Google Earth Reverse Engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#31

Post by lima » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 1:33 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #23

retroplasma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The obfuscation isn't necessarily a deliberate attempt at hindering reverse engineering, but a result of their optimizing JS compiler and Protobuf-to-JSON-bridge.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#32

Post by johannes1234321 » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

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?

Since they are a different sort of company, with another legal attack surface.

Going after GitHub means that GitHub has to shut down and the opponent sticks with their legal costs.

When attacking Microsoft they have enough cash to pay you out (in case they lose or they accept a payment to make you shut up) and the case might disrupt Microsoft enough to give you an advantage in a different field.

Not saying that Google would sue Microsoft. Would be very bad for their image. But a risk evaluation is different.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#33

Post by anc84 » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

pieterhg wrote: post #24

Love this, but I'm getting an error: "DeprecationWarning: Buffer() is deprecated due to security and usability issues" Opened an issue: https://github.com/retroplasma/earth-reverse-engineering/iss...

That's not an error, just a warning. You can proceed using it just fine.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#34

Post by JZL003 » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

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.

What do you mean by deobfuscator? It's de-minifier that just makes it pretty-printed (with the "{}" icon?)

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#35

Post by cronix » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

feikname wrote: post #18

kuhhk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you suspect that?

Not OP, but I'd say because IIRC it's now a different CEO.

MS has traditionally been a software company, and has a LOT of court experience over the last 40 years regarding copyright and lawsuits when it comes to code and IP. I just think they might have a different viewpoint than GH has traditionally had, since GH's business is completely different than traditional MS businesses. The post I was responding to was talking about GH in the past and what they might do based on that. I'm just saying there's a recently new owner who might look at it differently, so past behavior might not be the best indicator for this since it's being run by a different corporation now.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#36

Post by TacticalTable » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 3:11 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #16

Once you have an OBJ file, you can 3D print it: https://all3dp.com/1/obj-file-format-3d-printing-cad/ If you want a 3D model of your office building or something.

Do you have a better guide to this? The model seems to be infinitely thin, which makes it unprintable in all the slicers I've tried.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#37

Post by sdwisely » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 4:08 PM UTC

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 feel like it's to explicitly allow b-roll for media.

Re: Google Earth Reverse Engineering

#38

Post by ec109685 » Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 6:41 AM UTC

dpq wrote: post #21

ec109685 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Touché