've got a couple in orbit. The orbit has an extremely high altitude apogee and low altitude perigee. The high altitude apogee gives it a long dwell time (from the perspective of the ground).

It wouldn't be the most practical orbit for narrow FOV imagery but for polar weather, communications, and monitoring for things like over the pole missile launches they're pretty useful.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit

Disagree. The Iridium phone constellation covers the entire planet (which means it has line of sight to the entire planet) and has for about two decades. Starlink will, soon, as well. They’ve already solved the choreography issue you mentioned.

The entire globe has about 500 billion square meters. 24 bit uncompressed imagery is thus 1.5TB per global image. With some modest compression, you could get a video stream of that from the Starlink network, although the current design of Starlink would make it hard to have room for an aperture with better than, say, 3 meter resolution.

are your examples geostationary?

Starlink is not geostationary. It is a very high density low altitude system.

Correct. And with a wide field of view (45 degrees), they'd allow a real-time view globally.

You aren't taking high res imagery from Geo sats--they are much too far away.

It seems like the answer is actually yes, then? Seems like it would be expensive but that is no issue with this thought experiment. OP didn't require High-res or directly-overhead, some caveats you added which constrain the problem more. But either way, it totally seems possible.

Heck, put up 100,000 satellites and use the same kind of tech Apple/Google/MS use in their 3D views of cities (it, they do take airplane and satellite photos at various angles, and use software to stitch together the separate pieces).

Seems totally possible to meet OP's request given money not being an issue.

Starlink is seeking approval for tens of thousands of low-earth-orbit satellites. Each one will have high-bandwidth network connections. It doesn't seem intractable to put cameras on each one and stitch their feeds together for imagery that's maximum 30 minutes old for any arbitrary point on the globe.

And the market for near-real-time imagery might be even larger than the market for internet connectivity.

The next generation of LEO ground imaging satellites will be significantly larger than Starlink units.

Now, with the resolution relaxation from the United States Government that went into effect on February 21, 2015, you have access to an even clearer view of the ground with 30-centimeter resolution commercial satellite imagery.

https://spacenews.com/a-detailed-view-of-the-ground-with-30-...

WorldView-3 is the industry’s first multi-payload, super-spectral, highresolution commercial satellite. Operating at an altitude of 617 km, WorldView-3 provides 31 cm panchromatic resolution, 1.24 m multispectral resolution, 3.7 m short-wave infrared resolution, and 30 m CAVIS resolution. WorldView-3 has an average revisit time of less than one day and is capable of collecting up to 680,000 sq km per day, further enhancing the Maxar collection capacity for more rapid and reliable collection.

https://www.maxar.com/constellation

WorldView-3: Mass: 2800 kg (6200 lbs) Power: 3.1 kW solar array, Altitude: 617 km

Starlink: Mass: v 1.0: 260 kg (573 lb) Power: 6 kW solar array, Altitude: 550 km

https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Constellation_design_...

This is more or less the business model of Planet [0], which is imaging the whole Earth every day with around 200 satellites. (No affiliation, but I previously worked for a different smallsat company.) It would be possible to get a higher visitation than that with more satellites, but it may not be cost-effective (e.g. someone might be willing to pay $X for a subscription to daily images, but not $(48*X) for half-hour images).

I also doubt you could just slap a camera on Starlink satellites. Even ignoring payload size/weight, power consumption, etc, you're typically fighting 3 different constraints when you decide which way to rotate your satellite (sun exposure for power, antenna direction for high-bandwidth network, payload direction if you have cameras or other directional sensors). They're not going to want to try to deal with that for the first iteration of their fleet.

[0] https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/

I can’t help but be excited by the possibilities of tech like Planet, so many interesting applications for their data.

Excited? Maybe I’m just getting old but it terrifies me.

Agreed, and the terrifying use-cases aren't hypothetical, they're the raison d'etre. There are some good "plowshares" type projects out there, but I'm not sure those ends justify the original and ongoing ones

There is a huge difference between a comms relay sat (basically a transponder, a battery, and solar panels ) and an imaging satellite , which needs a huge collector mirror that coats O(billions) to polish.

There are also surveillance blimps, which I believe would be closest to a real-time feed. Some can apparently stay up for 30 days at a time. These have been tested for domestic intelligence, and radar (rather than optical) systems have been deployed overseas.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/blimplike...

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

Since you know what you're talking about. Say I'm willing to accept the updated-daily or even weekly high-res imagery of the whole planet. Any idea what the cost would boil down to? How many parties are involved?

Just wanting to learn more about this.

Sentinel imagery is weekly and is quite good. I use it to see snow melting in the mountains when planning hikes.

There’s a company called PlanetLabs (or just Planet) which aspires to this.

Want medium res (10m), Sentinel-2 imagery is your best bet. Won't cost you a penny. https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/

Looking for higher resolution (3m), the only viable option really is Planet. Even at that, they're pretty iffy with their pricing models and distribution. I think they range around the $2 per square kilometre mark.

for the whole planet, the jump between $0 and around $2/sq.km. is, what, $1 billion/update difference?

I'm no expert but there was an Ask HN about new APIs[1] recently. One answer linked to Albedo[2] which seems quite interesting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067945 [2] https://www.albedo.space/

What limits the field of view of these LEO satellites? Why can we not have high resolution images of wider swaths? Is it something like the number of "receptors" on an imaging cell, or would wider angle lenses significantly distort the imagery?

The curvature of the earth is gonna be a limiting factor for satellites in LEO. IIRC at 500 miles up you can only see (roughly) 1500 miles away. And realistically your range will be less than that because something that far away will be at a very oblique angle, which means more atmosphere in the way and more distortion

Obviously different to optical images. But I wonder if this kind of live view would be more possible with SAR at higher orbits. And with enough signal processing may actually be more useful for automated analysis than cloudy images.

I'm the founder of a company working to solve this exact problem. Revisit rate of Planet's 200+ Dove satellites are quite good (multiple/day) but are comparatively low-res compared to their Rapideye satellites, of which there are fewer. There are a slew of others (Maxar is the next biggest name that comes to mind) but the thesis is low earth orbit is getting crowded, satellites are incredibly expensive even with off-the-shelf parts and falling launch costs, and hardware capabilities are locked-in at launch.

We're taking the approach of using "free energy" in the form of 100,000+ daily commercial/freight/general aviation aircraft to crowdsource aerial imagery using mobile phones to start. Passengers who opt-in are rewarded with free in-flight wifi (where equipped), and we use the device to do orthorectification and photogrammetry at the edge before transmitting it back down via satellite internet. I'm glossing over much of the actual process, but this frees up a ton of computing that would otherwise have to be done on the ground. In the event the flight is not internet connected, we cache previous images based on flight path and upload the difference after comparing old vs. new on the device once signal is restored. End result is a massive boost in both temporal and spatial resolution at a dramatically lower cost. Think Google Maps, updated every few minutes.

We're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in looking at some samples.

Are you talking about passengers taking photos/video out of windows?

Correct. It sounds a bit far-out (and it is) but we've proven the feasibility with a testing group of around 300 passengers using a multitude of different phones/altitudes/conditions/routes. GPS works in airplane mode, so we pre-cache target coordinates based on the filed flight plan and alert the passenger to hold the device to the window when overflying the target. The gyroscope is used to provide feedback on phone orientation so we can get as close to nadir as possible, but we're still able to correct for obliques at around 20miles on the horizon using some general inference. Resolution is a function of altitude and device, but upscaling techniques enhance the images even further after they're transmitted.

We've also developed our own sensing device prototype we call "The Box" that's equipped with a much more powerful array of sensors, but the mobile device-sensing approach makes the most sense for a scalable MVP.

Do you have an example of the final (aerial) imagery result?

This is the real seller. No response to this is a massive red flag.

Check our Instagram for examples: @notasatellite

We do, search ’Not A Satellite’ and our social accounts will pop up. Instagram has the most descriptive content/examples.

Interesting approach, I can see how that's the easiest path to an MVP.

What's the user experience of this and what are the incentives for users to do this? How much are they paid?

UX on the flight contributor side is currently a low-touch app that accepts the user's flight number and prompts for their seat selection (assuming a commercial flight). We load an image correction profile based on whether the seat is fore or aft of the wing in order to correct for the blur caused by engine exhaust, after which we cache the image task coordinates we anticipate they'll be flying over. We provide a code for free in-flight wifi (actually 2--one for each side of the plane) that can be redeemed after completing a simple calibration task while taxiing or shortly after takeoff. The calibration looks at window opacity, occlusions, and considers atmospheric conditions for each leg of the flight.

In order to maximize battery life and prevent user fatigue, we only alert the user to begin recording when they're approaching a task coordinate by referencing the cached coordinate with the current GPS coordinate which is readily available even in Airplane mode. The "workload" for test users so far averages about 5 alerts per flight or 5-10 minutes of "recording", typically shortly after takeoff and prior to landing. We're using Lobe to train an ML model with the image feeds, so we're working on implementing a Captcha-style post-flight survey where a few sample images taken in flight are presented to the user for first-pass labeling. If a user completes this survey, they're rewarded with additional airline miles as a thank you

There are plenty of other opportunities to gamify the recording process and we've been taking cues from apps like Waze and OpenStreetMaps to inform some of these potential reward features. Possibilities include revenue sharing, free flights after reaching milestones, travel gear, etc. I remember flying Spirit years ago and they always had a fun way to reward the unlucky souls in the middle seat by putting a sticker on one of the tray tables. The passenger sitting in the "lucky" middle seat got a free round-trip ticket which I've always thought was really cool, so perks like those are top of mind as well.

Tl;dr - we're intent on keeping the UX transparent, engaging, and unobtrusive for the recorder--point, shoot, disembark--while rewarding them in kind for their time and effort.

Does this really work?

1. Cell phones from 30,000 ft are going to produce incredibly low resolution images, especially when taken through the window of an airliner. They're also all going to be oblique.

2. If you use real camera rigs, you're going to have to pay a fortune to outfit enough planes. Given that you don't control where the asset goes, this seems really inefficient.

3. Does the entire US actually get covered by all those flights? While ATC tries to give direct routing a lot more than they used to it still seems like you're going to end up with areas where planes hardly ever fly. I'd be really curious to see for a given swath what revisit rate you could get with what confidence from historical ADS-B data.

Please don't take this negatively. I previously cofounded an aerial imagery company and have designed aerial camera systems for a large aerospace company. I came up with an idea like yours, but wrote it off for the reasons I mentioned. It's really cool to see someone pursuing it. Feel free to reach out if you'd like. My email is cornell at cgw3 dot org.

I think it does for a few very specific reasons. I'll answer your questions in order:

1. Resolution is a function of altitude, atmospheric conditions, and camera capabilities. At 30,000ft with zoom, we can get results around 10cm/px on an average smartphone (iPhone SE 2). That's still pretty sharp but we can further enhance the image using satellite base maps, upscaling, and other inference techniques. Obliques can be corrected and used to assemble a "full image" when the opposite oblique is captured, but remains useful (to a certain point on the horizon--right now about 15 miles at cruising). There's still a vast amount of information we can obtain at higher altitudes including crop yield data, snow pack, reservoir/lake water levels, forest density, etc.

2. The physical device we're prototyping is about the size of a headphone case--I actually used a Bose QC25 headphone case to cast the model! There are a few potential avenues to deploy physical sensing hardware on flights including revenue sharing with airlines, using passengers to deploy, and other partnerships in the general aviation space. The DoD in particular has expressed interest in a purpose-built device for aerial sensing but for now, mobile device crowdsourcing in the commercial markets is the focus.

3. There are huge spots in and around US airspace where planes cannot (or generally do not) fly. Satellites will remain the key players when optimizing for coverage, but the high-frequency revisit I believe is best obtained using aerial imagery. I always like to tell people that's why we're "Not A Satellite" instead of "Anti-Satellite". There's more than enough room for both, and we see a huge opportunity to increase revisit and provide a complementary offering to satellite imagery.

We've looked at revisit frequency against ADS-B data and about 80% of the US sees at least 2 flights within a mile each day, exponentially more so around cities and developed areas. Many of our customers are interested in monitoring sites within 15 miles of a major international airport, so we're able to obtain high-resolution images using mobile devices because aircraft are typically below ~8,000ft within that radius. LAX for example can see as many as 500 takeoffs and landings each day, and there are hundreds of industrial sites (ports, fulfillment warehouses, other infrastructure) within the approach path.

I genuinely appreciate your questions. We're still early-stage and the discussions I've had on HN alone have vastly improved the quality of our pitch, business plan, and exposed major blind spots. Thanks again for the kind words, and I'll be sure to drop you a line!

planet.com can get you a ~12 images per day [1] for a reasonable price. If cost really isn't an issue, I'm confident you could strike a deal with planet.com to place their next few new satellites into the specific orbit you want to up the frequency even more.

[1]: https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/, as of June 2020.

What is that reasonable price? It is not given on the page you linked…

Are you looking at a 7-8 figure upside to your deal? It's reasonable. Are you looking for fun? Unreasonable.

I believe 3m res data from them is around the $2 per square kilometre mark, however varies wildly depending on scale

Could you divulge what you use the images for?

Or, anyone who buys satellite images?

I know about real estate, navigation, and I've heard that some business use them to forecast retail sales.

I curious about other uses.

Tracking deforestation, melting of glaciers, basically anything geographic. If you're looking for things people profit from, you're right that some trading firms use satellite images to count cars in parking lots of e.g. Walmart to predict earnings reports. Similar things can be done on oil refineries for example (some satellites can even look /through/ oil tanks to look at oil levels by looking at specific wavelengths).

We will have this eventually. Piggy baking on STarlink next gen or similar should make this possible.

Even for emergencies like flooding where it is very important to know which areas are flooded and which are not, I think presently there is no satellite based system which can give this information anywhere near realtime with anything close to the required resolution. So in the absence of such I assume the information will have to be gathered from ground reports and areal surveys, which I would think will be extremely time consuming and labour intensive to gather and collate and form a full picture of the flooding.

Even the biggest of floods is a localized problem. A fleet of drones can give you live feeds of the entire thing. The caveat is of course the military has the best ones, and there's an uneasy balance of allowing military use on home soil.

Baltimore has been leading the charge on aerial surveillance: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-cr-aerial-p...

I doubt drones could be a solution for flood monitoring presently, flood events could last days, endurance could be an issue. Floods could affected regions of several hundred square kilometres, I think it might be impractical to cover that much area by drones.

Technical issues apart , there are whole host of privacy issues with that kind of data. Stalking, theft to national security problems.

Imagine if there is real time /continuous feed of your house, it would be very easy to know when you are there and not by just looking for cars parked in the driveway.

Controlling access would be quite challenging.

this exists for city-wide using planes,

from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4BQ1XzwDg

from 4 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRa-AucbN6k

makes you think what they're doing today

One other thing to add - the Earth is really pretty cloudy. If you care about the clouds, new geostationary satellites are pretty good - (e.g. https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/).

If you care about the surface, a lot of places are really cloudy, including some that are cloudy basically all the time - https://www.cloudsandclimate.com/blog/where_is_cloudiest_par...

One of the closest public things you'll find to this is https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/

It's only medium-range and only updated once daily, with some missing spots due to the coverage of satellite tracks, but there are hundreds of different data layers which can be really interesting to explore.

Zoom.earth is great for weather.

Try https://www.windy.com then. Will blow your mind.

Rough numbers, back of envelope calculation: 500 trillion square meters on earth * 50 pixels per square meter * 3 byte pixel depth = 75 petabytes uncompressed. Assume 90% image compression and remove the 71% of earth that is oceans and you're down to a little over 2PB.

Think of each pixel. If you want 1m resolution, you need at least one pixel for every meter of the planet. And, satellites can't be told to stay over land only. So, how many satellites do you need in your constellation to keep a 1s refresh time?

The earth is 200 million miles^2 surface area.

So, no. I sorta remember 4 day refresh at 3m resolution was the "wish I could get to" goal.

The questions are:

- Does Google deliberatly blurring Gaza strip?

- Who benefits by artificially degraded quality of Gaza maps?

- Does Google quietly taking political sides?

- Yes.

- Israel.

- Yes, see how they took a position on the heart of this issue — the occupied territories themselves. They literally erased Palestine from the map.

Google did not erase Palestine. You can search "Palestine" on Maps and be shown Gaza Strip and West Bank, areas that were named before Google existed.

>- Yes, see how they took a position on the heart of this issue — the occupied territories themselves. They literally erased Palestine from the map.

The US government doesn't recognize Palestine. Therefore displaying the occupied territories as a distinct state would be the more politicalized option compared with displaying them as they currently do. Either way, it just goes to show that the idea of a company being apolitical becomes more difficult as it grows and eventually becomes impossible when you reach Google's size. There is no potential choice here that isn't going to be viewed politically.

The UN recognizes Palestine as do many other countries. The US was motivated not to recognize it because of the Israeli diaspora in America.

The list of states that recognize Palestine was very surprising to me. Basically it seems like only the "first-world" nations that do not recognize Palestine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_t...

Thanks for that link. It's remarkable.

Ie the colonizing powers of this planet

The reasoning behind the government's decision is irrelevant here. Google is a company headquartered in the US. Going against the official policy of the US government is a more politicalized move than going with the status quo.

Side note, you should be careful using Israeli and Jewish as interchangeable terms. There is no such thing as an "Israeli diaspora".

>Going against the official policy of the US government is a more politicalized move than going with the status quo.

How can this be when the policy of the US government is itself determined by politics in its original, non-metaphorical form?

I don't understand what you are getting at. If the US recognized Palestine that would also be a policy "determined by politics in its original, non-metaphorical form". There is no apolitical answer to the question of whether to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state.

If there's no apolitical answer, then going with the status quo isn't an apolitical answer.

It seems like you agree with me but are framing your comments as if you disagree. In my first comment I said:

>There is no potential choice here that isn't going to be viewed politically.

Maybe the two negatives in that sentence are throwing people off, but I can rephrase it to say "There is no apolitical choice here."

However any choice that goes against the status quo is going to be perceived as more political than a choice that accepts the status quo. That is just a general statement and isn't specific to the debate about recognition of Palestine.

Jews and Israeli are distinct. Maybe diaspora is incorrect word, but those who call Israel their home country and reside in the US are of the diaspora of Israel.

Google has headquarters in many countries including Israel. They use various Sources to create maps. And some happen to show Palestine as a separate country. Using one source over another is not a politicized move. But since the recognition of Palestine is recent, ignoring a UN resolution is politicized, more than following an archaic policy of a home country.

>Jews and Israeli are distinct. Maybe diaspora is incorrect word, but those who call Israel their home country and reside in the US are of the diaspora of Israel.

There are something like 100k Israelis is the US. They have virtually no political power. If you want to say "Jewish Diaspora" say "Jewish Diaspora". It really seems like you are using "Israeli Diaspora" in order to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism. My comment was simply pointing out that using Israeli and Jewish interchangeably is probably a more worrying indicator than just saying "Jews have influence in US politics" which is at least true at some level. Although nowadays Evangelicals play a bigger role in determining the US's political stance on Israel than Jews as evidenced by Jewish people being overwhelming Democrats while the Republicans are viewed as the pro-Israel party.

This actually leads me to wonder why US Evangelicals are so utterly pro-Israel. Christians have a long history of discriminating against Jews, but surely this modern development is not about over-compensating for that...? Is it just a "the enemy of my (Arab) enemy, is my friend"...?

I don't find particularly puzzling that the US, as a whole, might have pro-Israel policies for historic and strategic reasons; however, the intensity of sentiment, particularly on the Christian right, still baffles me.

The numbers I have seen is that somewhere between a third to half of Evangelicals support Israel specifically because Jews controlling The Holy Land is seen as a prerequisite to the End Times, the Second Coming of Jesus, and all the stuff from the Book of Revelation.

The United States worked with Israel for years, and has continued to some degree even now, to establish a legitimate and functional Palestinian state. The reason the US does not recognize Palestine is that right now there is not a fully formed Palestinian government. The PA never fully exerted its influence or enforced its own laws in the West Bank and has completely lost control of Gaza to a terrorist organization.

I know it does not neatly fit your narrative about a Jewish conspiracy in America ("Israeli diaspora?" really?), but US support is one of the reasons there is any Palestinian self-governance at all, limited as it may be.

Conspiracy? None whatsoever. Support for Israel is public and apparent even from politicians and lobbyists. This has guided US votes and vetoes in the UN. This is not a “narrative” nor a hidden story.

As far as PA exerting control, Israel has actively worked to keep the PA weak and frowned to recognize any sovereignty, even to this day keeping occupation forces inside and protecting illegal settlements.

> The reason the US does not recognize Palestine is that right now there is not a fully formed Palestinian government.

This is a funny narrative. Afghanistan does not not have a full government but that does not mean they are not recognized.

The US was motivated not to recognize it because of the Israeli diaspora in America.

There isn't much of an "Israeli diaspora" to speak of the the U.S. At most it makes up 2-3 percent of the Jewish descendant (or identified) population.

"Pro-Israel sentiment in Congress; more specifically, a sentiment favoring the current political status quo in Israel in regard to this particular issue" would be a better description of the proximate cause behind the current US policy, here.

Well, you actually don't know the facts. Palestine is a land, it was called that way even when the time of the British mandate, before WWII. Are the arabs that lived there are Palestinians? Yes. But what you don't mention is that also the jews that lived there were called Palestinians. The land of Israel and Palestine are exactly the same thing. There are arab Palestinians and jew Palestinians. They were not so smart to not take the UN partition plan for Palestine, which the jews accepted. So, right now the entire land is part of Israel :) Here's an explanation of past Israel prime minister Golda Meir, which has a statue in Manhattan. https://youtu.be/lhjB9W8UEgk

Well, you actually don’t know the facts. Did Jews live there before the British? Yes. But what you don’t mention is that they were under 8% of the total population. Of course, given what you already omit, you also omit that those 8% owned only 2% of the land. So tell me, why would the 92% accept that so much of what is rightfully theirs would be forcefully taken from them and given to a minority population? Especially when, at this point in 1947, so many of them were settlers who emigrated from Europe to colonize Palestinian land.

But you know, for someone who claims to know the facts, it sure seems like you are purposefully spreading disinformation.

I don't know where your numbers are coming from, but they are at the very least misleading because the population was not exclusively made up of Jews and the group we now call Palestinians and not all land was privately owned.

EDIT: I rephrased this to more clearly explain my point.

I don't understand your argument. Jewish Palestinians plus non-Jewish Palestinians do make up 100% of Palestinians.

Oops, I made that more confusing by trying to note everyone was a Palestinian when the place was called Palestine. By "non-Jewish Palestinians" I was trying to refer to the predominately Muslim and predominately Arab group that we now just call Palestinians. There was and still is a population of Christians in the area and there presumably was some larger population of foreigners in the area when it was under foreign rule. I edited that comment to clear things up.

Everyone is still a Palestinian nowadays though.

The reason why there are less Christian Palestinians is because a lot of them were deported or fled shortly after the Nakba.

A lot of them would come back if Palestine was restored, but most of them are legally prevented by Israel from coming back.

Not even Hamas or Hezbollah wants Palestine to be a single religion or single ethnicity state, so I don't really understand what you were trying to convey.

I'm not going to get that deep into politics here. You are basically arguing for a one state solution except it is Palestinian run instead of Israeli run. HN probably isn't the place to have that debate.

I wouldn't care if it was Palestinian run or Israeli run, if it was one or two states, as long as its peaceful and democratic.

What I care about are factually wrong and misleading statements.

The Christian population in the Christian towns of the Westbank (Bethlehem) and in Gaza have been decreasing steadily for the past 70 years - this has nothing to do with the occupation of the Westbank and Gaza and everything to do with persecution by the local population. This trend is not confined to just the Westbank and Gaza and is in fact a trend that is occurring across the entire Middle East where in the past 100 years the Christian population has decreased from 20% of the population to approximately 5% of the population.

Have you ever been in Gaza or the Westbank?

How these places work is that if you leave, you can never come back.

These places are awful to live in. The only people that stay there stay because they don't have a choice or for ideological reasons. That's why Christians leave moreso, they often have family that left and can get refugee status more easily.

The trend of Christians leaving is a highly localized trend. The greatest number of Christians left not everywhere in the Middle East, but in Iraq, Syria, and, a while ago, Turkey.

The events in the last sixty years that contributed the most to Christian emigration were the Lebanese civil war, the Iraq war, the Syrian Civil War, and the Nakba of 1948.

If by persecution by the locals you mean the Jewish Israelis — sure. But if you are trying to imply that the Muslim Arabs persecuted the Christians get out of here.

By wide margins the European Christian crusaders killed more Arab Christians then any other ethnic group. Palestinian Christians and Muslims have coexisted for a long, long time. To the point that the holiest of Christian churches are often entrusted to Muslim custodianship. How else would you explain that?

Indeed. The majority of Palestinian Christians left due to their ethnic cleansing by Israel in 1948.

It's not Hamas that destroyed a Christian church and orphanage a week ago. It was an Israeli bomb.

There were two or three attacks of Christians in Palestine by Muslims, however them being religiously motivated is doubtful and the perpetrators were condemned and prosecuted by everyone, even Hamas.

The vast majority of persecution of Christians in Palestine for their religion was by Jewish extremists, overwhelmingly. Let alone ethnic persecution of Christians.

The fact is Christians have been persecuted in the Middle East for 100s of years. Under the Ottoman Empire Christians (and any non Muslims) had to pay a Jizya tax - which is persecution (unless you believe it is okay to tax people for being another religion), moreover you had numerous massacres of Christian populations by the Ottoman Empire (one example of this is the Armenian genocide, but you also had cases of Greek, Maronites and other Christian group being murdered at a large scale). Now with that said, Europe was no better, and often worse when it came to its treatment of minorities at that time.

Regardless, the fact that historically Christians (and other minorities) were treated relatively well in the Middle East does not change the reality that for the past 100 years Christians and other minorities are facing massive persecution in the Middle East and in some cases genocide or ethnic cleansing.

Some examples of persecution Christians currently face (by no means complete)

- In Egypt, Copts can not perform any repairs on their churches without government approval, moreover in the past 10 years alone 100s have been killed by mobs attacking them.

- In Saudi Arabia, Christians can not practice their religion in public.

- In Iran Christians that converted from Islam face the death penalty

- Turkey two Byzantine Era churches, Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Saviour, were just converted to mosques.

- In Gaza Christian business and places of worship are regularly attacked by Islamic extremists, often with tacit approval of the ruling Hamas.

And this is just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to the type of persecution Christians face in the Middle East today.

Now let’s for a second talk about Jews of the Middle East. A 100 years ago the Jewish population in the Middle East (outside of Israel/Palestine) was nearly 1 million and yet today it numbers maybe a few 100.

Ask yourself where are the Jews of Syria, Algeria, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq etc? All had relatively large Jewish communities until recently. Persecution, violence and yes, ethnic cleansing is what decimated the Jewish population of the Middle East (outside of Israel).

The reality is, one of the few countries in the Middle East where religious minorities do not face any major persecution is Israel. Yes, you have had individual cases of extremists attacking minorities - but this is true for every country in the world, and when it does happen they are usually caught and brought to justice. This is why the fastest growing religious community in Israel is Islam and this is also why the Christian population in Israel is continuing to grow (unlike in the areas in the Westbank under the Palestinian Authority rule and Gaza under Hamas rule, where the Christian population is decreasing at an alarming rate). Does it mean Israel is perfect when it comes to how it treats minorities? Nope. But, when it comes to its treatment of minorities it is no where near as bad as the rest of the Middle East and is not much worse (and in some cases better) than the EU and the US.

> Ask yourself where are the Jews of Syria, Algeria, Yemen, Egypt, Iraq etc? All had relatively large Jewish communities until recently. Persecution, violence and yes, ethnic cleansing is what decimated the Jewish population of the Middle East (outside of Israel).

Yeah, please stop with your disinformation. Zionists try to present the migration to Israel from Arab lands as if it was somehow equivalent to the Palestinian Nakba. Lets see what some of those migrants say about this. Yisrael Yeshayahu, a former Knesset speaker who migrated from Yemen said "We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations." -- basically he came because he was a zionist. Another former speaker Shlomo Hillel said "I do not regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists" [1]. Iraqi-born Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, speaking of the wave of Iraqi Jewish migration to Israel, concludes that, even though Iraqi Jews were "victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict", Iraqi Jews aren't refugees, saying "nobody expelled us from Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted" [2]. It is truly despicable to paint those who came to Israel from other parts of the Middle East as colonizers looking to steal the property of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs as victims.

> And this is just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to the type of persecution Christians face in the Middle East today.

Again, I know it would be seemingly convenient for you -- a defender of Apartheid Israel -- to find another nation which behaves like Israel (in its persecution of other races/religions). Nonetheless, even if what you are saying is true -- and I believe many of the Muslims of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria would reject this -- what you are proving is nothing. This is just a whataboutism/red herring/tu quoque. How about Israel starts treating the Arab Muslims and Christians with dignity, stops abusing their rights, stealing their property and land.

Just remember -- you are here defending a country which has institutionalized racism and apartheid.

[1] http://www.haaretz.com/hitching-a-ride-on-the-magic-carpet-1... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20050814015754/http://www.haaret...

Ah yes - All 1 million Jews in Arab lands were so happy they just packed up and ran to Israel once they got the chance.

Look, I have relatives and many friends that escaped those countries because they were being persecuted and in some cases we’re under the threat of death. You trying to change history because it doesn't fit your narrative doesn't change what actually happened.

The reality is Yemenite Jews have faced legal persecution and violence for many years. Read up about the pogroms like the Adyen Riots of 1947 where nearly 100 Yemenite Jews were murdered.

Did some Yemenites came before Israel existed? Absolutely, as did Jews from all over the world. After all it is the most religiously significant place in Jewish religion - it is only natural that some would come and choose to make a life here. That does not change the fact that Jewish communities across the middle east faced (and still face) significant persecution.

I can give you countless examples of pogroms the Jews in the middle east faced before the state of Israel even existed, the Farhud pogrom in Iraq in 1941, the massacre of Jews in Constantine in 1934, the Hebron and Safed Massacres of 1929 in which 2000 year old Jewish communities were wiped out and there are many many many more. There were also and in some cases still are unjust laws, real apartheid laws, that exist persecuting against Jews and Christians. In Iraq you had laws that denied Jews the right to a bank account, or to work in many professions, including government positions, you had laws in Algeria that denied the Jews citizenship and laws in Libya that effectively denied Jews citizenship. And again - this is only the tip of the ice burg when it comes to the type of persecution Jews faced and still face today across the Middle East.

As far as you calling Israel an Apartheid state, plenty of Israeli Arabs would disagree with you. I have provided some links to a few of them[1][2][3]. The majority of Israeli Arabs are proud to be Israeli [4] and of Israel’s achievements. Does Israel have some racism? For sure - so does the US, the UK, France etc.. - that does not make it an apartheid state. Arab Israelis make up 20% of the states population and they have the same right as anyone else in the country and that is best demonstrated by the fact that the third largest political party is in fact an Israeli Arab party.

As for the Palestinians in the Westbank and Gaza - I truly hope to see them form a successful state beside Israel where they can enjoy those same democratic rights (the rights Mahmoud Abbas has denied them since 2006 when he last allowed an election). We were extremely close to achieving this in the past and I hope we achieve it in the future.

Now you never actually even tried to counter my argument about the persecution and real apartheid like laws christians face in the rest of the Middle East. Are you denying that 100s of Copts christians have been murdered in Egypt in the past 10 years? or the laws in Saudi Arabia that deny Christians the right to practice in public? Or that you can be put to death in Iran for converting from Islam to Christianity or the fact that Turkey just turned two historic Byzetine churches into mosques?

Now regardless of the above argument - and since you raised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (I did not - I spoke about the persecution of minorities in the Middle East and how it has effected the demographic balance). The only way we will get to a solution to this conflict is when we all start acknowledging each others suffering and start talking about the other sides suffering as well. I as an Israeli am willing to do that and I also will continue to fight any racism I see here in Israel (both by how I vote and by how I act). But this conversation has to be based on facts, those facts do not ignore the other sides suffering. It's a complicated conflict and there is no easy solution, but hopefully, through dialogue we can celebrate small baby steps in the right direction. However, I will not stand by when you or any other try to deny the suffering of any side and the persecution of minorities (doesn't matter if they are Jewish, Muslim, Christian[5], Bahai, Druze etc..) in the Middle East.

[1] - Yoseph Haddad - https://www.facebook.com/YosHaddad

[2] - Israeli Ambassador George Deek - https://twitter.com/GeorgeDeek

[3] - Mohammad Kabiya - https://twitter.com/mohammadkabiya as just some of the examples.

[4] - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/both-jews-and-arabs-say-...

[5] UN watch on the decline of Christians in Iraq and Syria - https://youtu.be/kbJ2su1rwAs

You would have land owned by Jewish Palestinians, land owned by non-Jewish Palestinians, and land cooperatively owned by both Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinians. Jewish Palestinians plus non-Jewish Palestinians do not make up 100% of Palestinians, but rather the result of 100% minus land cooperatively owned by both Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinians.

You're confusing land and people here.

DSingularity above is talking about 2% owning 8% of the land, with "92% accept that so much of what is rightfully theirs would be forcefully taken from them".

If you are saying I am confusing land and people, what is the 2% and 8% number referring to in the above comment? People and land? If so, what people, and what land?

At the time of the British mandate the Jewish minority — 2% of the population — owned a total of 8% of the land. So, my point was, why do you blame the Arabs for not accepting the partition plan which came to impose a forceful transfer of land from the majority to the minority. When you consider the facts you can clearly see why the Palestinians opposed the initial partition plan of Palestine.

Yes, but then my initial comment above about the Jewish population and the arab population is not confusing land and people. The Jewish population owned 2%, and the arab population owned X amount of land, while Y amount of land was owned cooperatively by individuals of both. It would be interesting to know what X and Y is.

The partitioning of land was obviously unfair after world war 2. I doubt anyone actually disagree with it. Land getting repossessed and captured during wars is never fair, and it was not the only border change that occurred when the world war ended. The allies did not just keep the borders at they were at the beginning of ww2, through much of the land grabs has been mostly forgotten outside of people studying history. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is one of the few remaining land conflicts from the war.

Its not just a land conflict from the war though. This is different than the way you are painting it -- that some British officer threw up his hands and said "I don't know whose land this is, here you have it".

If you look at the history of this area, what happened was Jewish terrorist groups (haganah[2], lehi[3], Irgun[4]) started going around murdering Palestinian villagers[1]. When the Palestinian villagers ran the Zionists settled their lands.The land and property was stolen from the Palestinians. They were terrorized into fleeing their lands and were never allowed to return!

So somehow, in the modern day when we all know this as fact, we are supposed to just accept that these people and all their dependents are condemned to eternal refugee status? Thats not the worse part. While the Palestinians are condemned as refugees any random Jewish people born in Europe or America are allowed to emigrate to Israel to settle those lands. This is why Israel is an Apartheid state.

How is this not absurd and how is it moral?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haganah [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_(militant_group) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun

I never said "that some British officer threw up his hands and said "I don't know whose land this is, here you have it"."

Land and property was stolen after world war 2 by the allied. History has painted most of that as being acceptable because the Nazis was bad and the allied good and so anything that occurred after victory was good. Land and property was stolen and the people who lived there were forced to fleeing their lands and to never be allowed to return.

For most of those, yes, we are supposed to just accept that those people and all their dependents are condemned to eternal refugee status. It seems that most conceded land has simply been accepted as belonging to the victors as any person who actually lived there is now dead given that it been almost 100 years. What makes the Palestinians situation a bit more unique among conceded land is that the people actually did not get removed a 100 years ago and so the conflict is still alive today. People are trying to remove them today.

As a concrete example of conceded land, Finland conceded much more land to Russia than the area size of Gaza, and the Finnish population (Karelians) had to flee while people from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia settled the captured land. Today the conceded Finnish land is still owned by Russia. The conflict is however pretty dead because Finland do not want to own a bunch of land where everyone is Russian-speaking, and the cost of bringing the standard of living to the same level as in Finland would be pretty expensive. Any descendant that used to live there will just have to accept it, and the idea of forcing out the Ukraine/Belarus/Russia descendants that live there today is so far away from reality that it thankfully does not exist.

In my own opinion, trying to find a solution based on who owned what a 100 years ago is unlikely to be productive. There was a world war, a lot of people died, and most everything about it was tragic except that the Nazis lost. The conflict today is not going to be solved by trying to fix history, but rather by finding a solution for those living there today.

Palestine was a Nation. Not merely a land. It had autonomy and governance all through history

Palestine with it's borders comes up perfectly with my Google maps

Palestine is not a country. Never has been. Its just a geographical area first established by the Romans, and always handed down to another country.

Not sure about sides here but if you launch rockets into cities indiscriminately and then the building where you keep your weapons, communication center using human shields after warning residents well ahead of time that the building will be blown up, actually gets taken out who is at fault here?

Why are people even defending Hamas???!

Does Israel not have right to defend itself? Is Israel like South Korea who gets attacked regularly and does nothing and opens itself up escalating levels of attack?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/17/palest...

This is an unnuanced take that ignores the complexity of the issue and provacative actions taken by Israel.

Self defense is provocative?

It's crazy how you got downvoted. Shows how much bias and misinformation exists even in HN.

What you said is plainly obvious.

If US mainland were ever attacked, no one here would object to a similar response.

A small discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27178589

There is perhaps an interesting machine learning application here.

There are higher resolution images available at lower frequencies and low resolution images possible with high frequency.

Would it not possible to "zoom and enhance" a low resolution image to higher resolution one using historical high res data of the location and learning from object types and classification?

Yes: https://medium.com/the-downlinq/super-resolution-and-object-...

You're basically letting an AI to hallucinate details, which looks good in most cases but in edge cases may cause unintended results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196650

Yo. That was crazy. So the whole "zoom and enhance" thing they do on TV is no longer science fiction. That meme is dead judging by what I am seeing in that thread.

We can get computers to make things up, sure. But usually when they "zoom and enhance" on TV it's because they want to see what's really there.

Yeah, if you used this sort of upscale AI on a pixelated picture of a suspect, you'll just end up arresting some guy who's face looks most common in the training dataset.

Kind-of anticipated by Antonioni in Blow Up.

It is absolutely possible and there are plenty of ML and non-ML solutions for this or similar problems.

A set of useful keywords would be "image sensor fusion".

Of course there would be limitations and most of the image updates would be boring (all the buildings and streets are still there) or lacking enough information to retrieve anything (new set of cars parked on the street) so you'd end up with highlights and uncertainties for changes overlaid on top of high confidence existing infra.

> Would it not possible to "zoom and enhance" a low resolution image to higher resolution one using historical high res data of the location and learning from object types and classification?

Sure. Probably provide pretty convincing high-detail images.

For the cases of most interest—i.e., when the new activity is unusual and unexpected—it will often be detailed, convincing, and completely wrong, though.

There are definitely applications where those details don't matter , that is why low res services do exist after all.

It would be nice UX enchantment if you will to what is a low res product.

The more sources of information you have the better you can collect and correlate it - especially if you have various low-resolutions taken at different times but still able to be lined up.

It's usually called satellite imagery, but isn't most of the high-resolution, closest photos actually aerial imagery, not from satellites? In that case I would understand if there isn't that much coverage.

No; at least per the providers, actual low-orbit satellite imagery is available to the (paying) public at 50cm resolution.

That’s a little scary. If those covered the globe, you could see and track anyone anytime they left their house. This gets dystopian fast. Imagine the ad targeting. Or “sorry, we notice you haven’t been to the gym all month, we have raised your insurance premiums 10%”

You don't even need satellite to track people, the FBI has been getting really good results with a small fleet of Cessnas.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/02/fbi-surveill...

Not to mention you already carry a mobile phone with both Bluetooth and wifi turned on. You gym plus others knew you have not been there since February.

50cm is not really good to identify a person. And it's not real time at all. You'd be better off calling the gyms directly.

Google already knows this if you have an Android phone.

The temporal resolution isn't great, and you don't have much control over timing. Also 50cm is too coarse for much people-sized activity to be really identifying.

So; great for seeing how a property has been developed over time, not so great for seeing who is going the gym or not.

These scans don't update with much frequency.

That's like using Google Street View and noticing an unknown car in your driveway and assuming your partner is having an affair. Much more likely, the image is old, and that car belongs to the previous tenant.

It's available, but by far the actual high quality (<1m) data used/publicly available was taken by aircraft, not satellite.

This is usually a result of the data set already being paid for, either via the local assessor's office or the USDA. This doesn't mean it's always available for free, but that the economics means it's usually available for less than the actual cost.

I don't they'd be able to get high resolution photos of Pyongyang without using satellites.

These days a lot of it is satellite. Sub-meter commercial imagery from satellites became first avaiable some time in the 90s I think, and pretty cost effective in the last decade or so.

I know satellite photo-imagery has greatly improved, as seen recently by the flex satellite companies showed on the Ever Given incident, but I'm a bit tickled by the conflation of satellite and aerial imagery. The later is the one we think of the most when thinking of Google Maps high-res "Satellite" view:

https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370129089941505

Google also used to hide this Secret U.S. Drone Base in Saudi Arabia, yet MS maps showed it. Which could show who is more chummy with the government. 'The image of the airfield, available in Bing Maps, would be almost impossible to discover randomly. At moderate resolutions, satellite images of the area show nothing but sand dunes. Only on close inspection does the base reveal itself. In Google's catalog of satellite pictures, the base doesn't appear at all." https://www.wired.com/2013/02/secret-drone-base-2/

Im kind of confused - they're saying its a problem for reporters and people trying to investigate, but also that other providers provide high resolution imagery.

I feel like both those things can't be true. How can it be a problem if you can just get the needed images from non usa companies?

They're available but not always free.

Probably price as a barrier. Or the background knowledge to know which providers are reliable, etc. You could imagine the pricing being inaccessible to certain markets (where currency is really weak, say Venezuela), whereas Google Maps is free for almost all uses.

Up-to-date high resolution imagery is quite expensive. Most of Google maps imagery is generated from an older database of images. Businesses like Maxar (formerly Digital Globe) that provide Earth imagery will sell a database of old out-of-date imagery for much cheaper. But more recent imagery is much more expensive because it is much more valuable. These companies will often provide free images that are up to date to help with disaster and recovery efforts but that doesn't mean it has been put in to Google maps yet, a lot of it just still an old database of imagery.

In Summary:

- Old out-of-date imagery: $

- Newer up-to-date imagery that has been captured: $$$

- Tasking a spacecraft to request image of a specific area: $$$$

Like all data -- new and high def data costs a lot more than something a couple years old. Data ages out.

random question, but where would one acquire old out of date imagery of this part of the world?

For example, I know through Google Earth's timelapse feature that Gaza has been consistently scanned by satellites over the last 3 or so decades. But the images on Google Earth's timelapse feature are of very very low quality. But viewing the timelapse is evidence enough that this information is out there.

There are a lot of tools built for Google Maps/Earth, and it is far more accessible. For a reporter/investigator with an unlimited budget, sure, but for most of the real world, if it isn't in Google maps it is essentially out of reach.

You expect reporters to go deeper than the first page on Google?

Organizations/NGOs heavily rely on satellite imagery (i) to assist in delivering many humanitarian efforts. It would seem useful for the UN to strongly prohibit the diminishing of such capability.

(i) www.hotosm.org

The UN does not have this authority.

Does the UN have any authority?

The security council does

Not where Google is concerned.

Only if the member states agree to back it up.

The UN is less a legislative body and more of an international treaty negotiation forum. If all of the UN member states agreed to such a thing then it certainly could be ratified - it sounds like it might vaguely fall under the purview of the first committee DISEC (Disarmament and International Security) and Israel might object to it but usually there's some bargaining involved in these sorts of things.

To my knowledge, there is, in fact, no strict limit on the authority the UN can have - but there may be some specific carve outs to other international bodies (i.e. laws of the sea - the division of antartica), however I think these carve outs were mostly made affirmatively by the UN to empower other organizations.

There is a separate question on whether the UN has the power to enforce legislation it passes, but that's a pretty simplistic reduction that can be applied to pretty much any governmental body and will almost always result in the answer of "It depends".

> there is, in fact, no strict limit on the authority the UN can have

There is no strict limit to the authority I can have. That doesn’t mean I can prohibit Google from doing squat. I could theoretically get the U.S. government to pass a law, but that’s not the same thing as authority.

I feel like I made a pretty good call out to this in the last paragraph of my comment but just to elaborate. The UN is an organization with essentially no organic power - it has no citizens, nor a tax base, nor an independent army. It does collect "mandatory" fees from members that, if halted, would likely suspend the membership of the nation in question, however even those are only enforced by various nation's desires to be a part of the UN. It'd be like me selling a Netflix disruptor that collected a monthly subscription fee for you to have the prestige to be a member and then sending you a card informing you of how to sign up for Netflix - literally nothing the UN does wasn't possible before the UN, it just centralizes where this is all happening. That all said, for smaller nations in particular, the membership can come with real benefits in terms of peacekeeping forces along with financial and humanitarian aide.

At a basic philosophical level laws and police have no power, nothing can stop you from committing murder. The only thing we can essentially do is give you pain in reaction - that pain could be pre-emptively acting guilt or fear of the consequences, it could be moral regret, it could also be physical restraint or torture. Given diseases like alzheimer's and essential tremors or a plethora of other physical and neurological ailments the list of people who can absolutely control your actions might be an empty set[1].

That all said, the UN has been granted some pretty wide authority to pass treaties that are generally acknowledged across the world - those treaties are generally respected and the US might hit you with a big stick if you violate them. So, honestly, I think the comparison in authority to an individual is pretty thin.

1. I think that by definition if we're talking in absolutes then it is always an empty set because there are actions you can't voluntarily execute, like, for instance, willing your heart to stop. But let's just assume that "absolute control" is a level of control achievable for most people at some point in their lifetime.

Google doesn't give a damn about you, but Google would very much care about discussions within UN to pressure modification of its products.

That's the difference. You can go on technicalities, but being technically correctt is the worst kind of correct.

Lol. In what world would anyone accept the UN dictating this?

Should the UN intend for satellite imagery to be available to NGOs they can fund the creation and distribution of such images, rather than trying to seize the images acquired by a private entity. It’s not that expensive.

That might actually be a really good role for the UN to take - satellite imaging and GPS tracking are security issues for most countries and companies trying to leverage that data have been hit with a lot of regulations and surprises in the past. Niantic had to specifically bow to a lot of concerns about military personnel being trackable through pokemon go when it first came out and private satellite imaging companies need to comply with a long list of deadzones issued by the US Government and other governments across the world.

Do they really depend on google maps in particular?

No. Bing Maps allowed to use their satellite views when editing OpenStreetMap.

To view the datasets with satellite images, you still need another provider (which Google maps isn't)

Generally? maybe, but Gaza is a tiny, urban well mapped place

The article mentions the Kyl-Bingaman Agreement [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl–Bingaman_Amendment

Also look at the azrieli mall in tel aviv...

there is a huge military base there which is blocked/blurred

I am curious and looking but I cannot find it, you think you can drop a pin and share that link?

Look here. The pin is at the western side of the base.

It's IDF headquarters, used to be bigger (from an old British camp, back when Tel Aviv hadn't grown to swallow it up), but the army has been steadily selling off the valuable urban land and relocating functions to less central locations.

I'm not seeing any notable degradation in satellite imagery, specific to that area, though.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mahane+Rabin+(HaKirya),+Te...

Blurring military bases is pretty common - also done in the US, for example.

I've never seen a US military base blurred on Google Maps.

Has to be particularly sensitive ones, apparently - and more common for US bases in Europe?

See https://fas.org/blogs/security/2018/12/widespread-blurring-o... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...

If you were to look up my address (I wish I could post publicly for verification purposes but for security I cannot) it doesn’t display it. It comes up with “address does not exist” and skips from my one neighbor’s house to the next completely skipping over our house.

FWIW Bing Maps (not mentioned in article) is also blurry, or rather because of their rendering preferences it is pixelated. Bing Maps has different and sometimes superior aerial imagery to Google Maps, but not this time.

Baidu Maps astonishingly has no roads at all in Gaza; just a little bit of data about parks. No aerial imagery for the area too. I don't read Chinese so can't tell if they have any explanation.

It can be conspiracy or may be not. For example Indian cities doesn't have clear images as US cities. Sometime back, I tried finding reason for same. Apparently, Google not just use satellite images. It gets aerial images from planes as well. Obviously, Google didn't pay for aerial images of Indian cities. This can be a reason for Israel as well.

I don't think it's a conspiracy- Israel admit that it requested Google to lower image resolution. The question is the reason behind it

My address actually isn’t even listed on google maps. I tried to rectify the situation but they wanted proof which baffled me because how do I prove where I live when they’re the ones with the damn satellites?

They probably just wanted a proof of residence such as a Utility Bill.

Give them your utility bill with your address?

Forgive me the joke, but maybe it is because the borders are dynamic.

I zoomed into random areas like Chekka, Lebanon and Kumasi, Ghana. I hadn't heard of these places before today, but they looked big enough on Google Maps. Zooming in, the mosaics appeared as if they were shot years apart, with noticeably different resolutions. Could Gaza just be one such scan, rather than something sinister?

> "Considering the importance of current events, I see no reason why commercial imagery of this area should continue to be deliberately degraded,"

Yeah, no. That does not answer the question right before it. What's with these sinister edits?

It's one of the most heavily imaged areas in the world - on the ground, as it's an active conflict zone. In space, satellites will pass over the region every X hours no matter what. Planet's satellites have a fresh, high resolution map of the Earth ~3.5 hours. Google had, at the very least, 7 satellites imaging the Earth in 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySat.

The question isn't whether the data exists. It does. The question is, why isn't it being displayed?

Correction: Google now consumes data from Planet - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/googl...

Because until very, very recently it was illegal to provide commercial high resolution images of this area: https://spacenews.com/u-s-government-to-allow-sale-of-high-r...

my guess would be that they dont want clear image of slow destruction and take overs also before after pictures.

In Gaza? There are no takeovers there, just a DMZ and periodic shooting.

The original Israeli ask, accepted by the US Congress, was for all of Israel, including the Territories, to have degraded satellite imagery - as a defensive measure against foreign intelligence-gathering and targeting.

> The question isn't whether the data exists. It does.

What is your basis for this claim? However many satellites Google has, why are the regions I named blurry too? Lebanon isn't that far away from Gaza. Cars at Chekka looked like specks. Across the sea, in Cypress, I could make out the front and rear windows of cars.

>> The question isn't whether the data exists. It does.

> What is your basis for this claim?

This is a really surreal response, given the part of that same comment that you seem to have forgotten to read:

>> In space, satellites will pass over the region every X hours no matter what. Planet's satellite have a fresh, high resolution map of the Earth ~3.5 hours. Google had, at the very least, 13 satellites imaging the Earth in 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySat . It is unclear, to me, how many space assets they do have, but I'm guessing they image the entire globe every week, at the very least.

I asked another question too. Why not answer that, then we can discuss surrealness. Ironically, my second question was right after my first question.

If the data exists for one place at a similar latitude, then it exists for every other place at a similar latitude, by the simple laws of orbital dynamics.

You have a completely wrong idea of the laws of orbital dynamics. If satellites don't want to keep burning tons of fuel, they will orbit the center of the earth, not its axis. The only situation where your comment could apply is if the satellite is orbiting only above the equator. All of this, completely disregarding the economics of satellite mapping, their operational limits, etc.

Note I said "at a similar latitude".

A satellite at a given inclination will trace out a ground path oscillating back and forth between D degrees north and D degrees south, where D is its inclination, with latitude varying sinusoidally with time. So it will spend different amounts of time at different latitudes, hence choice of inclination depending heavily on observation/communication target.

However, for any given latitude it will spend an equal amount of time at each longitude (east-west location) as the Earth rotates under its orbit. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_track

So for example, any satellite that images Georgia (the US state) or Taiwan will spend an approximately equal amount of time over Lebanon and Israel.

There are so many incorrect and vague things here, but rather than listing them out, I point back to my counter examples. Zooming in on Kumasi, Ghana should show you why you're wrong. Look at the mosaic lines. There are both N/S lines of disparity as well as E/W lines of disparity of resolution.

Use your own example, if you wish. Zoom in on Taiwan, and look at the cars. Next, zoom in on King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia at the same latitude. Look for cars there.

Verify if your explanation fits the data.

I believe you have an incorrect mental model of orbital mechanics. I would recommend playing with KSP to more intuitively understand the concepts, and then reading resources like, http://www.braeunig.us/space/orbmech.htm

For now, here's a video that might help you get a clearer idea, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_jM_BxQGvE - as you can see there's no fuel required. It's all about the inclination of the orbit (i.e. the angle it makes with Earth's equator).

At a 85˚ to 98˚ inclination, the satellite will pass over every to almost every point on the Earth (save for some bits on the poles depending on where you are on that spectrum.

There is no fuel required to make passes over Gaza. The satellite does that naturally, as a matter of course.

The video shows a polar orbit. How does this address azernik's point that "if the data exists for one place at a similar latitude, then it exists for every other place at a similar latitude"? With a polar or near-polar orbit, you'd get the densest (fewest stitches) and freshest data near the poles.

> as you can see there's no fuel required.

Like I wrote before, no fuel is required if you're orbiting the center of the earth. No one orbits the axis of the earth (other than orbiting above the equator). I was only responding to what azernik wrote.

Here's what I am saying: 1. the resolution of the images on Google Maps varies a lot from place to place. Not just Gaza, but other places too. I mentioned specific places too. Please verify that for yourself. 2. Orbital mechanics is the wrong explanation to reach for to account for the disparities.

>The question isn't whether the data exists. It does. The question is, why isn't it being displayed?

I just took a look at the Google Maps for Midtown Manhattan and they appear to be from around August 2019. Google surely has newer satellite images available for NYC. What is the reason they aren't updating them?

I think current events are making everyone a little too paranoid here. The images were required by law to be of lower resolution until mid-2020. The law changed and Google hasn't gotten around to updating the images yet because there is always a lag in imagery being updated. No real conspiracy theory needed.

The article mentions the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment once around the middle, that's the main reason. The wikipedia article is short and covers it well enough, but in short:

> The Kyl–Bingaman Amendment (KBA) prohibits US authorities from granting a license for collecting or disseminating high resolution satellite imagery of Israel at a higher resolution than is available from other commercial sources, that is, from companies outside of the United States. An exception exists if this is done by a US federal agency, or if it is done in order to abolish the secrecy of such recordings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment

So that Israel can draw its own borders without the criticism of 'international treaties' or 'human rights'

Did you even tried to open Google maps on the area? even at the lower resolution you can clearly see houses and roads

Israel gets criticized every day, and often at the UN. Most of it is unfair criticism.

Is there an alternative (european?) source with higher definition ? Even outdated imagery would be useful

tldr: Israeli-US agreement limited resolution until July 2020, and Gmaps hasn't gotten around to updating the imagery since.

The bigger question of course is why the "agreement" was made with the Israelis, and not with the Palestinians directly.

Might makes right, as always ...

USA is the only country on earth that recognises all of Israel’s territory claims.

Not just that.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

$38 billion. woah. if US continues to give Israel unconditional aid then it will start to look like a vassal state

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

The US needs an ally in the Middle East that is more reliable than any of the Arab nations are. Better than being even more beholden to Saudi Arabia.

US interests also benefit quite a lot from Israeli industry, from Intel to Cellebrite

It's primarily a subsidy for American weapons manufacturers (from whom the Israelis have to make purchases), mixed with a hefty R&D budget for new military technology like Iron Dome.

Exactly. And it keeps Israel from buying similar equipment from Russia or China (and helping support those developers).

"Primarily" is more than a bit of stretch, here.

All observation of U.S.-Israel relations since 1967 indicate that it's driven by a very strong ideological (and perceived electoral) component. In fact it's hard to think of a single case of a ("friendly") country for which the degree of U.S. support is less ideological.

Pork barreling plays a role for sure as well, but it's definitely second fiddle.

While that at a glance looks likr a thorough source, you might want to mention that most of that aid was a result of the after math of the 1973 war, which led to a stabilization of the Suez region militarily, friendly relations between Egypt (which also got annual aid from the deal) and U.S., the Camp David Accords, and an enduring peace that's nearing half a century between Egypt and Israel.

possibly because the israelis already have all the imagery they would want anyway, and the blurring is only a problem for people who don't?

As far as Gaza goes, Hamas rules Gaza but they're not the recognized government.

I'm not sure who you would ask to make policy in such a situation.

Just Hamas because they rule that area by force? That sounds a lot like asking Israel for the same reason.

I don't think there's a good/ automatic answer for these situations.

> As far as Gaza goes, Hamas rules Gaza but they're not the recognized government.

It's definitely more complicated by that, there is some evidence that people in the Gaza area have definitely supported Hamas, but of course they're rejected by the PNA (which rules over West Bank) and Israel.

> there is some evidence that people in the Gaza area have definitely supported Hamas

Such as when they were elected.

Playing the devil's advocate, if the US is willing to negotiate with both the Taliban and official Afghanistan government directly, why not Hamas and Israel?

(I am not trying to equate these groups; just compare the official vs force relationships)

Because they can't win in Afghanistan and are planning a retreat, whereas gaza is this way due to historical reasons, but mostly because they don't pose a real threat.

Should they have negotiated with the Palestinian Authority, which only partially controls the West Bank, or with Hamas, which took control of Gaza and proceeded to murder leaders from other Palestinian political parties? It is kind of hard to know who the "official" representatives of the Palestinian people actually are due to the failure to establish a functional Palestinian state or government.

I wish the recent history of Palestine were different too, but it seems unkind to use language that implicitly blames Palestinians as a people--or the factions that now hold power--for these issues. Literally any people on Earth would probably have a similar history, and be in a similar (or worse) place with respect to government, if they faced similar pressures for such an extended period of time.

How did I blame the Palestinian people? The fact is that they do not have a functioning government, and the government they have is not in a position to negotiate on their behalf when it comes to Gaza. The faction that controls Gaza is not even recognized as legitimate by the PA (which is supposed to represent the Palestinian people).

You appear, and i could of course be mistaken, to be blaming the palestinian people for "the failure to establish a functional Palestinian state or government". As if it the fault of a population that's mostly under 30 years old that they haven't been able to establish a government under the existing conditions. I'm not sure anyone else could.

That was a statement of fact, I was not blaming anyone in particular. As I have said elsewhere, if anyone is to blame it would be Hamas, whose political campaign in 2006 was based on delegitimizing the peace process and two-state solution and which pressed a war with Fatah that greatly weakened the PA. It is not as if the Palestinians were told to build a functioning state on their own; they receive a lot of help from other countries, including from Israel itself (e.g. joint police operations, joint security patrols, etc. -- all of which are confidence-building and institution-building measures).

Do you have any examples for that?

> Hamas, which took control of Gaza and proceeded to murder leaders from other Palestinian political parties

You appear to be misinformed. Hamas won regular elections (considered such by international observers, who also reported obstructions from Israel). Hamas then kept respecting the ongoing ceasefire with Israel and started softening its stance towards it, offering a permanent ceasefire, while on the other side Israel campaigned to put the Gaza strip under the strictest embargo. On June 8th, two days before the end of the ceasefire, Israel killed an Hamas official in an air strike.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Gaza_cross-border_raid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Hamas_political_violence_...

Hamas didn't keep the ceasefire. Hamas was behind the Qassam attack in early 2006. That's from one of your links by the way.

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3257913,00.html

> the failure to establish a functional Palestinian state or government.

Wonder whose fault you think it is that the Palestinians who currently live under what HRW and several Israeli human rights organizations consider apartheid, don't have a state.

I think it is the fault of Hamas, which derailed the peace process 15 years ago after running a political campaign that delegitimized the peace process itself (they claimed that it was actually terrorism, not diplomacy and negotiated deals, that had caused the Israelis to withdraw from Gaza). As I said, their first move after taking control of Gaza was to murder political opponents. They fought a civil war against Fatah that almost caused a total collapse of the PA, and ever since the PA has been barely functional.

Sure, because life on Gaza strip on 2006 was all moonlight and roses. Hell even going back 30 years ago you wouldn't find much difference [0]. I wonder what political force or nation could be benefiting from this constant chaos.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_(comics)

Is that supposed to be some kind of excuse for derailing the peace process? Are you actually denying that progress toward a two-state solution happened between the Oslo Accords in 1993 and Hamas taking power in 2006?

Like it or not the government of Israel and the PLO made a good-faith effort to establish a legitimate Palestinian state. It is not an easy task, the solution is not simple and there are a lot of legitimate grievances on both sides that need to be sorted out. Unfortunately groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and various other terrorist organizations have derailed that process. There is no cabal hiding in the background and pulling the strings to sow chaos in Palestinian society (do people really need to be told that wild conspiracy theories are nonsense?).

The median age in palestine is (was, 2014) 18 years old. Compare to 30 in israel or 40 in france.

Like it or not the vast majority of palestinians alive today had nothing to do with what hamas did 15 years ago. They were mostly children or not even born yet.

What does that have to do with the fact that Hamas derailed the peace process and continues to be the most significant obstacle to peace?

As far as i can tell you are advocating to punish the residents of pallestine because some time ago, when most of the current residents were either children or unborn, someone else did a bad thing.

To me that seems exceptionally unjust.

How am I saying anything of the sort? Regardless of when the people were born, it is a fact that they do not have a functioning government. It is a fact that Hamas derailed the effort to establish that government, and that Hamas has repeatedly interfered with those efforts over the past 15 years and continues to do so now. I am not "advocating" anything, I am simply stating the reality of the Palestinian situation today and why they are in that situation.

You seem to think Hamas is some long-past group. Hamas controls Gaza today; they are the ones launching rockets at Israel right now. Hamas remains the most significant obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians right now. As the rulers of Gaza, Hamas has been a brutally repressive regime, roughly on the level of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Hamas deliberately spreads their military assets across densely populated civilian areas in order to maximize civilian casualties during war. The Hamas charter says that the role of women in society is to produce more men. They have cracked down on hip-hop, baggy pants, hair salons, and even indigenous Palestinian folk tales.

I personally think the Palestinians deserve better than Hamas. Why do you keep dismissing the overwhelmingly negative impact this group has had on the Palestinian people? Why do you keep looking for a way to deny the role Hamas has played and continues to play in preventing the formation of an effective civil government and a functioning Palestinian state?

I think Hamas is a horrible organization. But if we could eliminate the entirety of the hamas leadership today, in a single moment, another similar organization would spring up because israel is creating the conditions that encourage such an organization to exist.

Israel holds all the cards here, not the palestinians. Not hamas. Israel is the party that must step up and provide a real solution. Israel's solution over the past decade has been to contain the palestinians, lock their borders, and knock over their buildings whenever they get too uppity. This policy will never result in a reduction of terrorists. It will never result in removing the conditions that allow hamas to exist.

Imagine if you are a 20 year old gazan (older than the average gazan) and all you know, your entire life, is israeli control of the strip. The death tolls aren't high enough that everyone has a dead family member, but i wouldn't be surprised if everyone knows someone the IDF killed. This is how america created terrorists in the middle east. This is how Israel is creating terrorists in their own backyard. Foreign politicians enforcing their will, through force, upon a people that don't want it.

Hamas isn't long past, the fact is Hamas is not particularly important. Hamas is a symptom, not the problem. If Israel had the will to fix their structural problems, Hamas would have no reason to exist.

Hamas is throwing unguided missles randomly and Israel is hitting them back by leveling buildings. Hamas is no more than a small child throwing a tantrum with no possibility to actually cause a change. All they can do is scream louder and hope someone else will do something. Again, Hamas is not the problem, they are a symptom of Israel's policy regarding palestinians.

Where are you getting this from? A 20 year old Gazan would be old enough to remember the day Israel withdrew from Gaza, both its military presence and settlers. A 20 year old Gazan would also remember that that shortly thereafter, when Palestinian businessmen were talking about converting former settlements into resorts and all the money they would make from tourism, Hamas took over. A 20 year old Gazan would remember life before the blockade.

Take a minute to think about that. Israel left Gaza completely, and then Hamas took over. Are you saying that turning over Gaza to Palestinians is the sort of restrictive measure that gives rise to terrorist groups?

You are absolutely wrong about Israel holding all the cards. The blockade of Gaza is a joint effort between Israel and Egypt. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank refuses to pay for electricity in Gaza. Hamas has diverted aid shipments to its own military infrastructure, preventing Gazans from repairing their buildings, and Hamas has previously insisted that shipments of fuel enter through the border crossing with Egypt because they do not want to accept any help from "Zionists." So how does Israel hold "all the cards?" In reality the cards are held by Israel, Egypt, the PA, and Hamas itself.

Meanwhile, over in the West Bank, Palestinians have plenty of legitimate complaints yet the PA manages to engage in joint security, law enforcement, and economic efforts with Israel. Sure, things could be better for the Palestinians in the West Bank, but that is exactly the goal of the peace process and all those joint efforts.

You seem to be confused about cause and effect. The situation in Gaza today is not the reason Hamas took power; Hamas is the reason for the conditions in Gaza. Hamas started a civil war among Palestinians, and as a result the PA refuses to pay the bills for Gaza, leaving them with sporadic and unreliable electricity. Hamas kept smuggling rockets into Gaza, then firing those rockets at Israeli cities, resulting in the Israeli blockade. Hamas kept smuggling rockets into Gaza through Egypt, arming Egyptian rebels, and using Sinai as a staging area to fire rockets at Israel, resulting in Egypt joining the blockade. Hamas spread its military assets across densely populated civilian areas, resulting in far higher civilian casualties and widespread damage to civilian buildings when the IDF responds to the rocket fire. Hamas diverted aid shipments of construction supplies to its tunnel network, preventing Gazans from rebuilding their damaged buildings during the ceasefire. What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to perform to conclude that Hamas is merely a symptom of some other problem?

Because Israel has more deeper pocketed lobby groups in US?

Perhaps pedantic, but it wasn't an agreement per se, just a regular domestic U.S. law, although Israel did indeed lobby in favor of the law. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment

And the US is emperor of pointing satellites at the Middle East? There aren’t other satellites outside US/Israel jurisdiction that can fill it in? Or they’re not allowed to pass it on?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27187416

Google being a "US Company" they are following that law.

KBA doesn't actually apply to Google.

KBA applies to operators of imaging satellites, Google's suppliers such as Maxar. In practice, it doesn't apply to distributors, only acquirers. (The text of KBA talks about issuing licenses for "dissemination" of satellite images, but you don't need a license to resell satellite images, or buy them then give them away for free like Google does.)

Legally, there is nothing stopping Google from using a non-US imagery supplier to get higher resolution images of Israel into Google Maps.

In practice, they probably don't want to. It is walking into a political minefield, and Google doesn't really gain anything for themselves by walking into that minefield.

Here's an interesting article I came across last month concerning a couple of archaeologists bumping against this problem (tldr - some non-US companies take hi-res satellite photos, and provide them at a cost)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-05/archaeologists-accide...

Because of a lack of resolution.

I find the comments here to be very anti-semitic.

Can we please leave the politics off HN?

TLDR: it used to be illegal under US law to distribute high-resolution images of Israel and Gaza. Now it's not. High-resolution images are available for purchase from satellite imaging companies but they haven't made it into Google Maps yet.

Pretty asinine if your claim about it being illegal in the pas is true. Making it illegal to know the truth about genocide... That's on a whole new level than turning Manning into Chalsea for revealing to the world how much US army cares for the conquered people

Semi-related: Jillian C. York’s recent book “Silicon Values” talks a bit about the “digital apartheid” in Palestine. Media companies like Facebook often have no presence in the occupied territories and let the Israeli office and policies apply to Palestinian accounts, often resulting in censorship of war crimes.

https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Values-Future-Surveillance-Ca...

probably for the same reason Israel is blurred, to protect it against terrorist attacks, and the algorithm is probably dumb enough to bundle Israel and Gaza into one territory in some geo index

I bet on that although this is really stupid since houses and roads are clearly visible and most of Israel is mapped at street level as well

tl;dr: Because Israel wants this, and the US has forced that wish on commercial companies like Google.

> US has forced that wish on commercial companies like Google

Not necessarily. Google has R&D in Israel[1]. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are both Jewish. Not that all Jews support Israel, but typically the case.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multinational_companie...

The regulation applies not only to Google; plus, your reservation seems to regard the linked article - I was just trying to extract the essence of its answer to the question.

The plight and occupation of Gaza isn't a technical curiosity. The answer is that there's a campaign of genocide and dehumanisation going on that bleeds into all aspects of life, that's why.

Smoke is telling the truth that blurred on gg maps can be fixed by an update.

Probably so they can’t be blamed for giving intel aka maps to Palestinians fighting for their lives

On the same note, why is Azeria labs offices blurred on Google Maps ? Is it a special feature ? Or just that you need to know people at Google ?

Am I the only one thinking it's not a bug, it's a feature? Please also blur all the Google Maps satellite images of where I live. Took me ages to get the ones of Google Street View blurred lol. Where do I sign up?

Why do re-education camps have soccer fields? What kind of weird soccer related torture are they performing??

The motivation should be obvious to everyone here: to stop the public from directly seeing the Israeli war crimes. That way the propaganda machine coming from the American authorities can continue to be swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

This is the result of historical blurring of all of Israel and all of the Territories, by US law. The goal was preventing intelligence gathering against Israel in general, not anything specific to Israeli action in Gaza and the West Bank.

This makes no sense whatsoever, regardless of what side you are allowed with. Satellite imagery is inferior to simple cameras at documenting what's happening in Gaza, war crimes or not.

You are not improving the reputation of Palestinian concerns with your post, so you if you want to help them, rethink your approach.

Satellite imagery can be damning when it comes to documenting genocide. See this article for a modern example[1] or this article for another example from WWII[2].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...

[2] https://blog.historicenvironment.scot/2020/01/holocaust-evid...

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