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Google Maps Hacks

simonweckert.com

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Re: Google Maps Hacks

#71

Post by OmarShehata »

wh1t3n01s3 wrote: post #43

A similar problem happens during unusual big snowfalls in the country or in the mountains. The primary roads turn red because the cars are going really slow cz there is 50cm of snow. So maps redirects you to secondary roads, where there is nobody and even more snow.

We got hit by a surprise blizzard once (driving from North Dakota to Minnesota, where it went from no trace of snow to blizzard in about 20 minutes of driving). Our car couldn't really make it up any road that wasn't well plowed.

I was trying to navigate to a hotel because I knew we couldn't make it back in this weather, but all the closest hotels weren't on main roads. I was desperately trying to figure out a way to tell Google "prefer main roads" so we could find a hotel that was several miles further away if that meant sticking to safer roads.

I thought a lot about how a feature like that could save lives in an emergency. Does this already exist anywhere?

Re: Google Maps Hacks

#72

Post by mattivc »

CrazyCatDog wrote: post #58
asutekku wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google maps runs also a lot of the time on background so no active navigation is required. I wonder if the introduction of background location activity notifications in iOS 13 decreased the amount of traffic data gathered from iPhone users.

I want one app to track my position at all times. I use google because I’m unaware of another—and I figure they have optimized the energy consumption of doing so. Then again, would be thrilled if someone could recommend an alternate way of doing this on iOS (preferably native). PS this function allowed me to time stamp my location which proved incredibly helpful in a FOFA request with state patrol—got me out of a tic…

I use an app called Arc for this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/arc-app-location-activity/id10...

I am pretty happy with it, so i can recommend giving it a try.

Re: Google Maps Hacks

#73

Post by lonelappde »

Google/Android fights this sort of abuse by making short lifetimes for smartphones, so adversary can't accumulate many working secondhand phones, or Google can detect and filter them by obsolete OS version :-D

Re: Google Maps Hacks

#75

Post by lanerobertlane »

judge2020 wrote: post #38
pjc50 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do it on wifi. With a bit of spoofing you could "move" all the phones up and down the street while they're in your basement.

Google spun-off Niantic and I hear they have pretty good anti-GPS spoofing algorithms/NNs (for Pokemon Go), I wouldn't be surprised if they use the same or similar tech for GMaps.

As someone who uses a spoofer app for Pokemon Go, the anti-spoofing is pretty limited.

There is a "you can't go 500 miles in 10 seconds" style check, that checks your displacement against your previous position periodically to makes sure it's realistic,

something that makes sure your GPS is always drifting a little, like a normal phone GPS would report (which the spoofer app builds in),

and other little things such as if it has camera permissions and you take a photo in game, the location in the photo metadata matches your in game location.

I usually play in my house in the North of England and regularly spoof the app to be in London, New York, Paris Mall or Tokyo.

Re: Google Maps Hacks

#76

Post by prashnts »

brian_herman wrote: post #46
prashnts wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really that easy with just IMU sensors, I’d assume ? I did one project in school (albeit a simple SVM based model) to classify walking vs running (and so on) and ambiguity was still there. Stationary vs. Walking was easy to draw a hyper plane in between, not Running. I still find it a difficult problem to get into, after 5 years. Perhaps ANN models might work better? Although my heart is still at Hidden MM states…

Do you have the code for your classification project? It would be great to see it on github or something.

I have it, not only the code but labelled dataset I created with an arduino, first, and then iPhone. It’s been a private repository forever, but thanks! I’ll make it public and Edit post the link down here.

(Its not pretty though...)

Edit: https://github.com/prashnts/MPU-9250

I have proper project reports I’d submitted somewhere for sure, as well. I’ll add it there in repo. I never bothered earlier.

Edit 2: this was the paper i finally submitted at school.

https://github.com/prashnts/MPU-9250/blob/master/Docs/submit...

Re: Google Maps Hacks

#77

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

vongomben wrote: post #17
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a guess: there's little economic incentive to perform this attack, and it would also be pretty expensive to perform regularly. So detecting and preventing it has not been a priority up to now. If people started doing it regularly, I'm sure countermeasures would be put in place.

Why expensive? If you compare it with other forms of rioting and strike I think is still cheap. Ghost digital crowd. BTW I wonder if you really need 99 different data Sims cards or rather have a smartphone hotspotting every 5.

Expensive in time compared to benefit accrued/harm done. At a minimum you have to spend a person's time on it, both in the gathering of a bunch of used phones, the setting up of many phone lines, and the actual work of walking on the street. A small street seeming busy on Google Maps doesn't really matter that much. Especially, if the street is not actually busy, since that's kind of an indicator that people don't really want to use it anyway. So the amount of traffic you'd potentially divert is similarly small.

This seems really obvious to me, so if it doesn't seem that way to you, maybe we just have different priors. I can't explain it any better than this, though.

Re: Google Maps Hacks

#79

Post by bockris »

OmarShehata wrote: post #71
wh1t3n01s3 wrote: post #43

A similar problem happens during unusual big snowfalls in the country or in the mountains. The primary roads turn red because the cars are going really slow cz there is 50cm of snow. So maps redirects you to secondary roads, where there is nobody and even more snow.

We got hit by a surprise blizzard once (driving from North Dakota to Minnesota, where it went from no trace of snow to blizzard in about 20 minutes of driving). Our car couldn't really make it up any road that wasn't well plowed. I was trying to navigate to a hotel because I knew we couldn't make it back in this weather, but all the closest hotels weren't on main roads. I was desperately trying to figure out a way to…

presumably your intended existing route was already on the main roads? while in navigation mode you can hit the search icon (magnifying glass) to search along the existing route. it won't be perfect but it should work for your use case.

Re: Google Maps Hacks

#80

Post by judge2020 »

lanerobertlane wrote: post #75
judge2020 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google spun-off Niantic and I hear they have pretty good anti-GPS spoofing algorithms/NNs (for Pokemon Go), I wouldn't be surprised if they use the same or similar tech for GMaps.

As someone who uses a spoofer app for Pokemon Go, the anti-spoofing is pretty limited. There is a "you can't go 500 miles in 10 seconds" style check, that checks your displacement against your previous position periodically to makes sure it's realistic, something that makes sure your GPS is always drifting a little, like a normal phone GPS would report (which the spoofer app builds in), and other little things such a…

Interesting, guess I shouldn't have such high expectations..

But I still would think G Maps has a system to deal with spoofing; maybe they weight your data based on how reliable/valid your data is over time.

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