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

That's how they will do it

[onyxruby]

They have long wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map and this is how they will do it. Just make their own maps and pretend they don't exist. Now if only they would do support virtual terrorism instead of real terrorism.

Re:That's how they will do it

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Their plan for world domination was stalled fourteen centuries ago - by the French, of all people (mind you, even the French were different 14 centuries ago!) - so they want at least a tiny teeny virtual simulation of what it would be like.

Re:That's how they will do it

[jitterman]

The Moors were stopped...

Oh no, I'm so sorry it's the Moops. The correct answer is the Moops.

Re:That's how they will do it

[r1348]

You are aware right, that Iranians are not Arabs?

Re:That's how they will do it

[buchner.johannes]

They have long wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map and this is how they will do it.

Please stop circulating this myth and criticize Iran by its actual statements.

Re:That's how they will do it

[khartoum]

Iran is a vast nation of heady jungles, dense forests, lush fields, snow-capped mountains, sandy beaches, leopards, eagles, flowers and the finest fruit east of Africa. And indeed, pristine desert. Not to mention the lovely people, of whom the vast majority resent the actions of their government.

So it will have burkas instead of smudges?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone up for a corn field portrait of a certain prophet?

Re:So it will have burkas instead of smudges?

[Opportunist]

/. sure has a lot of them.

Hey, nobody said anything about them having to be female, right?

Islamic 3D Earth

[Burpmaster]

So it'll be flat?

Re:Islamic 3D Earth

[magarity]

the fact that in the Qur'an, the earth is said to be flat. ... therefore, once it states something, nothing - not even scientific proofs - can negate it.

OK: what impact (pun intended) does that have when an islamic rocket scientist tries to calculate an ballistic missile trajectory?

Re:Islamic 3D Earth

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I think an Islamic 3D Earth is a great idea! The big difficulty in the plan will be convincing the Islamic folks to go live there . . .

Re:Islamic 3D Earth

[geekoid]

"These two groups probably comprise the majority of Christians in the USA."
no,. they don't. There just the loudest sects of that particular cult.

Re:Islamic 3D Earth

[zugmeister]

Simple:
1. Create 3D map image.
2. ...
3. Prophet!

I know what it will look like...

[tnk1]

It will look something like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map

Only, it will probably be centered in Mecca.

Quickly!

[GameboyRMH]

Time to draw some giant Mohammed cartoons in the desert, Nazca-style!

I'm confused...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is this just a huckster trying to make a few bucks off nationalist suckers by offering to draw a map with a few contentious names and borders modified(the sort of thing that a script kiddie could do by hacking together a KML layer for google earth in about 10 minutes; but I digress...) or is there some sort of 'Islamic geography' that has serious issues with basic tenents of what we know about our dear home geoid?

I'm honestly curious... It certainly isn't uncommon to have mere nationalist spats over mapping; but that's just standard political bluster.

Religious convictions that are seriously opposed to empirically demonstrable facts about the world, though, tend to be fairly amusing and sometimes quirky. You've got your flat earthers, your YECs, your geocentericists(does the Tychonic system get any love anymore?), your 'baraminologists', faith healers of a zillion different flavors, people who are pretty sure that Jesus and/or the 'lost tribes of Israel' ended up in North America, you name it, we've got it...

Is this just the tedious nationalism, or does folk islam have some weird bug up its ass about the-world-as-observed-from-orbit?

Re:I'm confused...

[Anonymous Coward]

Addition: in Europe maps are drawn with Europe in its center. In America maps are drawn with America in its center.

Nah, Most US maps have North and South America on the left, Africa dead center and Eurasia sprawled atop her. (Like the cheap whore it is.) Oz is in the right bottom, Anartica center very bottom and islands peppered around the continents.

Re:I'm confused...

[Nimey]

This just in: Australians are bottoms.

Re:I'm confused...

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

... is there some sort of 'Islamic geography' that has serious issues with basic tenents of what we know about our dear home geoid?

Many years ago I knew a Lebanese Muslim cartographer, who worked with one of my relatives (a geographer), and I actually talked to him about this sort of thing. The short version is that most of the the modern world maps he worked with were exactly the same as Western maps, centered on the Greenwich meridian because of the conventional measure of longitude and so as to avoid splitting up big landmasses. The avowedly Muslim ones would be just the same, only centered on Mecca or, more often, on the point on the equator due south of Mecca.

Centering the map on Mecca generally means cutting off Antarctica and the southern end of Argentina. Mecca is at about 21 N, so you can potentially get the north pole down to about 48 S (Tierra Del Fuego ends at about 56 S). The more normal practice of centering on the equator south of Mecca means that the edges of the map run through the eastern Pacific and cut Alaska off from the rest of the US, putting it and Hawaii at the far right of the map, while the Yukon stretches to the left edge of the map. That's not a huge difference from the standard Western map. It looks like it because of the distortions of the Mercator projection, but it's not generally a big deal. Centering the map on the Greenwich meridian is a convention; centering it on Mecca's meridian is a different one.

(It's interesting to note that maps are centered on Greenwich simply because latitude is measured from there, and yet the Greenwich meridian is very close to being an ideal central spot if you're interested in avoiding splitting any landmasses. A map centered on a Hamburg or Tunis meridian would perfectly split the Bering Strait, but Greenwich is pretty good. The world's mapmakers got lucky with that one.)

One would of course assume that an Iranian map would have some, shall we say, "provocative" interpretations of national boundaries and place names in the eastern Mediterranean.

On a semi-related note, in the geography-related fields it's demographers who are most prone to the nationalist (etc) political difficulties and shenanigans. My relative's department had a demographer from somewhere in East Africa who in the 1980s had to leave his home country after making population estimates that showed the wrong tribe as having a very high population. It's a lot easier to insist on lies about population numbers than on lies about the contours of the planet Earth.

Re:I'm confused...

[Gogo0]

yeah, those are called "maps of the USA", likewise, a map of spain doesnt typically include the rest of the continent or neighbors.
another sign that blind nationalism is really out of hand: when people base their criticisms on map orientation

America

[Pallidrone]

I wonder if it will show a crudely drawn America with the caption - "Here be dragons".

Re:Spain

[tnk1]

It's called Al-Andalus, you insensitive clod.

I would God would create a PKI...

[Beeftopia]

... so that I could confirm with a trusted third party that when someone claims to be speaking for, or doing the will of God, that I can reliably confirm it instead of just having to take the original individual's word for it.

Our values in Iran are the values of God

ALL RIGHT we'll create our own Google Earth!

[Thud457]

Without BLACKJACK!
Or HOOKERS!


or Israel.
or gays.

Terrorist view

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

They could replace street view with Terrorist View, showing all the best places for terrorist bombings.

Yes, I know not all people from that part of the world are terrorists. But that is a lot less funny.

Re:Terrorist view

[Iniamyen]

They could replace the magnifying glass cursor with a crosshairs cursor.

Re:a tool for western spy agencies?

[gandhi_2]

Actually, the system we used in Iraq recently made me WISH for a siprnet google earth.

Google data center

[booch]

So they're going to be bigger than Google's data center in 3 years? That's interesting, because nobody really knows how big Google's data centers are. I'd be willing to bet that most of the server admins at Google have no idea how many servers they have. The current estimates are approaching 2 million servers though. I have a very hard time believing that Iran is going to be able to build 2 million servers and the required infrastructure to run 2 million servers in the next 3 years.

I'm also curious why they'd need that many servers to run a mapping service. Their service would pretty much be guaranteed to have fewer users than Google, and provide only a fraction of the services that Google does. So I guess they're admitting that they don't really know anything about utilizing servers effectively. Or perhaps we should assume the more likely scenario -- that they're completely making all of this up.

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.

Re:in photoshop?

[maxwell demon]

will they use gimp or photoshop?

No, they would never use such un-Islamic tools. Of course the maps will be hand-drawn.

Real reason is probably the firewall

[lamber45]

Right now, GMail, YouTube and Maps are all mixed together (not necessarily 100%, probably possible to do IP filtering, but Google may be moving away from that) ... take maps away and it's easier to block the other two.

Sir Tim nailed it

[Nefarious Wheel]

"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web. . . . Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."
  -- Sir Tim Berners-Lee, "US backing for two-tier internet" in BBC News (7 September 2007)

Pictures taken from low globe orbit.

[mephox]

I wonder if their Photoshop skills are up to the task. And what about their satellite? Will they just have a camera in a dark room occasionally use the flash take a picture of a spinning globe? Because that would be awesome. I suppose occasionally, you will be able to see the hand of God reaching out to give the globe a spin.

French Resistance vs. Iraqi Resistance memes

[billstewart]

Leave aside that the US would still be a British colony if the French hadn't supported the revolutionaries as part of their war with Britain.

The reason we've had the "France surrenders" and "Freedom Fries" memes spread around by the US press since 2002 or so is that France didn't support Bush's war on Iraq, and the Bush League didn't want people comparing the Iraqi resistance to the WW II French Resistance, who were total badasses defending their country against invaders. Bush's propaganda push was that after the US beat Saddam, any Iraqis who didn't hail us as liberators were terrorists who deserve to be stomped into the ground because they hated our freedom.

Oh, yeah, the French Foreign Legion? They were colonialists who were generally on the side of evil, but they were also badasses.

Re:French Resistance vs. Iraqi Resistance memes

[russotto]

The reason we've had the "France surrenders" and "Freedom Fries" memes spread around by the US press since 2002 or so is that France didn't support Bush's war on Iraq

Nonsense; we've been sneering at the French (and they sneering right back) since at least WWII. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" goes back to 1995.

Re:French Resistance vs. Iraqi Resistance memes

[the gnat]

WW II French Resistance, who were total badasses defending their country against invaders

And a tiny fraction of the French population, much of which instead spent the war handing over their Jews to the Nazis, especially the (100% French) right-wing Vichy regime. Compare this to the Danes, who also pre-emptively surrendered and were generally nonviolent during their occupation - unlike France, they were not a military/industrial empire and would have been overrun no matter what - but helped nearly their entire Jewish population escape to Sweden and refused to cooperate with the Germans. After the war, France was treated as a "winner" in part because of the political smarts of de Gaulle, and in part to make them feel better and secure their cooperation against the Soviet Union, but in fact the war was won almost entirely by the US, UK (and affiliated nations), and USSR.

The "France surrenders" meme was around long before the run-up to the Iraq war, which is part of why it caught on so quickly (it didn't hurt that a large fraction of Americans are credulous morons happy to believe anything bad about everyone who opposed Bush's lunacy). WWII wasn't the last time France was completely embarrassed; the battle of Dien Bien Phu was another low point.

Sunni vs Shia, but also Persian vs Arab, Turk

[billstewart]

Iran's propaganda issues aren't just about Shia vs. Sunni or Muslim vs. The Great Satan America and The Previous Great Satan England, but also about Persians vs. Arabs, Turks, and other Muslims. Persians have been in the Empire business for more than a millennium before Islam.

Also, the Persians had the benefit of Greek culture after Alexander the Great invaded them, and probably well before, and the Greeks not only knew that the world was spherical, but had a pretty good estimate of its size.