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That's why some countries have weird regulations about maps. South Korea does not allow exporting vector maps, so Google Maps rendering is vector based everywhe

That's why some countries have weird regulations about maps. South Korea does not allow exporting vector maps, so Google Maps rendering is vector based everywhere except in a region surrounding South Korea [1]. China applies a (not so) secret pseudorandom offset to all geographic coordinates in online maps, frequently resulting in mismatches between systems that apply corrections and those that don't. It seems silly during peacetime but when there's an actual war, you can see why people might want that kind of thing. And militaries all over the globe do use Google Maps extensively, if not by policy then just by soldiers doing their own thing. Wrong borders in Google Maps have nearly led to international incidents when soldiers ended up on the wrong side of a border. And then there are the disputed borders that Google is forced to display differently in different countries. There is no globally accepted map and as a result the map Google shows you changes depending on where you're located. [1] Actually I am out of date, it looks like the South Korea maps are vector based now. Maybe the law changed. It definitely used to be the case.

perihelions 5y ago
- "Wrong borders in Google Maps have nearly led to international incidents when soldiers ended up on the wrong side of a border" Probably referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873285 ("Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps")
lifthrasiir 5y ago
> Actually I am out of date, it looks like the South Korea maps are vector based now. Maybe the law changed. It definitely used to be the case. The South Korean mapping law allows for the domestic service (still subject to slight censorship), but Google didn't want to put any servers other than edge servers to South Korea so as a sort of protest it essentially froze the map for South Korea from November 2016 to December 2021, when Google finally gave up and established a new domestic data center.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  Edit: as joatmon-snoo [1] pointed out, there were no new Google data center as opposed to new GCP regions in SK. I mistook my sources due to my dodgy reading. That said, I now have an even stronger suspicion; see my reply to joatmon-snoo for details. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521352
the-rc 5y ago
The law as I recall it a decade ago was a bit more specific: you could only store and process the data in South Korea. Thus, the whole planet's tiles were rendered in production on Borg, except for SK, whose tiles had to be rendered on a workstation under somebody's desk in the Seoul office. That meant no fancy mapreduces, let alone any rendering on the fly like the Maps API allows (selecting what details to show on the map, their look, etc.). Then, IIRC, the rendered bitmap tiles had to be pushed from the workstation to production. Vector maps, at the time, would have been heresy. Google asked for years to have the laws changed. Korean companies weren't affected, at least until they moved their own rendering to e.g. a cloud provider outside the country.
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  > Google asked for years to have the laws changed. The laws Google asked for changes were not limited to the mapping laws but any law to require domestic data centers, which might trigger the domestic tax issue at any moment. Your explanation that Borg couldn't handle domestic clusters doesn't clearly explain that Google eventually established SK data centers and started supporting vector maps anyway---and given that South Korea is not the only country with such requests (e.g. EU), not being able to cope with such laws is just a Google's fault.
  - joatmon-snoo 5y ago
    > doesn't clearly explain that Google eventually established SK data centers and started supporting vector maps anyway Google data centers != Google cloud data centers The two are logistically very different and consequently that means the types of workloads they host are also different. The latter is really for GCP usage only (both customers and Google-internal cloud infra necessary to host GCP). Compare https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/ with https://cloud.google.com/about/locations https://cloud.google.com/about/locations.
    - lifthrasiir 5y ago
      Oh, you are right. I'm aware of the difference, but I didn't realize that there were no new data centers as opposed to new GCP regions due to my dodgy reading. But then there are two possible scenarios: 1. SK vector maps were generated using domestic servers (but no Borg) as SK govt demanded. 2. Google "secretly" exported SK maps and generated vector maps using Borg anyway. And both scenarios are problematic. The former would mean that the GP's claim that vector map generation requires Borg is not true or at least exaggerated (this scenario was what I had in mind when reading my sources, hence no verification). The latter would mean that... well, Google is in direct violation of SK law and not even trying to hide that.
alasdair_ 5y ago
We ended up using Open Street Maps for SK data over Google. It worked very well.
paganel 5y ago
> And militaries all over the globe do use Google Maps extensively ISIS and the other Islamist factions in the Syrian Civil War were also using it extensively when fighting the Syrian Government forces and when planning their suicide attacks, but because Assad was the bad guy no Google action was taken (like restricting GMaps access in the area).
- kuraudo 5y ago
  When I think of the rank hypocrisy that is used to justify decisions like these, it makes me glad that I don't work on these teams.
vsareto 5y ago
>Wrong borders in Google Maps have nearly led to international incidents when soldiers ended up on the wrong side of a border. Speaking of, if you go click on the Ukraine label right now on Google Maps, you won't get the red outline showing their border. Click on a neighboring country label for a comparison. Belarus: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Belarus/@53.696013,25.7358071,7z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x46da2584e2ad4881:0xa1d181ec8c10!8m2!3d53.2002745!4d28.0467224 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Belarus/@53.696013,25.7358... Ukraine: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ukraine/@48.2486332,26.6945129,6z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x40d1d9c154700e8f:0x1068488f64010!8m2!3d49.0171573!4d31.3865662 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ukraine/@48.2486332,26.694...
- baybal2 5y ago
  If you go to the code, you will see it being deliberately set by data coming through AJAX. Whomever did this...
  - JeremyBanks 5y ago
- loveJesus 5y ago
- endless1234 5y ago
  It's the same in all countries with not-clear borders. Applies to eg Georgia, Serbia/Kosovo and India/Pakistan too.
  - np- 5y ago
    Interesting, even Spain seems to not get a red outline (maybe because of Catalonia?)
    - purjolok 5y ago
      It could be, but searching for Catalonia in Google maps explicitly indicates it's a part of Spain. https://www.google.se/maps?q=catalunya https://www.google.se/maps?q=catalunya Another explanation would be the dispute with Morocco about Perejil Island: https://www.google.se/maps?q=isla+perejil https://www.google.se/maps?q=isla+perejil Or even the dispute regarding Gibraltar with Britain.
kkfx 5y ago
Just for curiosity: did you mean that soldiers do have smartphones with them while on duty? If I were an officer I never accept personal proprietary devices with computing and communication abilities, it's simply absurd and crazy imagining soldiers on duty tracked by private companies just because they have a macro-spay in their pocket...
- modeless 5y ago
  There have been many cases of soldiers being tracked because of phones they were carrying. There was the widely publicized case of Strava revealing where some soldiers were stationed, and recently in Ukraine people noticed that Google Maps was showing "traffic jams" where Russian convoys were massing. Militaries should probably prohibit personal smartphones completely. But I imagine such a prohibition would be a pretty big hit to morale and would also be very difficult to enforce, especially for non-combat areas where soldiers might not see the point.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    We could also look into legislation where we finally make companies implement an easy private mode, where any data sharing is not permitted. Mobile apps behave far worse than desktop apps, although now that people notice they get away with it, the phenomenon also spreads on other systems.
- rixed 5y ago
  IIRC they were explicitly banned from Iraq after that website emerged where soldiers were competing with the most gory and cruel pictures of casualties, and which disapeared when the more manageable abu graib story stole the show (anyone remember that website btw?) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2004-05-23/rumsfeld-bans-camera-phones-in-iraq-report/1980520 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2004-05-23/rumsfeld-bans-camera-...
- greyhair 5y ago
  I know someone that works in federal systems in a secure area, and you cannot take anything into the secure facility other than your physical being and the clothes you are wearing. Not even a wind up Timex watch. They have lockers outside the secure area where you deposit all your personal effects before entering the secured area. Everything goes into the locker. So it is a little odd that deployed troops are allowed to carry connected devices, other than military issued.
k_sze 5y ago
In the case of China, are you sure the offset is due to regulation and not simply some mismatch of geodetic datum?
- gbraad 5y ago
  It has been in existence for years now. Tested with multiple devices. It looks deliberate. Foreign apps are affected. Amap works as expected.
  - k_sze 5y ago
    Refer to my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523751
    - gbraad 5y ago
      Thanks
- zacmps 5y ago
  It's well known, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
  - k_sze 5y ago
    Right, if you look under the "GPS shift problem" section, it does mention that it is due to the difference between the GCJ-02 and WGS-84 datums. So it is not like the regulations are saying "you must shift the coordinates by this amount", which would be stupid. It's just that foreign map publishers have not obtained the license to use the correct datum for Mainland China, so they make do with another one.
    - modeless 5y ago
      The "correct datum" is actually WGS-84 but deliberately obfuscated with a nonlinear transform. Yes, the regulations are explicitly saying "you must shift the coordinates by this amount". Wikipedia: "GCJ-02 (colloquially Mars Coordinates, officially Chinese: 地形图非线性保密处理算法; lit. 'Topographic map non-linear confidentiality algorithm') is a geodetic datum formulated by the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping and based on WGS-84. It uses an obfuscation algorithm which adds apparently random offsets to both the latitude and longitude, with the alleged goal of improving national security."
satya123788 5y ago

perihelions 5y ago

- "Wrong borders in Google Maps have nearly led to international incidents when soldiers ended up on the wrong side of a border" Probably referring to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873285 ("Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps")

lifthrasiir 5y ago

> Actually I am out of date, it looks like the South Korea maps are vector based now. Maybe the law changed. It definitely used to be the case. The South Korean mapping law allows for the domestic service (still subject to slight censorship), but Google didn't want to put any servers other than edge servers to South Korea so as a sort of protest it essentially froze the map for South Korea from November 2016 to December 2021, when Google finally gave up and established a new domestic data center.

lifthrasiir 5y ago
Edit: as joatmon-snoo [1] pointed out, there were no new Google data center as opposed to new GCP regions in SK. I mistook my sources due to my dodgy reading. That said, I now have an even stronger suspicion; see my reply to joatmon-snoo for details. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521352

the-rc 5y ago

The law as I recall it a decade ago was a bit more specific: you could only store and process the data in South Korea. Thus, the whole planet's tiles were rendered in production on Borg, except for SK, whose tiles had to be rendered on a workstation under somebody's desk in the Seoul office. That meant no fancy mapreduces, let alone any rendering on the fly like the Maps API allows (selecting what details to show on the map, their look, etc.). Then, IIRC, the rendered bitmap tiles had to be pushed from the workstation to production. Vector maps, at the time, would have been heresy. Google asked for years to have the laws changed. Korean companies weren't affected, at least until they moved their own rendering to e.g. a cloud provider outside the country.

lifthrasiir 5y ago
> Google asked for years to have the laws changed. The laws Google asked for changes were not limited to the mapping laws but any law to require domestic data centers, which might trigger the domestic tax issue at any moment. Your explanation that Borg couldn't handle domestic clusters doesn't clearly explain that Google eventually established SK data centers and started supporting vector maps anyway---and given that South Korea is not the only country with such requests (e.g. EU), not being able to cope with such laws is just a Google's fault.
- joatmon-snoo 5y ago
  > doesn't clearly explain that Google eventually established SK data centers and started supporting vector maps anyway Google data centers != Google cloud data centers The two are logistically very different and consequently that means the types of workloads they host are also different. The latter is really for GCP usage only (both customers and Google-internal cloud infra necessary to host GCP). Compare https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/ with https://cloud.google.com/about/locations https://cloud.google.com/about/locations.
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    Oh, you are right. I'm aware of the difference, but I didn't realize that there were no new data centers as opposed to new GCP regions due to my dodgy reading. But then there are two possible scenarios: 1. SK vector maps were generated using domestic servers (but no Borg) as SK govt demanded. 2. Google "secretly" exported SK maps and generated vector maps using Borg anyway. And both scenarios are problematic. The former would mean that the GP's claim that vector map generation requires Borg is not true or at least exaggerated (this scenario was what I had in mind when reading my sources, hence no verification). The latter would mean that... well, Google is in direct violation of SK law and not even trying to hide that.

alasdair_ 5y ago

We ended up using Open Street Maps for SK data over Google. It worked very well.

paganel 5y ago

> And militaries all over the globe do use Google Maps extensively ISIS and the other Islamist factions in the Syrian Civil War were also using it extensively when fighting the Syrian Government forces and when planning their suicide attacks, but because Assad was the bad guy no Google action was taken (like restricting GMaps access in the area).

kuraudo 5y ago
When I think of the rank hypocrisy that is used to justify decisions like these, it makes me glad that I don't work on these teams.

vsareto 5y ago

>Wrong borders in Google Maps have nearly led to international incidents when soldiers ended up on the wrong side of a border. Speaking of, if you go click on the Ukraine label right now on Google Maps, you won't get the red outline showing their border. Click on a neighboring country label for a comparison. Belarus: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Belarus/@53.696013,25.7358071,7z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x46da2584e2ad4881:0xa1d181ec8c10!8m2!3d53.2002745!4d28.0467224 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Belarus/@53.696013,25.7358... Ukraine: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ukraine/@48.2486332,26.6945129,6z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x40d1d9c154700e8f:0x1068488f64010!8m2!3d49.0171573!4d31.3865662 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ukraine/@48.2486332,26.694...

baybal2 5y ago
If you go to the code, you will see it being deliberately set by data coming through AJAX. Whomever did this...
- JeremyBanks 5y ago
loveJesus 5y ago
endless1234 5y ago
It's the same in all countries with not-clear borders. Applies to eg Georgia, Serbia/Kosovo and India/Pakistan too.
- np- 5y ago
  Interesting, even Spain seems to not get a red outline (maybe because of Catalonia?)
  - purjolok 5y ago
    It could be, but searching for Catalonia in Google maps explicitly indicates it's a part of Spain. https://www.google.se/maps?q=catalunya https://www.google.se/maps?q=catalunya Another explanation would be the dispute with Morocco about Perejil Island: https://www.google.se/maps?q=isla+perejil https://www.google.se/maps?q=isla+perejil Or even the dispute regarding Gibraltar with Britain.

kkfx 5y ago

Just for curiosity: did you mean that soldiers do have smartphones with them while on duty? If I were an officer I never accept personal proprietary devices with computing and communication abilities, it's simply absurd and crazy imagining soldiers on duty tracked by private companies just because they have a macro-spay in their pocket...

modeless 5y ago
There have been many cases of soldiers being tracked because of phones they were carrying. There was the widely publicized case of Strava revealing where some soldiers were stationed, and recently in Ukraine people noticed that Google Maps was showing "traffic jams" where Russian convoys were massing. Militaries should probably prohibit personal smartphones completely. But I imagine such a prohibition would be a pretty big hit to morale and would also be very difficult to enforce, especially for non-combat areas where soldiers might not see the point.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  We could also look into legislation where we finally make companies implement an easy private mode, where any data sharing is not permitted. Mobile apps behave far worse than desktop apps, although now that people notice they get away with it, the phenomenon also spreads on other systems.
rixed 5y ago
IIRC they were explicitly banned from Iraq after that website emerged where soldiers were competing with the most gory and cruel pictures of casualties, and which disapeared when the more manageable abu graib story stole the show (anyone remember that website btw?) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2004-05-23/rumsfeld-bans-camera-phones-in-iraq-report/1980520 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2004-05-23/rumsfeld-bans-camera-...
greyhair 5y ago
I know someone that works in federal systems in a secure area, and you cannot take anything into the secure facility other than your physical being and the clothes you are wearing. Not even a wind up Timex watch. They have lockers outside the secure area where you deposit all your personal effects before entering the secured area. Everything goes into the locker. So it is a little odd that deployed troops are allowed to carry connected devices, other than military issued.

k_sze 5y ago

In the case of China, are you sure the offset is due to regulation and not simply some mismatch of geodetic datum?

gbraad 5y ago
It has been in existence for years now. Tested with multiple devices. It looks deliberate. Foreign apps are affected. Amap works as expected.
- k_sze 5y ago
  Refer to my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523751
  - gbraad 5y ago
    Thanks
zacmps 5y ago
It's well known, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
- k_sze 5y ago
  Right, if you look under the "GPS shift problem" section, it does mention that it is due to the difference between the GCJ-02 and WGS-84 datums. So it is not like the regulations are saying "you must shift the coordinates by this amount", which would be stupid. It's just that foreign map publishers have not obtained the license to use the correct datum for Mainland China, so they make do with another one.
  - modeless 5y ago
    The "correct datum" is actually WGS-84 but deliberately obfuscated with a nonlinear transform. Yes, the regulations are explicitly saying "you must shift the coordinates by this amount". Wikipedia: "GCJ-02 (colloquially Mars Coordinates, officially Chinese: 地形图非线性保密处理算法; lit. 'Topographic map non-linear confidentiality algorithm') is a geodetic datum formulated by the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping and based on WGS-84. It uses an obfuscation algorithm which adds apparently random offsets to both the latitude and longitude, with the alleged goal of improving national security."

satya123788 5y ago