Can't stop smiling
This deserves one big thumbs up! And now my mischievous streak is now thinking how to top it!
Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin
A German artist has had a bit of fun with Google Maps after tricking its free satnav service into displaying traffic jams – by walking around with a hand cart full of mobile phones. Simon Weckert's performance art piece, titled Google Maps Hacks, is very simple. Weckert walked around the roads of Berlin pulling a small hand …
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Monday 3rd February 2020 19:16 GMT Drew Scriver
Re: Can't stop smiling
Expanding on the idea a bit. Remember the old 'art' of writing words on a calculator screen?
1) Find a US city with a nice grid pattern street layout.
2) Map out a word onto the street layout.
3) Get a couple of dozen people together, each with 100 or so phones in a backpack.
3) Station each of the participants at a predetermined intersection.
4) Have each person walk (or bike) around their designated city block until Google Maps shows the word online.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:45 GMT Pinemarten
Re: Can't stop smiling >> app drawings
Sorry mate, already done, Uk artist Anthony Hoyte has been doing this for years, drawing Xmas pics with a tracker app on his bike round the streets of london and elsewhere .....
Google " Cyclist creates festive reindeer on map app" for BBC story. cheers,
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 12:57 GMT ChrisC
Re: Can't stop smiling >> app drawings
I think our Spoonerism-afflicted hand tool was trying to suggest that if enough people collaborated, it'd be possible to get Google Maps to display the desired word/phrase *in realtime* as a traffic jam highlight, which would be rather more of an achievement than merely tracing out a recognisable image within a recorded GPS track for viewing *after* the event, which is something god only knows how many of us have done at least once whilst playing around with GPS trackers... If I dusted off my own data archives, somewhere I'd find all of the track data I captured getting on for 20 years ago walking around London with my old Garmin eTrex, which IIRC includes tracks showing the outline of the Isle of Dogs and some of its larger docks, Hyde Park and the Serpentine, and the route of the Circle line (or as close to it as you can get by following footpaths above ground).
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 11:52 GMT Spamfast
Re: Ingenious
Stephen Fry saying "Handy" in a German accent is fantastic TV.
Was quite funny, yes.
In the same vein, I remember an episode of Friends where Lisa Kudrow takes the piss out of an American acquaintance back from a stay in England insisting on calling her cellphone a "mobile". (Along with using "bugger" & "arse".)
(Demonstrating my age there, along with the fact that I don't get to choose the TV channel!)
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:37 GMT T-Unit
Re: Ingenious
Fun fact: There is no mention of them being red in the original German version. That was inserted into the English one to make the syllable count scan better.
Also Nena (the original band) don't really like the English translation claiming it "We made a mistake there. I think the song loses something in translation and even sounds silly."
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Monday 3rd February 2020 16:46 GMT Stuart Castle
Re: Ingenious
Phones in a helicopter hovering, yes.
Phones in a helicopter that was moving would probably be disregarded as anomalous readings by Google, because they'd be moving too much faster than the average. Even though 99 of them would arguably tip the average in their favour, having them all appear at the same time quickly would probably show up.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 11:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Ingenious
It's a timeless song that still gets a fair bit of airplay today!
But, yes, it is also of its time. The lyrics (either version) relate very much to what we all might potentially wake up to on any given day in the 1980s. Looking back, it all seems so strange and otherworldly now, but the Cold War really did have a very icy chill in the air for so many years.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 13:12 GMT ChrisC
Re: Ingenious
And yet, despite the ever present threat of global nuclear annihilation, the world felt so much safer back then. At least to the teen version of myself back in those days. *sigh* some days I just wish I could go back to the 80's for a while, where the winters were cold and snowy, the summers long and hot, and the home computer scene at its peak...
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 14:53 GMT Stork
Re: Ingenious
Absolutely. I am born in the late 60es and grew up less than 200km from DDR in direct line; my dad patrolled the sea border with Poland in the mid 50es (they just sailed along, the Polish opposites had their guns manned).
What has struck me, after meeting my Portuguese wife, was that here it was just not an issue the was much discussed - really Someone Else's Problem (Not sure about the apostrophe there)
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Wednesday 5th February 2020 11:18 GMT defiler
Re: Ingenious
it was just not an issue the was much discussed
Well, what are you going to do? There's not much you can do to affect the minds of those who can go and annihilate the world, so you might as well just get on with living.
Different game if you were one of the tank crews that knew damn fine they were just fodder to hold up the Soviets long enough to unleash the missiles, of if you were a bomber crew sitting at 2-minute alert (or less at times), or if you were a submarine crew with standing orders to attack Soviet cities if you couldn't get a signal from home when you surfaced. Those people I'm sure had a very different outlook on things, but they were (and still are) very much a minority, thankfully.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 14:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How easy it is to fool
> Yet another re-make of The Italian Job?
Trump could have a cameo playing the Benny Hill part.
https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/image-editorial/the-italian-job-1969-5886248aw
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Monday 3rd February 2020 17:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How easy it is to fool
I wouldn't be surprised to find this sort of trick has been used for years to boost the apparent popularity of various pubs and clubs etc. It's probably even easier than creating fake traffic jams because you can use your venue's WiFi and so don't need a box of SIMs.
See e.g. https://support.google.com/business/answer/6263531
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:57 GMT T-Unit
Re: Works for Waze too
Waze asks other users for confirmation and takes the numbers into account when re-routing. You'd either need to do this same thing with many phones or report an incident (crash, roadworks etc) to affect it. In the former case, one or two cars passing through unimpeded would undo your work, and in the latter case a few users hitting "not there" would undo it.
On top of that, if you are frequently reporting things that other users mark as incorrect, a behind-the-scenes credibility score drops and the weighting of your input is reduced.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 08:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Knew it.
Well, considering most of us come from dumb terminal style sat navs... I could either
a) read the 25 pages of "terms and conditions" to tell if Google were tracking me via the map app
b) Notice the maps know when cars stop/traffic appears before any other means (reports/traffic detectors at junctions, etc).
But thank for the snark. You must be great at parties. XD
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 17:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Knew it.
I gave a multiple options. The answer is pretty obvious depending on where you live. If in the middle of London/a bit city, they already have traffic scanners/CCTV working the (back then) existing "updates" for traffic.
But continue mentioning how obvious it is... now, that it's common tech/everywhere, vs the very very first instance of the app.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 16:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
I don't think this does as much as people think
All of the photoso show him walking along deserted streets. So Google sees a slow moving batch of vehicles and interprets it as a traffic jam becuase it has no data to indicate otherwise.
If you tried to do this to cause a problem on a road that contains other traffic (either will a trolley full of phones, or by spoofed GPS readings, as some people were suggesting on Twatter), I imagine that the cars passing at normal speed would demonstrate to Google that there was no problem. If that wasn't the case, you would see roads marked as red each time a bus pulls in at a bus stop.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 17:24 GMT Test Man
Re: I don't think this does as much as people think
It depends - there's clearly an algorithm that is working it out based on number of phones in a given area and type of road. 99 phones down a country lane = 99 cars all moving slowly so probably traffic. 99 phones down a motorway with hundreds of cars also in the same spot moving quickly - less probable traffic (although maybe shows one lane closed? Remember GPS isn't that accurate).
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Monday 3rd February 2020 20:04 GMT Stoneshop
Re: I don't think this does as much as people think
I imagine that the cars passing at normal speed would demonstrate to Google that there was no problem.
Depends on the ratio of slow-moving phones to fast-moving ones. Just a few fast ones passing the bunch of slow ones may well be fast bikies, mopeds or motorcycles, and not necessarily showing there's no jam
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:37 GMT GruntyMcPugh
Re: I don't think this does as much as people think
@AC
Google Maps is smart enough to sift moving traffic from static traffic, on a recent trip it would tell me 'stopped vehicle on the hard shoulder ahead', so understood that the lanes were moving, but the hard shoulder was blocked. In this case I imagine it would interpret some vehicles stuck behind a slow moving obstruction while others were able to pass.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 16:59 GMT oiseau
Hello:
... don't think it means what he thinks it means.
No, not in English:
---
dispositive - adjective
law US specialized
uk: /dɪsˈpɒz.ə.tɪv/
us: /dɪsˈpɑː.zə.t̬ɪv/
deciding a matter finally, or relating to the process of doing this:
No single factor is ordinarily dispositive.
The surveyor left off the original boundary lines, and that proved to be the dispositive fact in this appeal.
---
The chap is German, but in French (eg: dispositif), in Spanish (eg: dispositivo) and probably other languages with the same shared roots, it can also mean device or machinery, etc.
O.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 17:09 GMT TheProf
Performance? Art?
'Oh yes, I'm totally an artist. I walked around town with 99 smartphones so it looked like a traffic jam. I totally fucked up the city and then I had a deep and meaningful discussion about it in the artists' club. Except Hans was late, the bastard, and Greta still hasn't showed. Still, kudos for me for coming up with the best art Berlin has seen since well, since ever.'
So much less impressive than those joggers who use Strava to draw a giant cock in Central Park.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 18:11 GMT foxyshadis
Re: Performance? Art?
Unless every single car in the city is now self-driving and navigating entirely off of Google Maps, and all heading in the same direction, this didn't "fuck up the city." It caused a few people using GM to pick alternate routes, probably mostly rideshare drivers, and confused the hell out of a few people who stayed on the road anyway.
And, you know, it's white hat hacking that points out a potential problem in a system in a relatively benign way.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 19:26 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Performance? Art?
Depends where you are and what you are doing. I know many people who use a satnav on a daily commute as much for delay notifications as anything else. In my case, I'm doing fairly long trips with occasional detours around problems, not always to places I'm families with, but I still set the destination for trips I do regularly so I have an ETA if the boss calls and can re-route around traffic "incidents" in areas where I only know the major roads.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 19:57 GMT Stoneshop
Re: Performance? Art?
Navigaitng a city where you don't know the finer layout of the road maze, while also needing to keep an eye (or three) out for other traffic of all shapes and sizes? Having a satnav at least tell you when to turn left or right, or, when you missed that or had to detour because of just any applicable reasons, recalculates and offers a new instruction? Very worthwhile.
(Older Garmin plus OpenStreetMaps plus Afrikaans voice)
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Monday 3rd February 2020 23:20 GMT Kiwi
Re: Performance? Art?
Having a satnav at least tell you when to turn left or right, or, when you missed that or had to detour because of just any applicable reasons, recalculates and offers a new instruction? Very worthwhile.
Much the same here. I was given one to trial for someone who was importing some cheap ones, and soon found it useful when heading to places I didn't know. Didn't have to stop to look up a map, didn't have to keep as much of an eye out for a street name when also trying to negotiate other traffic and hazards, and could set it so the screen wasn't visible while driving and not have the initial novelty distraction of seeing it.
Leaves me better able to concentrate on what's around me. I'm not one of those drivers who suddenly slow down at every other turnoff while trying to read the name and think if I was supposed to turn at Thames Valley Road or turn after Thames Valley Road (which is why, pre sat-nav, I used to ask people to never give me names of roads I wasn't supposed to drive on, only names of roads I was turning on/off).
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 04:01 GMT Kiwi
Re: Performance? Art?
Works great for me.
If I'm using the tablet (which is rare but not unheard of) I use 'Navigate" and don't have any data options for it. "Navigate" will readily let me know when there's map updates, and on exit if connected does display an add screen (only when exiting and only when connected to the net/connected without PiHoile).
And I have a stand-alone unit that I have to manually hunt for maps for, and it only gets updated 2 or 3 times a year. But road changes are few, they are generally well-notified in advance (this unit shows up-and-coming roads that are still months or years away from completion), and it has a really neat (to me) feature where if you drive on a new road it from then on realises the road is open and starts to plan to use it. I've not known others to do this, and even saw many ones on Droid which you had to pay for that could be years out of date (eg Kapiti Expressway still NOT SHOWN AT ALL some 18 months after it opened). My unit is a cheapy based on the IGO 8 software. Not the greatest of units, based on WinCE, but works and keeps my secrets.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 07:59 GMT Stoneshop
Re: Performance? Art?
Good enough. It should have traffic congestion data coming in via RDS, although I suspect that's gotten disabled with some firmware upgrade. It used to work, also with OSM, but I haven't seen it show up for a while.
Just feed it a fresh set every three months or so and you're set. We've got the 1490, which takes microSD where you just plop the map on, but models that present as mass storage when you hook them up to USB should work OK too. OSM has a section on their website where you can build maps for the area you need, with output in Garmin format.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 23:51 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Performance? Art?
"We've got the 1490,"
Same here, and the RDS radio traffic receiver stiil works fine. I have two issues with it now. One is the poor connection to the mount, "fixed" by putting a torn off bit of paper into the top of the mount to increase the contact pressure, and the other is the GPS date problem where it no longer knows the time of year anymore causing it to no longer switch to night mode automatically at sunset. That's too bad since the voice control responds to the spoken command "brightness" followed a number (percentage) eg "20" to dim it down enough for night use. I do prefer the night mode colours though, so manually switch it when I get the opportunity.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 23:25 GMT Kiwi
Re: Performance? Art?
My daftphone has to smal a screen to be useful without my son holding it and tell me what to do...
I just have the unit connected to the stereo, and rely on voice instructions. It can be nice to be able to see some stuff on the screen (many still aren't great where you have say 2 or 3 roundabouts in close proximity, not giving you lane advice or "roundabout take 1st exit then roundabout take 3rd exit" like "Navigator" does on 'droid).
You can always go Tesla style and stick a honking great tablet screen in the middle of your dash, wrecking night vision. Bonus points if you move all your vent etc "tactile controls" to it so instead of being able to feel for things without looking away from the road, you now have to take your eyes off the road, re-focus on a bright screen, hunt for the item, make the change, eyes back to the road and re-gain night-vision plus re-focus on the road (some people have a slower focus). Do Tesla screens do a 'night-vision" mode? If not, please do!
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 09:23 GMT The Oncoming Scorn
Re: Performance? Art?
When I were a lad, my father had an route map to navigate us from Devon to Aunt& Uncles place in Suffolk (Early 1970's).
My job to read the thing, in best Dambusters Navigator style (Hadn't seen the film at that point) & navigate, while mum & sis sat in the back.
It was still used although as a rough guide, familiarity, roads changed & new ones appeared ie M5/M4 sprung into existence etc up until the early 80's.
To be fair there were probably more direct & easier routes than the RAC provided to him, mainly A30, A303 South & then North Circular & A11, but father was a nervous driver when out of his comfort zone & preferred to let me drive (While on L plates & on more than one occasion fell asleep while I was doing so) on trips to the same area for weddings.
Last significant trip he was quite proud of the way I took a truck around London without being fazed, old hat to me as I had taken a 7.5 ton job through the centre of London while exhibiting at the PCW show at Earls Court over a 6 day period some years earlier.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 18:07 GMT Steve Davies 3
Well done that man!
I'd buy you one of these if we ever met.
Getting one over on Google can only be good in my eyes.
What we need is for thousands more people to do this in a coordinated event. That would give a big two fingers to Google. Just stop slurping and go back to 'Do No Evil' and we might... might just start to trust you again.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 22:06 GMT jason_derp
Weird
"What is the relationship between the art of enabling and techniques of supervision, control and regulation in Google's maps?"
I love how the lines between "artist", "prankster", and "[nsfw version of] goofoff" are so easily blended in the modern era by tech. I'm in no way knocking art or throwing shade on this person, but it makes me wonder what it must have been like in the past. Like, when artists hid dirty stuff in paintings back in the day, did they get talked about as much (proportionally speaking) as this guy is? Like, he has an article on a well-known website because he did what some people would just consider a lark.
Curious if anybody can think of any historical people off the top of their head who provoked such a weird venn diagram of interpretations of them as a person due to their artwork (and their artwork relied heavily on contemporary technology of their time). My only other though is Giger getting stopped at an airport for all of his "pornagraphic" paintings that he was transporting. Would that have happened with him if air compressors and the air brush weren't invented?
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 08:31 GMT Mike 137
Re: Weird
Good thinking jason_derp. This has actually been a growing phenomenon for a very long time. Art is art because a particular artist created it. An almost identical piece by an unrecognised person isn't art. That's the entire basis for the art auction market - "a genuine Rembrandt!". It's just got easier to get on the bandwagon as "art" has become simpler to create without needing a high level of technical skill. It's interesting though that what used to be called criminal damage - painting over someone else's walls without permission - is also now art, and in some cases extremely "valuable" art. We have a culture that advocates protest and disruption, and a lot of modern art merely reflects that tendency.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 22:22 GMT Muscleguy
Hmmm
When the old Forth Road Bridge went Titsup while the new one was still some columns rising ouf of the sea a friend had to take her hound from Edinburgh to a specialist Vet in SE Fife (outside Anstruther for the record). I drove under directions from the friend using Google Maps driving instructions. It took us entirely different routes around the M90 north of the bridge going and coming but was flawless in terms of keeping us away from lots of traffic.
Considering it was a temporary situation in a small country it was still pretty impressive. They can be slow to correct mistakes, there was one locally which meant couriers could not find addresses for eg. but for traffic instructions it seems very good.
My geo sense is pretty good and I can still remember the routes taken and knew where we were and the likely routes. I've only used it once. I was trying to exit said friend's place on my own on a dark and wet night and took a wrong turning trying to work my way onto the Queensferry road. When I gave up, pulled over and consulted it I found I was somehow on the other side of the Western end of Princes St instead and heading south. I should have used it from the start but I thought I knew the way, in the daylight.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 22:38 GMT Kiwi
At last! A use for...
Memes! And copy-cats.. And trends.. And....
Normally I would hate these things and tend not to partake of them willingly.. But I might just have to look at getting a cartful of phones here.
Or.. Set up a few "walking tours" around the area. Get lots of mates out for a wander (or complete strangers interested in messing with Google for no real gain )
--> A tanker-load of your favourite, Mr Weckert, and may you have many many more!
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Monday 3rd February 2020 23:30 GMT Robert Grant
Do these maps function as dispositive nets that determine the behaviour, opinions and images of living beings, exercising power and controlling knowledge?
Don't forget all those libraries, only letting you think the thoughts contained within the books they choose to buy and let you borrow! Oh wait, without them, life is worse, not better.
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Monday 3rd February 2020 23:51 GMT Kiwi
Do these maps function as dispositive nets that determine the behaviour, opinions and images of living beings, exercising power and controlling knowledge?
Don't forget all those libraries, only letting you think the thoughts contained within the books they choose to buy and let you borrow! Oh wait, without them, life is worse, not better.
Books? libraries? How quaint and out-dated! And how many trees and tree-based ecosystems were murdered for your books? :)
Yep, I too like to sit down from time to time with something that doesn't require any electricity to 'turn the page".
But sadly, so many people today rely on their phones for their news, entertainment and so on. And crafty buggers have already realised they can manipulate you by altering the suggested/displayed news, videos, adverts and so on.
Perhaps not so much the maps themselves, but the underlying systems (much owned by google - youtube and search results etc) can be used to manipulate people by the results they're given. Lets say you wondered about the pros and cons of a certain vaccine (actual reports of harm/reactions vs the risks from the illness it maybe prevents). A straight search engine would give you results that are directly related to what you want, perhaps weighted by page popularity. A manipulated one might give you lots of news stories about people without the vaccine suffering horribly, pages from the nuttier end of the 'anti-vax' people where a few seconds reading can make you colour the whole group as quite bad, and only present glowing reports about the vaccine in question.
If you have the means to control the news people see, you have the means to control a lot of their views on life. That's why the people trapped into watching Faux News etc get so weird as time moves on, and why wall-wall horror stories/murderporn/world-as-we-knew-it-just-ended seem to keep people so fearful and more and more isolated from their neighbours.
(FTR, I'm just old enough to have missed polio so seen what it could do and what the vaccine thankfully prevented, but also have known people who had a bad reaction to some vaccines (normally quite rare but not unknown), and I also have questions about vaccinating against every minor niggle under the sun instead of letting the immune system build up naturally - so I'm firmly in the "read up about them carefully over several days and make an informed decision, try to avoid emotive people in either camp!" crowd)
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 18:12 GMT jtaylor
"Lets say you wondered about the pros and cons of a certain vaccine (actual reports of harm/reactions vs the risks from the illness it maybe prevents). A straight search engine would give you results that are directly related to what you want, perhaps weighted by page popularity."
The current situation is not so different from your "straight search engine," but the result is slightly dystopian. Search engines, and online profiling, try to give you more of what they predict you want. If you're searching for "vaccination risks" then you'll tend to see results that were preferred by people who have fears about vaccination. Those results might skew more towards the infowars end of things rather than NIH or WHO or NEJM sources.
Search engines take our confirmation bias as input and attempt to satisfy it.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 00:02 GMT Kiwi
Re: What I don't understand is
Presumably Google must have a means of distinguishing pedestrians from wheeled traffic.
The units I've used have varying profiles that can make changes to how they plan a trip, eg a truck/bus might try to avoid some of the narrower/twistier/hillier streets, pedristian or cyclist may get directed through narrow walkways or cycleways, while cars and motorbikes get normal roads.
I found some shortcuts through my neighbourhood through this, eg a couple of walkways that when you're there look like a driveway to a back section (which they are) but are also legal footpaths - you only discover that if you first come through from the other side or see them on a map/gps. I can walk to the local shops quicker than I can drive there.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 13:08 GMT Brewster's Angle Grinder
What's the error?
How accurate are the position reports? If they're using wifi it might be pretty granular. Even GPS can end up being rather inaccurate. So the phones in the cart could appear spread out to Google. And it might not be unusual for a street full of cars to have several reporting they're in the same spot.
So maybe next time we'll need two or three separate carts to fool Google.
BTW did anybody else notice the map showing he was next to the office of "Google Berlin"? That's real class.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 04:05 GMT Danny 2
Iowa Caucuses Cauc-Up App
The Iowa Dem caucus results were due in an hour ago. Apparently they are voting by a smartphone app! And surprise, surprise...
https://xkcd.com/2030/
Quote of the night: "We've been recommended to call in to the hotline and the hotline has been...unresponsive" - Shawn Sebastian, Story County Precinct Secretary.
'US Democracy. Have you tried turning it off and on again?'
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 04:35 GMT Danny 2
Re: Iowa Caucuses Cauc-Up App
Wolf Blitzer: Shawn Sebastian is joining us just now from Story County, he's a precinct secretary out there, what can you tell us about this delay in getting any results, Sean?
Shawn Sebastian: Well, Wolf, I have been on hold for over an hour with the Iowa Democratic Party. They tried to I think promote an app to report the results. The app by all accounts just doesn't work so we've been recommended to call into the hotline and the hotline has not been responsive.
Wolf Blitzer: Sean, have you got any explanation at all as to what's been going on?
Shawn Sebastian: No, I have not, no. I'm just waiting on hold and doing my best to report the results from my precinct.
Wolf Blitzer: What are you hearing? I know you're listening to a conversation from the Iowa Democratic party.
Shawn Sebastian: Umm...
Hotline: Can I help you?
Shawn Sebastian: This is a coincidence Wolf, I just got off hold just now,
Hotline: Hello?
Shawn Sebastian: So I've got to get off the phone to report the results
Wolf Blitzer: Go ahead and report your results, can...
Hotline: Hello?
Wolf Blitzer: ...we listen in as you report them, Sean?
Hotline: [Click]
Shawn Sebastian: Yep
Wolf Blitzer: Let's listen in
Shawn Sebastian: Alright. Okay. Hi, hello? They hung up on me. Shhiii...they hung up on me. Okay, I've got to get back in line on hold. They just hung up.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 09:34 GMT Timmy B
Amusing.... On the surface....
This could cause emergency services to be minutes late as they re-route around non-existent traffic. I'm a wilderness medic and it's unlikely to affect me (where I would need help it'll be helicopters) but my first thought was that this could have killed people.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 09:46 GMT sum_of_squares
Re: Amusing.... On the surface....
You know, emergency services have those funky blinkenlights so they can simply drive through a traffic jam. Also it's highly unlikely they rely on google maps for an emergency.
I would expect a real medic to know this.. you aren't a you a google employee by any chance, are you?
:-)
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:43 GMT Timmy B
Re: Amusing.... On the surface....
Not sure where they get routing data from but the last time an ambulance came here they were delayed 15 minutes because they re-routed round traffic. But after 2 and a half hours waiting the extra didn't matter that much. But they clearly do try to preempt traffic issues.
"you aren't a you a google employee"..... Are you Mario... or Dracula? :-)
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 15:05 GMT ICPurvis47
Re: Amusing.... On the surface....
When my wife was suddenly taken ill, I called an ambulance. They loaded her up and disappeared down the road with Blues and Twos blaring. I saw to the dog, collected some essential supplies for my wife, and secured the house. I then drove to the hospital. I asked at Reception which ward my wife was in, but they couldn't find any record of her arrival. They tried ringing round other departments of the hospital, to no avail, my wife was not traceable. Just then an ambulance arrived and my wife was wheeled out into the Reception area. I asked why they had taken so long to get from Rugby to Walsgrave, to be told that they were instructed to use the major roads and not back streets. They had gone east from Rugby to the M1, north to the M6, west to M6 Junction 2, south on the A46, before turning off onto local roads to reach the hospital. It had taken them over 50 minutes to reach the hospital, I had taken the A428 directly from Rugby to Binley and then local roads to the hospital, 22 minutes in all, and I was obeying the speed limits, unlike them doing 75 - 80 MPH on the motorways.
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Wednesday 5th February 2020 07:58 GMT Timmy B
Re: Amusing.... On the surface....
@ICPurvis
It's sadly all to common. A triumph of caution over common sense. Hope everything is OK, now.
I'm also on the verge of becoming a first responder so I'm sure I'll see all the silliness for myself. In fact it's the silliness that's stopped me so far.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 09:41 GMT sum_of_squares
Golden!
But I've read on his website, that GMaps assumes the traffic jam is over, once a single car passed him by. Duh!
So while his performance was great to make us think about the data we actually share every day and what contemporary "services" are doing already, it's probably not useful to create a major traffic chaos.
Or is it..?
*evil grin*
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Could i have someone drive my commute and red flag it so only I would know it was really OK.
I know not everyone uses GM but a significant proportion might and the commute would be better (once!)
This would need a idiot to drive my commute before me though , and 99+ smartphones and since i'm not rich a loan for all the sim cards phones etc.
Its funny but serious, kind of, maybe.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
My sat nav got me into an infinite loop
You'll be pleased to hear I'm not still there. I spotted the issue and exited the loop after the first iteration. It went like this Heading north, Satnav said "turn left", after a few hundred yards again "turn left" (so now heading south) then again "turn left" and the forth time - oh look I'm back on the road I started on, heading North and Satnav says there's a left turn ahead, looks familiar. I'll disobey!
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:40 GMT JohnG
Simulation
One could record the GPS track, WiFI SSIDs and MAC addresses, when moving along a certain route. Then play the data back in multiple VMs, with the GPS and WiFi interfaces spoofed. You could run the simulated route just before heading home, to help reduce traffic on your favourite route.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 10:45 GMT Venerable and Fragrant Wind of Change
40 years ago ...
Reminds me of a student prank by some friends ...
Main car park detects metal to count incoming and outgoing vehicles. Issues ticket to entering driver, reads ticket and takes payment on exit.
Students decide to play. Go there middle-of-night when it's empty. One swings a metal dustbin lid backwards and forwards across the detector at the entrance, another collects the tickets as they're issued. In the morning, car park is empty but thinks it's full and won't let any more cars in.
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Tuesday 4th February 2020 13:33 GMT David Pearce
The effect of these applications has been to make all legal routes equally jammed. My journey always gives the fasted route as the wrong way down a section of one way street because that is what the motorcyclists do and how Google "learns" restricted junctions. They don't bother to actually check road signs from the road
Biting the hand that feeds IT
