North Korea's Prison Camps Are Now On Google Maps

pigrabbitbear writes "It's been nearly a decade since Shin Dong-hyuk, an ex-prisoner of North Korea's Camp 14, crawled over the electrocuted body of a friend lying dead on a fence, a boundary he was born inside of and lived within for 23 years. He made his way across the Chinese border on foot and was granted political asylum and citizenship in Seoul. Now, thanks to updated Google maps of the region, you can actually (if somewhat loosely) retrace the steps of his incredible escape. Through its Map Maker program, which crowdsources cartographic info, Google has published finer details of some North Korean roads. More notably, it has included shaded-in locations of the country's notorious prison camps. The data has flowed in from a few different sources, including defected North Korean expats now living in Seoul. Geographically-minded tourists and visitors of North Korea have weighed in, and historic map data from pre-partitioned Korea into has also been helpful. (Google maintains that the recent trip to Pyongyang by CEO Eric Schmidt had nothing to do with this project.)"

Comments

Old News

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been on the iOS platforms since the last update. I asked Siri for riving direction to Sam's Hamburger shack and ended up in a NK concentration camp. Kinda hard to explain to Lil Un, but after a few months I was let go.

OpenStreetMap has better maps of North Korea

[SWroclawski]

If you look at OpenStreetMap's maps of North Korea in comparison to Google, you see that the OSM maps are of much higher quality, as well as being Free (unlike Google MapMaker):

http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&lon=125.7375&lat=39.03865&zoom=12

Check out the reviews for Hwasong Gulag

[futhermocker]

Seems to be a pretty cool resort
http://goo.gl/maps/bVK4C