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Glitch Cities: Buildings, Mysteriously Deleted from Chinese Street View
- bArray 10y agoVery strange indeed. The Chinese government rarely seem to act as a well oiled machine. This is probably some initiative somebody took that will come to bite them.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoIt isn't. A lot of commands from above but total local implementation, or even local governments doing their own thing since the emperor is so far away.
- fiatpandas 10y agoIt appears that the deletions are related to national security (infrastructural targets). Cooling towers, gas storage, bridges, etc. Although not sure what to make of that heavily guarded fire station. Perhaps it's a front for something.
- auganov 10y agoYou mean guarded cause of that little fence and a guard post? Like literally almost every compound in China has these, so definitely wouldn't call it "guarded" by international standards.
- nnq 10y agoCan't help it: the "quality" of this work screeeeams "made in China" :) ...and the work itself seems pretty relevant to national security: those are the kinds of buildings that have "taking photos forbidden" signs near them everywhere else in the world for obvious reasons. Kinda feel sorry for the poor slob who's getting fired for this ...just fired in the best case scenario.
- cantagi 10y agoSkeptical. The Chinese government can afford to hire people who have better photoshop skills than this to censor these buildings. Baidu should also be able to do a better job of censorship than this. To me this looks like some kind of algorithmic failure on the part of Baidu, perhaps the output of some convnet designed to remove watermarks and close foreground objects.
- maxander 10y agoThere are lots of streetview (or Total View or whatever) images, though. Wouldn't be surprised if done official had said streetview had to be censored and then vastly underestimated how large an undertaking that was, so there's then only a handful of underpaid guys tasked with photoshopping out the whole nation's sensitive infrastructure.
- anotheryou 10y agoMaybe Baidu just thought they can do better than that ugly blurring of Google.
- notacoward 10y agoIt's so clumsy, it makes me wonder whether it's being done by a poorly written program instead of actual people. For example, it's hard to imagine even a very stupid person cloning a nearby metal roof and not a patch of sky, as is evident in one of the pictures. Another possibility is that someone's deliberately drawing attention to these structures, using a bit of reverse psychology. If that was their goal, then the fact that we're talking about it means it worked. ;)
- anotheryou 10y agoTo me it looks like hand drawn masks + a batch script for something like photoshops auto-fill "healing brush tool". (photoshops tool actually handles edges differently though, so it's not that)
- xyzzy123 10y agoWow. The implementation is so bad, it's actually highlighting sensitive infrastructure.