Iran Plans To Launch an 'Islamic Google Earth'

Shipwack sends this quote from the Guardian: "The Iranian authorities have long accused Google Earth of being a tool for western spy agencies, but now they have taken their attacks on the 3D mapping service one step further — by planning the launch of an 'Islamic' competitor. ... The minister, however, gave little information on what he meant by an Islamic 3D map. 'We are developing this service with the Islamic views we have in Iran and we will put a kind of information on our website that would take people of the world towards reality Our values in Iran are the values of God and this would be the difference between Basir and the Google Earth, which belongs to the ominous triangle of the U.S., England and the Zionists [a reference to Israel].' Experts, however, have serious doubts about the project. An IT consultant who has worked on Iran's national internet project in the past said the announcement was merely an excuse to obtain funds and secure working contracts for the future. 'They have claimed to run their service in four months and said their data centre capacity will reach Google's size in three years,' he said. 'Three-year project, no business model and only relying on government funding, a piece of cake indeed. To have a data centre with such capacity and security level they need power stations, cooler systems, bandwidth, etc, which will require billions of dollars of investment that doesn't fit with Iran's sanctions-hit economy.'"

Comments

Re:That's how they will do it

[r1348]

You are aware right, that Iranians are not Arabs?

Re:Google data center

[swillden]

I'd be willing to bet that most of the server admins at Google have no idea how many servers they have.

(Googler here) You'd be wrong, actually. Google is a very numbers-oriented place; I can see the totals, including CPU, disk, RAM, etc. The numbers are... large.

I wish Iran all the best with their endeavor, but I'm skeptical.