40 ms·

Every map of China is wrong

482 points by bschne 2y ago

TrulyBright 2y ago
South Korea does it too. It forbids Google from access to its official map. Only local enterprises are licensed to get it. Precisely, the government bans the export of geographical data abroad. Check out the 243rd page of a US government report on trade barrier: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2024%20NTE%20Report_1.pdf https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2024%20NTE%20Report_1.p...
- Intralexical 2y ago
  The consequences for them seem a bit more urgent, though, given Seoul lying in artillery range of the DMZ.
  - javajosh 2y ago
    Yes, I'm sure obfuscating Google Street maps will prevent DPR artillery from accurately striking targets in Seoul.
    - Intralexical 2y ago
      Given some of the genius contraptions and tactics that the Russian Army has been caught using in Ukraine, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually did. Also, infosec isn't binary. Obfuscating Google Maps might not prevent the DPRK from doing terrible things to Seoul, but not obfuscating it would probably make it easier for them to do so.
      - solarkraft 2y ago
        > some of the genius contraptions and tactics that the Russian Army has been caught using in Ukraine This may have gone past me (I mostly remember the highly non-genius tactics), do you have some examples?
        gembeMx 2y ago
        I’m sure the American tax payers are sending in billions of dollars because Russia is highly non genius lol. Get your head out your ass
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        In Russia several hundreds of thousands of casualties is genius.
        jampekka 2y ago
        There doesn't seem to be any reliable casualty numbers from the war. It's entirely possible there are more Ukrainan than Russian casualties. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-losses-casualties-tanks-death-toll-anniversary-1864726 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-losses-casualties-ta...
        gembeMx 2y ago
        Exactly, Russia has been “dying” for years now but there’s only one country crying in the media.
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        Russia doesn't have any media to cry in, so there's that.
        gembeMx 2y ago
        [dead]
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        I was thinking of the combined casualties. It's not something to celebrate to hurt so many people for the benefit of the thieves in the Kremlin.
    - duxup 2y ago
      Autocratic governments can be surprisingly inefficient / bad at things.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      On one hand, I’m quite sure South Korea’s government has put a whole lot more thought into this than we have, and they decided to obfuscate the maps so… who knows, I guess they decided it helps. On the other hand, given that NK is using, what, WW2 vintage artillery, I can’t see how. They are probably aiming “south” with magnitude “lots,” right? What good is a 500 meter offset, or whatever, going to do when they are just aiming at the city in general.
      - lainga 2y ago
        On the third hand, if you've ever had to interact with a Korean bank over the internet (or read any of the laws that constrain this interaction), then yes, > South Korea’s government has put a whole lot more thought into this than we have in approximately 1998. and then never again. if it's not broken (for the chaebols), well...
- lmz 2y ago
  Note the bias against China in the comments here vs South Korea which is effectively doing the same thing.
  - throwawayqqq11 2y ago
    Note the topic is about china and any restriction of "public" data will gather negative comments. The only bias i am seeing is yours.
    - lmz 2y ago
      It's biased in the sense that this seems to be common practice in the region and yet China is singled out while darling US ally South Korea which does comparable things is excused (e.g. see sibling comments excusing it because of the conflict with NK).
  - himinlomax 2y ago
    South Korea is currently at war with a hostile oppressive totalitarian neighbour. China is at war with its people.
    - lmz 2y ago
      Doesn't Taiwan still claim the mainland as its own, at least in theory? Also there are border conflicts with e.g. India.
      - camgunz 2y ago
        This is a false equivalence
      - himinlomax 2y ago
        Taiwan only continues to claim it because rescinding the claim would be seen as "separatist" and thus a casus belli for the CCP to end the status quo.
    - ii41 2y ago
- indrora 2y ago
  The functional implications of this are a little different. Google, Bing, and others specifically have bitmap maps that are served out of Korea for this purpose. You can see it in Bing since the maps for Bing Maps use the classic Microsoft ~~ditches and diversions~~ Streets and Trips style maps. In Google, there’s a few spots in Japan that are rendered in Korea at some zoom levels. There’s been a lot of discussion on how to improve OSM in SK but it’s often through analog holes that are plausibly illegitimate. I talked about it previously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555567
- jajko 2y ago
  I saw the same in remote regions of eastern India (day dreaming about visiting them). Streets where river flows, interest point in the middle of wide river bed. Not far from china per se, but definitely a different country.
- fdr 2y ago
  My understanding is it forbids the hosting of the government collected (and curated, e.g. with regard to military bases) data outside the country, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat.... See also, https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/openstreetmap-in-korea https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/openstreetmap-in-korea, which relates the situation the same way. It doesn't seem like anyone is hassled for editing openstreetmap from here (and it is quite voluminous), so long as it is not a derivative work of the public surveys. There is an alternative military-base removed tileset variant, but I believe this is to aid korean GIS users who may not want their application to show sensitive installations, which can generate controversy.
cbeach 2y ago
Youtuber Johnny Harris released a great video covering China's changing maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpQQOQ__1ok&ab_channel=JohnnyHarris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpQQOQ__1ok&ab_channel=Johnn... It's a detailed analysis of China's 2023 map, which many countries believe oversteps China's boundaries.
- resolutebat 2y ago
  That's about border claims, which is a completely separate issue to what the article is talking about.
PLenz 2y ago
Maps are models. All models are wrong. Some are useful.
- eru 2y ago
  You might have a more interesting take after reading the article?
Waterluvian 2y ago
Super minor nit: WGS stands for World Geodetic System.
- opello 2y ago
  And (among minor nits) mentions of WGS-02 seem to be typos for GCJ-02.
dclowd9901 2y ago
Man the author did not have to resort to such a click baity title to get people to read. “Why Google Maps can’t map China” would have been accurate and not droll. I just opened Apple Maps and it looks perfectly fine. Tested about 10 areas and even rural areas and there was no issue. Stopped reading immediately after. I have no interest in supporting this crap.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- xk3 2y ago
  > there was no issue You should compare with https://m.amap.com/ https://m.amap.com/
  - boxed 2y ago
    That seems irrelevant. The issue in the article is the mismatch between satellite data and coordinates of points and features. There doesn't seem to be such a mismatch on openstreetmap or apple maps (presumably because apple maps is based on openstreetmap to a large degree). You just don't have to play Chinas game.
- refactor_master 2y ago
  I tried using Apple Maps in China last year, and while it “looks” just fine, it definitely isn’t. In Guangzhou everything was off by 50-500 meters until it sometimes wasn’t. Completely unreliable compared to a Chinese solution.
motoboi 2y ago
Anyone does know if that affects US capabilities do drop a bomb on relevant targets or it's just a comercial capability, like doordash not being able to route streets without a local partner?
- xk3 2y ago
  It has no military capability impact. The situation is similar to South Korea's map.
- adastra22 2y ago
  The US military does not rely on its enemy's maps for obvious reasons.
keepamovin 2y ago
Here’s where it gets interesting — GCJ-02 is based on WGS-84, but with a deliberate obfuscation algorithm applied to it. The effect of this is that there are random offsets added to both latitude and longitude, ranging from as little as 50m to as much as 500m. Holy shit. I can't believe they created an adversarial mapping standard. That is insane. It really paints a picture of their worldview I think. The oppressed "middle kingdom" under siege. Wow, what it must be like to have that view that everyone else is against you, and you have to bulwark yourself at every opportunity. Yet somehow, balance that with the "historical trend of opening up". It's a scary attitude, and must be scary to try to implement it. I never saw China like that before. This 1 article changes my mind about a few things. Even the map math is preparing for war! I kind of feel sorry for them. It's been like 70-some years but their war is not complete. And scary for the world: I hope they don't have to seek a cathartic resolution of whatever internal conflict they have by projecting it externally. I don't see them like that, but details like this add support to that idea, I think. I had no idea maps were like this before today.... :( Tho reading some other comments, it seems it's not so hard to undo this...maybe this is not really about war or such attitude tho...but then why? Why add that specialness to make it that much harder for people ? That in itself could speak volumes. It's a map, it's kind of representative of a national idea. How can you be for "opening up" but you make your maps different to everybody itself, and not necessarily better! Hahaha :) Maybe I'm just misunderstanding it.. haha :)
- ronsor 2y ago
  The standard has been reverse engineered before: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform I honestly don't know why companies simply don't implement it. It's not really "secret" -- or if it is, it's an "open secret".
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    Oh, I thought it was less like a Playstation DRM and more like something that would be harder to do. Tho I guess that makes sense. Probably companies don't want to run afoul of Chinese law which is fair.
- 2y ago
int0x29 2y ago
The US having a dedicated intelligence agency for maps seems to defeat most of the military value of this system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligence_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...
- deanresin 2y ago
  Pretty insane for the writer or even China/Russia to believe the US, with all of its resources, wouldn't be able to make their own accurate maps.
  - Laremere 2y ago
    Russia had accurate maps of the UK back in the cold war, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
    - SeanLuke 2y ago
      Not just accurate: far and away the most accurate.
      - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
        It’s nice that USSR dedicated more money to this than UK government did
        qingcharles 2y ago
        Are the USSR ones technically copyright-free? Because the UK ones are Crown Copyright IIRC and can't be used by the public without fees.
  - _xnmw 2y ago
    Pretty insane for you to believe that a foreign country from afar could produce mapping data with the same degree of accuracy, detail and realtime freshness as a local provider on the ground. Of course there's military value in protecting mapping data from foreign adversaries, at the very least it adds a a time delay and some uncertainty to the data. It also probably makes it harder for some unsophisticated terrorist to strap a consumer GPS to a stock drone and accurately hit a target.
hinkley 2y ago
I remember a couple of years ago someone was claiming the Three Gorges Dam was buckling and about to fail, based on the satellite views showing the top of the dam weaving back and forth. Everyone sane thought it was some interpolation bug from Google trying and failing to tile the pictures properly, but maybe this is the reason why.
- alleycat5000 2y ago
  It's because when you orthorectify an aerial image, you cast rays from the earth's surface to the camera, so if your model of the earth's surface is off (like when there's a giant man made structure) your mapping also gets wonky.
- exmadscientist 2y ago
  It probably doesn't help that reliable sources tell me that the Three Gorges Dam is, in fact, absolutely goddamn crooked and janky. One reason they don't allow close photography of it is simply that it looks so very bad. Grand Coulee Dam, on the other hand, despite being decades older? It's dead-on level.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - labster 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - defrost 2y ago
        Unsubstantiated myth. Unlike, say, Sedlec Ossuary.
      - hinkley 2y ago
        The Transcontinental Railroad was absolutely built on Chinese and Irish blood. But Coulee was a New Deal project. One of Roosevelt’s public works to help with recovery from the Great Depression.
lenerdenator 2y ago
> This ultimately means that data reported in GSJ-02 needs to be moderated in some way to account for inaccuracy, and individuals pursuing work in China will be penalised. I don’t have a solution for this, I'm fairly certain that the NSA does.
cat_plus_plus 2y ago
I am not a fan of China, but not wanting coordinates of strategic targets in your country to be precisely known doesn't seem crazy. Other restrictions they have like not being able to access the Internet, or being put in reeducation camps, or not having a say in how your government is run would affect me badly. But if navigation in my car worked fine, would I care if topography is a bit distorted? During the pandemic, I saw US federal, state and local government restrict my freedom in much more drastic ways, even after I was already vaccinated. I know it was even worse in China, but I would still focus on these other things and rather than not having precise coordinates of a military base.
- ammo1662 2y ago
  Topography in the navigation app will not be distorted for Amap or Baidu map. They looks correct. Maybe people just don't know how important a navigation app is. With enough usage data, you can know the traffic status of any area. Amap and Baidu already use these data to provide the countdown of traffic light. It has 90% accuracy. You can also have a deep understanding of the economic status, or find out some hidden buildings. So for an algorithm which is already reverse engineered many years ago, it cannot protect anything. It is just a policy to stop foreign companies to join this game. As for the reason, "national security", "unacceptable risk".
  - gravescale 2y ago
    > Amap and Baidu already use these data to provide the countdown of traffic light It's often off by whole second or two. Disaster, I know! It'll also tell if it can you the ideal speed to drive to hit the next green light and join a "green wave".
    - brnt 2y ago
      I wish TomTom would get in on that.
      - gravescale 2y ago
greatgib 2y ago
Would a GPS navigation app still work when working with gcj-02 data? Regarding the fact that every street and landmark will be distorted . Something like the itinerary of Google map for a trip?
deanresin 2y ago
This article is shameless weak justification for Russian/China purposely breaking their maps.
Intralexical 2y ago
The CCP newspaper report on this is… Interesting: > Faced with such a "hard nut", Li Chengming strengthened his confidence: "In the war years, Communists were not afraid of death. This difficulty is nothing! We must do it! And we must do it beautifully!" Under the guidance of veteran experts, he led his team to fight for a thousand years. Over many days and nights, a set of nonlinear confidentiality processing technology for topographic maps suitable for national series of scales was developed. https://archive.ph/20110804185923/http://cxzy.people.com.cn/GB/196034/14908095.html#selection-4137.2-4137.449 https://archive.ph/20110804185923/http://cxzy.people.com.cn/...
- stonekyx 2y ago
  Lol, typical Chinese propaganda speech I'd say. But just to be fair, > he led his team to fight for a thousand years The page you linked to actually said "more than a thousand days and nights", not years.
- trustno2 2y ago
  That's just hilarious honestly
  - Intralexical 2y ago
    Ikr? It reads like a parody of itself. You have to wonder whether anybody actually takes this seriously— The readers? Even the people writing it?
novolunt 2y ago
[dead]
AtNightWeCode 2y ago
Interesting. It is illegal in some western countries too to create your own maps. Another thing with maps is that online services have different maps depending on what country you access from.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  Can you give an example of a western country that restricts map creation?
  - AtNightWeCode 2y ago
    Some parts of Europe. But now when I looked it up the law was actually changed like 10 years ago. Damn I'm old.
captainmuon 2y ago
Does anybody know why, when you use Google Maps in China, your GPS location matches the map and not the satellite image? I would assume the maps being in GJC-02 and the satellite images being in some other global coordinate system. So your position should line up with the imagery, not with the map. Does the GPS chip report modified coordinates when it detects it is in china? Or does Google do this itself in the software stack? Another thing I don't understand is: OK, you are required to use GJC-02 for map data in China, and you are not allowed to convert to WGS-84. But then don't. You can directly project the map from GJC-02 to screen pixels, and from WGS-84 to screen pixels, and stuff would line up. And when you tap a point on the screen, you can report the legally mandated GJC-02 coordinates.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Yes, they apply the mandatory conversion and have gotten a license for the software to do this from the Chinese authorities. This wikipedia article has some more details on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
  - Slartie 2y ago
    I've been to Shanghai and Beijing in 2010 or so, and I vividly remember that my iPhone 3G (that I jailbroke and unlocked to be able to use local Chinese SIMs, oh, those were the times...) didn't work at all for the purpose of getting around, because Google Maps GPS locations didn't match up with the map. However, there was some obscure third-party mapping software available in the app store (I think it was even the official one, not Cydia) which basically showed a Google Maps view and drew the GPS dot onto it by itself, applying the conversion first and thus fixing the display problem. So at least back then Google Maps apparently didn't yet convert the GPS coordinates to the weird obfuscated Chinese system. But it was a big nuisance and took me a while to figure out. For the first days I thought my jailbreaking activity would have broken the GPS chip or something.
throwaway4good 2y ago
Here is an open source implementation that converts from WGS84 to GJC2: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/src/com/lbt05/EvilTransform/WGSPointer.java https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/src/com/lbt05/EvilTransform/TransformUtil.java https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... And converting the other way by a kind of binary search, I guess using a flaw in the obfuscation: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/src/com/lbt05/EvilTransform/GCJPointer.java https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... All seems very silly by today standards and I would think it hardly made sense back in 2002 when this was apparently devised.
- _xnmw 2y ago
  Maybe GJC2 can be modified on the fly, by changing offset parameters? So in a hypothetical war situation, only providers obtaining data in realtime from "authorized" sources would have access to accurate targeting information.
  - throwaway4good 2y ago
    Not unless you want to change all the map data.
  - TechnicalVault 2y ago
    Nah, because the thing is the Russian and US militaries will have their own maps of China anyway. There's a reason the UK's mapping agency retains the historic name of the Ordinance Survey, maps has always been a military thing and they've always retained surveyors.
    - jhbadger 2y ago
      This reminds me of a fascinating book titled "The Red Atlas" by John Davies and Alexander Kent which is about the very detailed maps of Western cities the Soviet Union created during the Cold War.
- 2y ago
ipnon 2y ago
Medium is not the best place to host your writing. I didn't even read the article because more than half of my screen was taken up by the Medium call-to-action and the Google account modal. Does anyone remember when a webpage just loaded a document?
- gwill 2y ago
  i use reader mode in firefox/safari/orion.
- hlynurd 2y ago
  Medium doesn't have the best user experience but their SEO is fantastic (the last time I knew)
zokier 2y ago
> This means that de facto, most of the world has subscribed to American mapping conventions. That is overstating the situation; ITRS is the key standard here and it's maintained by IERS. I think WGS-84 and ITRS are somewhat aligned these days, but the exact relationship is not clear to me. Various regional reference systems are also still widely used, for example ETRS89 in Europe, which is afaik semi-independently defined by EPN (EUREF Permanent Network). Most notably Galileo GNSS does not use WGS-84. The key difference between various other systems and the Chinese one is just that for the other systems the conversions to and from WGS-84 are available to high precision.
navigate8310 2y ago
I think India is too heading in this direction
tomohawk 2y ago
I thought they were going to say because the maps include Manchuria, Tibet, East Turkistan (Xinjiang), Taiwan, a chunk of Mongolia, and the South China Sea as part of China.
smartmic 2y ago
When I read the title, I first thought it was about the political dispute over the border between India and China, keyword "Actual Line of Control". Depending on your perspective, this is also why every map from the other point of view is "wrong". https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/what-is-the-difference-between-the-mcmahon-line-and-the-line-of-actual-control/ https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/what-is-the-difference-...
MissTake 2y ago
Put Apple Maps also in the “seems to be fine” category as well. I just compared two parts of Shanghai, and Apple seemingly had no issue overlaying the roads correctly where Google maps were offset.
nxobject 2y ago
For what it's worth, I think people were able to reverse-engineer deviations between China's scheme and Google Maps' own scheme because Google's online services un/intentionally provided information about those deviations – which its Chinese provider somehow gave to Google – which people then scraped. [1] What that says about China's strategy of relying on indigenous mapping partners is up to you to decide. [1] https://wuyongzheng.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/china-map-deviation-as-a-regression-problem/ https://wuyongzheng.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/china-map-devia....
jhoechtl 2y ago
For military purposes the deliberate obfuscation between geodesic datums is meaningless as detailed and correct maps of china can be derived out of traced satelity images and maped to WGS84. Apparently Google and Bing do not have access to these "corrected" maps.
- akira2501 2y ago
  They surely do and or could if they wanted. They don't want them. It would be complicated for them to openly have them.
miohtama 2y ago
Related, Google Maps does not work in South Korea. Only local Maps application. Because of the threat of North Korea (surely North Koreans cannot find the local map application in the app store).
ajmurmann 2y ago
I don't understand why Google adheres to this law. They are blocked in China anyways, no?
- kube-system 2y ago
  Not having a search engine there doesn't mean they don't have any business that could be impacted by Chinese law: https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/?location=China https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/resul... Also, making your employees fugitives of foreign law can make their weekend travel plans a little bit more complicated.
PhasmaFelis 2y ago
I read the title and thought "I bet it's deliberate maliciousness from the Chinese government," and then read the article hoping I'd be wrong, but nope.
LaserToy 2y ago
Fascinating. How does streets align on the Chinese maps though? If random offsets are added, nothing should align. Or 500 meters is not large enough offset to create a mess? What I mean, arrears that are parallel in reality, may not be parallel on a map.
kstrauser 2y ago
> Its first two articles state why China is purposely obfuscating WGS-84 data, and in brief, they state that the law was formulated to: > 1. Promote the development of surveying and mapping in the service of national economic construction. In other words, a senior party member's brother-in-law runs a civil engineering firm that, by pure coincidence, happens to offer a surveying service. No one does regulatory capture better than a planned economy.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- xster 2y ago
  Are you referring to something specific?
simonmysun 2y ago
Recently I noticed that in Google Maps the coordinates is somehow deobfuscated when I am back in China. That means, you'll see the map differently when you are inside China, though without a VPN Google Maps is not accessible. It is not accurate. Straight lines become curvy at a 5 to 10 meter scale. This is obvious when you look at airport runways. I haven't figured out what exactly leads to the different treatment from Google. I had too few opportunities to test it out. When I arrive at Germany it immediately shows wrong map of China. Another observation is that all the user-uploaded photos on Google Maps Community aren't accessible in China either.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
This just seems bizarre. What’s to stop companies in other countries from meaningfully mapping China using satellite data? Can’t they figure out the amount of obfuscation or use AI algorithms to align the maps correctly?
- phantomathkg 2y ago
  None, other than their personal safety (when the person enter China border, that's include Hong Kong), or if they want to enter China market.
- dudeinjapan 2y ago
  Yes, it’s just market protectionism. There’s no military advantage to doing this.
- bhaney 2y ago
  As far as I can tell, the only thing stopping them is that China considers it illegal for them to do so. Companies that provide a map of China would probably also like to operate in China, so they comply with their laws.
  - bschne 2y ago
    someone raised this point in another discussion about it, but I wonder if that's the main aim why you need the obscure algorithm in the first place, couldn't you just have these laws about maps of any standard?
    - 5kg 2y ago
      (National) Security theatre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater Plus everyone who's involved will get richer.
- lolc 2y ago
  It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Back when surveying was analog. Way back in... 2002?
lolc 2y ago
So Openstreetmap must be illegal in China! And indeed it is: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/China https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/China Of course that doesn't stop people from mapping every bench in China https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=China#map=3/33.99/104.14 https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=China#map=3/33.99...
- Reason077 2y ago
  Indeed, despite its apparent illegality, China seems to be fairly well-supported and well-mapped by OpenStreetMap, at least in major cities. And is entirely mapped in normal WGS-84 without the obfuscation problem. In any case, according to Wikipedia, open-source code is available to convert between WGS-84 and the obfuscated GJC-02 coordinates. Since technology seems to have caught up with it, is there any advantage (military or otherwise) for China to persist with obfuscation? Much like the US gave up on GPS "selective availability" years ago, there would seem now days to be more economic advantage to ditching obfuscation than there is security advantage of keeping it. Is not as if the missiles of China's enemies are going to get confused by China's obfuscated coordinates. Is it just because of inertia that GJC-02 still exists?
  - toss1 2y ago
    Great point. This seems like low-intelligence autocratic bullshirt more than anything. Does the CCP really think that the US military are going to use ordinary street msps to target their missiles and that this obfuscation will protect them from on-target hits? Sure, in WWII there were a few apocryphal instances of bad maps foiling an attack, but that was decades before mapping satellites. As mentioned, it's been a long time since the US stopped limiting GPS resolution. This just makes CCP seem backward.
    - SllX 2y ago
      Not going to defend it, but I’ve always read it as an attempted countermeasure to unsophisticated espionage or domestic terrorism rather than an addition to their missile defense system. It’s not good enough to obfuscate targets when you can literally see and guide missiles from above their airspace, but it might trip up people operating on the street on their own or in small cells. America isn’t the PRC’s only adversary, and authoritarian dictatorships thrive only so far as they can control information and the movements of their subjects.
acl777 2y ago
https://archive.ph/9eYGR https://archive.ph/9eYGR
082349872349872 2y ago
I haven't read 3BP myself (but I have read you all discussing it numerous times), so take the following with a grain of salt: Might this be a 2002 foreshadowing of the 2008 novel, in which GCJ-02 was meant as an anti-sophon measure? (I checked to see when CIA had a network liquidated, but that was 2010, so —unless someone's been applying a temporal obsfucation algo— any earthling paranoia leading to metaphorical wallfacers was already in the zeitgeist before that action was taken) Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8dX-A4h2DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8dX-A4h2DU

482 points by bschne 2y ago

South Korea does it too. It forbids Google from access to its official map. Only local enterprises are licensed to get it. Precisely, the government bans the export of geographical data abroad. Check out the 243rd page of a US government report on trade barrier: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2024%20NTE%20Report_1.pdf https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/2024%20NTE%20Report_1.p...

Intralexical 2y ago
The consequences for them seem a bit more urgent, though, given Seoul lying in artillery range of the DMZ.
- javajosh 2y ago
  Yes, I'm sure obfuscating Google Street maps will prevent DPR artillery from accurately striking targets in Seoul.
  - Intralexical 2y ago
    Given some of the genius contraptions and tactics that the Russian Army has been caught using in Ukraine, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually did. Also, infosec isn't binary. Obfuscating Google Maps might not prevent the DPRK from doing terrible things to Seoul, but not obfuscating it would probably make it easier for them to do so.
    - solarkraft 2y ago
      > some of the genius contraptions and tactics that the Russian Army has been caught using in Ukraine This may have gone past me (I mostly remember the highly non-genius tactics), do you have some examples?
      - gembeMx 2y ago
        I’m sure the American tax payers are sending in billions of dollars because Russia is highly non genius lol. Get your head out your ass
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        In Russia several hundreds of thousands of casualties is genius.
        jampekka 2y ago
        There doesn't seem to be any reliable casualty numbers from the war. It's entirely possible there are more Ukrainan than Russian casualties. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-losses-casualties-tanks-death-toll-anniversary-1864726 https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-losses-casualties-ta...
        gembeMx 2y ago
        Exactly, Russia has been “dying” for years now but there’s only one country crying in the media.
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        Russia doesn't have any media to cry in, so there's that.
        gembeMx 2y ago
        [dead]
        actionfromafar 2y ago
        I was thinking of the combined casualties. It's not something to celebrate to hurt so many people for the benefit of the thieves in the Kremlin.
  - duxup 2y ago
    Autocratic governments can be surprisingly inefficient / bad at things.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    On one hand, I’m quite sure South Korea’s government has put a whole lot more thought into this than we have, and they decided to obfuscate the maps so… who knows, I guess they decided it helps. On the other hand, given that NK is using, what, WW2 vintage artillery, I can’t see how. They are probably aiming “south” with magnitude “lots,” right? What good is a 500 meter offset, or whatever, going to do when they are just aiming at the city in general.
    - lainga 2y ago
      On the third hand, if you've ever had to interact with a Korean bank over the internet (or read any of the laws that constrain this interaction), then yes, > South Korea’s government has put a whole lot more thought into this than we have in approximately 1998. and then never again. if it's not broken (for the chaebols), well...
lmz 2y ago
Note the bias against China in the comments here vs South Korea which is effectively doing the same thing.
- throwawayqqq11 2y ago
  Note the topic is about china and any restriction of "public" data will gather negative comments. The only bias i am seeing is yours.
  - lmz 2y ago
    It's biased in the sense that this seems to be common practice in the region and yet China is singled out while darling US ally South Korea which does comparable things is excused (e.g. see sibling comments excusing it because of the conflict with NK).
- himinlomax 2y ago
  South Korea is currently at war with a hostile oppressive totalitarian neighbour. China is at war with its people.
  - lmz 2y ago
    Doesn't Taiwan still claim the mainland as its own, at least in theory? Also there are border conflicts with e.g. India.
    - camgunz 2y ago
      This is a false equivalence
    - himinlomax 2y ago
      Taiwan only continues to claim it because rescinding the claim would be seen as "separatist" and thus a casus belli for the CCP to end the status quo.
  - ii41 2y ago
indrora 2y ago
The functional implications of this are a little different. Google, Bing, and others specifically have bitmap maps that are served out of Korea for this purpose. You can see it in Bing since the maps for Bing Maps use the classic Microsoft ~~ditches and diversions~~ Streets and Trips style maps. In Google, there’s a few spots in Japan that are rendered in Korea at some zoom levels. There’s been a lot of discussion on how to improve OSM in SK but it’s often through analog holes that are plausibly illegitimate. I talked about it previously. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38555567
jajko 2y ago
I saw the same in remote regions of eastern India (day dreaming about visiting them). Streets where river flows, interest point in the middle of wide river bed. Not far from china per se, but definitely a different country.
fdr 2y ago
My understanding is it forbids the hosting of the government collected (and curated, e.g. with regard to military bases) data outside the country, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat.... See also, https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/openstreetmap-in-korea https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/openstreetmap-in-korea, which relates the situation the same way. It doesn't seem like anyone is hassled for editing openstreetmap from here (and it is quite voluminous), so long as it is not a derivative work of the public surveys. There is an alternative military-base removed tileset variant, but I believe this is to aid korean GIS users who may not want their application to show sensitive installations, which can generate controversy.

cbeach 2y ago

Youtuber Johnny Harris released a great video covering China's changing maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpQQOQ__1ok&ab_channel=JohnnyHarris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpQQOQ__1ok&ab_channel=Johnn... It's a detailed analysis of China's 2023 map, which many countries believe oversteps China's boundaries.

resolutebat 2y ago
That's about border claims, which is a completely separate issue to what the article is talking about.

PLenz 2y ago

Maps are models. All models are wrong. Some are useful.

eru 2y ago
You might have a more interesting take after reading the article?

Waterluvian 2y ago

Super minor nit: WGS stands for World Geodetic System.

opello 2y ago
And (among minor nits) mentions of WGS-02 seem to be typos for GCJ-02.

dclowd9901 2y ago

Man the author did not have to resort to such a click baity title to get people to read. “Why Google Maps can’t map China” would have been accurate and not droll. I just opened Apple Maps and it looks perfectly fine. Tested about 10 areas and even rural areas and there was no issue. Stopped reading immediately after. I have no interest in supporting this crap.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xk3 2y ago
> there was no issue You should compare with https://m.amap.com/ https://m.amap.com/
- boxed 2y ago
  That seems irrelevant. The issue in the article is the mismatch between satellite data and coordinates of points and features. There doesn't seem to be such a mismatch on openstreetmap or apple maps (presumably because apple maps is based on openstreetmap to a large degree). You just don't have to play Chinas game.
refactor_master 2y ago
I tried using Apple Maps in China last year, and while it “looks” just fine, it definitely isn’t. In Guangzhou everything was off by 50-500 meters until it sometimes wasn’t. Completely unreliable compared to a Chinese solution.

motoboi 2y ago

Anyone does know if that affects US capabilities do drop a bomb on relevant targets or it's just a comercial capability, like doordash not being able to route streets without a local partner?

xk3 2y ago
It has no military capability impact. The situation is similar to South Korea's map.
adastra22 2y ago
The US military does not rely on its enemy's maps for obvious reasons.

keepamovin 2y ago

Here’s where it gets interesting — GCJ-02 is based on WGS-84, but with a deliberate obfuscation algorithm applied to it. The effect of this is that there are random offsets added to both latitude and longitude, ranging from as little as 50m to as much as 500m. Holy shit. I can't believe they created an adversarial mapping standard. That is insane. It really paints a picture of their worldview I think. The oppressed "middle kingdom" under siege. Wow, what it must be like to have that view that everyone else is against you, and you have to bulwark yourself at every opportunity. Yet somehow, balance that with the "historical trend of opening up". It's a scary attitude, and must be scary to try to implement it. I never saw China like that before. This 1 article changes my mind about a few things. Even the map math is preparing for war! I kind of feel sorry for them. It's been like 70-some years but their war is not complete. And scary for the world: I hope they don't have to seek a cathartic resolution of whatever internal conflict they have by projecting it externally. I don't see them like that, but details like this add support to that idea, I think. I had no idea maps were like this before today.... :( Tho reading some other comments, it seems it's not so hard to undo this...maybe this is not really about war or such attitude tho...but then why? Why add that specialness to make it that much harder for people ? That in itself could speak volumes. It's a map, it's kind of representative of a national idea. How can you be for "opening up" but you make your maps different to everybody itself, and not necessarily better! Hahaha :) Maybe I'm just misunderstanding it.. haha :)

ronsor 2y ago
The standard has been reverse engineered before: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform I honestly don't know why companies simply don't implement it. It's not really "secret" -- or if it is, it's an "open secret".
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Oh, I thought it was less like a Playstation DRM and more like something that would be harder to do. Tho I guess that makes sense. Probably companies don't want to run afoul of Chinese law which is fair.
2y ago

int0x29 2y ago

The US having a dedicated intelligence agency for maps seems to defeat most of the military value of this system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligence_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...

deanresin 2y ago
Pretty insane for the writer or even China/Russia to believe the US, with all of its resources, wouldn't be able to make their own accurate maps.
- Laremere 2y ago
  Russia had accurate maps of the UK back in the cold war, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
  - SeanLuke 2y ago
    Not just accurate: far and away the most accurate.
    - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
      It’s nice that USSR dedicated more money to this than UK government did
      - qingcharles 2y ago
        Are the USSR ones technically copyright-free? Because the UK ones are Crown Copyright IIRC and can't be used by the public without fees.
- _xnmw 2y ago
  Pretty insane for you to believe that a foreign country from afar could produce mapping data with the same degree of accuracy, detail and realtime freshness as a local provider on the ground. Of course there's military value in protecting mapping data from foreign adversaries, at the very least it adds a a time delay and some uncertainty to the data. It also probably makes it harder for some unsophisticated terrorist to strap a consumer GPS to a stock drone and accurately hit a target.

hinkley 2y ago

I remember a couple of years ago someone was claiming the Three Gorges Dam was buckling and about to fail, based on the satellite views showing the top of the dam weaving back and forth. Everyone sane thought it was some interpolation bug from Google trying and failing to tile the pictures properly, but maybe this is the reason why.

alleycat5000 2y ago
It's because when you orthorectify an aerial image, you cast rays from the earth's surface to the camera, so if your model of the earth's surface is off (like when there's a giant man made structure) your mapping also gets wonky.
exmadscientist 2y ago
It probably doesn't help that reliable sources tell me that the Three Gorges Dam is, in fact, absolutely goddamn crooked and janky. One reason they don't allow close photography of it is simply that it looks so very bad. Grand Coulee Dam, on the other hand, despite being decades older? It's dead-on level.
- hinkley 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - labster 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - defrost 2y ago
      Unsubstantiated myth. Unlike, say, Sedlec Ossuary.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      The Transcontinental Railroad was absolutely built on Chinese and Irish blood. But Coulee was a New Deal project. One of Roosevelt’s public works to help with recovery from the Great Depression.

lenerdenator 2y ago

> This ultimately means that data reported in GSJ-02 needs to be moderated in some way to account for inaccuracy, and individuals pursuing work in China will be penalised. I don’t have a solution for this, I'm fairly certain that the NSA does.

cat_plus_plus 2y ago

I am not a fan of China, but not wanting coordinates of strategic targets in your country to be precisely known doesn't seem crazy. Other restrictions they have like not being able to access the Internet, or being put in reeducation camps, or not having a say in how your government is run would affect me badly. But if navigation in my car worked fine, would I care if topography is a bit distorted? During the pandemic, I saw US federal, state and local government restrict my freedom in much more drastic ways, even after I was already vaccinated. I know it was even worse in China, but I would still focus on these other things and rather than not having precise coordinates of a military base.

ammo1662 2y ago
Topography in the navigation app will not be distorted for Amap or Baidu map. They looks correct. Maybe people just don't know how important a navigation app is. With enough usage data, you can know the traffic status of any area. Amap and Baidu already use these data to provide the countdown of traffic light. It has 90% accuracy. You can also have a deep understanding of the economic status, or find out some hidden buildings. So for an algorithm which is already reverse engineered many years ago, it cannot protect anything. It is just a policy to stop foreign companies to join this game. As for the reason, "national security", "unacceptable risk".
- gravescale 2y ago
  > Amap and Baidu already use these data to provide the countdown of traffic light It's often off by whole second or two. Disaster, I know! It'll also tell if it can you the ideal speed to drive to hit the next green light and join a "green wave".
  - brnt 2y ago
    I wish TomTom would get in on that.
    - gravescale 2y ago

greatgib 2y ago

Would a GPS navigation app still work when working with gcj-02 data? Regarding the fact that every street and landmark will be distorted . Something like the itinerary of Google map for a trip?

deanresin 2y ago

This article is shameless weak justification for Russian/China purposely breaking their maps.

Intralexical 2y ago

The CCP newspaper report on this is… Interesting: > Faced with such a "hard nut", Li Chengming strengthened his confidence: "In the war years, Communists were not afraid of death. This difficulty is nothing! We must do it! And we must do it beautifully!" Under the guidance of veteran experts, he led his team to fight for a thousand years. Over many days and nights, a set of nonlinear confidentiality processing technology for topographic maps suitable for national series of scales was developed. https://archive.ph/20110804185923/http://cxzy.people.com.cn/GB/196034/14908095.html#selection-4137.2-4137.449 https://archive.ph/20110804185923/http://cxzy.people.com.cn/...

stonekyx 2y ago
Lol, typical Chinese propaganda speech I'd say. But just to be fair, > he led his team to fight for a thousand years The page you linked to actually said "more than a thousand days and nights", not years.
trustno2 2y ago
That's just hilarious honestly
- Intralexical 2y ago
  Ikr? It reads like a parody of itself. You have to wonder whether anybody actually takes this seriously— The readers? Even the people writing it?

novolunt 2y ago

[dead]

AtNightWeCode 2y ago

Interesting. It is illegal in some western countries too to create your own maps. Another thing with maps is that online services have different maps depending on what country you access from.

Symbiote 2y ago
Can you give an example of a western country that restricts map creation?
- AtNightWeCode 2y ago
  Some parts of Europe. But now when I looked it up the law was actually changed like 10 years ago. Damn I'm old.

captainmuon 2y ago

Does anybody know why, when you use Google Maps in China, your GPS location matches the map and not the satellite image? I would assume the maps being in GJC-02 and the satellite images being in some other global coordinate system. So your position should line up with the imagery, not with the map. Does the GPS chip report modified coordinates when it detects it is in china? Or does Google do this itself in the software stack? Another thing I don't understand is: OK, you are required to use GJC-02 for map data in China, and you are not allowed to convert to WGS-84. But then don't. You can directly project the map from GJC-02 to screen pixels, and from WGS-84 to screen pixels, and stuff would line up. And when you tap a point on the screen, you can report the legally mandated GJC-02 coordinates.

jillesvangurp 2y ago
Yes, they apply the mandatory conversion and have gotten a license for the software to do this from the Chinese authorities. This wikipedia article has some more details on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
- Slartie 2y ago
  I've been to Shanghai and Beijing in 2010 or so, and I vividly remember that my iPhone 3G (that I jailbroke and unlocked to be able to use local Chinese SIMs, oh, those were the times...) didn't work at all for the purpose of getting around, because Google Maps GPS locations didn't match up with the map. However, there was some obscure third-party mapping software available in the app store (I think it was even the official one, not Cydia) which basically showed a Google Maps view and drew the GPS dot onto it by itself, applying the conversion first and thus fixing the display problem. So at least back then Google Maps apparently didn't yet convert the GPS coordinates to the weird obfuscated Chinese system. But it was a big nuisance and took me a while to figure out. For the first days I thought my jailbreaking activity would have broken the GPS chip or something.

throwaway4good 2y ago

Here is an open source implementation that converts from WGS84 to GJC2: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/src/com/lbt05/EvilTransform/WGSPointer.java https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/src/com/lbt05/EvilTransform/TransformUtil.java https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... And converting the other way by a kind of binary search, I guess using a flaw in the obfuscation: https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/src/com/lbt05/EvilTransform/GCJPointer.java https://github.com/googollee/eviltransform/blob/master/java/... All seems very silly by today standards and I would think it hardly made sense back in 2002 when this was apparently devised.

_xnmw 2y ago
Maybe GJC2 can be modified on the fly, by changing offset parameters? So in a hypothetical war situation, only providers obtaining data in realtime from "authorized" sources would have access to accurate targeting information.
- throwaway4good 2y ago
  Not unless you want to change all the map data.
- TechnicalVault 2y ago
  Nah, because the thing is the Russian and US militaries will have their own maps of China anyway. There's a reason the UK's mapping agency retains the historic name of the Ordinance Survey, maps has always been a military thing and they've always retained surveyors.
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    This reminds me of a fascinating book titled "The Red Atlas" by John Davies and Alexander Kent which is about the very detailed maps of Western cities the Soviet Union created during the Cold War.
2y ago

ipnon 2y ago

Medium is not the best place to host your writing. I didn't even read the article because more than half of my screen was taken up by the Medium call-to-action and the Google account modal. Does anyone remember when a webpage just loaded a document?

gwill 2y ago
i use reader mode in firefox/safari/orion.
hlynurd 2y ago
Medium doesn't have the best user experience but their SEO is fantastic (the last time I knew)

zokier 2y ago

> This means that de facto, most of the world has subscribed to American mapping conventions. That is overstating the situation; ITRS is the key standard here and it's maintained by IERS. I think WGS-84 and ITRS are somewhat aligned these days, but the exact relationship is not clear to me. Various regional reference systems are also still widely used, for example ETRS89 in Europe, which is afaik semi-independently defined by EPN (EUREF Permanent Network). Most notably Galileo GNSS does not use WGS-84. The key difference between various other systems and the Chinese one is just that for the other systems the conversions to and from WGS-84 are available to high precision.

navigate8310 2y ago

I think India is too heading in this direction

tomohawk 2y ago

I thought they were going to say because the maps include Manchuria, Tibet, East Turkistan (Xinjiang), Taiwan, a chunk of Mongolia, and the South China Sea as part of China.

smartmic 2y ago

When I read the title, I first thought it was about the political dispute over the border between India and China, keyword "Actual Line of Control". Depending on your perspective, this is also why every map from the other point of view is "wrong". https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/what-is-the-difference-between-the-mcmahon-line-and-the-line-of-actual-control/ https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/what-is-the-difference-...

MissTake 2y ago

Put Apple Maps also in the “seems to be fine” category as well. I just compared two parts of Shanghai, and Apple seemingly had no issue overlaying the roads correctly where Google maps were offset.

nxobject 2y ago

For what it's worth, I think people were able to reverse-engineer deviations between China's scheme and Google Maps' own scheme because Google's online services un/intentionally provided information about those deviations – which its Chinese provider somehow gave to Google – which people then scraped. [1] What that says about China's strategy of relying on indigenous mapping partners is up to you to decide. [1] https://wuyongzheng.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/china-map-deviation-as-a-regression-problem/ https://wuyongzheng.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/china-map-devia....

jhoechtl 2y ago

For military purposes the deliberate obfuscation between geodesic datums is meaningless as detailed and correct maps of china can be derived out of traced satelity images and maped to WGS84. Apparently Google and Bing do not have access to these "corrected" maps.

akira2501 2y ago
They surely do and or could if they wanted. They don't want them. It would be complicated for them to openly have them.

miohtama 2y ago

Related, Google Maps does not work in South Korea. Only local Maps application. Because of the threat of North Korea (surely North Koreans cannot find the local map application in the app store).

ajmurmann 2y ago

I don't understand why Google adheres to this law. They are blocked in China anyways, no?

kube-system 2y ago
Not having a search engine there doesn't mean they don't have any business that could be impacted by Chinese law: https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/?location=China https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/resul... Also, making your employees fugitives of foreign law can make their weekend travel plans a little bit more complicated.

PhasmaFelis 2y ago

I read the title and thought "I bet it's deliberate maliciousness from the Chinese government," and then read the article hoping I'd be wrong, but nope.

LaserToy 2y ago

Fascinating. How does streets align on the Chinese maps though? If random offsets are added, nothing should align. Or 500 meters is not large enough offset to create a mess? What I mean, arrears that are parallel in reality, may not be parallel on a map.

kstrauser 2y ago

> Its first two articles state why China is purposely obfuscating WGS-84 data, and in brief, they state that the law was formulated to: > 1. Promote the development of surveying and mapping in the service of national economic construction. In other words, a senior party member's brother-in-law runs a civil engineering firm that, by pure coincidence, happens to offer a surveying service. No one does regulatory capture better than a planned economy.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xster 2y ago
Are you referring to something specific?

simonmysun 2y ago

Recently I noticed that in Google Maps the coordinates is somehow deobfuscated when I am back in China. That means, you'll see the map differently when you are inside China, though without a VPN Google Maps is not accessible. It is not accurate. Straight lines become curvy at a 5 to 10 meter scale. This is obvious when you look at airport runways. I haven't figured out what exactly leads to the different treatment from Google. I had too few opportunities to test it out. When I arrive at Germany it immediately shows wrong map of China. Another observation is that all the user-uploaded photos on Google Maps Community aren't accessible in China either.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

This just seems bizarre. What’s to stop companies in other countries from meaningfully mapping China using satellite data? Can’t they figure out the amount of obfuscation or use AI algorithms to align the maps correctly?

phantomathkg 2y ago
None, other than their personal safety (when the person enter China border, that's include Hong Kong), or if they want to enter China market.
dudeinjapan 2y ago
Yes, it’s just market protectionism. There’s no military advantage to doing this.
bhaney 2y ago
As far as I can tell, the only thing stopping them is that China considers it illegal for them to do so. Companies that provide a map of China would probably also like to operate in China, so they comply with their laws.
- bschne 2y ago
  someone raised this point in another discussion about it, but I wonder if that's the main aim why you need the obscure algorithm in the first place, couldn't you just have these laws about maps of any standard?
  - 5kg 2y ago
    (National) Security theatre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater Plus everyone who's involved will get richer.
lolc 2y ago
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Back when surveying was analog. Way back in... 2002?

lolc 2y ago

So Openstreetmap must be illegal in China! And indeed it is: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/China https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/China Of course that doesn't stop people from mapping every bench in China https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=China#map=3/33.99/104.14 https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=China#map=3/33.99...

Reason077 2y ago
Indeed, despite its apparent illegality, China seems to be fairly well-supported and well-mapped by OpenStreetMap, at least in major cities. And is entirely mapped in normal WGS-84 without the obfuscation problem. In any case, according to Wikipedia, open-source code is available to convert between WGS-84 and the obfuscated GJC-02 coordinates. Since technology seems to have caught up with it, is there any advantage (military or otherwise) for China to persist with obfuscation? Much like the US gave up on GPS "selective availability" years ago, there would seem now days to be more economic advantage to ditching obfuscation than there is security advantage of keeping it. Is not as if the missiles of China's enemies are going to get confused by China's obfuscated coordinates. Is it just because of inertia that GJC-02 still exists?
- toss1 2y ago
  Great point. This seems like low-intelligence autocratic bullshirt more than anything. Does the CCP really think that the US military are going to use ordinary street msps to target their missiles and that this obfuscation will protect them from on-target hits? Sure, in WWII there were a few apocryphal instances of bad maps foiling an attack, but that was decades before mapping satellites. As mentioned, it's been a long time since the US stopped limiting GPS resolution. This just makes CCP seem backward.
  - SllX 2y ago
    Not going to defend it, but I’ve always read it as an attempted countermeasure to unsophisticated espionage or domestic terrorism rather than an addition to their missile defense system. It’s not good enough to obfuscate targets when you can literally see and guide missiles from above their airspace, but it might trip up people operating on the street on their own or in small cells. America isn’t the PRC’s only adversary, and authoritarian dictatorships thrive only so far as they can control information and the movements of their subjects.

acl777 2y ago

https://archive.ph/9eYGR https://archive.ph/9eYGR

082349872349872 2y ago

I haven't read 3BP myself (but I have read you all discussing it numerous times), so take the following with a grain of salt: Might this be a 2002 foreshadowing of the 2008 novel, in which GCJ-02 was meant as an anti-sophon measure? (I checked to see when CIA had a network liquidated, but that was 2010, so —unless someone's been applying a temporal obsfucation algo— any earthling paranoia leading to metaphorical wallfacers was already in the zeitgeist before that action was taken) Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8dX-A4h2DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8dX-A4h2DU