Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

There was a story floating around recently about a Russian man who marked up his credit card agreement and sent it back, where it was blindly signed by a representative of the card company, and he then enforced it on them with hilarious and expensive consequences for the card company.

Yeah, they'll probably just toss your counter-offer. But the point is that you can make it. You can take their contract, alter it, sign the altered copy, and send it back, and then they can accept or refuse. The important point here is that you are not considered to have agreed to the original because you signed an altered copy.

A more thorough way to do this electronically would be to modify the DOM, save the modified agreement, click Agree to sign your end, and then e-mail the modified agreement back to the originator and let them know what's going on. Of course, their automated systems have given you access in the meantime, but that's hardly your fault.

I don't really understand how making a modification you know won't be sent back to the server is "fraud", but sending the user an agreement you know won't be read is "not fraud". Seems like either we base both scenarios on what people should do (read the original/modified agreement), or on what people actually do (not read anything), but not base one scenario on one and one scenario on the other.

You say you don't see why an agreement to the original is invalidated because you couldn't make a counter-offer, but that's how contracts work. Negotiation is inherent to the process. Big companies are trying to hide that with form contracts that everyone is expected to sign as-is, but it's still supposed to be present.

Honestly, I had to take a look at in depth to respond, since it has been a while since I looked at the google api in depth. What I still notice is that Openlayers and the esri allow for a lot more service types. You have KML and GeoRSS, which are fine, but do not seem to support many other of the more common formats out of the box such as Arcserver services,WMS, or WFS (which are probably the 3 most common types in the GIS world). I have seen some workarounds for these, but they seem hacky and slow in the implementations I have seen. I do not have a big problem with KML, but I cannot always change what format a 3rd party serves a map as.

The other thing that appears to be lacking is front end geoprocessing. With esri at least, you can do quite a bit of geometry manipulation out of the box. This can be extremely useful for realtime data visualizations, as starting up a new map service is often a bottleneck with any of the backend platforms. If you can just render the new layer on the client, you save loads of time.

My last issue might just be a lack of understanding, but from what I have seen of the backend offering that google maps enterprise offers, it is missing some major features. For one, the documentation is lacking, and it appears that the entire rest api is marked as experimental. Second, although it allows for some basic hosting and whatnot (easily replicated by a free server like geoserver, which is trivial to set up), it once again does not have any real processing engine, so you have to download all of the data to another server you own anyway to do any real work on the data.

That being said, I really do think it is a great product, and I definitely point people in your direction if they are looking for a quick an easy way to add a map to a site with some basic data. At the same time, I am not sure the enterprise plan really makes much sense, since the results can be so easily replicated with geoserver + openlayers and you already need a server solution anyway for running a processing engine like grass or pyqgis.

Also note: I am probably not your typical use case, and I realize that most people just need to throw preprocessed layers on a static map. All I can say is that I look forward to the day when I do not feel like I am the only one around doing dynamic big data GIS on the web, so I don't have to keep building all of this stuff from scratch ;)

In what sense did I "agree to bind [myself]" to those terms? I just loaded a public website that has map tiles on it. You are arguing that I have agreed, thereby, to something written on a different website (two clicks away), which I was neither presented, nor asked to agree to, nor signed an agreement to?

It seems very similar in the sense to which Google "agreed" to pay me money if they spider my page more than N times/day, which is what my own website's terms say in the footer. Yet I've never received a check. Is Google playing dumb and claiming they never read the terms, so can't be held liable?

np and cheers!

Yeah, I think so too. And querying SRTM tiles is prerry simple.