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Comment by Firefishy | Hacker News Reader

I am part of the team which runs the OpenStreetMap.org infrastructure, we also get a lot of weird and wonderful requests / emails. .mil, .gov, .edu and GeoTLD variants.

I should really do a write-up sometime.

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I remember being in Tel Aviv for work, and pulling up maps to plot out a bike route from the hotel to the office. Only to find that the entire route is blurred out online. Turns out our office was a few 100 meters from something important to the IDF, so no map/route data available. Too far to reasonably walk, and didn't want to try a bike without knowing there was a reasonable route...

Why would a road or route be blocked from OpenStreetMaps? That doesn't really provide any security if the area is public.

In what way do you mean “public”?

Not parent poster, but I'd describe a commute road as "very public".

My question still stands. What does “public” mean here?

It means people walk by, take photos and post it on Instagram 500 times per day.

You can also refer to Merriam Webster.

You'll need to clarify what your question means for more detail than that.

This does remind me of driving on the western edge of the Dead Sea in 2014 with my family. The only device we had that was capable of 3G-less navigation was my Nokia Lumia 620 (windows phone) with bing maps. I had maps downloaded for all of Israel and Palestine, but they refused to work at that particular spot. Still not sure if it was some kind of GPS/map blocking or just being at a really low altitude. Pretty sure that once we passed Jericho and turned towards Jerusalem, it started working again.

I suspect a lot of software does not behave well at negative altitude. I heard of an ECU having trouble on one of the rare negative altitude roads.

Stupid question: Did you rent the bike? You nerd sniped me here! How did you have a bike on a work trip? That sounds fun.

Afaik Tel Aviv has city wide bike share, so guessing that's what OP was using.

Cool, I was not aware. I found the website here: https://metrofun.co.il/

Did something like the android 'osmand' app with offline openstreetmap data for .IL downloaded function?

You should compare notes with the trove of weird emails that Daniel at haxx.se gets (the curl guy) because his email address is in the curl license text appended in the fine print of a bunch of products.