651–660 of 755 posts
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I compared the same area in apple vs google maps, the islands don't even show up in google unless you zoom way in. You sure about this?
People outside of China are served a different set of maps. Each country is served maps that conform to their territorial claims. E.g. If you view the map of India while in India, it'll appear different than if you viewed it in China.
Daring Fireball [1] has another passage from the article which is illuminating with regards to any promises Apple makes about how it will resist governmental pressure to compromise its products, vis-à-vis Apple's CSAM scanning tool. "Sometime in 2014 or early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping told members of the Apple Maps team to make the Diaoyu Islands, the objects of a long-running territorial di…
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If I remember correctly, this used to happen on historical maps too, the UK and Europe were often made larger than they actually are. It feels silly but there are manipulative reasons to do this.
I say you remember incorrectly. Some map projections (see https://explainxkcd.com/977 > for an overview) make objects appear proportionally larger when we move from the equator to the poles, Greenland and Antarctica are greatly exaggerated. But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted – and not because the King wanted a huge Mappy McMapface.
Expanding on this; Mercator is useful for navigation because it's conformal, i.e. it preserves angles. When you're plotting the course of a ship, this is very convenient.
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I think these things have a corrupting influence on the principles of the company over time: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html It's better to figure out an exit (imo) than continue to capitulate on these kinds of things, particularly in a country that is hostile to foreign companies and IP (and particularly if one of your company values is the privacy of your users). --- >>Peter Thiel: Well I…
Not disagreeing with what Thiel is saying here, but it's pretty hypocritical for him to be criticizing here considering he's the co-founder of Palantir, a company that feeds some tasty tasty morsels to the surveillance state and military-industrial complex.
He's just pro-Western civilization and pro-US.
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To add, India has a similar law for maps. Any company serving maps in India has to show, for example, all of Kashmir - including the ones we aren't in control of - as belonging to India. I've made a small hobby out of noting websites which should be illegal in India because of that. A recent memorable incident (not a website, and not found by me) was when John Oliver's Last Week Tonight did a show on Asian-Americans…
> I've made a small hobby out of noting websites which should be illegal in India because of that. Do you mean you are reporting these sites?
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Google Maps is blocked in China, I think.
So, as much as people like to throw shade at Google, we can say that they haven't caved on this. That's a plus for them.
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That is rather chilling, is it not? That a nation would prevent its citizens from looking around and measuring what they see? I can't help but wonder how the chickens will come home to roost.
They're preventing citizens from publishing that info, not looking around and measuring from what I found. Imagine a country that prevents its citizens from recording a song they hear and sharing it with their friends. Oh, wait, US more or less does that and forces other countries to implement policies that prevent it or they will ban trade with those countries.
Not to mention that the US government gets any data it wants from banks, telcos, social media, google, etc., which is called metadata surveillance here in the US but it is used to formulate a variety of social "scores" such as one's likelihood to commit "terrorism", etc.
The US GPS system had the signals obfuscated for years so that precise geo coordinates were only available for non-civilian uses. Why bother altering the maps if you can alter the GPS signals. This was rolled back only because hacks were found to work around it.
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Anyone who has worked in mapping/GIS at a company that sells in China has seen this in action. The "display these islands larger" requests, the obfuscated coordinate system for geo-aligning maps, and other map content regulatory issues[1] all need to be dealt with if you want your map product available in the country. Not excusing it, but every company with maps there is required to do this, not just Apple. 1: https:…
This is a mind boggling realization. Is OSM data also compromised in the same way?
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Some US voting districts are very odd shapes, specifically to include/exclude factors which increase the chances of a particular political party winning.
Not to completely defend gerrymandering but districts are also drawn "oddly" to help ensure minority representation within a system with absurd constraints. If there were more representatives districts would be more granular and localized but because representatives are capped at 435 you have this bizarre situation of needing to give opportunities for equal representation across populations that are spread across a c…
If one candidate in a district gets 100,000 votes and another 85,000 votes, both would go to congress and each would get that many vote-points. Rather than number of representative votes, voting outcomes would be determined by who has more vote-points. That way if you have three similarly sized districts, District X and District Y where 40% want party A and 60% want party B, and then district Z where you have 90% want party A and only 10% want party B, you'd still end up with .4/3+.4/3+.9/3 (56%) votes for party A rather than 67% for party B, regardless of how you redistrict. Plus you'd have asymmetric interests where opposing parties would represent the same districts so they would be incentivized to work together, and also some representation for minority regional parties who may align with one party on some issues and another on others.
To limit budgets, I guess there would have to be a maximum number of candidates per district, maybe filtering out anyone who does not have at least 10% of the vote (or some other number determined by some reasonable formula), an option for candidates who don't meet the threshold to reallocate their vote-points to someone who did (or a ranked choice voting system that keeps going until everyone remaining has the minimum vote threshold), and maybe no matter what you'd at least send two candidates unless literally only one candidate had votes.
This would also have a side effect of incentivizing more people to vote and allow people to vote with a bit less strategy and more earnestness.