Super minor nit: WGS stands for World Geodetic System .
And (among minor nits) mentions of WGS-02 seem to be typos for GCJ-02.
Every map of China is wrong
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Re: Every map of China is wrong
#112Medium is not the best place to host your writing. I didn't even read the article because more than half of my screen was taken up by the Medium call-to-action and the Google account modal. Does anyone remember when a webpage just loaded a document?
Re: Every map of China is wrong
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sure the American tax payers are sending in billions of dollars because Russia is highly non genius lol. Get your head out your ass
In Russia several hundreds of thousands of casualties is genius.
There doesn't seem to be any reliable casualty numbers from the war. It's entirely possible there are more Ukrainan than Russian casualties.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-losses-casualties-ta...
Re: Every map of China is wrong
#114> This means that de facto, most of the world has subscribed to American mapping conventions.
That is overstating the situation; ITRS is the key standard here and it's maintained by IERS. I think WGS-84 and ITRS are somewhat aligned these days, but the exact relationship is not clear to me.
Various regional reference systems are also still widely used, for example ETRS89 in Europe, which is afaik semi-independently defined by EPN (EUREF Permanent Network).
Most notably Galileo GNSS does not use WGS-84.
The key difference between various other systems and the Chinese one is just that for the other systems the conversions to and from WGS-84 are available to high precision.
Re: Every map of China is wrong
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Never had any issues. Noone cared about my camera while I was there. And I created like 5K photos there. Not that I ever use GPS, because it eats away your batter, but noone really cared about it.
Those laws are there to be applied selectively.
When you are a nobody, they wont care. When you are a person of interest this law will be applied to you.
If they want you are just a tourist, otherwise you are a spy who took 5000 photos.
Re: Every map of China is wrong
#116Here’s where it gets interesting — GCJ-02 is based on WGS-84, but with a deliberate obfuscation algorithm applied to it. The effect of this is that there are random offsets added to both latitude and longitude, ranging from as little as 50m to as much as 500m. Holy shit. I can't believe they created an adversarial mapping standard. That is insane. It really paints a picture of their worldview I think. The oppressed "…
Given e.g. the USA military buildup in the South China sea, perhaps the paranoia isn't entirely unfounded?
Re: Every map of China is wrong
#117Here’s where it gets interesting — GCJ-02 is based on WGS-84, but with a deliberate obfuscation algorithm applied to it. The effect of this is that there are random offsets added to both latitude and longitude, ranging from as little as 50m to as much as 500m. Holy shit. I can't believe they created an adversarial mapping standard. That is insane. It really paints a picture of their worldview I think. The oppressed "…
Given e.g. the USA military buildup in the South China sea, perhaps the paranoia isn't entirely unfounded?
Are you just going to ignore the fact that China has been illegally building dozens if not hundreds of military bases there in international waters and is now trying to claim that it owns this territory?
Re: Every map of China is wrong
#118Does anybody know why, when you use Google Maps in China, your GPS location matches the map and not the satellite image? I would assume the maps being in GJC-02 and the satellite images being in some other global coordinate system. So your position should line up with the imagery, not with the map. Does the GPS chip report modified coordinates when it detects it is in china? Or does Google do this itself in the softw…
Yes, they apply the mandatory conversion and have gotten a license for the software to do this from the Chinese authorities. This wikipedia article has some more details on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
I've been to Shanghai and Beijing in 2010 or so, and I vividly remember that my iPhone 3G (that I jailbroke and unlocked to be able to use local Chinese SIMs, oh, those were the times...) didn't work at all for the purpose of getting around, because Google Maps GPS locations didn't match up with the map. However, there was some obscure third-party mapping software available in the app store (I think it was even the official one, not Cydia) which basically showed a Google Maps view and drew the GPS dot onto it by itself, applying the conversion first and thus fixing the display problem.
So at least back then Google Maps apparently didn't yet convert the GPS coordinates to the weird obfuscated Chinese system. But it was a big nuisance and took me a while to figure out. For the first days I thought my jailbreaking activity would have broken the GPS chip or something.
Re: Every map of China is wrong
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given e.g. the USA military buildup in the South China sea, perhaps the paranoia isn't entirely unfounded?
Are you just going to ignore the fact that China has been illegally building dozens if not hundreds of military bases there in international waters and is now trying to claim that it owns this territory?
That probably makes the paranoia even more founded? Especially when their (perceived) adversary has the habit of regularly starting illegal wars.
Re: Every map of China is wrong
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a means to keep detailed maps out of the hands of an enemy it's indeed not great. As it's all rather obvious to reverse engineer this and people have indeed done so. But as a means to force foreign companies to use Chinese data suppliers this works perfectly. Because using this software would be illegal in China and anyone looking to business there legally would end up having to use Chinese data centers, Chinese d…
Some elaborate technical trade barrier? I think that is giving them too much credit. This is thinking from a military apparatus stuck in the 1950es.
Maybe not planned as a barrier, but effectively being one now? So this could be a reason why not to revert it.