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For anyone unwilling to open maps and check: the South Korean tiles are bitmaps (you see this because the city labels rotate along with the map in SK but not in
by ReverseCold 9y ago
For anyone unwilling to open maps and check: the South Korean tiles are bitmaps (you see this because the city labels rotate along with the map in SK but not in NK).
That's interesting though,why does South Korea use bitmaps?
- yongjik 9y agoSouth Korea has this brain-dead law that prohibits any map data on South Korea from being exported: the data must physically remain in a server located in South Korea. Obviously, this is a huge problem for Google, who wants to keep the world's map data in multiple data centers across the world. So... imagine what kind of horrible kludges some unfortunate developers had to write just to comply with that law.
- jacquesm 9y agoEvery time someone from outside of South Korea looks at it that map data is exported. But don't tell them.
- yongjik 9y agoI think the law distinguishes between an end-user accessing map data and transferring the whole data overseas. But as you pointed out, that's not really a meaningful distinction. Anybody who's interested in a particular place in Korea (be it CIA or North Korea) can simply visit map.naver.com or buy commercially available satellite photos.