16 ms·

Null Island is one of the most visited places on Earth, and it doesn’t exist

141 points by pncnmnp 4y ago

b1c837696ba28b 4y ago
Null Island is where you will find Bias Beach, the "/dev/null" of magnetic tape recording. As in, "where is the guide vocal?" "I sent it to Bias Beach to make room for the cowbell."
pella 4y ago
2022: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08383 https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08383 ( old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 ) "I think I discovered a military base in the middle of the ocean' -- Null Island, the most real of fictional places" by: Levente Juhasz, Peter Mooney "This paper explores Null Island, a fictional place located at 0∘ latitude and 0∘ longitude in the WGS84 geographic coordinate system. Null Island is erroneously associated with large amounts of geographic data in a wide variety of location-based services, place databases, social media and web-based maps. While it was originally considered a joke within the geospatial community, this article will demonstrate implications of its existence, both technological and social in nature, promoting Null Island as a fundamental issue of geographic information that requires more widespread awareness. The article summarizes error sources that lead to data being associated with Null Island. We identify four evolutionary phases which help explain how this fictional place evolved and established itself as an entity reaching beyond the geospatial profession to the point of being discovered by the visual arts and the general population. After providing an accurate account of data that can be found at (0, 0), geospatial, technological and social implications of Null Island are discussed. Guidelines to avoid misplacing data to Null Island are provided. Since data will likely continue to appear at this location, our contribution is aimed at both GIScientists and the general population to promote awareness of this error source."
- pella 4y ago
  related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mtz49cqsdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mtz49cqsdY "2022: Null Island - a node of contention in OpenStreetMap"
rupellohn 4y ago
Strava shows some interesting artifacts there: https://www.strava.com/heatmap#13.00/0.00000/0.00000/hot/all https://www.strava.com/heatmap#13.00/0.00000/0.00000/hot/all
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  Makes sense, as in my experience Strava defaults to 0°N 0°E when for whichever reason it cannot get location and it has no recent cached info.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
I recall that the default place for "unknown" in the US was a spot just next to a farm they was raided by the police on a regular basis because this is where their GPS was directing them. They even had a document to show that explained the thing. I think that this point was ultimately moved to the center of a lake.
- yunruse 4y ago
  I remember this! A company, MaxMind, provided GeoIP mapping, but the default unknown for the US was right on someone's property, which lead to severe distress and (quite reasonably) a lawsuit [0]. A horrifying example of peculiar glitches causing real harm :( [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-mapping-lawsuit-kansas-farm-ip-address https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-m...
  - romwell 4y ago
    > A horrifying example of ~peculiar glitches~ incompetent people with monopoly on violence causing real harm :( The people who authorize the raids aren't supposed to blindly rely on tech without being aware of its limitations. A person who doesn't understand that GeoIP doesn't give you coordinates to raid should not be in a position to send raids to such coordinates, and is the one ultimately responsible for this. The fact that there will be no consequences for them is the real issue.
    - treeman79 4y ago
      People are people. First responders are told to go to a place and do a thing. That is what they do. They do this dozens of times a day. Sometimes the computer is stupid.
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        >First responders are told to go to a place and do a thing. By whom? There's still a human blindly trusting what the computer says somewhere in the loop, and we can and should expect them to do due diligence for a matter where lives are on the line, like a raid.
freyfogle 4y ago
Null Island is great of course, but when it comes to non-existent "places" in the ocean I prefer Point Nemo https://en.osm.town/@opencage/110207798392328927 https://en.osm.town/@opencage/110207798392328927
- tialaramex 4y ago
  But Nemo does exist, it's just not actually very intersting since it's notable only in this abstract sense. Similarly when the Americans build a base at the geographic South Pole (Amundsen-Scott base) the Russians built one at the pole of inaccessibility - the place furthest from the sea, which is not interesting in the same way as the actual South Pole, but still a desolate horrible place to be, grossly unsuited to human habitation. Unlike Amundsen-Scott, I believe that Russian base is no longer permanently inhabited 'cos it turns out that's very expensive and the Russians don't have the same budget for such things.
Stevvo 4y ago
Things have a habit of showing up at the world origin in video games when something goes wrong. e.g. In older GTA games there was usually a big pile of cars under the map at 0,0,0. In MSFS multiplayer, planes are showing up at Null Island all the time, because the game teleports you there often when using the developer-mode.
- shawnz 4y ago
  By causing an explosion at 0,0,0 in Ocarina of Time you can kill all of the unloaded skulltulas on the map: https://youtu.be/aMlXzCYKXDk https://youtu.be/aMlXzCYKXDk
- qtzaz 4y ago
  Doom: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/(0,0)_respawning_bug https://doomwiki.org/wiki/(0,0)_respawning_bug
flint 4y ago
Colonel Bleep - and it is called Zero Zero Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Bleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Bleep
tgflynn 4y ago
This makes no sense to me. Generally speaking an application should return an error message or code when something goes wrong, not a potentially valid piece of data. That an entire industry would adopt this kind of workaround for poor software engineering is astonishing.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  The problem comes from databases. Sometimes you simply have no source for the data. (Say, your phone with GPS turned off and now towers around.)
  - tgflynn 4y ago
    That's what NULL (or it's various equivalents) is for.
- lmc 4y ago
  Welcome to GIS :D Seriously, it's a domain with huge under-the-surface complexity (no pun intended)[1], and most of the early efforts were spent in dealing with the maths and science, rather than software engineering. Things are getting better though. [1] here is a good jumping off point (imagine the technical debt this might lead to): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_reference_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_reference_system
- secretsatan 4y ago
  I’m guilty of sending results to null island for various reasons and it can be confusing, but to give the user simply an error would be worse, as they have nothing rather than something. If for some reason we can’t get a geolocation, for various reasons, even a user simply denying access to gps, we can still deliver meaningful results as while the data is improperly located, it still has meaningful coordinates relative to itself and can be transformed later.
  - tgflynn 4y ago
    If you can handle an error and still return meaningful data that's fine, but returning the coordinates 0,0 to the user because GPS isn't working is far worse than giving them an error message. At that point you're essentially lying to them.
tialaramex 4y ago
Even without Tony Hoare's Billion Dollar Mistake, this sort of nonsense is too easy. Do not define types which unnecessarily have a "default" value when you know there is no meaningful default for the intended type. This happens way too much for numeric values. "Not applicable" or "None" aren't the same thing as zero, but it is seen for other types too.
- rob74 4y ago
  Yes, all the persons in various databases that are born on January 1st 1900 (or 1970) because their birth date is unknown will agree...
  - rmilk 4y ago
    Or adding a middle name of “A” because some databases can’t handle that a person might not have a middle name or middle initial.
    - xenophonf 4y ago
      I have a fairly sophisticated user registration system that can't handle people without family names. We had to jump through some hoops to be able to enroll people who just have given names.
      - blackshaw 4y ago
        Must have been tough if you rolled out this system in Indonesia.
  - fencepost 4y ago
    I'm still irritated about whatever bit or bits of sloppy coding ended up assigning 1/1/1970 as a birthdate for all contacts in my Google account that didn't have a birthdate specified. Combined with birthday notifications and more annoying alerts in older versions of Android or in the browser, it made for annoying New Years Day mornings with several hundred alerts.
  - 4y ago
rhplus 4y ago
Curiously, Google Maps satellite view does show underwater prominences at 0E 0N that are distinctly darker and more detailed than those around it. Perhaps at one point in history there really was an island there. https://maps.app.goo.gl/tcBMs8AviWhBdYP69 https://maps.app.goo.gl/tcBMs8AviWhBdYP69
- Agentlien 4y ago
  Maybe it sank due to the weight of all the concurrent visitors?
- petsfed 4y ago
  Looking at the the google earth projection, I wonder if that too is just an artifact of the origin. That is, it has features that seem to correspond with the latitude and longitude axes. Not sure if that's just apophenia at work, or if they're real. Anybody with access to sonar maps of the region able to report?
- HPsquared 4y ago
  It's all the Amazon packages that were sent there, slowly piling up on the seabed.
bloak 4y ago
Perhaps a good API would return some coordinates plus a distance, to give an idea of the accuracy, and if the most likely location is on private property but there is a public place close to the most likely location within the probable region then return the nearest public place instead of the most likely location so as to avoid problems when incompetent users of the API inevitably ignore the accuracy number and send armed police to the given coordinates. In that case (South Pole, 1e6 km) or (Point Nemo, 1e6 km) would be a reasonable response when you have no idea of the location, and if some armed police freeze to death or drown, then diddums!
addaon 4y ago
Null Island is also the place where so many self-driving cars, UAVs, and navigation systems achieve their best possible performance. I've run across multiple products that represent latitude and longitude as floats internally. At double precision, this is suitable for most purposes... but it does mean that positional precision is maximized in and around Null Island, and slowly decays as you move away. I do wish more folks would represent latitude and longitude as binary angular measure, or other sane fixed point representation.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Yeah, I've "been there". Something glitched in the flight mapping system, it showed us coming from there.
  - addaon 4y ago
    Using zero as a default (the main topic of this article) is one thing... I'm pointing out that floating point is able to represent points with greater density near Null Island than it is in, say, Alaska, just due to the spacing between pronounceable coordinates.
    - sk0g 4y ago
      Games also have this issue, with some creative solutions. Paraphrasing a GDC talk, in Outer Wilds space travel would not work properly -- in that the player character would move around a dynamic solar system with a pivot point and planets moving about. Instead they made the player the world origin (0, 0, 0), and the player 'moving' actually moved the world around instead, thus moving objects were tracked more accurately the closer they are to you!
NelsonMinar 4y ago
There's a whole Null Archipelago that spans the globe: https://smathermather.com/2014/09/10/null-archipelago-null-islands-for-all-coordinate-reference-systems/ https://smathermather.com/2014/09/10/null-archipelago-null-i...
zitterbewegung 4y ago
Apple defined this as the middle of nowhere in Classic Mac OS I believe.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  That's a different co-ordinate. It's the point on the ocean surface that is farthest from any land. Found a MacOS System 7 pic. Seems to be at 56 S, 2 W. [0] https://www.journaldulapin.com/2017/02/02/easter-egg-nulle-part/ https://www.journaldulapin.com/2017/02/02/easter-egg-nulle-p...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
atomicbeanie 4y ago
Any dumbing down of end-to-end encryption will hand Russia and China nuclear powered hacking tools for our economy, infrastructure and digital integrity.
worldsayshi 4y ago
Seems like the perfect place to build an artificial Island for your anarchist hacker nation if you want to bring a sci-fi novel to life.
SoftTalker 4y ago
I thought that is where little Bobby Tables lived?
- stolenmerch 4y ago
  It is, he works at "THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD"
  - Smaug123 4y ago
    For those who don't know, this is an actual thing: a UK company had a name which Companies House listed as "[NAME AVAILABLE ON REQUEST FROM COMPANIES HOUSE]" until the company changed name to "THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD" before finally dissolving last month. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12956509 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
Waterluvian 4y ago
Let’s create a mess by putting something important there.
mackman 4y ago
Go look for it on the maps Facebook renders for a fun Easter egg. https://imgur.io/a/zjzZjhQ https://imgur.io/a/zjzZjhQ I wonder if anyone will recognize it.
duck 4y ago
Via this How can I visit 'Null Island'? thread [0] I discovered the Confluence project [1] which seems to be web 1.0 at its best. 0: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/68027/how-can-i-visit-null-island https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/68027/how-can-i-v... 1: https://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=4040 https://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=4040
jvanderbot 4y ago
We used to get regular support calls from concerned test operators in military uniforms saying something like "the system is heading southeast instead of the direction I sent it". A bunch of zeros in the command was always the cause. It was our version of "did you try turning it off and on again?".
ggm 4y ago
One of the richest postcodes in Britain exists because office workers marked uncoded addresses with a default and it wound up appearing in stats for GDP/income despite being a barren wasteland in reality.
dang 4y ago
Related. Others? Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592960 - April 2023 (1 comment) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34860299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34860299 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 - April 2022 (37 comments) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 - Dec 2019 (56 comments) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552176 - Nov 2019 (1 comment) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329101 - March 2019 (1 comment) If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 - July 2016 (54 comments) The Republic of NULL Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 - May 2016 (15 comments) The Geographical Oddity of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 - April 2016 (14 comments) The Republic of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952593 - Jan 2016 (2 comments) A Brief History of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 - Jan 2016 (7 comments)
p1mrx 4y ago
How often do ships actually go there due to navigational error? Somebody should leave a buoy with cameras or something. Edit: The Gulf of Guinea region has a decent amount of ship traffic, so a ship would have to stop at 0,0 and change direction to count as a navigational error, or a Null tourist.

141 points by pncnmnp 4y ago

Null Island is where you will find Bias Beach, the "/dev/null" of magnetic tape recording. As in, "where is the guide vocal?" "I sent it to Bias Beach to make room for the cowbell."

pella 4y ago

2022: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08383 https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08383 ( old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 ) "I think I discovered a military base in the middle of the ocean' -- Null Island, the most real of fictional places" by: Levente Juhasz, Peter Mooney "This paper explores Null Island, a fictional place located at 0∘ latitude and 0∘ longitude in the WGS84 geographic coordinate system. Null Island is erroneously associated with large amounts of geographic data in a wide variety of location-based services, place databases, social media and web-based maps. While it was originally considered a joke within the geospatial community, this article will demonstrate implications of its existence, both technological and social in nature, promoting Null Island as a fundamental issue of geographic information that requires more widespread awareness. The article summarizes error sources that lead to data being associated with Null Island. We identify four evolutionary phases which help explain how this fictional place evolved and established itself as an entity reaching beyond the geospatial profession to the point of being discovered by the visual arts and the general population. After providing an accurate account of data that can be found at (0, 0), geospatial, technological and social implications of Null Island are discussed. Guidelines to avoid misplacing data to Null Island are provided. Since data will likely continue to appear at this location, our contribution is aimed at both GIScientists and the general population to promote awareness of this error source."

pella 4y ago
related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mtz49cqsdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mtz49cqsdY "2022: Null Island - a node of contention in OpenStreetMap"

rupellohn 4y ago

Strava shows some interesting artifacts there: https://www.strava.com/heatmap#13.00/0.00000/0.00000/hot/all https://www.strava.com/heatmap#13.00/0.00000/0.00000/hot/all

Mordisquitos 4y ago
Makes sense, as in my experience Strava defaults to 0°N 0°E when for whichever reason it cannot get location and it has no recent cached info.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

I recall that the default place for "unknown" in the US was a spot just next to a farm they was raided by the police on a regular basis because this is where their GPS was directing them. They even had a document to show that explained the thing. I think that this point was ultimately moved to the center of a lake.

yunruse 4y ago
I remember this! A company, MaxMind, provided GeoIP mapping, but the default unknown for the US was right on someone's property, which lead to severe distress and (quite reasonably) a lawsuit [0]. A horrifying example of peculiar glitches causing real harm :( [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-mapping-lawsuit-kansas-farm-ip-address https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-m...
- romwell 4y ago
  > A horrifying example of ~peculiar glitches~ incompetent people with monopoly on violence causing real harm :( The people who authorize the raids aren't supposed to blindly rely on tech without being aware of its limitations. A person who doesn't understand that GeoIP doesn't give you coordinates to raid should not be in a position to send raids to such coordinates, and is the one ultimately responsible for this. The fact that there will be no consequences for them is the real issue.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    People are people. First responders are told to go to a place and do a thing. That is what they do. They do this dozens of times a day. Sometimes the computer is stupid.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      >First responders are told to go to a place and do a thing. By whom? There's still a human blindly trusting what the computer says somewhere in the loop, and we can and should expect them to do due diligence for a matter where lives are on the line, like a raid.

freyfogle 4y ago

Null Island is great of course, but when it comes to non-existent "places" in the ocean I prefer Point Nemo https://en.osm.town/@opencage/110207798392328927 https://en.osm.town/@opencage/110207798392328927

tialaramex 4y ago
But Nemo does exist, it's just not actually very intersting since it's notable only in this abstract sense. Similarly when the Americans build a base at the geographic South Pole (Amundsen-Scott base) the Russians built one at the pole of inaccessibility - the place furthest from the sea, which is not interesting in the same way as the actual South Pole, but still a desolate horrible place to be, grossly unsuited to human habitation. Unlike Amundsen-Scott, I believe that Russian base is no longer permanently inhabited 'cos it turns out that's very expensive and the Russians don't have the same budget for such things.

Stevvo 4y ago

Things have a habit of showing up at the world origin in video games when something goes wrong. e.g. In older GTA games there was usually a big pile of cars under the map at 0,0,0. In MSFS multiplayer, planes are showing up at Null Island all the time, because the game teleports you there often when using the developer-mode.

shawnz 4y ago
By causing an explosion at 0,0,0 in Ocarina of Time you can kill all of the unloaded skulltulas on the map: https://youtu.be/aMlXzCYKXDk https://youtu.be/aMlXzCYKXDk
qtzaz 4y ago
Doom: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/(0,0)_respawning_bug https://doomwiki.org/wiki/(0,0)_respawning_bug

flint 4y ago

Colonel Bleep - and it is called Zero Zero Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Bleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Bleep

tgflynn 4y ago

This makes no sense to me. Generally speaking an application should return an error message or code when something goes wrong, not a potentially valid piece of data. That an entire industry would adopt this kind of workaround for poor software engineering is astonishing.

LorenPechtel 4y ago
The problem comes from databases. Sometimes you simply have no source for the data. (Say, your phone with GPS turned off and now towers around.)
- tgflynn 4y ago
  That's what NULL (or it's various equivalents) is for.
lmc 4y ago
Welcome to GIS :D Seriously, it's a domain with huge under-the-surface complexity (no pun intended)[1], and most of the early efforts were spent in dealing with the maths and science, rather than software engineering. Things are getting better though. [1] here is a good jumping off point (imagine the technical debt this might lead to): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_reference_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_reference_system
secretsatan 4y ago
I’m guilty of sending results to null island for various reasons and it can be confusing, but to give the user simply an error would be worse, as they have nothing rather than something. If for some reason we can’t get a geolocation, for various reasons, even a user simply denying access to gps, we can still deliver meaningful results as while the data is improperly located, it still has meaningful coordinates relative to itself and can be transformed later.
- tgflynn 4y ago
  If you can handle an error and still return meaningful data that's fine, but returning the coordinates 0,0 to the user because GPS isn't working is far worse than giving them an error message. At that point you're essentially lying to them.

tialaramex 4y ago

Even without Tony Hoare's Billion Dollar Mistake, this sort of nonsense is too easy. Do not define types which unnecessarily have a "default" value when you know there is no meaningful default for the intended type. This happens way too much for numeric values. "Not applicable" or "None" aren't the same thing as zero, but it is seen for other types too.

rob74 4y ago
Yes, all the persons in various databases that are born on January 1st 1900 (or 1970) because their birth date is unknown will agree...
- rmilk 4y ago
  Or adding a middle name of “A” because some databases can’t handle that a person might not have a middle name or middle initial.
  - xenophonf 4y ago
    I have a fairly sophisticated user registration system that can't handle people without family names. We had to jump through some hoops to be able to enroll people who just have given names.
    - blackshaw 4y ago
      Must have been tough if you rolled out this system in Indonesia.
- fencepost 4y ago
  I'm still irritated about whatever bit or bits of sloppy coding ended up assigning 1/1/1970 as a birthdate for all contacts in my Google account that didn't have a birthdate specified. Combined with birthday notifications and more annoying alerts in older versions of Android or in the browser, it made for annoying New Years Day mornings with several hundred alerts.
- 4y ago

rhplus 4y ago

Curiously, Google Maps satellite view does show underwater prominences at 0E 0N that are distinctly darker and more detailed than those around it. Perhaps at one point in history there really was an island there. https://maps.app.goo.gl/tcBMs8AviWhBdYP69 https://maps.app.goo.gl/tcBMs8AviWhBdYP69

Agentlien 4y ago
Maybe it sank due to the weight of all the concurrent visitors?
petsfed 4y ago
Looking at the the google earth projection, I wonder if that too is just an artifact of the origin. That is, it has features that seem to correspond with the latitude and longitude axes. Not sure if that's just apophenia at work, or if they're real. Anybody with access to sonar maps of the region able to report?
HPsquared 4y ago
It's all the Amazon packages that were sent there, slowly piling up on the seabed.

bloak 4y ago

Perhaps a good API would return some coordinates plus a distance, to give an idea of the accuracy, and if the most likely location is on private property but there is a public place close to the most likely location within the probable region then return the nearest public place instead of the most likely location so as to avoid problems when incompetent users of the API inevitably ignore the accuracy number and send armed police to the given coordinates. In that case (South Pole, 1e6 km) or (Point Nemo, 1e6 km) would be a reasonable response when you have no idea of the location, and if some armed police freeze to death or drown, then diddums!

addaon 4y ago

Null Island is also the place where so many self-driving cars, UAVs, and navigation systems achieve their best possible performance. I've run across multiple products that represent latitude and longitude as floats internally. At double precision, this is suitable for most purposes... but it does mean that positional precision is maximized in and around Null Island, and slowly decays as you move away. I do wish more folks would represent latitude and longitude as binary angular measure, or other sane fixed point representation.

LorenPechtel 4y ago
Yeah, I've "been there". Something glitched in the flight mapping system, it showed us coming from there.
- addaon 4y ago
  Using zero as a default (the main topic of this article) is one thing... I'm pointing out that floating point is able to represent points with greater density near Null Island than it is in, say, Alaska, just due to the spacing between pronounceable coordinates.
  - sk0g 4y ago
    Games also have this issue, with some creative solutions. Paraphrasing a GDC talk, in Outer Wilds space travel would not work properly -- in that the player character would move around a dynamic solar system with a pivot point and planets moving about. Instead they made the player the world origin (0, 0, 0), and the player 'moving' actually moved the world around instead, thus moving objects were tracked more accurately the closer they are to you!

NelsonMinar 4y ago

There's a whole Null Archipelago that spans the globe: https://smathermather.com/2014/09/10/null-archipelago-null-islands-for-all-coordinate-reference-systems/ https://smathermather.com/2014/09/10/null-archipelago-null-i...

zitterbewegung 4y ago

Apple defined this as the middle of nowhere in Classic Mac OS I believe.

karmakaze 4y ago
That's a different co-ordinate. It's the point on the ocean surface that is farthest from any land. Found a MacOS System 7 pic. Seems to be at 56 S, 2 W. [0] https://www.journaldulapin.com/2017/02/02/easter-egg-nulle-part/ https://www.journaldulapin.com/2017/02/02/easter-egg-nulle-p...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

atomicbeanie 4y ago

Any dumbing down of end-to-end encryption will hand Russia and China nuclear powered hacking tools for our economy, infrastructure and digital integrity.

worldsayshi 4y ago

Seems like the perfect place to build an artificial Island for your anarchist hacker nation if you want to bring a sci-fi novel to life.

SoftTalker 4y ago

I thought that is where little Bobby Tables lived?

stolenmerch 4y ago
It is, he works at "THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD"
- Smaug123 4y ago
  For those who don't know, this is an actual thing: a UK company had a name which Companies House listed as "[NAME AVAILABLE ON REQUEST FROM COMPANIES HOUSE]" until the company changed name to "THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD" before finally dissolving last month. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12956509 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Waterluvian 4y ago

Let’s create a mess by putting something important there.

mackman 4y ago

Go look for it on the maps Facebook renders for a fun Easter egg. https://imgur.io/a/zjzZjhQ https://imgur.io/a/zjzZjhQ I wonder if anyone will recognize it.

duck 4y ago

Via this How can I visit 'Null Island'? thread [0] I discovered the Confluence project [1] which seems to be web 1.0 at its best. 0: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/68027/how-can-i-visit-null-island https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/68027/how-can-i-v... 1: https://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=4040 https://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=4040

jvanderbot 4y ago

We used to get regular support calls from concerned test operators in military uniforms saying something like "the system is heading southeast instead of the direction I sent it". A bunch of zeros in the command was always the cause. It was our version of "did you try turning it off and on again?".

ggm 4y ago

One of the richest postcodes in Britain exists because office workers marked uncoded addresses with a default and it wound up appearing in stats for GDP/income despite being a barren wasteland in reality.

dang 4y ago

Related. Others? Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592960 - April 2023 (1 comment) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34860299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34860299 - Feb 2023 (1 comment) Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 - April 2022 (37 comments) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 - Dec 2019 (56 comments) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552176 - Nov 2019 (1 comment) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329101 - March 2019 (1 comment) If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 - July 2016 (54 comments) The Republic of NULL Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 - May 2016 (15 comments) The Geographical Oddity of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 - April 2016 (14 comments) The Republic of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952593 - Jan 2016 (2 comments) A Brief History of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 - Jan 2016 (7 comments)

p1mrx 4y ago

How often do ships actually go there due to navigational error? Somebody should leave a buoy with cameras or something. Edit: The Gulf of Guinea region has a decent amount of ship traffic, so a ship would have to stop at 0,0 and change direction to count as a navigational error, or a Null tourist.