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Google Maps Hacks
- scarejunba 7y agoI imagine that if this is widespread they'll be able to use spam-filtering style stuff to get data from reliable accounts like mine (lots of reviews, location history on for decades, etc.) to override this stuff. An interesting reminder that all crowdsourced data does suffer from operating in an adversarial space. Wikipedia to Traffic.
- londons_explore 7y agoDo the phones have to be open and navigating somewhere,or is it enough for them to just be idle on the home screen?
- myself248 7y agoMy understanding is this: If it was only phones running Maps, they wouldn't get much data. Phones running Maps are actively using the GPS, so they provide more precise data. Those sitting idle just get tower location, which helps fill in some vague flow information but doesn't do much for specific street or momentary speed.
- allannienhuis 7y ago> Those sitting idle just get tower location Do you have links or google keyword hints to more information about that? Is that OS specific?
- londons_explore 7y agoThe GPS hardware is pretty power hungry, so is normally only switched on rarely for short bursts unless the user is actively navigating. You can see that with `adb logcat` on an android phone.
- irrlichthn 7y agoVery cool hack. Thought about that this could be possible several times now, nice that someone actually did and succeeded :)
- threatofrain 7y agoI expect Google to start weighing user data by some notion of account credibility. It’s a problem that extends beyond maps.
- tomaskafka 7y agoThey can start with reviews, where this is much more important and commonly misused thing - and they still don't care. At all. So, nope :).
- Santosh83 7y agoWhy can't the phones determine their proximity to each other and report it to Maps, which would then presumably figure out that they're too close to represent separate vehicles?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoJust a guess: there's little economic incentive to perform this attack, and it would also be pretty expensive to perform regularly. So detecting and preventing it has not been a priority up to now. If people started doing it regularly, I'm sure countermeasures would be put in place.
- vongomben 7y agoWhy expensive? If you compare it with other forms of rioting and strike I think is still cheap. Ghost digital crowd. BTW I wonder if you really need 99 different data Sims cards or rather have a smartphone hotspotting every 5.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoExpensive in time compared to benefit accrued/harm done. At a minimum you have to spend a person's time on it, both in the gathering of a bunch of used phones, the setting up of many phone lines, and the actual work of walking on the street. A small street seeming busy on Google Maps doesn't really matter that much. Especially, if the street is not actually busy, since that's kind of an indicator that people don't really want to use it anyway. So the amount of traffic you'd potentially divert is similarly small. This seems really obvious to me, so if it doesn't seem that way to you, maybe we just have different priors. I can't explain it any better than this, though.
- wtracy 7y agoIt doesn't strike me as particularly expensive compared to getting thirty-plus bicyclists to go down the street in a block like the Critical Mass activists do.
- WilTimSon 7y agoWow, I never actually stopped to think about the way Google determines traffic but it seems so obvious now. This is a very simple but cool trick, I'd expect to see something like this in an action movie where people need to reroute an important car to a particular street. Anyone have any idea how often this data is updated? So if the guy runs through a street with a cart and it turns red, when will it show up as clear?
- ody4242 7y agoI guess an important piece (conveniently left out of this story) is that it does not work if there are other cars on the road, as these cars quickly invalidate the data coming from the slow cart.
- matz1 7y agoBut wouldn't that other car be classified as error?
- matmo 7y agoI don't know what the tipping point is, but it'd probably take more than one. I've commuted through backed up/stopped/solid red sections on a motorcycle where I just get to lane-split and cruise through, and it'd still stay red.
- mayniac 7y agoI think Google uses phone sensors to tell motorbikes apart form cars. Pretty simple tech: cars don't lean. Which makes it all the more infuriating that Google Maps still has huge flaws when it comes to motorbike navigation.
- c0restraint 7y ago> I think Google uses phone sensors to tell motorbikes apart form cars While they could, I doubt they do... do you have evidence of this?
- Proven 7y ago"One should never underestimate the navigational impact of a truck filled with mobile phones" - S. Weckertbaum :-)
- unfundiert 7y agoI'm stunned how fast Google Maps detects traffic jams. I assume all those smartphones are running car navigation and as traffic detection works by trusting the clients I fear there's no chance to avoid this kind of exploit. Nevertheless it would be interesting to know what's the ratio of correct / malicious clients to fool the system. That migt highly depend on whether Google implemented any detection of faulty clients.
- moltar 7y agoYou can probably avoid it by more accuracy somehow. If the road is just for 1 car width, and there are 50 cars in the same radius (because all are inside the cart), it’s an impossible scenario. I think gps accuracy is something like 3 meters, which is about one car length.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe situation could also easily be discovered by probing accelerometers of the phones that travel in groups. Separate vehicles don't exhibit perfectly synchronized acceleration and deceleration, especially not in a traffic jam.
- stickfigure 7y ago...unless they're on a bus.
- filleduchaos 7y agoExactly. A bus is one vehicle, and you don't want to count every phone on it as a separate entity.
- lonelappde 7y ago...which can be exclusded from car driving predictions.
- asutekku 7y ago
- brenden2 7y agoCool, could use something like this to keep traffic off my street until all the devices are banned.
- chapium 7y agoImagine a cyclist using this to reduce traffic being routed to roads they are travelling on.
- nudgeee 7y agoI used to work for a mapping & navigation company that offered a traffic API service. It worked by using anonymized cell phone data to predict traffic patterns. I once heard a story that during peak hour, every five minutes or so the jams on a highway would magically disappear then reappear. After some head scratching, turns out there is a train track inbetween the lanes of the highway full of high speed commuters that would cancel out the stationary car commuters.
- onionisafruit 7y agoHow did you fix that? I’ve been wondering how google and the others differentiate between cars on the free vs express lanes.
- sixothree 7y agoThe device itself should be able to discern the mode of transportation, no?
- fastball 7y agoPretty easy to train some ML network to differentiate between transport modes, assuming the device has a accelerometer / gyroscope / whatever.
- prashnts 7y agoNot really that easy with just IMU sensors, I’d assume ? I did one project in school (albeit a simple SVM based model) to classify walking vs running (and so on) and ambiguity was still there. Stationary vs. Walking was easy to draw a hyper plane in between, not Running. I still find it a difficult problem to get into, after 5 years. Perhaps ANN models might work better? Although my heart is still at Hidden MM states...
- brian_herman 7y agoDo you have the code for your classification project? It would be great to see it on github or something.
- flarg 7y agoI'm sure I've seen a related effect where a clear road is red until I drive down it and it then turns green
- copperx 7y agoMuch better than the more common scenario of driving to work with an all green route and then finding that traffic is at a standstill. And then seconds later Google Maps marks the road as red. This happens so much that I don't trust all green routes to work anymore.
- oxfordmale 7y agoI wonder if there are other non-ethical commercial purposes for this. For example, could shops use it to inflate their footfall and make them look busier than they are ? Can you think of any other areas where this hack could be used for non-ethical purposes ?
- robkop 7y agoNot sure exactly how rideshare prices are calculated but say you're picking someone up on a street -- you could potentially make a fake traffic jam on the street so that the app would calculate a longer route and hence pay you more.
- onionisafruit 7y agoCausing rush hour commuters to take a less optimum route depriving them of time at home and causing more pollution from car emissions is unethical.
- alien1993 7y agoWould it be possible to do this by using the Android emulator and simulate its position?
- nateburke 7y agoI am wondering what the minimal monthly data plan cost would be to have this working continuously on your street. In a suburb, surely 20 phones would be enough, no? At $30/ month maybe somewhere between 500 and 600 per month?
- nannal 7y agoYou don't need lots of cell phone plans, just one with a wifi hotspot.
- eli 7y agoThough that assumes they haven’t implemented even trivial filtering of bogus data.
- pjc50 7y agoJust do it on wifi. With a bit of spoofing you could "move" all the phones up and down the street while they're in your basement.
- judge2020 7y agoGoogle spun-off Niantic and I hear they have pretty good anti-GPS spoofing algorithms/NNs (for Pokemon Go), I wouldn't be surprised if they use the same or similar tech for GMaps.
- lanerobertlane 7y agoAs someone who uses a spoofer app for Pokemon Go, the anti-spoofing is pretty limited. There is a "you can't go 500 miles in 10 seconds" style check, that checks your displacement against your previous position periodically to makes sure it's realistic, something that makes sure your GPS is always drifting a little, like a normal phone GPS would report (which the spoofer app builds in), and other little things such as if it has camera permissions and you take a photo in game, the location in the photo metadata matches your in game location. I usually play in my house in the North of England and regularly spoof the app to be in London, New York, Paris Mall or Tokyo.
- netsharc 7y agoAn interesting "red but no traffic" phenomenon is in Iceland, with roads which are next to scenery viewing points. The roads are mostly empty in this country, but everyone must've slowed down when they saw the breathtaking scenery, and would pull into the viewing point's parking spot to stop and take pictures. On Google Maps these areas were marked red. On another navigation related topic; I was using Waze in a high-traffic city, where even the alternate routes have a lot of traffic. I was thinking, it surely would be possible for Waze to look back along my route and calculate which route would have been better for me. E.g. if I drove from A via B, C, D, E towards Z, and there was an alternate route A-B-F-G-E-Z, and the route branches out at B (you can either take path B-C-D-E or path B-F-G-E), the app could find a car that was near me at point B, and went to F later on. It would then know the time I would have needed to drive from B to F. This ghost car doesn't need to go all the way to E, if it turned off at F, the app could find another car, one which at that point was at point F and later on drove to G (or better, E), and then see how much time they took. And so on for each segment of my alternate route...
- Spooky23 7y agoThis happens on NY 73, which is a road in the Adirondack High Peaks region between the highway and Lake Placid. It’s legit — even though cars are parked, you still need to slow down! I usually avoid Google maps for traveling in areas that I don’t know. It takes you off on stupid routes that save marginal time (if any) too much. Waze is good for interstate travel, but IMO Apple is better for giving you the “right”, low drama route.
- ryanianian 7y agoThis is my common complaint with Waze and most driving apps - they optimize for "least time," not "least anguish". I would almost always prefer to spend an extra 5 minutes on my "normal" route (that I have on auto-pilot) instead of saving that 5 minutes by taking confusingly-named side-streets with lots of left turns onto other busy side-streets. I don't know if Apple Maps really gets this any better to be honest.
- 7y ago
- speedgoose 7y agoI wonder whether Google Maps takes into account the various ways of transportation, such as bicycles, public transports, or electric cars driving on the bus lines.
- blfr 7y agoYes, if you look in your Google Maps timeline it can even often guess which mode of transportation you used.
- judge2020 7y agoMight be via the phone sensors more then GPS travel insights - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmmotionactivity https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmmotio...
- wizofaus 7y agoIndeed, I wonder exactly why Google maps thought all these smartphones were in a car at all. Can only assume they were all configured to be following driving directions.
- duxup 7y agoI always wondered about that. I don't think enough people use Google maps in my area for it to be consistent much of the time. Lots of random (not on map) or way out of date slowdows. The reporting feature doesn't seem to do much. Granted otherwise it is a great app, and I don't pretend to have the solutions to the wonkyness, just wonky at times when it comes to identifying traffic issues.
- mercwear 7y agoSimple yet interesting experiment and the type of content that keeps me coming back to HN. Nice work OP.
- nateburke 7y agoThis is a hack in an older, juvenile sense of the word, the sense that found cars on top of MIT buildings and football fans holding up cards that spell "we suck" in aggregate. I might be getting older but "hack" these days seems to just mean "go to work" or even "go to work on the weekend".
- draw_down 7y agoCome on
- capableweb 7y ago> older, juvenile sense of the word Eh, alright. What's then the "hack" definition that is younger and more adult? In my mind, hack has always been the same. Clever thing that does what you want. That's it.
- konceptz 7y agoDidn’t look it up for source but I thought hacking was coined by model train enthusiasts, “hacking” together train sets.
- aaron695 7y agoThis is just like releasing an un-weaponized buffer overflow. It's now up to someone else to see where they can push it. Create a app that connects everyone's phones and spoofs GPS(Not sure this is technically easy) as a group.... What can you do? Create secret clubs of commuters? Draw a penis on Google maps? Fake data during viral outbreaks to maximise peoples exposures by making them all use the same overloaded car park at a hospital? Move cars into locations were there are riots? Google Maps data was used by researchers during the protests in Tehran. I'm sure the three letter agencies use it as well.
- dddw 7y agoyeah the word irked me too. seeing this comes from an art-context I'd call it an 'intervention' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_intervention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_intervention
- shubidubi 7y agoit's not a bug, it's a feature.
- wh1t3n01s3 7y agoA similar problem happens during unusual big snowfalls in the country or in the mountains. The primary roads turn red because the cars are going really slow cz there is 50cm of snow. So maps redirects you to secondary roads, where there is nobody and even more snow.
- tokai 7y agoScary, that could kill someone.
- a3n 7y agoNo problem, we have Terms of Service to avoid that liability.
- wh1t3n01s3 7y agoNot really, if you die, nobody will probably know this was the case.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoIs it your opinion that Google (TOS aside) would be legally responsible for accidents that result from hazards on routes that Google directs propel to?
- a3n 7y agoMy opinion, probably not. But based on my legal knowledge (none), it may be arguable. TOS are just another brick in the wall.
- OmarShehata 7y agoWe got hit by a surprise blizzard once (driving from North Dakota to Minnesota, where it went from no trace of snow to blizzard in about 20 minutes of driving). Our car couldn't really make it up any road that wasn't well plowed. I was trying to navigate to a hotel because I knew we couldn't make it back in this weather, but all the closest hotels weren't on main roads. I was desperately trying to figure out a way to tell Google "prefer main roads" so we could find a hotel that was several miles further away if that meant sticking to safer roads. I thought a lot about how a feature like that could save lives in an emergency. Does this already exist anywhere?
- n-gauge 7y agoCool trick - I wonder how much of the cell tower's capacity he is hogging too?
- sudhirj 7y agoNo more than two buses, it's only a 100 phones.
- maitredusoi 7y agoI am happy to realize that it is Artistically possible to disrupt Google Map
- The_mboga_real 7y agoAre you discussing Google Maps? It must be true that you lot really have no other problems. All hail the virgin fag!
- jasoneckert 7y agoI never thought it'd be possible, but this blog post made me actually want to buy 99 smartphones.
- lonelappde 7y agoGoogle/Android fights this sort of abuse by making short lifetimes for smartphones, so adversary can't accumulate many working secondhand phones, or Google can detect and filter them by obsolete OS version :-D
- jpindar 7y agoThe author has a twitter thread about this: https://twitter.com/simon_deliver/status/1223569659645112320 https://twitter.com/simon_deliver/status/1223569659645112320
- sunflowerfly 7y agoThis happens a lot when driving around on smaller highways in rural areas here in the US. We even joke when we see red on the map; is it a real slowdown or did the one driver with Google Maps slow down to pass a tractor?
- philshem 7y agoThis gives a new meaning to the maxim "You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic."
- copperx 7y ago"I'm sorry boss, I'm going to be late because I'm traffic."
- a3n 7y agoJammers! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Your_Funeral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Your_Funeral
- timthorn 7y agoThe A14 north of Cambridge has recently been rerouted, and towards the end of the project - but months before it opened - Bing maps showed green traffic across countryside where the construction workers were moving along the new road.
- k2xl 7y agoSeems like someone who is malicious could spin up a bunch of VMs, spoof their gps as slow moving across various streets to simulate traffic jams. Even sophisticated spoofing would have hard time detecting this. You could even do the inverse, simulate no traffic but have virtual cars go through streets faster than usual even if there is a traffic jam! Would we have some major impacts in the economy of an area if major highways are simulated at high traffic earlier/later than usual over the course of many days? Could affect local city transportation budgets to build or not build roads/new streets if they base their data solely on analytics coming from Google. Bots have become more and more sophisticated, so niche types of manipulation is harder to detect, and for something like GPS you can't really prompt a RECAPTCHA before routes are used. Cell phone tower data probably doesn't suffer from this risk as much, since you have to pay for cellular data and spoofing data to cell towers is probably more difficult.
- AlexandrB 7y agoNavigation apps have mostly settled into a comfortable state of "good enough" mediocrity. In addition to the "red but no traffic" problems highlighted by others I find turn by turn directions are incredibly annoying while driving in areas I'm intimately familiar with and there's no way to say "I know what I'm doing when I'm in this area" or "pause giving me voice directions for 10 minutes". Additionally: * I can't compare multiple modes of transportation on the same map. E.g. driving vs. walking vs. transit. * There's no way to optimize for minimizing left turns, especially onto busy streets. * Multi-destination route optimization is not available. E.g. I need to go to the mall, the grocery store, and the bank, what's the sequence of destinations and route that minimizes travel time.[1] Edit: [1] I realize this is describing the travelling salesman problem, but for small (<=4) n it should not be too difficult while still being useful in practice.
- dangerlibrary 7y agoMy wife and I regularly talk about how "Thanks Google, I'll take it from here" is the best Maps features that doesn't exist.
- ryanmcdonough 7y agoYou mean pressing “end route” ?
- hosanex 7y agoPlease thing I never understood was there app insisting on this is still the fastest route. As if it's supposed to be anything else when you searched for the fastest route to start with.
- kaikai 7y agoTraffic could have started after you began your journey, making another route without traffic faster.
- chairmanwow1 7y agoWhy is his face blurred in the photos, but not in the video (or the video thumbnail for that matter)?
- Jamwinner 7y agoWent back to using maps, with a quick glance at traffic cameras in problem spots, it gets me there faster, and with _less distraction_.
- fludlight 7y agoCheck out the rest of this artist’s portfolio, some of them are quite good. http://www.simonweckert.com/work.html http://www.simonweckert.com/work.html
- rosybox 7y agoThat 10px font size is not accessible. I can't read what's there without zooming in. It looked like decorative text or legal disclosures for a contest or something. Did the site's creator find that the ideal text size to use?
- mihaaly 7y agoNever mind, there is no real content in the text just empty phrases.
- joantune 7y agoFrom my last experience circa 1/2 years ago, you just need to be the only one on the road. About that time I was driving up at odd hours on a highway, when I noticed a yellow stretch on google maps coming up. Turns out the highway was mostly empty, and the only other vehicle in the road was a truck, which is limited to a fraction of the top speed.
- maxerickson 7y agoHow does the cellular network location sharing work? Would it be possible to use 1 radio to spoof multiple devices there, or is there going to be enough security to prevent that?
- kehphin 7y agoDoes anyone else get a bit of unexpected joy when they drive through a section of ‘red’ road without any actual traffic? It makes me feel like I saved a bit of time in my life.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoThis is a pretty cool hack. I can see neighborhood watch groups using it to keep Waze from routing people down their streets during rush hour. It is also a nice demonstration of how people who understand automation can "work the system" in ways that people who don't understand automation cannot.
- H8crilA 7y agoThis is really no different than spammy SEO in web documents. One can only imagine the accuracy of virtual Android simulators running fake GPS and Google Maps if there was money to be made on fooling the traffic analysis.
- shric 7y agoI'd love a motorcycle mode aka "ignore traffic", in states/jurisdictions where lane filtering/splitting is allowed. I don't want to have to go offline to avoid it taking into account current traffic.
- t413 7y ago+1 agreed– just a toggles for 'disable traffic optimization' and 'prefer 2+ lane roads' would do the trick. I'm definitely adding a pretty bad outlier to real-time traffic data about stopped traffic.. Very similar to what this cute hack is doing.
- Nition 7y ago> Google’s map service has fundamentally changed our understanding of what a map is ... and how they look aesthetically. Paper maps used to look like a diagrammatic network of streets, with pale background and yellow for main roads, and our fundamental understanding of what a map is, was that it was a tool for navigation. Now with Google Maps, maps look like ??? and our fundamental understanding of what a map is, is ???.
- jmpeax 7y agoGoogle Maps is not a tool for navigation, it is a tool to sell advertising to businesses. The same way a pig farm is not a b&b for pigs.
- stiray 7y agoHas anyone tried using Maps? I don't think it solves the left turn problem, but I am extremly unhappy with google maps interface and pushing of ads. After a bit of searching I have found Maps and never turned back. Well, I hope it comes handy to someone else too... https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.axet.maps/
- dddw 7y agotried, didn't work. I use osmand, altough it works fine for regular navigation, it's kinda slow and eats all my batteries. i'm givin nokia maps (here maps) a second chance
- jeffml84 7y agoThis is not a hack. A hack is something that lets you achieve some sort of goal. This is some silly prank made to look like a hack to get on the front page of hacker news. So that's the real hack. "techies love to see stuff like this to make them feel smart!" Worked.
- aussieguy1234 7y agoHostile residents who don't like car traffic through their neighbourhoods might do this to keep cars out of their streets.
- andresramon 7y agoTrading binary option without any experience is like gambling with your money when you can actually employ a skilled professional manager like Mrs Lisa who has earned me over $57500 over the last three weeks You can reach her via email or WhatsApp contact@kay-puncher . com + 1 7 4 0 2 0 6 9 3 9 7
- z3t4 7y agoAnother fun thing you can do is to write messages to those who study hot maps.
- EGreg 7y agoWe hacked Google's maps to make a web-based "GPS" system, like the navigation on the phone. It's not perfect, but it allows us to do things like have the driver share their geolocation in the Web browser, without putting it in the background, and without downloading any native apps. I'd say very little in the Qbix Platform is hacked together, but this is one of those things. It's not in the core, we have it in the Travel plugin. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Q7IzVv1VU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Q7IzVv1VU Here's a list of all the features: https://qbix.com/features.pdf https://qbix.com/features.pdf Here is the overview of the whole open source platform in case you're curious: https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform
- dghughes 7y agoGeez, those second-hand phones look nicer than what I am using now :( edit: And why wouldn't a bus with 50 people all with smartphones have the same effect?
- great_kraken 7y agoThe people on the bus wouldn't be in car navigation mode of Google Maps.
- dghughes 7y agoI don't think everyone has to be using car navigation mode. The traffic in my small town is shown on Google Traffic and I doubt locals here need navigation to get back to their home 5km away.
- mindfulhack 7y agoThis video is a bit of a seminal moment for me. It's made me realise the information and tools we rely on and assume are true are actually just systematic fabrications produced by self-serving corporations, and are not necessarily the truth whatsoever. What does this mean for Google Search? (We had this discussion the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22139421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22139421)
- Xorlev 7y ago> systematic fabrications If that's what you want to call models, sure. It doesn't matter whether it's a 503(c) or a corporation, modeling the real world is imperfect and messy.
- stevenhuang 7y agoWhat a predictably cynical interpretation. Your immediate reaction to the application of imperfect models to the real world need not be one of distrust as if slighted but rather simple acknowledgment that this is just the best we can currently do.
- mindfulhack 7y agoYou have a point. Perhaps it's Google users' fault as much as anyone else's, to form such trusting emotional bonds to the Google service in the first place. However: 1. Google doesn't do anything to educate their users about this reality. 2. If corporations like Google really wanted to do "the best we can currently do", they'd try harder but instead they just do "the best we need to do to make billions of dollars from collecting people's data." Case in point, turns out Yandex image search is better than Google's. Google won't try harder if no one knows there's something better.
- spookthesunset 7y agoWhat the heck are you on about? > Google doesn't do anything to educate their users about this reality. What do you propose they do? Have cameras on every street instead? Somehow spend a fortune to embed sensors in to every roadway on earth? As it turns out, when you aggregate a ton of (hopefully) anonymized data, you can get some really cool shit. Like the "how busy is this business" thing they have for a lot of businesses.
- matchagaucho 7y agoSounds like a good interview question for Google. "Given GPS and cell tower location data, how do you prevent a false positive traffic jam when 99 phones are all within 1M of each other?"
- xxxxxxxx 7y agoPolice roadblocks to test for drugs and alcohol (aka booze bus) also show up as red on google maps.
- maxtollenaar 7y agoGoogle maps and other navigational apps could potentially flood residential routes that weren't supposed to handle traffic. People have done different measures to combat this. One anecdote is: "And in 2016, in Takoma Park, Maryland, residents went to great lengths to prevent Waze drivers from flooding their roads during a bridge reconstruction project. A Takoma Park man reportedly started reporting phantom wrecks and traffic jams on his street before Waze banned him" ref: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-05-07/why-some-cities-have-had-enough-of-waze https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-05-0...
- newtonapple 7y agoI drove through North Lake Tahoe one time on a weekday around midnight, and Google Maps was showing all red as I was driving up the mountain... I was super confused as there were no cars around me and it was not snowing either. What I later realized was that all the trucks were parked alongside the freeway taking breaks... I never realized that you could basically trick Google Maps by using a bunch of cellphones. Very neat!
- antidamage 7y agoJust one hack. Not really worthy of the plural.
- sLsMIrnov 7y agoerrors happen. but it is excellent application
- yjl001 7y agovery good article. Thanks for sharing this.
- art_loving_nerd 7y agoTo me, this is not so much about Google Maps or even "hacking" a computer system, but rather about how and how much computer information systems shape our view of reality, and how fake news may be created simply by naive and/or buggy software. It's just that in this case the big gap between view and reality can easily be shown by some photos or a simple video, while in case of search engines or recommendation systems, or advertising, it is much harder to show. To me this is kind of a "the emperor is naked" moment for surveillance capitalism, and even more so, as it is that simple.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- MattGrommes 7y agoI can't wait until some rich neighbors get together to buy a bunch of phones to use this to keep people off "their" streets. I'm sure there will be some startup selling this service in parts of the Bay Area in no time.
- vool 7y agoThis paper (2013) might be of interest "We demonstrate in practice how hackers can take control of navigation systems and, in the case of a wide distribution of floating car data, can actively control the traffic flow." https://media.blackhat.com/eu-13/briefings/Jeske/bh-eu-13-floating-car-data-jeske-wp.pdf https://media.blackhat.com/eu-13/briefings/Jeske/bh-eu-13-fl...