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Google Earth Reverse Engineering

github.com

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Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#21

Post by dpq »

ec109685 wrote: post #20
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?

> You think google is going to send a cease and desist letter to github

Wouldn't be the first time, either: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-shuts-down-gaia-efforts...

TL;DR: They shut down an open source GEarth clone called Gaia a decade ago, although they managed to not to lose a lot of karma over that due to graceful handling.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#22

Post by tylerl »

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

That's an interesting TOS.

I've never before seen "fair use" called out as an explicit allowance in terms of copyright restrictions by the part of the copyright holder. It's not entirely clear to me what that would even imply.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#23

Post by dTal »

retroplasma wrote: post #11
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.

That's kind of funny that Google wrote both the obfuscated code and the deobfuscator.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#26

Post by widforss »

tylerl wrote: post #22
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

That's an interesting TOS. I've never before seen "fair use" called out as an explicit allowance in terms of copyright restrictions by the part of the copyright holder. It's not entirely clear to me what that would even imply.

It may have implications in countries where fair use is not a thing.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#27

Post by userbinator »

tylerl wrote: post #22
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

That's an interesting TOS. I've never before seen "fair use" called out as an explicit allowance in terms of copyright restrictions by the part of the copyright holder. It's not entirely clear to me what that would even imply.

I suspect they're trying to give more reassurance to "personal, non-commercial use is allowed as long as you don't hit our servers too hard" --- which seems to be their stance on a lot of their other services too.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#28

Post by anc84 »

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

Could you point to a description of the protocols and formats for the 3D data in that documentation please?

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#29

Post by mtmail »

paganel wrote: post #17
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 ins…

The book 'Never Lost Again' (2018) tells the keyhole/Google Maps story line. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35820393-never-lost-agai... Actually I left with the impression nobody involved had a good plan what Google Maps should be after launch. API was an afterthought.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#30

Post by ashleyn »

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…

Definitely had the same observation that Google prefers subterfuge through obscurity/difficulty as opposed to legal methods. Their open source projects are notoriously impossible to build.
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