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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.
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?
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.
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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
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.
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.
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!
Since we are talking about Israel, you can replace "two soldiers" with "two 18 year old kids".
In most countries, kids graduate high school and start getting drunk and laid in college. In Israel kids finish high school and start their military service. And this is for both genders.
“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
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?