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Israeli Troops Who Relied On Waze Blundered Into Deadly Palestinian Firefight (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Israeli forces mounted a rescue mission in a Palestinian neighborhood after gun battles erupted when two soldiers mistakenly entered the area because of an error on a satellite navigation app, Israeli authorities said Tuesday.The clashes late Monday in the Qalandiya refugee camp outside Jerusalem left at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously. According to initial Israeli reports, the two soldiers said they had been using Waze, a highly touted Israeli-invented navigation app bought more than two years ago by Google. The smartphone app, which has a settings option to 'avoid dangerous areas,' relies on crowdsourcing to give users the fastest traffic routes.
I was going to say that this would be the "people blindly follow satnav without engaging their brains" aspect of technology. However, upon reading the article, I see this:
the driver deviated from the suggested route and, as a result, entered the prohibited area.
So fuck that, this article is about when the people DON'T use satnav technology. Yet they are blaming it on an error in Waze paragraphs earlier. Maybe they think it's an error that Waze came close enough that a small deviation lead to disaster? Well, they also say that the soldier who went astray had turned off the "avoid dangerous or prohibited areas" setting, which is also a user error.
Something doesn't quite add up about the Waze aspect of the story.
A gun battle broke out in a Palestinian neighborhood late Monday after Israeli forces tried to rescue two soldiers who had mistakenly entered the area because of an error on a satellite navigation app, Israeli authorities said Tuesday.
Really?
Agence France-Presse quoted a Waze official on Tuesday as saying that the setting to warn about areas “dangerous or prohibited for Israelis to drive through” had been switched off on the device the soldiers used.
“In this case, the setting was disabled,” the official told the news agency. “In addition, the driver deviated from the suggested route and, as a result, entered the prohibited area.”
I'm having a really hard time seeing how that's the app's fault.
Nope, no sig
“In this case, the setting was disabled,” the official told the news agency. “In addition, the driver deviated from the suggested route and, as a result, entered the prohibited area.”
User error, as usual
They took that land after all of their friendly neighbors tried to wipe them off of the map.
Not exactly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus
Jewish militias started killing Arabs, Arabs fled, Israel blocked their return, and redistributed their property/lands to Jewish immigrants. Israel's hands are just as bloody as anyone else's.
I don't fault Indians for scalping my ancestors whenever they had the opportunity, and I don't fault the Palestinian people for attacking their occupiers whenever they get the chance. Israel can certainly do quite a bit to right their wrongs--honoring the Palestinian right of return would be a start.
PROTIP: If you want to take the moral high ground, you might want to stop calling some humans baboons.
Also, "These guys wearing regular civilian clothes in a civilian vehicle" are not always just passing by for no reason at all : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...