3 ms·

The obvious concern would be China building high-res maps of every inch of US cities.

by theptip 2mo ago

tamimio 2mo ago
Buy an iPhone, download an app (polycam, scaniverse, strayscanner, etc), build professional grade point clouds/maps. Technology itself is everywhere.
Danox 2mo ago
That boat has sailed for all of the countries that have the technological capability and it has gotten even better with the advent of AI because now you can correlate the information at a even higher level faster and that ability is only getting better every day. In short, there are no real secrets geographically at least not for long. What’s more important is that you have the rare earth minerals inventory and even that is not a secret.
fc417fc802 2mo ago
They already have that, and us maps of their country as well. Everyone has maps of everything at this point. If it's above ground then literally everyone that matters knows about it.
- theptip 2mo ago
  I don’t think that lidar maps are public knowledge. If they were why would Google be spending so much money creating their own? This is not the same thing as taking a picture from a satellite.
  - fc417fc802 2mo ago
    I realize that. I didn't say "publicly available" but rather that anyone important has access to the information that they want. I expect that any exceptions to that can be trivially remedied on a case by case basis. It's a matter of scale. Satellite imagery gets you most of the way there. I can think of only a very few instances where you'd care about higher resolution and those should be few enough that any well funded actor (ie the ones we care about here) can perform targeted data collection.
    - theptip 2mo ago
      Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities? Or do you concede the point that they do not, in fact, have those yet? Satellite does not get you most of the way there, the threat model here is military (drone) warfare where you would like 3d maps at high resolution. To me “Targeted collection” would look a lot like “backdoor some small % of the commercial drones we sell and siphon the data out”. You should check the Snowden files for the implant tech that NSA was putting in Cisco routers bound to China if you think this sounds far fetched.
      - fc417fc802 2mo ago
        > Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities? I never claimed that - you aren't engaging with what I actually wrote. I questioned the usefulness of such data in the general case. I also pointed out that in the rare cases where such data for a small area would prove useful it would be trivial to collect (on account of being a small area). Just what sort of resolution do you believe is necessary or useful for drone warfare or other military uses? What do you have in mind here? Regardless, if I (a civilian) can afford the equipment and plane ticket to collect a LiDAR point cloud of a monument approximately anywhere in the world then any well funded actor can also send a "tourist" to do the same. For that matter I don't think you even need LiDAR. Photogrammetry techniques can achieve arbitrarily high spatial resolution proportional to that of the input data. LiDAR just has some advantages if you're considering deploying on a wide scale or for certain realtime or power constrained tasks. Generally none of that applies to state actors.

The obvious concern would be China building high-res maps of every inch of US cities.

by theptip 2mo ago

The obvious concern would be China building high-res maps of every inch of US cities.

Buy an iPhone, download an app (polycam, scaniverse, strayscanner, etc), build professional grade point clouds/maps. Technology itself is everywhere.

Danox 2mo ago

That boat has sailed for all of the countries that have the technological capability and it has gotten even better with the advent of AI because now you can correlate the information at a even higher level faster and that ability is only getting better every day. In short, there are no real secrets geographically at least not for long. What’s more important is that you have the rare earth minerals inventory and even that is not a secret.

fc417fc802 2mo ago

They already have that, and us maps of their country as well. Everyone has maps of everything at this point. If it's above ground then literally everyone that matters knows about it.

theptip 2mo ago
I don’t think that lidar maps are public knowledge. If they were why would Google be spending so much money creating their own? This is not the same thing as taking a picture from a satellite.
- fc417fc802 2mo ago
  I realize that. I didn't say "publicly available" but rather that anyone important has access to the information that they want. I expect that any exceptions to that can be trivially remedied on a case by case basis. It's a matter of scale. Satellite imagery gets you most of the way there. I can think of only a very few instances where you'd care about higher resolution and those should be few enough that any well funded actor (ie the ones we care about here) can perform targeted data collection.
  - theptip 2mo ago
    Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities? Or do you concede the point that they do not, in fact, have those yet? Satellite does not get you most of the way there, the threat model here is military (drone) warfare where you would like 3d maps at high resolution. To me “Targeted collection” would look a lot like “backdoor some small % of the commercial drones we sell and siphon the data out”. You should check the Snowden files for the implant tech that NSA was putting in Cisco routers bound to China if you think this sounds far fetched.
    - fc417fc802 2mo ago
      > Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities? I never claimed that - you aren't engaging with what I actually wrote. I questioned the usefulness of such data in the general case. I also pointed out that in the rare cases where such data for a small area would prove useful it would be trivial to collect (on account of being a small area). Just what sort of resolution do you believe is necessary or useful for drone warfare or other military uses? What do you have in mind here? Regardless, if I (a civilian) can afford the equipment and plane ticket to collect a LiDAR point cloud of a monument approximately anywhere in the world then any well funded actor can also send a "tourist" to do the same. For that matter I don't think you even need LiDAR. Photogrammetry techniques can achieve arbitrarily high spatial resolution proportional to that of the input data. LiDAR just has some advantages if you're considering deploying on a wide scale or for certain realtime or power constrained tasks. Generally none of that applies to state actors.