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Google Earth's New Tool Lets You Measure Distance Between Anything On Earth (theverge.com)
Google Earth's new Measure tool is rolling out to Android and Chrome devices that will let you measure the distance and area of things on the map. An iOS version is said to be "coming soon." The Verge reports: With the tool, users can measure the distance between two points or the surface area of a selected chunk of the map. (Now you can finally find out how far your house is from the North Pole.) Users aren't limited to simple squares, either. The Measure tool will let you select the borders of an area so it's easier to measure irregularly shaped objects like parks, buildings, or even states and countries.
June 25 2018, 8:00 a.m.
THE SECRETS ARE hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering, windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a second glance, because their function is not publicly known. They are an integral part of one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks – and they are also linked to a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.
Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.
The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.
Much has previously been reported about the NSA’s surveillance programs. But few details have been disclosed about the physical infrastructure that enables the spying. Last year, The Intercept highlighted a likely NSA facility in New York City’s Lower Manhattan. Now, we are revealing for the first time a series of other buildings across the U.S. that appear to serve a similar function, as critical parts of one of the world’s most powerful electronic eavesdropping systems, hidden in plain sight.
“It’s eye-opening and ominous the extent to which this is happening right here on American soil,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It puts a face on surveillance that we could never think of before in terms of actual buildings and actual facilities in our own cities, in our own backyards.”
There are hundreds of AT&T-owned properties scattered across the U.S. The eight identified by The Intercept serve a specific function, processing AT&T customers’ data and also carrying large quantities of data from other internet providers. They are known as “backbone” and “peering” facilities.
While network operators would usually prefer to send data through their own networks, often a more direct and cost-efficient path is provided by other providers’ infrastructure. If one network in a specific area of the country is overloaded with data traffic, another operator with capacity to spare can sell or exchange bandwidth, reducing the strain on the congested region. This exchange of traffic is called “peering” and is an essential feature of the internet.
Because of AT&T’s position as one of the U.S.’s leading telecommunications companies, it has a large network that is frequently used by other providers to transport their customers’ data. Companies that “peer” with AT&T include the American telecommunications giants Sprint, Cogent Communications, and Level 3, as well as foreign companies such a
the distance between creimer and reality?
Click the little ruler in the top bar. I can't remember that ever not being there and know for a fact it's been there for bare-minimum 5 years.
Is this to help Kim Jung-Un verify his missiles can reach D.C.?
That's what I use driving directions for. After the ice poles melt, we can drive to the North Pole!
Woot woot!
All your firsts are belong to us.
Google does something that cartographers and map hackers have been doing for a very long time, news at 11.
the distance between Xi Jinping and Whinnie the Pooh?
I haven't checked this feature but I've often wanted a nice quick great circle measurement option regardless of whether there was any road between my A and B. For that, google has been singularly useless for as long as they had their maps around.
https://www.daftlogic.com/
They have distance and area calculators. Thanks for coming out Google.
Somehow I doubt it. So, vaguely measure.
I never tried checking the area... but I can click two points and measure distance and was able to do this on browsers a long time ago. This "new" thing must be only on mobile OS?
I hope Santa makes extra cookies for all of the kids that try to walk to the North Pole this December.
Round earth or stupid?
...my turgid cockhead and your moms pouting pussy. The distance?
Negative 10 inches! That's how deep I'm in her.
Google Earth's New Tool Lets You Measure Distance Between Anything On Earth
How about.... my hand from my cup of coffee? How about now? And now? Now?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
flat. There, I said it.
For the 5 major American political parties (Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Green and Disaster Area), I tried to find the distance between their core platforms and reality. The measurement was so astronomical it required interpretation by a professor of Neomathematics from the University of Maximegalon. You know the one.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
0...
Table-ized A.I.
It's amazing that it is now newsworthy when an app or website gets a feature that the desktop program has had since the very beginning.
Given the ability to measure was one of the reasons why many people used Google Earth in the first place it makes me wonder WTF the app writers were thinking taking so long to implement one of the most basic and standard features their software has always had.
What next, Office 365 gets the ability to change font size?
I remember using this my android phone on version 2.3 Gingerbread and had this feature under a checkbox in the settings as a beta feature. Gingerbread was released in late 2010, so this has likely been available for 7 years or more...
C'mon folks, us cavemen used to have to code this stuff ourselves back when the earth was still cooling. Remember Microsoft's Terraserver? Back then you could write your own front-end for it (well, you had to if you didn't want to consume the data thru Microsoft's site as there was no API). We'd calculate distance between points using Great Circle Distance with the Mean Earth Radius (6371 km) as r in the formula, which gives you pretty good results and is my guess as to what Google's using to calculate this stuff.
I've always wished there was a way to take an arbitrary area in Google maps and then overlay it over some other area on Google maps with a correction for the difference in projection so as to easily compare the sizes of areas.
It's still 4".
*** Don't be dull.***
As the crow flies or will they account for earth curvature? (I guess that's easy for you flat-earthers out there)
The answer is almost always "not far enough"
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Finally I can try and measure the coastline.
(and no specified OTHER thing)
is by definition ZERO...
easy peasy