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Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps
Garabito writes "An error on Google Maps has caused an international conflict in Central America. A Nicaraguan military commander, relying on Google Maps, moved troops into an area near San Juan Lake along the border between his country and Costa Rica (Google translation of Spanish original). The troops are accused of setting up camp there, taking down a Costa Rican flag and raising the Nicaraguan flag, doing work to clean up a nearby river, and dumping the sediment in Costa Rican territory."
This is how google takes over the world! Soon there will be a very small dot somewhere in google maps called "googleland", and then over time the borders will expand. But nobody will question it, because it must be right.
A classic case of misinformation being worse than no information. However, Google does have a disclaimer on the service about possible errors.
It shouldn't, but it amazes me how a military force from one country can take action based on information from a free service offered by a company in another country. It boggles the mind.
Remember to maintain your supply of
Indeed. I almost rode my bike to a seemingly nearby park I had never explored. Then I double-checked it on the park authority's site and found it was over 100 miles away from where the Google map showed it.
So I 100% feel what this Nicaraguan commander felt. I mean; out situations were basically identical.
There is precedent for this. For example, ISO approved a standard that redefined leap year calculations to match a bug in Microsoft Excel.
we can't have nice things.
We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag ? "What? We don't need a flag, this is our home, you bastards" "No flag, No Country, You can't have one! Those are the rules... that I just made up!...and I'm backing it up with this gun, that was lent to me from the National Rifle Association." --Eddie Izzard
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
"(Google translation of Spanish original)."
How can I trust it now?
My understanding is that minor-but-with-alarming-possibilities-of-escalation operational cartography fuckups have been occurring since approximately the invention of boundary stones, well back in the BCs...
The main amusement here is that A)Google gets mentioned by name and B)the ease of use of a mass-market civilian product leads a military user(who presumably has access to better information, from some sort of national mapping/geospatial intelligence/GIS wonk service; but probably with a lousier interface) to rely on it.
100 miles. When I saw it, I reported it to Google using right-click->"Report a Problem." And wouldn't you know... now that I look, it is no longer there.
So that's why the Google EULA says "Not responsible for inadvertent war." I never understood that before...
See, it's stuff like this that's going to give South American military juntas a bad name.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Imagine the resources of a nation like Nicaragua, then imagine the quality of their IT infrastructure... does it really surprise you that much that Google has a better and usually more accurate mapping service than they can get from their government?
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
but it amazes me how a military force from one country can take action based on information from a free service offered by a company in another country.
Something tells me you haven't traveled to many 3rd world countries. Google has probably dodeca-tupled the intelligence gathering capacity of most 3rd world countries.
"taking down a Costa Rican flag", should have been another big clue
Who is commanding this chicken-shit outfit? Simons? How could they not know something was wrong when they find the wrong flag on the flagpole? "Hey! Those bastards snuck over and put up their flag on our land! This land here...that we never had before..." This sounds like a land grab, and if someone notices, blame Google for a "map error."
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
the bond film?
the bad guy is basically rupert murdoch (played by jonathan pryce)
he brings china and the uk to the brink of war by hacking the gps satellite's signals, making a british warship think it is in international territory when it has actually strayed into chinese waters. launch a few missiles... china thinks the uk is firing on them, the uk thinks china is firing on them: all in a plot to sell more newspapers (well, it is 1997, when newspapers were still relevant)
reality is beginning to resemble the plots of bond movies
i'm waiting for dr. no to become reality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The real worrying thing is...why would ANY military agency even be looking at Google Maps in the first place. Then again this isn't the first time this has happened. The US military forces used tourist maps to plan the invasion of the island of Grenada in 1983. Granted, there was very little cartography of the island available... but to resort to tourist maps?
Didn't that lead to a hospital being targeted and destroyed?
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
The article looks like an advertisement to me. Just like Verizon vs Att. Here bing/yahoo vs google in the lines of Nigerian scam.
There's a map for that.
The clueless summary gets it wrong. I live in Costa Rica - the problem isn't dredging the river, it's that Nicaragua is dumping all the gunk on the Costa Rican side of the river and destroying protected forests.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No, the stupidity is in not recognizing that this google maps story is just BS and they have every intention of seizing this island.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For instance, in 2002, the UK Royal Marines accidentally invaded Spain, because of a map reading error.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1827554.stm
Hence the old joke: "What's the most dangerous thing in the British Army? -- An officer with a map."
Today I used Google maps (instead of the official ones, with hopes no one would notice), to justify raiding neighboring land. If General finds out he's gonna be sooo pissed! FML.
- Nicaraguan commander, Eden Pastora
Since I found the "must not be used for running nuclear facillities" in the WinNT Eula, I'm definitly not sure if you're joking or not....
bickerdyke
That border area has been under dispute for some time. I'm sure they knew exactly what they were doing.
In fact the entire Guanacaste region used to be part of Nicaragua.
The first incident was apparently due to the local Indonesian authorities persisting in the use of 1933 Dutch maps and the Australians using more recent Indonesian maps. The Dutch map indicated that the Mota Bicu river formed the border. However, the 1992 Indonesian map used by the Australians showed the border as being 500 metres to the west of that position. Apparently, the Indonesian map reflects a post-1975 decision to make the border a fixed provincial border not dependent on the river as a landmark, with the result that as the river changed course over time and as the villagers moved with it, the village of Motaain would shift its location from East to West Timor and vice versa....
http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/57JQZ2
Actually I doubt that do have better information than Google does. Not that many nations have the resources to spend on that type of tool that the US, NATO, Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, and so on do.
A lot of nations will get that type of Data from the US or Russia depending on who they are friends with at the time.
Heck for a long time U2 pilots where buying handheld GPS units because the U2 was still waiting for it's official upgrade. Later the units bought them as a COTS rescue aid but used them for navigation.
I actually read about B-1 units wiring in unofficial GPS antennas and using notebooks for navigation while waiting for that plane to get it's update.
Nothing is unusual about this except that in this case it came back to byte them.
BTW Google maps are not that accurate in many places so if you are going to use them to navigate and RPV I would double check them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Given that Maps/Earth is a free service, and Google isn't exactly a charity, it would actually not at all surprise me if the quality of Google's offerings for a given area is strongly correlated to that area's level of wealth, IT development, and existing national mapping services and/or 3rd party information providers.
Consider, most of what Google does, it does either as an experiment/long term investment, or as part of its core ad-selling business. Now, their mapping services have been around for a while, and don't seem to be an experiment(and the concept of geographically localized advertising is obviously attractive), so it seems very likely that they are ancillary to the core business.
Consider: Where are ads most valuable, per impression, and consumer data/metrics most valuable? In wealthy, populous, areas with good internet penetration and lots of electronic commerce.
Where is good mapping data cheapest: Where some existing national, regional, and/or local mapping/planning authority exists, and has already collected decent records in a standardish format, at public expense and available for no or nominal money.
Therefore, you would strongly expect Google to have the best starting data in relatively wealthy, stable, well-governed areas, and have the greatest incentive to do the labor-intensive data cleaning process of sending out GPS-carrying surveyors and streetview cars and things in dense, wealthy areas. The further from either of those you go, the more likely it is that Google's "data" are whatever satellite or aerial photos they managed to pick up cheaply and georectify well enough that there aren't visually obvious gaps and tears. Because modern sensors are good, such data are actually likely to be perfectly OK for things like physical geography lessons; but there isn't actually a big black line painted along most national borders, satellites aren't going to see that. And, given that this incident occurred in what sounds like a relatively sparsely populated Latin American border region, I'm guessing that the place isn't crawling with streetview cars...
If what you care about are things like national borders, military installations/posts, and geographic features where some kind of army engineering corps is doing work, the national mapping service is probably actually the place to go. Unfortunately, they are probably not set up with a very nice user interface. Paper maps or some ghastly 80's GIS frontend, usable after a few months of specialized training, are a definite possibility. Google, on the other hand, has virtually no incentive to care about such things(at least in their free civilian offering, I don't know if they have a government/intelligence version); but has a decent interface, and produces results with a lovely air of apparent accuracy most of the time.
Consider some history: During British colonial rule(first via East India company, later direct) The Great Trigonometric Survey (1802-early 20th century) produced some quite accurate maps of the entire subcontinent, and some pretty hostile terrain, using nothing more than hand tools, dead trees, and pre-computer math. Surveying, like civil engineering, is nontrivial; but you can actually do an excellent job with quite primitive tools. Satellites and GPS enabled everything sure makes the job easier, and computers sure make the interface nicer; but there is nothing except disorganization stopping even a country with early 19th century technology from producing excellent maps.
Why do you typically vote Republican then?
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". - Albert Einstein
Which suggests that the "Google Maps" explanation is probably a BS excuse for accidentally-on-purpose dumping stuff in Costa Rica.
I am officially gone from
I once got driving directions that told me “turn left”... off an overpass. (It’s fixed now.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
You can go back another 200 years. The US has never not been at war, or some military adventure. Actually the US has always been a just been a continuation of European expansion throughout its history.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Spending cuts from wherever it's not absolutely necessary (and I hate to say this, but defense has a significant bit of fat to trim -- I'm not saying anything extreme and ridiculous like that we don't need a military, or our troops don't need body armor or something, just that we go to excess in the name of funneling money into defense contractors currently).
Make all the "welfare" programs into "workfare" -- there's always some public work somewhere we can throw people at, and if all else fails let smaller governments (as in local) as well as nonpolitical nonprofits (churches, charities, and the like) request laborers from the pool; the whole point being to make them work for their living, even if their on the government dole. Specifically we don't want it to be nice work (we want people to prefer having a "legitimate" job), we want it to be a "I have no other choice, but at least picking litter off the interstate is better than going hungry."
No tax cuts, at least not for a while. Cutting expenses doesn't help reduce debt if you also cut revenue. Devise a specific plan for debt reduction, and do not reduce taxes until we've got it back under control.
Require a budget be balanced on average. Running a deficit during a recession helps recovery, but it's only a good endeavor if you then pay down the deficit once the economy has recovered. Persistent debt is not desirable in any way.
Every president, regardless of party, gets their war. It is in the contract I think.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If you're fiscally conservative and want to end the all-war-all-the-time state of things, there's only one party you should be voting for.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I'd mod this insightful. You'd think that if they were properly trained soldiers they would have the wherewithall to check a real map once they saw a Costa Rican flag. That would've set off all sorts of bells for me. Not sure what they were doing depending on Google Maps in the first place though.
The fact that they took the Costa Rican flag down and replaced it with their own though makes me wonder if this was a "mistake". Sounds like they raised a middle finger along with their flag.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
See, the fun thing about these enforced work program ideas is that they only work if no one is doing the job already. That "public work somewhere we can throw people at" is currently done by salaried government employees (who are probably unionized) and who will heartily object to being replaced by people who were too lazy to sign up for that job under their own free will.
Sometimes, there's a good reason why people can't work. For example, some people hurt their backs pretty bad. They can't work a "normal job" because they can't stand up for more than a little while, or sit down for a little while, or even sleep because of the pain.
I used to be of the same mentality as yours, but then I learned more about why there are people like that.
Unfortunately, there are also people who fake a lot of things and lie in order to get benefits. That is a real shame because you take away from many things that money is needed for, and also those people who are legitimately hurt or unable to work as a "normal person" and don't have another source of income.
One thing I tell people, is that not all people in Skid Row are crack heads. You see families and better than homeless dressed people out here. These are people who have lost their jobs, then their homes, and finally their ability to get work.
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
I concur. This wasn't a mistake. Map & compass has worked well for a long, long time. Soldiers were able to navigate the jungles long before the arrival of GPS, Google Maps, and checkin apps. In a country like Nicaragua that has a small military budget, land navigation training has to be part of the core training, at least for NCOs, and certainly for officers. I can't think of a single nation that has done away with land nav training; doing so would be like forgoing marksmanship training.
The only other explanation is that the guy in charge of the mission was a complete incompetent, and his subordinates either weren't paying attention or didn't have the balls to tell him he was fucking up.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Didn't even bother to check the absolute source of truth, Wikipedia. Newbies.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
WTF did the IS do with Somalia? The genocides in Rwanda and Durfar? Oh yeah, we let it happen.
We invaded a country for no actual reason whatsoever, in hopes of political benefits, oil, family grudges, and/or posturing. None of which are worth the slightest loss of life, American or otherwise. Why invade Iraq, and not step for actual atrocities like the ones you mention? Oh, there is no money in it, no mythical glory.
There is no glory in being the aggressor. I am proud of America, but it is damn hard to be proud of our actions sometimes. Sometimes I wonder if we are the bad guy, the international Skeletor. Questioning our policies is NOT anti-American. Being against some of the boneheaded stuff we do is also not Anti-American. There is no shame in saying "Hey guys, you might be doing something stupid.".
Just because other people are sometimes stupid or wrong doesn't mean they lose the right to question others. There is something strange in that. We can be evil as long as we aren't as evil as someone else? This makes no sense to me.
"Yes I'm stupid, but thats okay because I'm not as stupid as you! nyah nyah nyah!" Meanwhile everyone walks off a cliff, but at least we get the distinction of walking off a slightly lower (yet equally fatal) one.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I'm not saying anything extreme and ridiculous like that we don't need a military, or our troops don't need body armor or something, just that we go to excess in the name of funneling money into defense contractors currently).
What I find interesting is that you guys spend absolutely insane amount of money on big shiny toys like F-22, but your basic Army stuff - like the standard infantry rifle - still has known problems compared to most other designs in service of other countries, and, despite those problems being well known for a while now, and several attempts to do something about it, there is still no fix in sight.
It's almost as if big military projects are primarily about what you call "pork barrel spending", rather than about making your soldiers safer...
That certainly seems true. Mainly because the US appears to require war in order to function properly. If you're not destroying some foreign company, you're declaring silly things like "War on Drugs".
A nation has three pillars of influence, diplomatic, economic and military; It used to be the the real purpose of War was to insure that countries would be preferentially amenable to the other two pillars of influence. Unfortunately the world is getting increasingly stupid and stubborn and unresponsive to diplomatic and economic pressure, and to be entirely honest the "pointless fucking wars the US has been waging for 40 years" have mostly been UN wars where the US and Great Britain have been stuck doing the heavy lifting and the 40 years would be more like 50 or 60 now.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
“turn left”... off an overpass. (It’s fixed now.)
The map, or the side of the bridge?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Not everything, they started a COTS program either right before or right after 9/11. There was a report right after the Invasion of Iraq was over by the Marine Corps which talked about things Marines bought themselves and brought for the war and which of those things the Marine Corps should buy outright off the shelf. Down to "we shouldn't buy Camelbak water packs because civilian models update faster so we should just do a reimbursement if Marines want newer models, or buy them in smaller lots."
I wish I had it here to link to, but its on a laptop at home.
Its not trash its sediments, Nicaragua unilaterally decided to clean the sediments from the bottom of the river. Where they left the "trash" is a protected are due to its biodiversity. Costa Rica told them, "hey thats Costa Rica, get off" they answered, "no, we stay here" Keep in mind Costa Rica doesnt has an army
When we go to war, one overriding and fundamental change should occur:
All industrial production, all natural resource extraction and development, and all labor in this country shall be devoted 100% to the war effort for its duration.
I'm not saying that the government should take over all means of production, but I am saying that no military contractor should be allowed to take any kind of profit beyond operating costs for the duration. They can be paid in bonds that are redeemable at the end of the war, but they certainly should not profit. Anyone who is engaged in any endeavor that is not directly part of the war effort should find themselves very unpopular for doing so.
If this sounds extreme, that's because it is. It should be the barrier that the government faces when it chooses to go to war, and it would provide the motivation for the entire country to end that war, and no profit motive for anyone at all for there to be any interest in artificially prolonging the war.
I find it disgusting that there is a "defense industry" that is based on greed, instead of a reluctant one that is based on desperate need.
From the instant we go to war, no person should be engaged in *anything* except the war effort, until that war is over. All commodities should be rationed. All industrial profits should be bonded for the war effort. And every able bodied man and woman should make it his or her personal duty to contribute.
If we have an issue that doesn't persuade the whole country to be willing to make that sacrifice, we don't have an issue worth going to war over.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.