Dumb decision from Microsoft. Will they remove country borders from Bing Maps because they might be considered political too?
In Bing Maps, I expect them change country borders based on localization settings, but that was probably too onerous to implement and test in the Windows 95 days.
They didn't actually remove the map - they just removed any functionality it had. So the time set window is massive for no reason, it contains this huge world map bitmap that no longer does anything.
It's not a standard Windows control, so there had to be lots of work to get the timezone boundaries, map to values usable for their world map bitmap, iterate a bit on the behaviour for when the user clicks at x,y on the map, et. al.
The elation of shipping the minor feature, followed a few months later, with the realization that most of that work is going to be neutered.
You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest if as soon as country A invades country B you move the border on the map. That would be pretty counterproductive.
Documenting reality doesn't endorse what happened. Istanbul was Constantinople. Shit happens. If I'm travelling, I'd much rather the flags and borders reflect the situation on the ground instead of making meaningless humanitarian gestures.
The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries.
You can come up with some arbitrary criteria to split the difference, but your reality would break when you effectively set foot in a spot that works under the competing assumption.
No, in a disputed territory there's one reality, and 1..n delusions.
If you bothered to actually travel to Ukraine you'd find there are plenty of places where you can get dronestruck by either side. If you bothered to actually travel to the disputed India/China/Pakistan border area you'll find either side might hit you with a stick and take you into custody. If you'd lived in Northern Ireland 40 years ago, or even South Italy today, you'd find that the group that enforces its laws with force in your street might be quite different from the group that is internationally thought to be "in control" of the country you're supposedly part of.
Control is not a binary. There's no country in the world that doesn't have murders, kidnappings, and takeovers. When (as in South Korea recently) there's a group of people outside a guy's house who say they're coming to arrest him under a warrant from the Supreme Court, and he says he's the President and the warrant is illegitimate and they're just a gang of thugs trying to kidnap him, who is in control? There's no way to answer that except retrospectively. When armed men declare independence or a revolution, are they "in control" of an area in a sense that should be shown on a map, or just regular criminals? Again, no way to tell.
I'm quite familiar with Taiwan thank you very much, and yes it's one of the more stable situations (although these things have a way of seeming stable until they suddenly aren't) where one of the claims is rather attenuated and silly. That doesn't mean there's a simple, easy solution to territory disputes in general.
I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis.
Google maps added the „gulf of America“ to their US version, because anywhere else it’s still the Gulf of Mexico (even in iOS autocorrect, it changed it correctly to uppercase).
> if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage.
https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-google-deter...
Yandex censorship around this is really amusing. They did indeed drop all mentions of countries and borders everywhere, for one thing. But also in Alice (their LLM chatbot), it's to the point where if you ask it to prepare a road trip from Sochi to Bucharest and describe the route in detail including which countries it passes through, it refuses to answer.
As far as I know, no it’s not? (Haven’t been to Russia for about a year now, but I haven’t heard about any blocks from my friends.)
Either you chose sides, create different releases of software for some countries (deployment nightmare), or just remove such „sensitive“ features.
1) Don’t lie. Apps don’t have to “lie” to do business in America. If someone labels the Gulf as the “Gulf of Mexico”, there’s not really a goddamn thing the Federal Government can do about it except throw a shit fit. The fullest extent that they can enforce this is on contractors making products and services specifically for the Federal Government’s and Military’s own use.
2) Maps apps are probably going to relabel it as the Gulf of America anyway within America, and it’s not exactly a lie. Barring any issue with Congress, if there’s some statute buried somewhere that legally enforces the name of the Gulf to be the Gulf of Mexico, it isn’t exactly a lie if the President exercising the authority of the Office of the President renames a geographical feature that’s at least partly touched by the US. There’s a lot of geographical features that have different names either in different languages, different locales or both, and it’s fully within the Executive branch’s purview to name them. They do so all the time, although typically for the more obscure things nowadays since for anything too prominent, the name was decided long ago.
Maps apps can set their own policy on this, but generally the easiest course of action is to defer to governing authorities.
I’m not even one to defend the PRC, but between the PRC, the Republic of China, Korea, Japan, and Russia there’s a lot of land and naming disputes between them.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/01/28/gulf-mexico-g...