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Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

bbc.com

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Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#181

Post by mayli »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #97

Not really related to the article at hand, but I've been on a bit of a Google Maps binge the past couple weeks. I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them. Another strange thing I found that might not be super well known (I didn't know about it) is that all GPS data in China is offset by a nonlinear psuedo-random amount. If you turn on the satellite view in Google Maps and look at various citi…

See the explanation on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#182

Post by carstenhag »

im3w1l wrote: post #94
canada_dry wrote: post #48

Organizations/NGOs heavily rely on satellite imagery (i) to assist in delivering many humanitarian efforts. It would seem useful for the UN to strongly prohibit the diminishing of such capability. (i) www.hotosm.org

Do they really depend on google maps in particular?

No. Bing Maps allowed to use their satellite views when editing OpenStreetMap.

To view the datasets with satellite images, you still need another provider (which Google maps isn't)

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#183

Post by nurgasemetey »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #113
squeaky-clean wrote: post #97

Not really related to the article at hand, but I've been on a bit of a Google Maps binge the past couple weeks. I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them. Another strange thing I found that might not be super well known (I didn't know about it) is that all GPS data in China is offset by a nonlinear psuedo-random amount. If you turn on the satellite view in Google Maps and look at various citi…

My memory says that US government GPS at one point intentionally introduced reduction in accuracy/resolution as well, but they stopped, which was part of what led to the commercial GPS revolution (along with cheaper tech of course). Let's see... Wikipedia seems to confirm: > During the 1990s, GPS quality was degraded by the United States government in a program called "Selective Availability"; this was discontinued o…

As I recall, it was due to plane crash and US h̶a̶d̶ decided to make precise GPS available to public

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#184

Post by grawprog »

hatsunearu wrote: post #13
deadalus wrote: post #5

Is it possible to have real-time live-feed of the entire planet? If cost isn't an issue, would something like that be possible?

https://zoom.earth/ not quite real time (I'm not sure if that's even possible) but this is quite up to date. I used to to check out the smoke from last year. edit: you get pictures every 10 minutes of the whole globe, but the resolution is pretty bad, good enough to check the cloud coverage though

>but this is quite up to date.

It's up to date zoomed out, but zoomed in seems to be similar to what google maps provides. The picture of the area I live is the same 10 year old picture on google maps, complete with a house that hasn't existed in almost as much time.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#185

Post by oogabooga123 »

EvilEy3 wrote: post #175
Trias11 wrote: post #135

The questions are: - Does Google deliberatly blurring Gaza strip? - Who benefits by artificially degraded quality of Gaza maps? - Does Google quietly taking political sides?

You forgot: - Did I fix my tinfoil hat?

JIDF in action, ladies and gentlemen

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#186

Post by ocdtrekkie »

acomjean wrote: post #180
jrochkind1 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My memory says that US government GPS at one point intentionally introduced reduction in accuracy/resolution as well, but they stopped, which was part of what led to the commercial GPS revolution (along with cheaper tech of course). Let's see... Wikipedia seems to confirm: > During the 1990s, GPS quality was degraded by the United States government in a program called "Selective Availability"; this was discontinued o…

When I was a civil engineer last century gps accuracy was an issue because people wanted to use gps for surveying. They came up with a system that would use 2 receivers and a radio between them to get much higher accuracies. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/natureofgeoinfo/book/export/... I think the US Government can also shut it off at a moments notice.

They could, but multiple governments now publicly broadcast from similar constellations, so it wouldn't have nearly as much benefit for them to do so.

Modern dirt cheap receivers can pick up European, Chinese, Russian, etc. constellations for location just as well as the American one.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#188

Post by azernik »

qart wrote: post #137
thaumasiotes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The question isn't whether the data exists. It does. > What is your basis for this claim? This is a really surreal response, given the part of that same comment that you seem to have forgotten to read: >> In space, satellites will pass over the region every X hours no matter what. Planet's satellite have a fresh, high resolution map of the Earth ~3.5 hours. Google had, at the very least, 13 satellites imaging the…

I asked another question too. Why not answer that, then we can discuss surrealness. Ironically, my second question was right after my first question.

If the data exists for one place at a similar latitude, then it exists for every other place at a similar latitude, by the simple laws of orbital dynamics.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#189

Post by riffic »

Robotbeat wrote: post #121
berkes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even with such a budget: geostationary satellites over the poles are not possible[1] and really hard anywhere but over the equator, really. So that means most of the south and north part of the earth cannot be covered with such a constellation; they would need to be orbiting satellites, which makes "real time" even harder, because it would require an enormously complex choreography to ensure there's at least one…

Disagree. The Iridium phone constellation covers the entire planet (which means it has line of sight to the entire planet) and has for about two decades. Starlink will, soon, as well. They’ve already solved the choreography issue you mentioned. The entire globe has about 500 billion square meters. 24 bit uncompressed imagery is thus 1.5TB per global image. With some modest compression, you could get a video stream of…

are your examples geostationary?
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