141–150 of 275 posts
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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...
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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...
Exactly, Russia has been “dying” for years now but there’s only one country crying in the media.
Here is an open source implementation that converts from WGS84 to GJC2: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... And converting the other way by a kind of binary search, I guess using a flaw in the obfuscation: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... All seems very silly by today standards and I would think…
Maybe GJC2 can be modified on the fly, by changing offset parameters? So in a hypothetical war situation, only providers obtaining data in realtime from "authorized" sources would have access to accurate targeting information.
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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 (…
Great point. This seems like low-intelligence autocratic bullshirt more than anything. Does the CCP really think that the US military are going to use ordinary street msps to target their missiles and that this obfuscation will protect them from on-target hits? Sure, in WWII there were a few apocryphal instances of bad maps foiling an attack, but that was decades before mapping satellites. As mentioned, it's been a l…
It's just an economic policy to help local mapping tech get good without international competition, and to control access to information by channeling it through domestic state-controlled enterprises.
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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.
Mapping is explicitly regulated so no need for an indirect barrier.
AFAIK it is the same other places. If a Chinese company wanted to do an extensive commercial map of the US it would face all sorts of regulative hurdles.
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South Korea is currently at war with a hostile oppressive totalitarian neighbour. China is at war with its people.
South Korea is currently at war with North Korea in what is known as the Korean War. China and the US also fought in what is known as the Korean War. You can't claim SK and NK are at war with each other while implying China and US are not at war with each other. It's exactly the same war.
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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.
Discontinuity at the border isn't a big issue compared to all locations in the country being wrong relative to the satellite view. If Google cared enough, I'm sure they could find a solution - since Google doesn't operate in China, they don't really have to respect Chinese laws. But Google doesn't operate in China so they don't care that much and are presumably happy to leave things the way they are. Also, keeping th…
Well, they buy the data from one of the few blessed Chinese companies, which is a form of doing business, and regardless what Chinese law says Google has most likely a contractual obligation not to convert the data. In other words, if they did convert the data they'd probably not get updates anymore.
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> since Google doesn't operate in China, they don't really have to respect Chinese laws I suspect that in practice that’s not true; there are a lot of ways China could make life difficult for a big international tech company, from looking the other way regarding IP theft to arresting people associated with Google on spying charges when they’re there on personal trips
Also, Google currently doesn't really have a presence in China (and, despite some to-and-fro, currently doesn't intend to reenter the market either), so it's probably not that important to them to fix these issues. I wonder if they actively update the map or if it's stuck at some point in the past? This isn't the first time they have done something like this, Germany was stuck with Street View imagery from 2008 (and…
Interesting. It is illegal in some western countries too to create your own maps. Another thing with maps is that online services have different maps depending on what country you access from.