10 ms·

What’s going on with WhatFreeWords?

250 points by polemic 7y ago

Reason077 7y ago
If What3Words wants to be ubiquitous, and relied on for things like navigation and emergency services, then it ought to be an open standard, with a published algorithm and open-source implementation. If they’re going to be dicks about keeping it proprietary then maybe it’s time for someone to come up with an open alternative.
- lol768 7y ago
  >If they’re going to be dicks about keeping it proprietary then maybe it’s time for someone to come up with an open alternative. There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code from Google (AKA Plus Codes). They have a useful wiki article which compares existing systems: https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...
  - slavik81 7y ago
    Notably missing from the evaluation is MGRS, the coordinate system used by NATO for more or less the same purpose. I like it because if you have the coordinates of a landmark, you can easily estimate the coordinates of other nearby locations entirely in your head, and the system encodes precision so you can indicate uncertainty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System
    - ssambros 7y ago
      With it's pros being the ability to know how close the points are just having the 2 coordinates and arbitrary precision. Who knows how far away epic.region.music and epic.global.music are from just the names? While 18SUJ2163104440 and 12SVC0452723150 are 6 grid zones apart east to west.
      - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
        That's a handy property for the 3 people on Earth who have the algorithm behind it memorized, but the rest of the world would prefer to be able to easily read, write and share the codes.
        labster 7y ago
        Most people can tell proximity in lat/lon coordinates based on the algorithm they learned in first grade: the number line. Perhaps they could use a similarly ubiquitous system, like the alphabet. There’s even a song to help you memorize it!
        AWildC182 7y ago
        The algorithm is absolutely trivial -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System It's actually quite pleasant to use and allows you to just truncate to the level of precision you want. S/He just posted the 1m resolution string when 18-SU-J-216-044 would get you to 100m. All this said, I think the real issue is that we refuse to PICK a standard and so every device with a GPS and ever map has one or two of -MGRS -UTM (almost identical to MGRS) -LL DD MM' SS.ss" -LL DD.dddd... -LL DD MM.mmmm...' etc. If you make a device that can output or accept a location string, make sure it can handle all LL cases and UTM/MGRS.
        dmix 7y ago
        I think we have different definitions of trivial. Or you put a lot of trust in the average persons intelligence or more importantly laziness.
    - PLenz 7y ago
      Mgrs is also a perfect m-ary tree, it really has so many useful properties for doing spatial machine learning.
    - slavik81 7y ago
      To expand a bit, I wish it was included in the comparison not only because it has some big advantages, but also because it has some drawbacks worth examining. The top-level zones are its weakness. The further apart two coordinates are from each other, the more difficult it is to reason about their relationship. MGRS works fantastic for reasoning about coordinates on the same grid square, but gets harder as you move up to comparing between grid squares and harder still as you compare between zones. A grid square is 100km x 100km, so it's pretty big, and coordinates in the square are easy to manipulate. If you know your office is at 4QFJ 21631 04440 and the Starbucks is about 500 meters down the road to the north, then you know Starbucks' coordinates are roughly 4QFJ 21631 04940. To indicate your uncertainty, you'd say 4QFJ 216 049, or possibly just 216 049 if the grid square was already known from context. The system is typically extended to allow that reasoning to work even at the edges of a grid square, by allowing eastings and northings that extend past the grid square edge. This means there's more than one possible way to describe a location, though only one canonical way. Unless you're already familiar with the area, you may need a map to compare coordinates on different squares. Some of the grid zones are also a little oddly shaped. It's mostly not a big deal because they're huge, and it really only affects which coordinate representation is the canonical one at the boundaries, but it would be nice if the top-level 6° by 8° grid zones were more regular.
  - ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
    I mean there are also normal co-ordinates, and also the grid reference system in the UK. What3words will be a nightmare over a weak voice radio signal, if amateur radio experiences are anything to go by
    - bfieidhbrjr 7y ago
      It’s literally designed to be used over voice, that’s the entire point.
      - ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
        Over a weak radio signal, it will be a nightmare. Sticking to numerics will be far easier.
        snodnipper 7y ago
        I have encountered many positive statements about What3Words for emergency response. Just one news article: https://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/17935101.what3words-app-used-south-western-ambulance-find-patients/ https://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/17935101.what3words-app-us... Can you comment more about "weak radio signal"? Perhaps one can deduce the a number by hearing a small sample of a sound...whereas W3W has a wider vocabulary? My guess is that if necessary, one could repeat each word several times (e.g. over a period of 10 seconds).
        ryanlol 7y ago
        There exists vast experience in aviation to learn from. When you’re having radio readability issues you really want a small and clear vocabulary.
        snodnipper 7y ago
        Thanks - I can see that. I am guessing that the smaller vocabulary is particularly useful in analogue systems. Perhaps W3W is viewed positively for (digital) cellular connections but might be inappropriate for other radio technology.
  - thelittlenag 7y ago
    (disclosure: i work for qalocate.com) I think that OLC and W3W have many flaws. If you want to read a critique OLC I suggest you read this: https://www.qalocate.com/whats-wrong-with-open-location-code/ https://www.qalocate.com/whats-wrong-with-open-location-code... At QA Locate we've been working on a similar solution that we call GeohashPhrase. Rather than encoding a location as 3 random words, or the alphanumeric code of OLC, we instead just encode a geohash as a sentence. Encoding/decoding is relatively trivial, and can be done offline, but I've yet to write up docs I'm comfortable with other people reading. There are some light docs you can reference here: https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ We have a video on the tech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM I'm working on some better preliminary docs, but working code takes priority ;-) Btw, the GeohashPhrase will be open source and free to use.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Damn, I was all riled up to read a good critique of OLC but this fell way short of the mark, in my opinion. Things like: > Implicit, however, is that the only way to resolve that shortened code is to make a call to the Google Maps API. Why? If OSM supports plus codes, that'll work equally well, no? > By allowing reference locations in plus codes these codes are tied to specific political entities Okay, but, as I understand it, you just need to point to something in the general vicinity, close enough that it can disambiguate Athens, Greece from Washington DC. Unless the city moves half a country away, the code will still work. > If so, what I really need to know is the correct parking, or rideshare drop off, and the closest entrance, not directions to center court, which is apparently where “Q5RQ+6V Dallas, Texas” actually is! Are you really complaining that the coordinate you set wasn't the coordinate you wanted to set? Or that Google Maps (not OLC) isn't smart enough to route you to a stadium properly? The rest of the article is similarly seemingly looking to pick a fight with tenuous assertions, I'm afraid.
    - lioeters 7y ago
      I've liked the idea of Open Location Code for some time, so when I read the following, I thought "Surely that's not right?" > Implicit, however, is that the only way to resolve that shortened code is to make a call to the Google Maps API. I'd always thought OLC could encode/decode coordinates with a simple algorithm, with more or less precision based on the length of the code. Referring to their documentation, I found this [0]: > Supporting local codes.. If you have no map and cannot determine the device location, a local code is not sufficient and you should display a message back to the user asking them to provide a town or city name or the full global code. > ..extract the local code and send the remaining text to your geocoding service (Nominatim, Google, etc). What! I didn't know this about shortened codes - that need for an external service to decode plus codes diminishes my enthusiasm for the standard considerably. Thank you for the write up, will be keeping my ears open for GeohashPhrase. --- [0] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Supporting-plus-codes-in-your-app https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Supporting...
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  > it ought to be an open standard, with a published algorithm and open-source implementation. That's entirely against their business model. See also the open street map wiki page on it: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words Or any of the previous HN discussions (just some samples): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15579017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15579017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712591
  - brokensegue 7y ago
    I don't understand their business model. How will they make money
    - tpetry 7y ago
      I guess they hope someone will buy them. Like Apple to do easy navigation for the apple maps app.
    - MauranKilom 7y ago
      They have been and will keep fighting tooth and nail to keep the algorithm and associated database proprietary, copyrighted, patented and under every kind of protection they can afford. In parallel, they invest heavily into PR, such as feeding story-starved journalists their marketing pitch. The point is to get adoption and network effect, locking users (e.g. Mongolian mail service) into a monopoly that they can eventually leverage. Since no one but them can (or rather is allowed) to do the conversion, they request payment per lookup/coordinate conversion. There is nothing novel or innovative about their algorithm, it's downright awful in some regards, and there is little benefit to actually derive from the system in the first place (compared to established open systems). They're just really good at PR (and takedown notices) - that's their real business plan.
    - kawfey 7y ago
      They license the product to car companies like Mercedes [0], and they provide training and licensing to emergency management agencies, which is gaining popularity in the UK, North Yorkshire, for example [1]. Their business model is more or less undercut by opensource and reverse engineered alternatives, hence the predatory DMCA takedowns. This is obviously a bad PR move. It's the 21st century; the product/IP itself provides little to no value to the average user. It's the services that does. Open source the product and make money licensing, installing, training, and integrating it into everyday life. [0]https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/what3words-voice-navigation-first-to-mercedes-benz/ https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/what3words-voice... [1] https://northyorkshire.police.uk/news/whats-what3words-and-why-is-it-useful-a-blog-from-our-inspector-mark-proctor/ https://northyorkshire.police.uk/news/whats-what3words-and-w...
- dev_dull 7y ago
  I've never heard of what3words before now and read up on their site. It's a fun idea but I wouldn't say its invention or even novel, just convenient. I'm not surprised they're relying on litigation to try and fend off competitors.
  - scrooched_moose 7y ago
    It's not even convenient. Where in relation to curve.empty.buzz is grape.trunk.gossip? Is it closer/farther than slurs.this.shark? The first is about 6 feet north. The second is 3600 miles east. It's an almost intentionally terrible system designed for people to be reliant on their services.
    - rhacker 7y ago
      It would be cool to base the closeness on word2vec somehow. Though, I'm not adept in either space to do that.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  Indeed, keeping it proprietary makes no sense at all. But there is a great free alternative already, I use it all the time: http://www.what3fucks.com http://www.what3fucks.com
  - stallmanite 7y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation for what3fucks. Entertaining a f.
paulgb 7y ago
I want to side with whatfreewords here, but as a matter of law* I think the takedown was legitimate. Even though they reimplemented the algorithm, they include the what3words word list which what3words can (rightfully, IMHO) argue is their protected intellectual property. *IANAL
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  Many legal frameworks have an interoperability clause which would allow using that list for the sole purpose of interop. What W3W seems to be doing is taking down the sites on trademark grounds (that is, "what three words" and "what free words" being too similar). They might have a case there, and whatfreewords might be better off distancing themselves a bit in naming. Call it "Simple Locator", state somewhere on the website (not the headline) that it's a scheme "compatible to what3words (which is a trademark by ...)" and they lose that angle of attack.
  - otakucode 7y ago
    When it comes to trademark, companies are compelled to act. Failing to defend your trademark will make you incapable of defending it in the future. The DMCA can NOT be used for trademark disputes, however. The DMCA exclusively deals with copyright. Normally, the "interoperability" defense is used to protect instances of circumventing copyright protection mechanisms, not for copying itself. For instance, that was the defense in the case where Lexmark brought a DMCA claim against a third party ink cartridge manufacturer, claiming that by making their ink work, they circumvented protection mechanisms Lexmark claimed existed to protect their copyrighted firmware code in their ink carts. The court didn't buy it, Lexmark lost, it was established that you can do that kind of circumvention. But this copying of the word list... it's different in a couple fundamental ways, and I don't know if there has been a case that has dealt with this sort of thing.
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      Given that they also sent a claim regarding a map feature on the .com site that wasn't provided by that site, I'm not sure if any of the claims they throw at ISPs (DMCA or not) are even legit. The main issue is that the "free" team can't counter-claim without losing anonymity, so as far as bogus DMCA claims go, they're quite powerless. That's why I went for the WIPO dispute, which is based on their trademark and IMHO has the most leg to stand on, instead of relying on the unwillingness of the counterparty (whatfreewords) to defend themselves.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
saagarjha 7y ago
Question: who are the people running this? Why are they so intent on staying anonymous? It seems to have bitten them multiple times…
- dewey 7y ago
  > Why are they so intent on staying anonymous? Because the company would sue them right away? That's why they have to hop from hosting provider to hosting provider because the company is taking the sites down.
kerkeslager 7y ago
So, I'm a bit confused. https://whatfreewords.org https://whatfreewords.org seems to be up and running just fine.
- yorwba 7y ago
  The text above the title says "anonymous · 16d", which I assume means it was posted 16 days ago.
- justsomeguyaa 7y ago
  Not for lack of trying http://ix.io/1YgI http://ix.io/1YgI
jonatron 7y ago
Why not just create an alternative that doesn't break copyright, trademark and patent law?
- EGreg 7y ago
  There is. It’s called geohash.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    There may be an alternative, but Geohash is not it. Geohashes look like "u4pruydqqvj", which is questionably useful for situations very different from situations where you'd want "pinks.haunted.graves".
    - EGreg 7y ago
      It would be better if we took geohash and transformed it into words organized from a dictionary. Because the closer things are the more they share a common prefix.
  - brokensegue 7y ago
    Or plus codes
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  Because W3W's main strength is PR. Their system itself is really not that useful (or innovative, or difficult to create), and there are several free and open alternatives. But you don't hear about them without hearing about W3W.
  - otterley 7y ago
    If the alternatives are so great, why aren’t they being adopted? Surely a truly superior alternative could gain traction despite W3W’s publicity; we see new systems supplant older ones all the time in other areas. If you identified a substitute that was clearly superior in every way to W3Ws, that would also be helpful. So far every one that's been identified here has faced usability or other objections.
IshKebab 7y ago
> To ensure that we did not violate the What3Words company's copyright, we did not include any of their code, and we only included the bare minimum data required for interoperability. Yeah copyright doesn't work like that. You don't get to violate it just because you need to for interoperability (unfortunately). An example of this is console emulators which aren't allowed to distribute boot ROMs. Whether What3Words has anything that is copyrightable is another matter.
- teraflop 7y ago
  > Yeah copyright doesn't work like that. You don't get to violate it just because you need to for interoperability (unfortunately). This is only sort of true; it's a messy and complex area of law. For instance, interoperability was one of the defenses Google raised in the Oracle lawsuit over Android's use of Java APIs. (It ended up not helping them much, on the grounds that Android isn't actually that interoperable with other Java implementations, which is different from interoperability not being a usable defense at all.) And the DMCA has specific exceptions allowing reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability.
  - gpm 7y ago
    And using your copyright on a list of words to try and get a monopoly on a system of specifying location might well constitute copyright missuse and invalidate the entire copyright. But raising any of these defenses involves extensive lawyers and court cases and the acceptance of the considerable risk that you will lose the suit.
grizzles 7y ago
The way to take What3 to the woodshed would be with an actual standard. Publish a new dictionary of per spoken language mappings to Google's plus.codes. Something like xaddress.org on top of plus.codes. Call it twowords. You get the best of both worlds, human friendly nav for Uber like apps, compact codes for shipping / logistics / universality.
- jimofl 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be kind of like "DNS for locations" where any string phrase could be associated with the OLC/Plus Code (many human descriptive names to one location identifier)? Better, what if you could then universally translate between that and the many other kinds of location encodings, both human descriptive and computer identifier? That's what we do at QA Locate with our LNS (Location Naming Service) and our ULT (Universal Location Translator). See our technical two pagers located here: https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ https://www.qalocate.com/resources/
kerkeslager 7y ago
People keep talking here about free (libre) alternatives like Open Location Codes or geohashes, but these aren't alternatives, because they aren't human readable in the same way. The closest thing I've found is the now-defunct 3Geonames[1] project which exists only in presentation archives as far as I can see, and that's only partly human readable. [1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_3geonames/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_3geonames...
- thelittlenag 7y ago
  (disclosure: i work for qalocate.com) At QA Locate we've been working on a solution to this that we call GeohashPhrase. It encodes a geohash as a sentence. There are some light docs you can reference here: https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ And we have a video on the tech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM I'm working on some better preliminary docs, but working code takes priority ;-) Btw, the GeohashPhrase will be open source and free to use.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    I always wondered, could this w3w geocoding method be done not completely random, but in such a way, that each subsequent word would narrow down the area? So one can easily understand that places like lake.cotton.juice and lake.cotton.horse are really near each other, and if their first word is there same they are at least on the same continent?
    - thelittlenag 7y ago
      I don't think you could easily do that with 3 words. They already have a dictionary 40000 deep and then end up repeating words, just to get to get enough combinations. With the GeohashPhrase we intentionally telescope exactly like you've described. This is because all we do is encode a geohash, and it already has this property.
      - 7y ago
kodablah 7y ago
> A good way to host the site would be to put it on a Tor onion service [...] If you know how to help set this up please get in touch. This is not very difficult. The Tor website explains it pretty clearly [0]. Alternatively since y'all are familiar with Go, there is a library [1] that makes listening on an onion address almost as easy as a regular address. 0 - https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-service.html.en https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-service.html.... 1 - https://github.com/cretz/bine https://github.com/cretz/bine
eruci 7y ago
Well, so far w3w strategy of bribing third world countries into "adopting" their system (Mongolia) and feeding stories to journalists about emergency services and others using their system - seems to have had the effect of bringing w3w into the spotlight, including many stories on HN. Now the legal game of whack-a-mole against their leaked wordlist and code is producing a similar effect. Good for them for making it this far with a very flawed encoding scheme.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Up until reading this article I was a big fan of w3w and was even thinking about including their geocoding into our XMPP clients. Now I think best course is for whatfreewords to change coding algorithm (there are ways to improve, I think), and host a competing open source geocoding service.
ponytech 7y ago
I took one of the library provided on whatfreewords and included into my (work in progress) website as a conversion tool: Convert coordinates location to 3 words : https://freews.org/location-to-w3w https://freews.org/location-to-w3w Convert 3 words to coordinates location : https://freews.org/w3w-to-location https://freews.org/w3w-to-location I have no idea if it is useful or if it does break some copyright laws but I thought it could be fun :)
alexhektor 7y ago
You can definitely give an answer in the WIPO dispute, and I would absolutely try to do so. The WIPO is a joke though in my opinion - there is no appeal process whatsoever. We lost a case that we should have clearly won with jdownloader.com (our domain being .org, and us having started the project and having all the copyrights registered..) There was no way for us to answer in any way to the claims that the defendant made, and the decision was final.. In any way - I would definitely try to write an appeal.., but of course a lawyer and legal advise would be very helpful..
- otterley 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, did you hire an attorney experienced in litigating these disputes?
codezero 7y ago
Just playing around with this data set, I can't understand why What3Words is so exciting. The dataset includes words with plural versions, different tenses of the same word, and words that are combinations of shorter words that are also in the data set. If I'm listening to an emergency responder at ship.wreck.shipwreck, or was that at shipwreck.ship.wreck There are probably a lot of ways to accidentally get confusion with such poorly groomed word combinations. Maybe they've come up with a clever way to make such combinations exist in the middle of the ocean, which would be a great place for a shipwreck.ship.wreck anyways :)
- solstice 7y ago
  Also, the word "wreck" seems really inappropriate because of the silent w.
  - Freak_NL 7y ago
    > Okay Sir/Madam, where are you? I'm at https://what3words.com/broken.spies.wreck https://what3words.com/broken.spies.wreck ! > There is no 'rack', did you mean https://what3words.com/broken.spice.back https://what3words.com/broken.spice.back ? No 'wreck'! As in shipwreck! > Got it! https://what3words.com/broken.spice.wreck https://what3words.com/broken.spice.wreck !
- shakna 7y ago
  > If I'm listening to an emergency responder at ship.wreck.shipwreck, or was that at shipwreck.ship.wreck Wow. They both work. One's in Sweden, and the other's in Alaska. It seems the corpus has not been well thought out at all.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dmix 7y ago
DMCA is so easy to abuse.
tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
Now we have 17 competing standards...
- coderheed 7y ago
  "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."
tpaschalis 7y ago
I think that the main bottlenecks for a competing geocode system is being open-source, simple to understand, and having an available API to start off quickly. Geohash [1] is public-domain, features variable-precision encoding of coordinates, and can speed up some computational processes like neighbor-finding and proximity searches, so I think it ticks a lot of boxes. Throw in a NATO-alphabet style in order to transform to words, and voila! If anyone wants to play around I have built a ready-to-use API for Geohash [2] that is and will remain free [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash [2] http://geohash.world/ http://geohash.world/
verall 7y ago
I seriously do not understand how people read about W3W and not feel icky just by being near. Right off the bat the talk about fleecing..ahem, selling their service, to developing nations. The whole thing is a PR operation, a CRUD database, and a sales team sufficiently soulless to wine and dine governing structures in developing nations to reap the juicy public dollars. Who gives a damn about copyright infringement. These guys should be in prison. I have yet to hear a problem it solves that wouldn't be solved better by a post office.

250 points by polemic 7y ago

If What3Words wants to be ubiquitous, and relied on for things like navigation and emergency services, then it ought to be an open standard, with a published algorithm and open-source implementation. If they’re going to be dicks about keeping it proprietary then maybe it’s time for someone to come up with an open alternative.

lol768 7y ago
>If they’re going to be dicks about keeping it proprietary then maybe it’s time for someone to come up with an open alternative. There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code from Google (AKA Plus Codes). They have a useful wiki article which compares existing systems: https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...
- slavik81 7y ago
  Notably missing from the evaluation is MGRS, the coordinate system used by NATO for more or less the same purpose. I like it because if you have the coordinates of a landmark, you can easily estimate the coordinates of other nearby locations entirely in your head, and the system encodes precision so you can indicate uncertainty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System
  - ssambros 7y ago
    With it's pros being the ability to know how close the points are just having the 2 coordinates and arbitrary precision. Who knows how far away epic.region.music and epic.global.music are from just the names? While 18SUJ2163104440 and 12SVC0452723150 are 6 grid zones apart east to west.
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
      That's a handy property for the 3 people on Earth who have the algorithm behind it memorized, but the rest of the world would prefer to be able to easily read, write and share the codes.
      - labster 7y ago
        Most people can tell proximity in lat/lon coordinates based on the algorithm they learned in first grade: the number line. Perhaps they could use a similarly ubiquitous system, like the alphabet. There’s even a song to help you memorize it!
      - AWildC182 7y ago
        The algorithm is absolutely trivial -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System It's actually quite pleasant to use and allows you to just truncate to the level of precision you want. S/He just posted the 1m resolution string when 18-SU-J-216-044 would get you to 100m. All this said, I think the real issue is that we refuse to PICK a standard and so every device with a GPS and ever map has one or two of -MGRS -UTM (almost identical to MGRS) -LL DD MM' SS.ss" -LL DD.dddd... -LL DD MM.mmmm...' etc. If you make a device that can output or accept a location string, make sure it can handle all LL cases and UTM/MGRS.
        dmix 7y ago
        I think we have different definitions of trivial. Or you put a lot of trust in the average persons intelligence or more importantly laziness.
  - PLenz 7y ago
    Mgrs is also a perfect m-ary tree, it really has so many useful properties for doing spatial machine learning.
  - slavik81 7y ago
    To expand a bit, I wish it was included in the comparison not only because it has some big advantages, but also because it has some drawbacks worth examining. The top-level zones are its weakness. The further apart two coordinates are from each other, the more difficult it is to reason about their relationship. MGRS works fantastic for reasoning about coordinates on the same grid square, but gets harder as you move up to comparing between grid squares and harder still as you compare between zones. A grid square is 100km x 100km, so it's pretty big, and coordinates in the square are easy to manipulate. If you know your office is at 4QFJ 21631 04440 and the Starbucks is about 500 meters down the road to the north, then you know Starbucks' coordinates are roughly 4QFJ 21631 04940. To indicate your uncertainty, you'd say 4QFJ 216 049, or possibly just 216 049 if the grid square was already known from context. The system is typically extended to allow that reasoning to work even at the edges of a grid square, by allowing eastings and northings that extend past the grid square edge. This means there's more than one possible way to describe a location, though only one canonical way. Unless you're already familiar with the area, you may need a map to compare coordinates on different squares. Some of the grid zones are also a little oddly shaped. It's mostly not a big deal because they're huge, and it really only affects which coordinate representation is the canonical one at the boundaries, but it would be nice if the top-level 6° by 8° grid zones were more regular.
- ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
  I mean there are also normal co-ordinates, and also the grid reference system in the UK. What3words will be a nightmare over a weak voice radio signal, if amateur radio experiences are anything to go by
  - bfieidhbrjr 7y ago
    It’s literally designed to be used over voice, that’s the entire point.
    - ourlordcaffeine 7y ago
      Over a weak radio signal, it will be a nightmare. Sticking to numerics will be far easier.
      - snodnipper 7y ago
        I have encountered many positive statements about What3Words for emergency response. Just one news article: https://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/17935101.what3words-app-used-south-western-ambulance-find-patients/ https://www.dorsetecho.co.uk/news/17935101.what3words-app-us... Can you comment more about "weak radio signal"? Perhaps one can deduce the a number by hearing a small sample of a sound...whereas W3W has a wider vocabulary? My guess is that if necessary, one could repeat each word several times (e.g. over a period of 10 seconds).
        ryanlol 7y ago
        There exists vast experience in aviation to learn from. When you’re having radio readability issues you really want a small and clear vocabulary.
        snodnipper 7y ago
        Thanks - I can see that. I am guessing that the smaller vocabulary is particularly useful in analogue systems. Perhaps W3W is viewed positively for (digital) cellular connections but might be inappropriate for other radio technology.
- thelittlenag 7y ago
  (disclosure: i work for qalocate.com) I think that OLC and W3W have many flaws. If you want to read a critique OLC I suggest you read this: https://www.qalocate.com/whats-wrong-with-open-location-code/ https://www.qalocate.com/whats-wrong-with-open-location-code... At QA Locate we've been working on a similar solution that we call GeohashPhrase. Rather than encoding a location as 3 random words, or the alphanumeric code of OLC, we instead just encode a geohash as a sentence. Encoding/decoding is relatively trivial, and can be done offline, but I've yet to write up docs I'm comfortable with other people reading. There are some light docs you can reference here: https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ We have a video on the tech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM I'm working on some better preliminary docs, but working code takes priority ;-) Btw, the GeohashPhrase will be open source and free to use.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Damn, I was all riled up to read a good critique of OLC but this fell way short of the mark, in my opinion. Things like: > Implicit, however, is that the only way to resolve that shortened code is to make a call to the Google Maps API. Why? If OSM supports plus codes, that'll work equally well, no? > By allowing reference locations in plus codes these codes are tied to specific political entities Okay, but, as I understand it, you just need to point to something in the general vicinity, close enough that it can disambiguate Athens, Greece from Washington DC. Unless the city moves half a country away, the code will still work. > If so, what I really need to know is the correct parking, or rideshare drop off, and the closest entrance, not directions to center court, which is apparently where “Q5RQ+6V Dallas, Texas” actually is! Are you really complaining that the coordinate you set wasn't the coordinate you wanted to set? Or that Google Maps (not OLC) isn't smart enough to route you to a stadium properly? The rest of the article is similarly seemingly looking to pick a fight with tenuous assertions, I'm afraid.
  - lioeters 7y ago
    I've liked the idea of Open Location Code for some time, so when I read the following, I thought "Surely that's not right?" > Implicit, however, is that the only way to resolve that shortened code is to make a call to the Google Maps API. I'd always thought OLC could encode/decode coordinates with a simple algorithm, with more or less precision based on the length of the code. Referring to their documentation, I found this [0]: > Supporting local codes.. If you have no map and cannot determine the device location, a local code is not sufficient and you should display a message back to the user asking them to provide a town or city name or the full global code. > ..extract the local code and send the remaining text to your geocoding service (Nominatim, Google, etc). What! I didn't know this about shortened codes - that need for an external service to decode plus codes diminishes my enthusiasm for the standard considerably. Thank you for the write up, will be keeping my ears open for GeohashPhrase. --- [0] https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Supporting-plus-codes-in-your-app https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Supporting...
MauranKilom 7y ago
> it ought to be an open standard, with a published algorithm and open-source implementation. That's entirely against their business model. See also the open street map wiki page on it: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words Or any of the previous HN discussions (just some samples): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15579017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15579017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712591
- brokensegue 7y ago
  I don't understand their business model. How will they make money
  - tpetry 7y ago
    I guess they hope someone will buy them. Like Apple to do easy navigation for the apple maps app.
  - MauranKilom 7y ago
    They have been and will keep fighting tooth and nail to keep the algorithm and associated database proprietary, copyrighted, patented and under every kind of protection they can afford. In parallel, they invest heavily into PR, such as feeding story-starved journalists their marketing pitch. The point is to get adoption and network effect, locking users (e.g. Mongolian mail service) into a monopoly that they can eventually leverage. Since no one but them can (or rather is allowed) to do the conversion, they request payment per lookup/coordinate conversion. There is nothing novel or innovative about their algorithm, it's downright awful in some regards, and there is little benefit to actually derive from the system in the first place (compared to established open systems). They're just really good at PR (and takedown notices) - that's their real business plan.
  - kawfey 7y ago
    They license the product to car companies like Mercedes [0], and they provide training and licensing to emergency management agencies, which is gaining popularity in the UK, North Yorkshire, for example [1]. Their business model is more or less undercut by opensource and reverse engineered alternatives, hence the predatory DMCA takedowns. This is obviously a bad PR move. It's the 21st century; the product/IP itself provides little to no value to the average user. It's the services that does. Open source the product and make money licensing, installing, training, and integrating it into everyday life. [0]https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/what3words-voice-navigation-first-to-mercedes-benz/ https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/what3words-voice... [1] https://northyorkshire.police.uk/news/whats-what3words-and-why-is-it-useful-a-blog-from-our-inspector-mark-proctor/ https://northyorkshire.police.uk/news/whats-what3words-and-w...
dev_dull 7y ago
I've never heard of what3words before now and read up on their site. It's a fun idea but I wouldn't say its invention or even novel, just convenient. I'm not surprised they're relying on litigation to try and fend off competitors.
- scrooched_moose 7y ago
  It's not even convenient. Where in relation to curve.empty.buzz is grape.trunk.gossip? Is it closer/farther than slurs.this.shark? The first is about 6 feet north. The second is 3600 miles east. It's an almost intentionally terrible system designed for people to be reliant on their services.
  - rhacker 7y ago
    It would be cool to base the closeness on word2vec somehow. Though, I'm not adept in either space to do that.
qwerty456127 7y ago
Indeed, keeping it proprietary makes no sense at all. But there is a great free alternative already, I use it all the time: http://www.what3fucks.com http://www.what3fucks.com
- stallmanite 7y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation for what3fucks. Entertaining a f.

paulgb 7y ago

I want to side with whatfreewords here, but as a matter of law* I think the takedown was legitimate. Even though they reimplemented the algorithm, they include the what3words word list which what3words can (rightfully, IMHO) argue is their protected intellectual property. *IANAL

pgeorgi 7y ago
Many legal frameworks have an interoperability clause which would allow using that list for the sole purpose of interop. What W3W seems to be doing is taking down the sites on trademark grounds (that is, "what three words" and "what free words" being too similar). They might have a case there, and whatfreewords might be better off distancing themselves a bit in naming. Call it "Simple Locator", state somewhere on the website (not the headline) that it's a scheme "compatible to what3words (which is a trademark by ...)" and they lose that angle of attack.
- otakucode 7y ago
  When it comes to trademark, companies are compelled to act. Failing to defend your trademark will make you incapable of defending it in the future. The DMCA can NOT be used for trademark disputes, however. The DMCA exclusively deals with copyright. Normally, the "interoperability" defense is used to protect instances of circumventing copyright protection mechanisms, not for copying itself. For instance, that was the defense in the case where Lexmark brought a DMCA claim against a third party ink cartridge manufacturer, claiming that by making their ink work, they circumvented protection mechanisms Lexmark claimed existed to protect their copyrighted firmware code in their ink carts. The court didn't buy it, Lexmark lost, it was established that you can do that kind of circumvention. But this copying of the word list... it's different in a couple fundamental ways, and I don't know if there has been a case that has dealt with this sort of thing.
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    Given that they also sent a claim regarding a map feature on the .com site that wasn't provided by that site, I'm not sure if any of the claims they throw at ISPs (DMCA or not) are even legit. The main issue is that the "free" team can't counter-claim without losing anonymity, so as far as bogus DMCA claims go, they're quite powerless. That's why I went for the WIPO dispute, which is based on their trademark and IMHO has the most leg to stand on, instead of relying on the unwillingness of the counterparty (whatfreewords) to defend themselves.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

saagarjha 7y ago

Question: who are the people running this? Why are they so intent on staying anonymous? It seems to have bitten them multiple times…

dewey 7y ago
> Why are they so intent on staying anonymous? Because the company would sue them right away? That's why they have to hop from hosting provider to hosting provider because the company is taking the sites down.

kerkeslager 7y ago

So, I'm a bit confused. https://whatfreewords.org https://whatfreewords.org seems to be up and running just fine.

yorwba 7y ago
The text above the title says "anonymous · 16d", which I assume means it was posted 16 days ago.
justsomeguyaa 7y ago
Not for lack of trying http://ix.io/1YgI http://ix.io/1YgI

jonatron 7y ago

Why not just create an alternative that doesn't break copyright, trademark and patent law?

EGreg 7y ago
There is. It’s called geohash.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  There may be an alternative, but Geohash is not it. Geohashes look like "u4pruydqqvj", which is questionably useful for situations very different from situations where you'd want "pinks.haunted.graves".
  - EGreg 7y ago
    It would be better if we took geohash and transformed it into words organized from a dictionary. Because the closer things are the more they share a common prefix.
- brokensegue 7y ago
  Or plus codes
MauranKilom 7y ago
Because W3W's main strength is PR. Their system itself is really not that useful (or innovative, or difficult to create), and there are several free and open alternatives. But you don't hear about them without hearing about W3W.
- otterley 7y ago
  If the alternatives are so great, why aren’t they being adopted? Surely a truly superior alternative could gain traction despite W3W’s publicity; we see new systems supplant older ones all the time in other areas. If you identified a substitute that was clearly superior in every way to W3Ws, that would also be helpful. So far every one that's been identified here has faced usability or other objections.

IshKebab 7y ago

> To ensure that we did not violate the What3Words company's copyright, we did not include any of their code, and we only included the bare minimum data required for interoperability. Yeah copyright doesn't work like that. You don't get to violate it just because you need to for interoperability (unfortunately). An example of this is console emulators which aren't allowed to distribute boot ROMs. Whether What3Words has anything that is copyrightable is another matter.

teraflop 7y ago
> Yeah copyright doesn't work like that. You don't get to violate it just because you need to for interoperability (unfortunately). This is only sort of true; it's a messy and complex area of law. For instance, interoperability was one of the defenses Google raised in the Oracle lawsuit over Android's use of Java APIs. (It ended up not helping them much, on the grounds that Android isn't actually that interoperable with other Java implementations, which is different from interoperability not being a usable defense at all.) And the DMCA has specific exceptions allowing reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability.
- gpm 7y ago
  And using your copyright on a list of words to try and get a monopoly on a system of specifying location might well constitute copyright missuse and invalidate the entire copyright. But raising any of these defenses involves extensive lawyers and court cases and the acceptance of the considerable risk that you will lose the suit.

grizzles 7y ago

The way to take What3 to the woodshed would be with an actual standard. Publish a new dictionary of per spoken language mappings to Google's plus.codes. Something like xaddress.org on top of plus.codes. Call it twowords. You get the best of both worlds, human friendly nav for Uber like apps, compact codes for shipping / logistics / universality.

jimofl 7y ago
Wouldn't it be kind of like "DNS for locations" where any string phrase could be associated with the OLC/Plus Code (many human descriptive names to one location identifier)? Better, what if you could then universally translate between that and the many other kinds of location encodings, both human descriptive and computer identifier? That's what we do at QA Locate with our LNS (Location Naming Service) and our ULT (Universal Location Translator). See our technical two pagers located here: https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ https://www.qalocate.com/resources/

kerkeslager 7y ago

People keep talking here about free (libre) alternatives like Open Location Codes or geohashes, but these aren't alternatives, because they aren't human readable in the same way. The closest thing I've found is the now-defunct 3Geonames[1] project which exists only in presentation archives as far as I can see, and that's only partly human readable. [1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_3geonames/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_3geonames...

thelittlenag 7y ago
(disclosure: i work for qalocate.com) At QA Locate we've been working on a solution to this that we call GeohashPhrase. It encodes a geohash as a sentence. There are some light docs you can reference here: https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ https://www.qalocate.com/resources/ And we have a video on the tech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM I'm working on some better preliminary docs, but working code takes priority ;-) Btw, the GeohashPhrase will be open source and free to use.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  I always wondered, could this w3w geocoding method be done not completely random, but in such a way, that each subsequent word would narrow down the area? So one can easily understand that places like lake.cotton.juice and lake.cotton.horse are really near each other, and if their first word is there same they are at least on the same continent?
  - thelittlenag 7y ago
    I don't think you could easily do that with 3 words. They already have a dictionary 40000 deep and then end up repeating words, just to get to get enough combinations. With the GeohashPhrase we intentionally telescope exactly like you've described. This is because all we do is encode a geohash, and it already has this property.
    - 7y ago

kodablah 7y ago

> A good way to host the site would be to put it on a Tor onion service [...] If you know how to help set this up please get in touch. This is not very difficult. The Tor website explains it pretty clearly [0]. Alternatively since y'all are familiar with Go, there is a library [1] that makes listening on an onion address almost as easy as a regular address. 0 - https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-service.html.en https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-service.html.... 1 - https://github.com/cretz/bine https://github.com/cretz/bine

eruci 7y ago

Well, so far w3w strategy of bribing third world countries into "adopting" their system (Mongolia) and feeding stories to journalists about emergency services and others using their system - seems to have had the effect of bringing w3w into the spotlight, including many stories on HN. Now the legal game of whack-a-mole against their leaked wordlist and code is producing a similar effect. Good for them for making it this far with a very flawed encoding scheme.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

Up until reading this article I was a big fan of w3w and was even thinking about including their geocoding into our XMPP clients. Now I think best course is for whatfreewords to change coding algorithm (there are ways to improve, I think), and host a competing open source geocoding service.

ponytech 7y ago

I took one of the library provided on whatfreewords and included into my (work in progress) website as a conversion tool: Convert coordinates location to 3 words : https://freews.org/location-to-w3w https://freews.org/location-to-w3w Convert 3 words to coordinates location : https://freews.org/w3w-to-location https://freews.org/w3w-to-location I have no idea if it is useful or if it does break some copyright laws but I thought it could be fun :)

alexhektor 7y ago

You can definitely give an answer in the WIPO dispute, and I would absolutely try to do so. The WIPO is a joke though in my opinion - there is no appeal process whatsoever. We lost a case that we should have clearly won with jdownloader.com (our domain being .org, and us having started the project and having all the copyrights registered..) There was no way for us to answer in any way to the claims that the defendant made, and the decision was final.. In any way - I would definitely try to write an appeal.., but of course a lawyer and legal advise would be very helpful..

otterley 7y ago
Out of curiosity, did you hire an attorney experienced in litigating these disputes?

codezero 7y ago

Just playing around with this data set, I can't understand why What3Words is so exciting. The dataset includes words with plural versions, different tenses of the same word, and words that are combinations of shorter words that are also in the data set. If I'm listening to an emergency responder at ship.wreck.shipwreck, or was that at shipwreck.ship.wreck There are probably a lot of ways to accidentally get confusion with such poorly groomed word combinations. Maybe they've come up with a clever way to make such combinations exist in the middle of the ocean, which would be a great place for a shipwreck.ship.wreck anyways :)

solstice 7y ago
Also, the word "wreck" seems really inappropriate because of the silent w.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  > Okay Sir/Madam, where are you? I'm at https://what3words.com/broken.spies.wreck https://what3words.com/broken.spies.wreck ! > There is no 'rack', did you mean https://what3words.com/broken.spice.back https://what3words.com/broken.spice.back ? No 'wreck'! As in shipwreck! > Got it! https://what3words.com/broken.spice.wreck https://what3words.com/broken.spice.wreck !
shakna 7y ago
> If I'm listening to an emergency responder at ship.wreck.shipwreck, or was that at shipwreck.ship.wreck Wow. They both work. One's in Sweden, and the other's in Alaska. It seems the corpus has not been well thought out at all.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dmix 7y ago

DMCA is so easy to abuse.

tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago

Now we have 17 competing standards...

coderheed 7y ago
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."

tpaschalis 7y ago

I think that the main bottlenecks for a competing geocode system is being open-source, simple to understand, and having an available API to start off quickly. Geohash [1] is public-domain, features variable-precision encoding of coordinates, and can speed up some computational processes like neighbor-finding and proximity searches, so I think it ticks a lot of boxes. Throw in a NATO-alphabet style in order to transform to words, and voila! If anyone wants to play around I have built a ready-to-use API for Geohash [2] that is and will remain free [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash [2] http://geohash.world/ http://geohash.world/

verall 7y ago

I seriously do not understand how people read about W3W and not feel icky just by being near. Right off the bat the talk about fleecing..ahem, selling their service, to developing nations. The whole thing is a PR operation, a CRUD database, and a sales team sufficiently soulless to wine and dine governing structures in developing nations to reap the juicy public dollars. Who gives a damn about copyright infringement. These guys should be in prison. I have yet to hear a problem it solves that wouldn't be solved better by a post office.