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Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

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

#191

Post by aeroman »

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?

One other thing to add - the Earth is really pretty cloudy. If you care about the clouds, new geostationary satellites are pretty good - (e.g. https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/).

If you care about the surface, a lot of places are really cloudy, including some that are cloudy basically all the time - https://www.cloudsandclimate.com/blog/where_is_cloudiest_par...

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

#192

Post by sigzero »

Udik wrote: post #39
betterunix2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should they have negotiated with the Palestinian Authority, which only partially controls the West Bank, or with Hamas, which took control of Gaza and proceeded to murder leaders from other Palestinian political parties? It is kind of hard to know who the "official" representatives of the Palestinian people actually are due to the failure to establish a functional Palestinian state or government.

> Hamas, which took control of Gaza and proceeded to murder leaders from other Palestinian political parties You appear to be misinformed. Hamas won regular elections (considered such by international observers, who also reported obstructions from Israel ). Hamas then kept respecting the ongoing ceasefire with Israel and started softening its stance towards it, offering a permanent ceasefire, while on the other side…

Hamas didn't keep the ceasefire. Hamas was behind the Qassam attack in early 2006. That's from one of your links by the way.

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3257913,00.html

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

#194

Post by fwip »

vinhboy wrote: post #173
gruez wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're basically letting an AI to hallucinate details, which looks good in most cases but in edge cases may cause unintended results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196650

Yo. That was crazy. So the whole "zoom and enhance" thing they do on TV is no longer science fiction. That meme is dead judging by what I am seeing in that thread.

We can get computers to make things up, sure. But usually when they "zoom and enhance" on TV it's because they want to see what's really there.

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

#195

Post by azernik »

mgerullis wrote: post #147
avipars wrote: post #120

Also look at the azrieli mall in tel aviv... there is a huge military base there which is blocked/blurred

I am curious and looking but I cannot find it, you think you can drop a pin and share that link?

Look here. The pin is at the western side of the base.

It's IDF headquarters, used to be bigger (from an old British camp, back when Tel Aviv hadn't grown to swallow it up), but the army has been steadily selling off the valuable urban land and relocating functions to less central locations.

I'm not seeing any notable degradation in satellite imagery, specific to that area, though.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mahane+Rabin+(HaKirya),+Te...

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

#196

Post by f430 »

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?

Not sure about sides here but if you launch rockets into cities indiscriminately and then the building where you keep your weapons, communication center using human shields after warning residents well ahead of time that the building will be blown up, actually gets taken out who is at fault here?

Why are people even defending Hamas???!

Does Israel not have right to defend itself? Is Israel like South Korea who gets attacked regularly and does nothing and opens itself up escalating levels of attack?

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

#197

Post by azernik »

merth wrote: post #98
areoform wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the most heavily imaged areas in the world - on the ground, as it's an active conflict zone. In space, satellites will pass over the region every X hours no matter what. Planet's satellites have a fresh, high resolution map of the Earth ~3.5 hours. Google had, at the very least, 7 satellites imaging the Earth in 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySat . The question isn't whether the data exists. It do…

my guess would be that they dont want clear image of slow destruction and take overs also before after pictures.

In Gaza? There are no takeovers there, just a DMZ and periodic shooting.

The original Israeli ask, accepted by the US Congress, was for all of Israel, including the Territories, to have degraded satellite imagery - as a defensive measure against foreign intelligence-gathering and targeting.

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

#198

Post by idownvoted »

sequoia wrote: post #134

Tangentially related but where does this come from and why is it so widely repeated (as in this article): > ...Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world I've seen this claim (both in the "one of the most..." and " the #1 most..." forms) many times and I don't know where it comes from. What am I missing? Here[0] wikipedia says Gaza Strip has ~5,046/sqkm. I thought maybe Gaza City was meant, it's dens…

You're missing the intention of those pushing this claim: Painting Israel as running a prison intentionally bad, or vice-versa making Gaza the new Warsaw-Ghetto.

If other commentators can't note the rediculousness of putting Gaza next to Tokio, Singapur or Hong Kong, I will: A place with virtually no economy outside of NGOs, the Hamas and UN-Orgs vs. economic beacons that draw talent from all over the world.

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

#199

Post by ryandrake »

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 understanding is that all agreements with Chinese map data providers require that map software implementors only display data projected into the "obfuscated" coordinate system, and the agreements forbid un-projecting back into "real world" WGS-84, regardless of how simple the algorithm is. So, it's more of a business agreement and less of a political thing, but with China there isn't much of a difference.

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

#200

Post by freewizard »

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…

What I learned a few years back about this is the official (un)obfuscating implementation was distributed to licensed companies in binary .dll/.so/.a , and not allowed to be redistributed or reverse-engineered. Licenses are only given to local companies, and foreign companies may only buy service from them. That's why if you reverse engineer Google Map or Apple Map app, they all make real time API calls to do the conversion on servers. Those contracts may also limit the end user who can consume these APIs to be in China, hence foreign users will see the shifts of roads/etc.

The open-sourced implementation one may find on the internet are probably thru sth like curve fitting by sampling many data points. It may have good enough approximations but may not work one day if the gov agency decides to change the algorithm. Changing algorithm is a backward compatibility hell but not a big problem for the industry actually, because most Map apps are owned by big corp which has resource and motivation to comply.

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