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Comment by teruakohatu | Hacker News Reader

Surely Niantic Labs should freeze their copy of OSM data to prevent this kind of abuse.

The funny part is they almost certainly do, historically the geodata in niantic’s games has been months or years out of date — so all this vandalism is for nothing.

Yes, they should. Even if they delay use of updates by some months, that should be enough to make it not worth adding fake stuff.

I wonder if this is possible at the server side. If niantic clients are identifiable, maybe OSM can serve them an old copy.

Why would the use the live database instead of importing snapshotted dumps?

Because Devs are lazy. Same reason time servers get hammered instead of companies setting up their own. From other comments, it sounds like Niantic do snapshot though.

I would assume Niantic and every other serious OSM user has just downloaded the OSM dataset and uses a local copy. Even most OSM smartphone apps do that.

My experience of OSM smartphone apps is that while they do cache map tiles, they also update stale data within a timescale of hours.

Yeah that's what they do, unless something changed.

I haven't been paying attention recently, but it used to be pretty common to see big threads discussing the impact of an update.

Hmm, how often do you think they do it? If it's already months, and people are still posting fake OSM data, that's evidence against my hypothesis above

For Pokemon go, it could be once per year:

Aug 2023: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/1646shv/open_...

Oct 2022: https://pokemongolive.com/en/post/mapupdates-2022/

Pikmin bloom updated once at Feb 2024 after launch at Oct 2021:

https://twitter.com/NianticHelp/status/1760694331466224078

Wow I'm amazed if people are creating fake beaches and waiting that long to use them. Or do they know in advance when the update is going to happen?

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