8 ms·

Trap Streets

66 points by jonathansizz 11y ago

pella 11y ago
relevant links: * http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street * http://gizmodo.com/the-fake-places-that-only-exist-to-catch-copycat-cartog-1695414770 http://gizmodo.com/the-fake-places-that-only-exist-to-catch-...
joshuaheard 11y ago
Governments should not own copyrights. A copyright is the ownership to a published work. However, taxpayers paid for the creation of the work, so they are the actual owners. Since everyone owns the work, there is no enforceable right.
- danharaj 11y ago
  Tax money is not taxpayer money. As soon as one pays their taxes, it is no longer their money. If taxpayers want tax money used in a certain way, they should convince voters to tell the government to use it in that way. That's how taxes work. Talking about 'taxpayer money' is language trying to establish an entitlement to tax money that tax payers do not have. It is anti-democratic language because in trying to establish such a spurious entitlement, it throws the power of the electorate to dictate government under the bus. I'm curious where all the assertions in your argument came from, because they do not come from law, and they do not come from classical Liberalism which is the foundation of western democracies. I've only ever seen it trotted out in an attempt to establish a relation of accountability between governments and property owners instead of the foundational relation of accountability between governments and voters. Doesn't sound so nice, really.
- tfgg 11y ago
  While I agree with the conclusion that mapping data should be free, since it's useful infrastructure and will probably help the entire economy more than it costs to make it free, I don't see how your argument necessarily follows. Governments can own things in a way that doesn't mean that everyone has property rights over it -- just a democratic right to influence how it is used. The government owns the pavement, that doesn't mean I can dig it up and take it away (copyright is different from this, but just to illustrate "government propety" != "everyone's property") In the case of mapping data, a government can choose the invest money in a product, which it then sells to a subset of the population. Charging means that taxpayers pay less. It also means there are direct customers that can drive the development of the product along the economically highest impact lines.
  - msandford 11y ago
    You have to have some context in order for the argument against government owning copyrights to make sense. 1. Copyright was created in order to encourage the creation of things that might not otherwise be created were copyright not to exist; books, magazines, etc that without copyright nobody would have incentive to produce as anyone could just COPY it without investing the time to create it first 2. Copyright is thus a legal construct for ensuring that the people who did some creative or laborious act had SOME way of getting paid, namely rationing it economically 3. The government has already paid for the work to be done through taxes and this power is basically absolute; if you disagree try and not pay taxes and see how long you stay out of prison 4. Charging people for things the government does may or may not be more economically efficient, it really depends on the cost associated with the infrastructure to accept payments and ration out the goods versus the cost of simply publishing for free, in recent times it's gotten cheaper to publish and cheaper to accept money 5. The idea that the government has any right to ration information as opposed to physical goods is a tough sell because once the information is created and the marginal cost of replicating it is zero or very close to, what is the charging mechanism for? I totally get why it might be better to ration roads or schools or whatever; they're tangible things and there's not an infinite amount of them. But everyone in the US can have a copy of the map for effectively free once it's been created so there's not a lot of good argument (at least in my opinion) why it shouldn't be free.
    - tfgg 11y ago
      I understand the history of copyright, but in general I don't understand why copyright can't be an incentive for governments to create and maintain information products such as maps, just as much as it is for companies/individuals. Without copyright and the ability to charge for use, the government might not want to spend the larger amount of money to create or maintain the dataset.
    - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
      >Copyright was created in order to encourage the creation of things that might not otherwise be created were copyright not to exist; // I'm really not so sure about this: initially, like in the Statute of Anne it was to protect publishers so they could profit from the work. This has a side-effect of encouraging creation in that content creators know they have the chance to make money rather than just having their work duplicated freely. But in current renditions of copyright law the public domain is (or was) an important element - works that would otherwise have been held privately can be duplicated when the work is older, enriching the public domain just as patents enrich[ed] the public domain with information about inventions. I think your assertion goes a step too far. WRT the US Constitution'd "copyright" clause [which I'm imagining you had in mind] isn't a million miles away but "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" could as easily be about making knowledge public as it is about rewarding authors of "Writings".
- notahacker 11y ago
  As a taxpayer, I'd much rather the government made a profit from its commercially-motivated research or IP ventures rather than simply spending its tax revenues underwriting the profits of third parties that copy its work.
cfontes 11y ago
Another interesting story about the same topic http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an-imaginary-town-becomes-real-then-not-true-story http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an...
buro9 11y ago
The relevant Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right The question of how to enforce "Database Rights" boils down to proving that the data is both yours (through the use of fake data like trap streets), and that the act of compiling the data is non-trivial.
dmbaggett 11y ago
Fun fact: at ITA Software we put "trap flights" into the data so we could tell when people were using our data without our knowledge. These were flights between totally obscure city pairs, that departed a single day of the year at 3am. (No scheduled flights depart between 0300 and 0359 local time anywhere in the world.)
- qb 11y ago
  > No scheduled flights depart between 0300 and 0359 local time anywhere in the world. Yes, they do. Take DXB for example.
  - dmbaggett 11y ago
    Really? The 10+ years I was in the industry there weren't any such flights. I can believe it's changed, though -- that's interesting. Can you give an example flight?
    - qb 11y ago
      Daily 03:15 Dubai (DXB) 3 06:55 Seattle-Tacoma (SEA) EK 227 Non-stop Boeing 777-200LR (77L) 14:40 Effective 2015-07-07 through 2015-10-31
- wtbob 11y ago
  You might wish to delete this comment, as it could be used by a competitor to easily filter out such flights…
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Given the size of flight schedules datasets and the likelihood that not all the fake flights are that obvious, it's probably easier to buy the data from one of the proprietary schedule data vendors than clean up unauthorised scraped data...
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    It's probably a trap comment. I'd wager the actual trap data is not as described there.
TuringTest 11y ago
I strongly suspect that the place where I live was used as a trap street by Google Maps for years. It is a newly constructed apartment building in the outskirts of a small town. A small alley at the corner of the street where I live, which doesn't have any apartment numbers, was shown heavily distorted in the map (actually stepping over my building). Beyond a desire of accuracy, I complained to the Google Maps because the distortion was extending to the part of my street where my apartment's doorstep is located, and delivery men were having problems to find my address. After several months sending bug reports, they finally fixed the corner layout. I think this is an actual example of trap street because the accumulation of symptoms (supposedly no one living at that particular point, low traffic street, remote area, recent construction). If I'm right, this example shows that placing such traps can have an impact on the people living there.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  In the US they sourced at least some of their data from the Census TIGER data (In my town it still shows a big jag that is particular to recent TIGER data...). The older editions of the TIGER data tended not to obsess over street level spatial accuracy, I think it was mostly used as a catalog of where a given address would be, so a few dozen meters was fine.
- tghw 11y ago
  You can edit data in Google Maps directly. It still has to be approved, but it often goes faster than trying to do it with bug reports. https://www.google.com/mapmaker https://www.google.com/mapmaker
  - Splines 11y ago
    I've done this - works pretty well and is easy. I added my address since it was new construction and friends were getting routed about a mile away to a different street. Satisfying to say "remember how google maps couldn't find my address? I fixed it". A bit of the IKEA effect going on there.
- minikites 11y ago
pierrec 11y ago
HN's obsession for trap locations is starting to become uncanny. I'm not going to complain about it, though - no matter how obscure and niche it is, I gotta agree that it remains an interesting topic. How far can we push the obsession? Surprise me!
- ibmthrowaway271 11y ago
  It's a common topic posted by people looking for a big boost of karma. 1. Find the most popular topics (by points) in HN 2. Manually filter out 'event' topics (e.g. product releases, time specific news items, etc) that won't work when reposted 3. Wait until a topic hasn't been raised for a while and post a unique URL (either a related URL that hasn't been posted as a topic but maybe appeared in the discussion, or an existing URL that is made unique) 4. Hope for big boost of karma Which is why we often see many of the same old subjects being brought up again and again. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm sure that some are being posted by people trying to get their karma scores up. Reminds me, where's that list of pg's essays...
  - gknoy 11y ago
    http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html ;)
- uptown 11y ago
  Surely there's a bit more life left in the topic. Perhaps a self-driving car that's led astray by referencing bad trap-street maps?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It's a trap topic. Anyone submitting it gets flagged as karma-seeker. Anyone whining about it in comments also gets flagged in the system. What the moderators do with that data is classified.
- DanBC 11y ago
  ...and it's not just trap locations for maps, but trap tracings on circuit diagrams or trap gates in ICs.
tfgg 11y ago
In the past I've used a trap unicode character in a name in a public wiki-style CC-BY licensed database of politicians to confirm that a site was (not maliciously) failing to credit us. This resulted in the person who was using our data reverting the unicode character edit in our database, probably because it was breaking their import scripts.
than 11y ago
My new favorite trap is the MOUNTWEAZEL, a lexicographical trap street embedded in dictionaries to catch infringers. Good episode of the The Allusionist podcast: http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/mountweazel http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/mountweazel

66 points by jonathansizz 11y ago

pella 11y ago

relevant links: * http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street * http://gizmodo.com/the-fake-places-that-only-exist-to-catch-copycat-cartog-1695414770 http://gizmodo.com/the-fake-places-that-only-exist-to-catch-...

joshuaheard 11y ago

Governments should not own copyrights. A copyright is the ownership to a published work. However, taxpayers paid for the creation of the work, so they are the actual owners. Since everyone owns the work, there is no enforceable right.

danharaj 11y ago
Tax money is not taxpayer money. As soon as one pays their taxes, it is no longer their money. If taxpayers want tax money used in a certain way, they should convince voters to tell the government to use it in that way. That's how taxes work. Talking about 'taxpayer money' is language trying to establish an entitlement to tax money that tax payers do not have. It is anti-democratic language because in trying to establish such a spurious entitlement, it throws the power of the electorate to dictate government under the bus. I'm curious where all the assertions in your argument came from, because they do not come from law, and they do not come from classical Liberalism which is the foundation of western democracies. I've only ever seen it trotted out in an attempt to establish a relation of accountability between governments and property owners instead of the foundational relation of accountability between governments and voters. Doesn't sound so nice, really.
tfgg 11y ago
While I agree with the conclusion that mapping data should be free, since it's useful infrastructure and will probably help the entire economy more than it costs to make it free, I don't see how your argument necessarily follows. Governments can own things in a way that doesn't mean that everyone has property rights over it -- just a democratic right to influence how it is used. The government owns the pavement, that doesn't mean I can dig it up and take it away (copyright is different from this, but just to illustrate "government propety" != "everyone's property") In the case of mapping data, a government can choose the invest money in a product, which it then sells to a subset of the population. Charging means that taxpayers pay less. It also means there are direct customers that can drive the development of the product along the economically highest impact lines.
- msandford 11y ago
  You have to have some context in order for the argument against government owning copyrights to make sense. 1. Copyright was created in order to encourage the creation of things that might not otherwise be created were copyright not to exist; books, magazines, etc that without copyright nobody would have incentive to produce as anyone could just COPY it without investing the time to create it first 2. Copyright is thus a legal construct for ensuring that the people who did some creative or laborious act had SOME way of getting paid, namely rationing it economically 3. The government has already paid for the work to be done through taxes and this power is basically absolute; if you disagree try and not pay taxes and see how long you stay out of prison 4. Charging people for things the government does may or may not be more economically efficient, it really depends on the cost associated with the infrastructure to accept payments and ration out the goods versus the cost of simply publishing for free, in recent times it's gotten cheaper to publish and cheaper to accept money 5. The idea that the government has any right to ration information as opposed to physical goods is a tough sell because once the information is created and the marginal cost of replicating it is zero or very close to, what is the charging mechanism for? I totally get why it might be better to ration roads or schools or whatever; they're tangible things and there's not an infinite amount of them. But everyone in the US can have a copy of the map for effectively free once it's been created so there's not a lot of good argument (at least in my opinion) why it shouldn't be free.
  - tfgg 11y ago
    I understand the history of copyright, but in general I don't understand why copyright can't be an incentive for governments to create and maintain information products such as maps, just as much as it is for companies/individuals. Without copyright and the ability to charge for use, the government might not want to spend the larger amount of money to create or maintain the dataset.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    >Copyright was created in order to encourage the creation of things that might not otherwise be created were copyright not to exist; // I'm really not so sure about this: initially, like in the Statute of Anne it was to protect publishers so they could profit from the work. This has a side-effect of encouraging creation in that content creators know they have the chance to make money rather than just having their work duplicated freely. But in current renditions of copyright law the public domain is (or was) an important element - works that would otherwise have been held privately can be duplicated when the work is older, enriching the public domain just as patents enrich[ed] the public domain with information about inventions. I think your assertion goes a step too far. WRT the US Constitution'd "copyright" clause [which I'm imagining you had in mind] isn't a million miles away but "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" could as easily be about making knowledge public as it is about rewarding authors of "Writings".
notahacker 11y ago
As a taxpayer, I'd much rather the government made a profit from its commercially-motivated research or IP ventures rather than simply spending its tax revenues underwriting the profits of third parties that copy its work.

cfontes 11y ago

Another interesting story about the same topic http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an-imaginary-town-becomes-real-then-not-true-story http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an...

buro9 11y ago

The relevant Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right The question of how to enforce "Database Rights" boils down to proving that the data is both yours (through the use of fake data like trap streets), and that the act of compiling the data is non-trivial.

dmbaggett 11y ago

Fun fact: at ITA Software we put "trap flights" into the data so we could tell when people were using our data without our knowledge. These were flights between totally obscure city pairs, that departed a single day of the year at 3am. (No scheduled flights depart between 0300 and 0359 local time anywhere in the world.)

qb 11y ago
> No scheduled flights depart between 0300 and 0359 local time anywhere in the world. Yes, they do. Take DXB for example.
- dmbaggett 11y ago
  Really? The 10+ years I was in the industry there weren't any such flights. I can believe it's changed, though -- that's interesting. Can you give an example flight?
  - qb 11y ago
    Daily 03:15 Dubai (DXB) 3 06:55 Seattle-Tacoma (SEA) EK 227 Non-stop Boeing 777-200LR (77L) 14:40 Effective 2015-07-07 through 2015-10-31
wtbob 11y ago
You might wish to delete this comment, as it could be used by a competitor to easily filter out such flights…
- notahacker 11y ago
  Given the size of flight schedules datasets and the likelihood that not all the fake flights are that obvious, it's probably easier to buy the data from one of the proprietary schedule data vendors than clean up unauthorised scraped data...
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  It's probably a trap comment. I'd wager the actual trap data is not as described there.

TuringTest 11y ago

I strongly suspect that the place where I live was used as a trap street by Google Maps for years. It is a newly constructed apartment building in the outskirts of a small town. A small alley at the corner of the street where I live, which doesn't have any apartment numbers, was shown heavily distorted in the map (actually stepping over my building). Beyond a desire of accuracy, I complained to the Google Maps because the distortion was extending to the part of my street where my apartment's doorstep is located, and delivery men were having problems to find my address. After several months sending bug reports, they finally fixed the corner layout. I think this is an actual example of trap street because the accumulation of symptoms (supposedly no one living at that particular point, low traffic street, remote area, recent construction). If I'm right, this example shows that placing such traps can have an impact on the people living there.

maxerickson 11y ago
In the US they sourced at least some of their data from the Census TIGER data (In my town it still shows a big jag that is particular to recent TIGER data...). The older editions of the TIGER data tended not to obsess over street level spatial accuracy, I think it was mostly used as a catalog of where a given address would be, so a few dozen meters was fine.
tghw 11y ago
You can edit data in Google Maps directly. It still has to be approved, but it often goes faster than trying to do it with bug reports. https://www.google.com/mapmaker https://www.google.com/mapmaker
- Splines 11y ago
  I've done this - works pretty well and is easy. I added my address since it was new construction and friends were getting routed about a mile away to a different street. Satisfying to say "remember how google maps couldn't find my address? I fixed it". A bit of the IKEA effect going on there.
minikites 11y ago

pierrec 11y ago

HN's obsession for trap locations is starting to become uncanny. I'm not going to complain about it, though - no matter how obscure and niche it is, I gotta agree that it remains an interesting topic. How far can we push the obsession? Surprise me!

ibmthrowaway271 11y ago
It's a common topic posted by people looking for a big boost of karma. 1. Find the most popular topics (by points) in HN 2. Manually filter out 'event' topics (e.g. product releases, time specific news items, etc) that won't work when reposted 3. Wait until a topic hasn't been raised for a while and post a unique URL (either a related URL that hasn't been posted as a topic but maybe appeared in the discussion, or an existing URL that is made unique) 4. Hope for big boost of karma Which is why we often see many of the same old subjects being brought up again and again. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm sure that some are being posted by people trying to get their karma scores up. Reminds me, where's that list of pg's essays...
- gknoy 11y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html ;)
uptown 11y ago
Surely there's a bit more life left in the topic. Perhaps a self-driving car that's led astray by referencing bad trap-street maps?
TeMPOraL 11y ago
It's a trap topic. Anyone submitting it gets flagged as karma-seeker. Anyone whining about it in comments also gets flagged in the system. What the moderators do with that data is classified.
DanBC 11y ago
...and it's not just trap locations for maps, but trap tracings on circuit diagrams or trap gates in ICs.

tfgg 11y ago

In the past I've used a trap unicode character in a name in a public wiki-style CC-BY licensed database of politicians to confirm that a site was (not maliciously) failing to credit us. This resulted in the person who was using our data reverting the unicode character edit in our database, probably because it was breaking their import scripts.

than 11y ago

My new favorite trap is the MOUNTWEAZEL, a lexicographical trap street embedded in dictionaries to catch infringers. Good episode of the The Allusionist podcast: http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/mountweazel http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/mountweazel