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I'm fairly certain that the NSA does.
I remember a couple of years ago someone was claiming the Three Gorges Dam was buckling and about to fail, based on the satellite views showing the top of the dam weaving back and forth. Everyone sane thought it was some interpolation bug from Google trying and failing to tile the pictures properly, but maybe this is the reason why.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point it was illegal in NYC to go out with a with a mask on, while it was also made illegal to go out without a mask on. (That was when they were both protests that made them ban masks (that obscure the face), and Covid that made them mandate masks. But I think the laws were written broadly enough that both covering and not covering your face were technically forbidden.)
Do you have any reference for that? I live in NYC and was here for the whole pandemic, and this is the first I hear something like that.
> Everything is mask crime
> We talked last week about a hypothetical minimalist legal system with only two crimes: Wire fraud, for stuff you do in your house, and coronavirus-related curfew violations, for stuff you do outside your house. If you go to someone’s house and murder them, that’s violation of your local stay-at-home order and you can be arrested for that; who needs a law against murder? I wrote:
> > You’d need a regime of sentencing enhancements (leaving the house to do murder is worse than leaving the house to jaywalk), and you’d probably need like one more law for domestic violence, but the point is that you can get a pretty parsimonious legal system if that’s what you want. I do not actually think it’s what you want.
> The reason you shouldn’t want it is that any sort of minimalist legal system like this leaves huge room for discretion. If the only crime is a fairly common and trivial one like leaving the house, then the people who get prosecuted and severely punished for it might be the ones who leave the house to do murders, but they might not be. They might be people who leave the house and are otherwise disfavored by the police, prosecutors, judges and juries. Poor people, members of minorities, people with unpopular political beliefs, that sort of thing.
> Anyway a fun fact about New York state law (via public defender Sam Feldman) is that now:
> * It is illegal to be around people without a mask, and
> * It is illegal to be around people with a mask on.
> There’s an executive order requiring masks in public when you cannot social distance, and a state law forbidding them. So pretty much anyone who goes outside in New York is breaking the law. Presumably they won’t all be prosecuted.
He quotes https://twitter.com/srfeld/status/1251228271645208577 as the source.
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It seems that even taking geotagged photos is illegal in China, indeed some camera models automatically disable geotagging when inside China: https://ogleearth.com/2012/05/why-do-panasonic-leica-fujifil...
Thanks for the details. It is always interesting how the most innocent things are seen as danger by an autocracy.
So Openstreetmap must be illegal in China! And indeed it is: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/China Of course that doesn't stop people from mapping every bench in China https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=China#map=3/33.99...
I remember a couple of years ago someone was claiming the Three Gorges Dam was buckling and about to fail, based on the satellite views showing the top of the dam weaving back and forth. Everyone sane thought it was some interpolation bug from Google trying and failing to tile the pictures properly, but maybe this is the reason why.
Grand Coulee Dam, on the other hand, despite being decades older? It's dead-on level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, despite its apparent illegality, China seems to be fairly well-supported and well-mapped by OpenStreetMap, at least in major cities. And is entirely mapped in normal WGS-84 without the obfuscation problem. In any case, according to Wikipedia, open-source code is available to convert between WGS-84 and the obfuscated GJC-02 coordinates. Since technology seems to have caught up with it, is there any advantage (…
I want to know why Google hasn’t corrected their map overlays. The shift in the roads makes it frustrating to look at.
Youtuber Johnny Harris released a great video covering China's changing maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpQQOQ__1ok&ab_channel=Johnn... It's a detailed analysis of China's 2023 map, which many countries believe oversteps China's boundaries.
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I want to know why Google hasn’t corrected their map overlays. The shift in the roads makes it frustrating to look at.
Because Chinese law forbids to convert their coordinates to WGS84, and using the Chinese coordinates for satellite data would give a discontinuity at the border. This is explained in the article.