Hacker News Reader

Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

That is rather chilling, is it not? That a nation would prevent its citizens from looking around and measuring what they see? I can't help but wonder how the chickens will come home to roost.

View on HN

No where near as chilling as to be constantly being anxious about your social score, getting disappeared for political speech, overstepping your bounds with a corrupt local government official, and a 100 other things.

Don't forget being disappeared for merely stating that you have been raped by someone who happens to be a powerful political figure.

Or getting your organ harvested while in jail

Chickens can't find their way home if maps are illegal now can they.

They won't even be able to cross the road, hence for the CCP the age old question "Why did the chicken cross the road?" is meaningless :)

They're preventing citizens from publishing that info, not looking around and measuring from what I found.

Imagine a country that prevents its citizens from recording a song they hear and sharing it with their friends. Oh, wait, US more or less does that and forces other countries to implement policies that prevent it or they will ban trade with those countries.

>a country that prevents its citizens from recording a song...

False analogy. No-one claims copy-write on the physical world. Well, not except the CCP.

That's not true. Building designs have copyrights as do skylines.

Eg the lights on that tower in france

Unrelated.

Building designs are man-made and in any case this is about taking photographs and not replicating man-made designs.

Most of the things we care about on a map are man made too. Roads, tracks, bridges, shops, street addresses. I rarely care about where a mountaintop or a river are. I care for the track to get there or the bridge to cross to the other bank or the road to a restaurant.

Songs are being played in the physical world.

I think the analogy is perfectly valid anyway. You're just trying to find an excuse to compensate a dissonance. But all rules are arbitrary.

Well said. The level of blind jingoism on HN is chilling.

Not to mention that the US government gets any data it wants from banks, telcos, social media, google, etc., which is called metadata surveillance here in the US but it is used to formulate a variety of social "scores" such as one's likelihood to commit "terrorism", etc.

The US GPS system had the signals obfuscated for years so that precise geo coordinates were only available for non-civilian uses. Why bother altering the maps if you can alter the GPS signals. This was rolled back only because hacks were found to work around it.

That's the chilling thing about Chinese censorship?

> "the chilling thing"

Your comment implies a singular chilling thing, while his does not.

Mostly because every year China would arrest a few Japanese for surveying lands in China. It is funny how surveying a country is so important.

I'm no sympathizer to the CCP, but I don't think this argument makes sense in our time.

There's a big gap between a private individual looking around, and lots of private individuals coordinating to look at everything all the time.

Modern technology is making that gap larger year after year.

That argument would be more appropriate if OSM was about something other than where the streets went.

Sadly anything can be politicized these days.

USSR/Russia also had a very long history of restrictions on accurate maps (of just about anything!), on the basis that it is a national security threat if the country ever gets invaded. Street-level maps were broadly available but deliberately falsified:

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-...

Detailed (<1:2500000) topographic maps were automatically classified as a state secret, and restricted on a "need to know" basis outside of the military until 1989.

A detailed article on this explaining how and why they went about it: http://www.hundzor.org/lj/10postnikov.pdf

funnily enough correct and detailed maps of ussr were available in nato countries

True, and people knew it. I used to travel on the bicycle with the help of USSR maps made in early eighties (due to unavailability of other options), and yes, what you saw on the map was sometimes very different from what was in the real life, especially if you were close to the external border.

Until 2000, the US reduced the accuracy of GPS for civilian applications. The UK removed street signs and railway station names in anticipation of German invasion in WWII. Kuwaitis removed street signs when Iraq invaded in 1990.

'Where the streets go' is strategically valuable information.

My understanding is that the resolution of commercially available satellite imagery is restricted by the US. I don't recall details, just passing references from the show "What on Earth?"

Commercial satellite operators licensed in the US are restricted to no more than 25 cm imagery resolution. Of course that limit doesn't apply to foreign operators. And it doesn't apply to aircraft either; many of the "satellite" images you see on Google Maps were actually shot from airplanes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com