10/01/2018

Headline October 02, 2018/ '' ' DIGITAL -MAPS- HIJACK '' ''


'' ' DIGITAL -MAPS- HIJACK ' ''




DIGITAL MAPS - for sure are just about the greatest of modern marvel, until of course, they're hijacked..............

FOR centuries, people have relied no maps to figure out where they are and where they're going. But today's digital maps -

Seemingly more precise than ever - aren't always as dependable as they just so appear.

At the end of the August, for instance, Snapchat users woke up early to find the app's internal map has renamed New York City with the anti-Semitic label ''Jewtropolis''.

In Washington, D.C., Google Maps incorrectly renamed a Senate office building after the late Sen, John McCain a few days after his death on August 25. Researchers have found numerous fake business listings in Google Maps for plumbers and hotels - apparent attempts to game search results and juice referral traffic.

Digital maps are a modern uber-convenience, capable of pinpointing nearby landmarks, shops and restaurants, highlighting traffic jams and navigating you to destinations across the country.

Google, Apple and a variety of lesser known companies constantly update these real world representations using a variety of sophisticated tools, from satellite in orbit to the phone in your hand.

But there's another important input : crowdsourced data submitted by ordinary people, which can make today's maps more like a Wikipedia than Rand McNeally.

When the navigation app Waze flags a highway accident, for instance, it's because drivers further down the road have reported it.

Other unpaid volunteers submit information on new business locations, landmarks and even new roads.

All that is a bet that the wisdom of the crowd eventually ends up getting it right. But ''eventually'' can take a while, and in the meantime, pesky humans can still much things up but good.

Take, for instance, the morning of August 30, when users of Snapchat found New York City hatefully rebranded in the app's map.

In addition to ''Jewtropolis'' label, prominent city landmarks bore ugly new names such as ''Pedophile  Bridge,'' ''Zionist Cannibal Drive'' and ''Adolf Hitler Memorial Tunnel.''

Snapchat and other apps such as The Weather Channel and Runkeeper  rely on a company called  Mapbox for their maps.

Mapboc CEO Eric Gundersen said the company uses more than 130 sources of data. One of them is an open-source project similar to Wikipedia called OpenStreetMap.

There, a user made made more than 80 anti-Semitic label changes in a ''tirade'' across New York  and other places in early August; records of those changes show the anonymous user also abusively renamed London streets and dubbed Russia ''Commieland''.

The changes were reverted in OpenStreetMap  less than two hours later by another contributor, other records show.

At Mapbox, however, the anti-semitic changes mounted in a pipeline of map edits where they languished for 20 days until human reviewers  cleared a backlog.

While Gundersen said that a Mapbox artificial-intelligence tool flagged the problem when it showed up and quarantined the abusive changes, a reviewer  then mistakenly pushed through one of the edits anyway, over writing correct data.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation, a  not-for-profit  group based in Cambridge, England, said in a blog post that the changes were reverted so quickly that no one noticed them until Mapbox served up the  vandalized OpenStreetMap data to thousands of apps and websites.

''The vast majority of editors want to come together to build something great, and these massively outnumber the few bad apples,'' the foundation said.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Operational Research on Technology and Services continues.

With respectful dedication to the  Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all  ''register'' on : www.wssciw.blogspot.com - The World Students Society for every subject in the world, and Twitter-!E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:


''' World & Winning '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

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