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Google Earth Reverse Engineering

github.com

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Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#11

Post by retroplasma »

arthurcolle wrote: post #4

this is sick. how did you figure out the numeric schemes and even have the idea to look where you did?

Mainly lived inside Chrome's dev tools for many nights. Its deobfuscator and debugger is very handy. Still scratched my head lots of times along the way. Some interesting stuff is still missing, e.g. no idea yet how they get octant paths from geo coordinates.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#12

Post by oh_sigh »

userbinator wrote: post #9
jpatokal wrote: post #6

"Reverse engineering" seems a bit pointless when Google has open sourced the code for Google Earth Enterprise: https://github.com/google/earthenterprise (Update: The client was not open sourced, just the server.) However, this doesn't give you carte blanche to use Google's own imagery: https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html

I wonder why the latest release is over 800MB compressed... I doubt that includes the actual imagery either.

It looks like they include install files for all 3rd party dependencies like postgres, python, openssl, etc.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#13

Post by cronix »

kodablah wrote: post #7
userbinator wrote: post #5

I hope this gets mirrored somewhere else, because I don't trust GitHub to not cave in to legal demands despite RE being legal regardless of EULA in parts of the world, and the extra attention this gets may otherwise kill it.

From what I've seen, GitHub will only respond to a DMCA request for takedown, and Google very rarely files those (I think I saw one in the GitHub DMCA notice repo for an entire internal published source repo once, could be misremembering). Google doesn't usually fight with lawyers instead of tech (e.g. making scraping more difficult). Not saying you shouldn't fork or fear, but GitHub and Google are generally good act…

Yes, but MS now owns Github and MS might have a different viewpoint in terms of copyright than GH has traditionally had.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#14

Post by gammateam »

userbinator wrote: post #5

I hope this gets mirrored somewhere else, because I don't trust GitHub to not cave in to legal demands despite RE being legal regardless of EULA in parts of the world, and the extra attention this gets may otherwise kill it.

Just clone it and move on

I do that for anything that looks predictably hot

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#15

Post by kuhhk »

cronix wrote: post #13
kodablah wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen, GitHub will only respond to a DMCA request for takedown, and Google very rarely files those (I think I saw one in the GitHub DMCA notice repo for an entire internal published source repo once, could be misremembering). Google doesn't usually fight with lawyers instead of tech (e.g. making scraping more difficult). Not saying you shouldn't fork or fear, but GitHub and Google are generally good act…

Yes, but MS now owns Github and MS might have a different viewpoint in terms of copyright than GH has traditionally had.

Why do you suspect that?

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#17

Post by paganel »

automatoney wrote: post #3

I'm so glad that this has been made, I tried working on something like this a while ago but gave up after struggling for a bit. At the time I was surprised it didn't exist yet. I'm wondering though if Google'll eventually patch things so this doesn't work, or if they're not too bothered by people grabbing data like this.

In the “old”, initial days (circa 2005-2006) they weren’t bothered by this, I remember they released the GMaps public API back then as a result (among other factors) of some people reverse engineering the public-facing interface. If I’m not mistaken one of the first projects that was using the reverse-engineered version (before the API was made public) was the former Chicago Crime website, one of the first Django installations.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#19

Post by tribby »

kuhhk wrote: post #15
cronix wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but MS now owns Github and MS might have a different viewpoint in terms of copyright than GH has traditionally had.

Why do you suspect that?

I can't speak for OP, but microsoft hasn't had the best relationship with open source in the past,[1] and they are a pretty litigious company.[2] however, their strategy seems to have changed significantly in recent years and I seriously doubt they will change how github operates. if anything, github has improved since it was acquired.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#20

Post by ec109685 »

userbinator wrote: post #5

I hope this gets mirrored somewhere else, because I don't trust GitHub to not cave in to legal demands despite RE being legal regardless of EULA in parts of the world, and the extra attention this gets may otherwise kill it.

You think google is going to send a cease and desist letter to github based on someone’s work reverse engineering google’s App in Chrome?

And if they do that, nobody will have a copy of this source code?

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