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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.
Sod it all, I want tech or geek news.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you're relying on a commercial and/or free app or program for life-or-death situations, I think you're doing it wrong. If said option is the only option, then you have to take it at face value and accept some self-responsibility. I'm not going to trust my life to crowdsourcing for surgery or medication, so why would I trust my life to crowdsourcing for navigating near a war zone?
So, two soldiers of one of the best-trained, best-equipped military forces on the planet were using a consumer-oriented phone app for navigation?
Something tells me that a certain two solders will be peeling a whole lot of potatoes over the next year or so.
If you're using crowdsourcing to figure out the safe way to go, someone's got to be the first one to report a hazard.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I just looked through my Waze settings and I don't see "avoid dangerous areas", does that just show as an option for some third world places like Palestine or NYC?
The closest thing I found was "avoid dirt roads"
It seems Waze is sadly lacking the option to mark a hazard for "active firefight".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
two soldiers mistakenly entered the area because of an error on a satellite navigation app
And what was this supposed "error"?
According to the article (or at least, the most informative quotes in the article), the "dangerous places" setting was switched off and the driver wasn't actually on the Waze-suggested route.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Did you guys see anything in there about bullets and explosions? "
"Ummm...Maybe check the current weather section."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
What could possibly go wrong?
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
policy and the map will be correct!
Of course one person's "dangerous neighbourhood" is someone else's "home" .... crowd sourcing the distinction is probably a silly idea - or was there an "Occupying Army" switch they forgot to turn on to tell it what side they were on?
There WAS no firefight at the time. From TFA:
The trouble didn't show up until after they arrived.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
just wait for an auto drive car to mess up like this and who will do the hard time when you drives on to the airport runway?
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.c...
Or drive though a armed forces base?
On to a bus only lane / road?
That'll hopefully teach them not to rely on civilian navigation tools that assume peacetime.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You would think traffic backing up at crossing 1, then 2, then 3, would give it an idea that crossing 4 would soon backup based on some sort of distance per minute algorithm bit NO!
Bullets I can forgive, they travel faster than freight trains....
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I'm sorry, I can't read your Unicode comments... Can you use a text editor like vi or something?.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The headline makes it sound like there was this firefight just sort of hanging out, like firefights do, and a couple of troops just blundered into it.
Let's rewrite the headline in active voice: "Palistinians Attempt to Kill Two Noncombatant Israeli Soldiers Who Accidentally Entered Refugee Camp"
From the article:
I don't think Israel is perfect, nor Israeli soldiers, but I am rather tired of how passive voice is so often used when describing things done to Israelis.
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=3132
I wouldn't say that the two Israeli soldiers "blundered into a firefight". They blundered into a refugee camp, and there a group of Palestinians tried to kill them. Since their vehicle was blocked and then destroyed, they fled on foot. The firefight came later, when more Israeli soldiers came to rescue the two who blundered.
Note that the Slashdot story headline is worse than the one from the Washington Post, which is: "Israeli troops relying on Waze app blunder into Palestinian area; clashes follow"
I note also that the summary has a detailed accounting of the harm done to Palestinians: "at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously." Yet curiously it leaves out the small details that the Palestinians attacked first, destroyed a military vehicle, and injured 10 Israeli soldiers.
Again for comparison, the Washington Post article says:
Perhaps the omissions are simple mistakes, but it's kind of strange how the omissions were all about harm done to Israeli soldiers.
I'll finish with one more quote from the Washington Post story:
So the two soldiers who "blundered" are guilty of getting a bit lost. I've gotten a bit lost; I'm just lucky that I don't live in a place where a mob of people will attack me if I go to the wrong neighborhood.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I look forward to reading their review on play.google.com
"It is a killer app."
Sloppy commenters. It's as if there were no "preview" function, isn't it?
"In 300 meters, shoot left."
"...recalculating..."
"In 200 meters, throw hand grenades right."
"...recalculating..."
"Arriving at ambush location, on right."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
A refugee camp is not a dangerous area. The problem is that they were foreign military invaders and they were probably there to do harm. It's not really easy to "wander into" a refugee camp.
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Isn't this like a police officer reporting that waze failed to warn him about his speed trap before he set it up and gave out four tickets?
How exactly was a navigation app supposed to warn the soldiers an area was dangerous when the only thing that made it dangerous was two soldiers walking into a peaceful neighborhood then subsequently shooting it up, killing a person and injuring 10 others. Or are they really suggesting they walked into a pack of heavily armed dangerous Palestinians who unexpectedly opened fire on them, all missing with every surprise shot, with the result of them walking away chuckling and talking about a smartphone app leaving a trail of bodies behind because they are just that damn good.
Have they ever considered the possibility that Google is okay with people of both sides of their holy war using the app and considers an area safe until someone on either side reports a couple murderous militant assholes shooting someone who prays to wrong flavor of the same sky fairy?
First of all "Ãoestormed" would make an awesome band name.
But beyond that, once the car was firebombed it would have been helpful to mark that for other Waze users. Again, there's no good way to mark "active firefight" or "mob action" in Waze, though at the very least they could mark the burned-out husk of the vehicle as "object on road".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah. Sorry about the Unicode stuff. /. somehow lacks an "edit" functions. I usually don't proof-read copy-n-paste operations.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Heh heh. If someone firebombs my car, there's a firefight.
No israelis were harmed during the manufacture of this news.
'Poor navigation by israeli leads to invasion and subsequent killing of one Palestinian and the injury to 10 more.' would have been a more acurate headline.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, Waze did know to send Infidel troops into a Mohammedan Jihadi camp and kick some butt!!! They're really living up to parent company Google's motto 'Do no evil'.
Here, I'll code it for ya:
Table-ized A.I.
The closest thing I found was "avoid dirt roads"
I browsed through the source code when the client app was first released and you are indeed right. The option (at the time) to "Avoid Palestinian controlled areas" had been replaced with "Avoid dirt roads" in the worldwide code release.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
> our civilized slashdot society
Err... You wouldn't happen to be new here, would you? 'Cause if that's what you're expecting...
Top of the page, on the right - there's a slider. Slide it to 5. You'll still find some things that offend you. But it's probably less likely.
I think the person you replied to is an idiot. However, you can censor your view of this site on your own. We're not going to censor others for your delicate sensibilities. Yes, they're an idiot. Yes, that's what happens. You'll get over it. No pixels were harmed in the making of their post. Hell, they're probably Jewish.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
does it matter that two people got shot at for going down the wrong street not bother anyone? I'm not trying to say its ok, but maybe someone could have just said: "your in the wrong area guys, you need to shake your ass back the way you came. pronto!"
Was getting shot at really necessary?
"A traffic incident has been reported here by fellow Wazers"
Must not have sound too threatening.
"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. âoe '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.' " A cynic might suggest the soldiers went looking for trouble, and found more than they were counting on. Of course, we're not allowed to say things like that...it's "anti-Semitic".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
How many Palestinians would have died if the Israelis had not been using Waze?
Sure... when you suicidal bastards acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, and stop lobbing rockets into Israel.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
crowd sourcing can be blamed just like the weather to justify military action that was not sanctioned by the people.
You'd think sky-high walls would be hard to miss. Huh, I guess not.
Those guys certainly weren't the sharpest pencils in the box.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I love me a good blast from the past! Well played!
Ezekiel 23:20
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/...
Waze doesn't have the option to avoid "bad" areas, because Microsoft had a patent on it. I don't think MS has a navigation product any more, but they have a patent on avoiding high crime areas and because of that Waze have stated that they won't implement anything remotely similar.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This seems a bit similar to yesterdays discussion on people following a robot out of a burning building. They trusted the robot, and got burned...these guys trusted the app, and (figuratively) got burned.
Just another day in Paradise
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I've always wondered. If enough people drive off a bridge while using Google Maps, or Waze, or any app that uses crowd sourced data, would it then suggest others follow and also drive off the bridge? It should clearly label it as a fast moving road based on gps data until they hit the end of the bridge, and accelerometer data once they're falling off.
I'm sorry, but simply because some silicon and radio waves are involved, I don't see why that elevates this to newsworthy status. How about a headline from 1952 Korea, or 1944 Russia, or 1776 Virginia, where a poorly rendered paper map led to an ambush? Does it make the front page of a firearms journal of the day? I hope not.
Sorry, I didn't mean to offend real baboons by identifying Palestinians as baboons.