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Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

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Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP comment in http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight w…

In the long run, I can’t help but wonder if creating the internet was a mistake. We’ve effectively encouraged the absolute worst elements of society to come out and have a field day without the social pushback that had kept them in line for millennia.

If you combine that, social media, and porn, how much of the internet is still 'wholesome'? I think niche forums are my favorite part of the internet left.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I thought Editfight was something special. I came by occasionally and drew something. Too bad it's gone now -- just a few days ago my 4 year old asked me if he could play the game where you draw something on the screen again. It's a bummer you had to shut it down, but I understand.

Thanks for the kind words, and glad to hear it made an impression! The code is sitting here on my computer just waiting to be deployed again, but it would have to be somewhere those demonic trolls can find. That said, they don't go to HN and I do own the domain name for another year, so maybe a subdomain is in order... EDIT: (Apparently my HN account is rate-limited so I can't reply directly.) How about this: anyone…

Is there a way to federate to HN logins? Only open it to HN members?

Or at least invite only?

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#33
Looks like https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047 may have been the source of this. It's the only changeset in the history of OSM for the area that contains the offending term. It's from August 10, and was reverted on August 11 in https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61556585

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#34

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

That is true, but at the same time, Wikipedia wouldn't be possible without it. The CEO confirmed that their absuse-detection system immediately flagged the label, but apparently some human reviewer approved it. Which shows that even if your system is perfect, humans are always the weakest link.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#35

We are just finishing building out our OSM infrastructure, and this morning in the shower I was thinking how nice it is that we can fix the maps by adding new construction and new roads (we do real estate for part of our state), and contribute this directly to OSM and then update tiles from OSM. Then I came in to read this story. Yesterday we were trying to figure out what our update strategy would be, if we would pu…

The age of update heuristic is likely a good start; high profile vandalism like this is likely to be noticed in a reasonable amount of time. Vandalism in low profile areas is going to be harder to find though.

I'm pretty sure you can get a stream of all the changes, so you would need to do something like have one copy of the database where you processed updates in near real time, and a second (production) copy where you had a delayed replication stream; in that stream, you'd want to look ahead at the real time database to calculate your stability heuristic.

Alternatively, you could have the realtime database also populate a changed object queue -- anytime an object is changed pull it out of the middle of the queue and place it at the end again. If it makes it to the front, pull the current object data and place it in your production database.

This should help with vandalism, but you do run the risk of accepting only parts of a coordinated edit of several objects. You could consider simply stopping replication into your production database in case anything ends up ultimately unstable, but I suspect it's hard to find a point in time where everything edited before was not edited again in the next 15 days (or whatever your threshold is).

This is definitely a complex problem to solve, especially since you would want to have some escape hatches so your changes happen quickly, or you could flag upstream changes to apply quickly, or worst case, you might want to revert to an earlier version of the database.

If you can figure out how to divide the data into different regions, you might have better luck, but sometimes object ids are moved around quite a bit. Geodata is already messy, and having a multitude of editors doesn't help with consistency etc.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#36
post #26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to know the OSM relation ID that was affected? The "New York City" relation [1] does not have anything related in its history [2] [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/175905 [2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/relation/175905/histor...

I wouldn't be surprised if it was purged from the history. Otherwise might it imply that New York City was once given that name, historically?

OSM doesn't record historical changes of that kind (as in differentiating it from any other edit) and the nature of a change in that way. Although one might be able to infer actual geographical changes from comparisons. It just concerns itself with a snapshot of "now".

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society and Distributed Systems are similar in the sense that interesting stuff happens at the tail, and if you want to make them behave properly, you need to focus on those 1% (or 0.1% of the tail cases). For systems: queries of death, queries with highest serving latency, records with huge size compared to rest of the entries in DB, records with extremely high fan-in for your streaming pipeline, ... For society, a…

> It is also the tail that imposes the maximum cost on your system / society. This is not true for every case. Excessive focus on tail risks (and moral hazard,) in fact, can be absurdly costly.

See: medicare fraud prevention.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the kind words, and glad to hear it made an impression! The code is sitting here on my computer just waiting to be deployed again, but it would have to be somewhere those demonic trolls can find. That said, they don't go to HN and I do own the domain name for another year, so maybe a subdomain is in order... EDIT: (Apparently my HN account is rate-limited so I can't reply directly.) How about this: anyone…

Is there a way to federate to HN logins? Only open it to HN members? Or at least invite only?

I just put the site up in a subdomain specific to HN, check my post history for the link. Everyone from HN is invited, tell your friends. It'll be a mini party lol

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#39

And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy. On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

That is true, but at the same time, Wikipedia wouldn't be possible without it. The CEO confirmed that their absuse-detection system immediately flagged the label, but apparently some human reviewer approved it. Which shows that even if your system is perfect, humans are always the weakest link.

Yeah, it's clear that this strategy can work, but a lot of people underestimate how much energy must be spent policing for anti-social behavior.

Re: Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed

#40
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, I can’t help but wonder if creating the internet was a mistake. We’ve effectively encouraged the absolute worst elements of society to come out and have a field day without the social pushback that had kept them in line for millennia.

If you combine that, social media, and porn, how much of the internet is still 'wholesome'? I think niche forums are my favorite part of the internet left.

I genuinely think Social Media is going to get us all killed.

Porn might prevent the next generation from being born, worst case.

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