The experts think the rock was "Tiddleywinked" by the rover's own wheels while turning or maneuvering on the ground.
One possible location where it might have come from is also pretty obvious when you get wider field photographs than the sensational press like so publish.
For instance, Compare this is a wider field shot of the ares BEFORE the appearance:
Notice that scuff mark in the lower left corner of the Pic 2, and find the same location in Pic 1. (Its diagonally down and to the right of the "bald eagle head shot" in Pic 1.)
A little trench has been exposed, dirt turned over and some material is missing. A rock is clearly missing from this hole. Could the rock have been un-Marsed from this hole by a wheel, and thrown that far, landing it upside down such that we see an un-weathered surface? Not saying for sure this is where it came from, (hole looks a little small), but a simple widefield view will probably reveal similar candidate sources.
I Hope JPL holds off on releasing any new imagery until the conspiracy nut jobs work their way into a screaming lather. The deflation is so much more fun that way,
But we can demand technology kill switches. Just as security was bolted onto the internet to make up for the lack of it being designed in, we shouldn't find ourselves in a position of having to bolt security onto our televisions, cars, and robotic servants.
This particular algorithm has a lot of uses. We'd want that garbage sorting automaton to the entire system stop dead in its tracks when a human hand came through in the stream of cans and bottles and waste paper being dumped into the maw of a waste sorting facility. But we don't want machines roaming the streets looking for what might be an enemy soldier, and trying to distinguish between that and someone hanging the wash on the line to dry.
Agreed, the CAs are a weak spot, which governments and spies can easily co-opt. Single point of trust also become something of ponzi racket, taking your money but still not sure of who you are, and surrendering the keys to the castle upon any governmental whim.
As for the webs of trust, I'm not sure that matters for most people. The concept is cool, but unless you are signing code or some such, it really doesn't matter in everyday life. When I send email to my family members, business associates, etc. and encrypt it by default, I'm certain their key is good, simply by the flow of communication over time.
For example, when I communicate with someone in India about ordering $5000 worth of carved jade, the fact that someone showed up at a key signing party with something approximating credentials and convinced other people, who I don't know, that he was who he claimed to be, really provides no additional protection. Its a nice idea, but unworkable in the larger world.
I submit that a web of distrust is equally effective. I may distrust a new merchant, I may distrust his keys, I may insist on samples, on references in other countries, I may insist on shipping confirmation of a bonded shipment by a carrier I choose from known companies, even specifying which office of that carrier is to be used, and payment by a money transfer method that affords me feedback without providing direct access to my account.
By distrusting every link in the chain, the materials, the merchant, the shipper, the banks, I build trust over time, such that, future shipments can happen with a simple encrypted message. I've essentially LEARNED to trust this unknown person.
This is the HUMAN method. It is the natural method, its worked for centuries.
Like I've said in the past, mankind simply can't seem to stop itself from building Skynet piecemeal. Too dumb and trusting to think all those interesting things could ever be made into weapons or instruments of control.
The alternate response is that if RSA did knowingly weaken commercial security, then you more or less have to stop trusting them.
And if they didn't Knowingly weaken security, but rather did so unwittingly, then you also have to stop trusting them. If they are that incompetent they had no clue, they probably don't belong in the business.
They only came out and told people to stop using their broken software AFTER Snowden made it known that it was compromised. NIST is pretty much in the same predicament.
If people who disagreed with the NSA were arrested, or lost their jobs, or were audited, or were deported, or disappeared in the middle of the night, we would know about it. Those things can't be kept secret.
Sure they can be kept secret. And we don't know how many people fall into this category. But any such losses would be simply lost in the local mystery that every town has, namely the huge number of missing persons.
There a a vast forest of people missing in which you could hide a lot of "disappeared" people. Someone quietly working in a field without a huge public exposure (whether white hat or black hat) could go missing from his basement lair, get reported, and forgotten by all but his mom and the world would never take notice.
Trustycon sounds like an oxymoron right out of the gate, like someone's idea of a sick joke.
The problem we have is that the industry is defined now, whereas when it was starting out, there were not entire infrastructures available for every task. Just getting a new mechanism employed by web servers and web browsers has a huge inertia today. And the industry has made almost zero headway in the task of getting people to even sigh e-mail by default, let alone encrypt it.
Now that email clients update themselves, rather than being installed and never touched again, the single thing that get most people's correspondence out of the hands of governments and advertising giants is opportunistic encryption built into the clients.
It doesn't matter how secure your algorithms are if people won't use it.
The people I was responding to seem to think you need all separate hardware. No way that should be necessary, with any modern hardware if the user understands how to manage the system properly. .
The free market already fixed this problem, if you don't like your provider, you're free to chose another. That's what makes capitalism and America great.
-- Ethanol-fueled
I don't know the details in this ares, but I doubt they would e setting up this kind of metered service tiers if they had and competition. Its a telephone coop, which suggests small town rural.
Too often, the situation is that there is no viable competition, as the market is too small or too remote to attract competition, or it has been legislated away by cities granting right of way to exclusive contracts.
Pretty much this. Not sure who these "other users" are, but if they are children, you're going to regret giving them access to your dev machine
Wait, has windows 8.1 slipped so far in the security department that you can't isolate one user from another? Windows professionals tell me all the time that windows can be protected and locked down just as tightly as Linux. (I don't necessarily believe this, but they get paid the big bucks to do this in their day jobs).
Normal account control features should provide all the protection you need if used correctly. Children should have a limited account, obviously, but permissions should keep any unauthorized users out of protected areas aren't new, unless someone is saying they have been deleted from windows 8.1. (In which case a swift downgrade to Windows 7 might be in order).
A big thumb drive for backups might be in order, obviously, but Windows should be able to provide enough protection for a self study project.
And if this gets overturned or is not the case in other countries I would suggest that bloggers form a collective media organisation - Independent Media United.:)
As a side bonus they could use it as a blogging community, buy hosting in bulk or whatever....
This. Probably the best idea in the whole thread.
Seriously, one or more associations, unions, collectives would be great. Hosting them in on place, no so much. But having an organization that has to at least pay lip service to keeping their bloggers members honest, and not involved in shake-downs (Cox was accused by the Judge of this very tactic: Retraction for Money) would go a long way.
The organizations would not even have to be view-point neutral. Just Organized and encouraging SOME sort of standards in reporting. Confirmation of claims, statement when the story is all of single source, Cross reference to other (and perhaps competing) sources. Follow-up corrections and retractions when events prove them wrong.
All those things we expect, (but often don't get) from print media.
Bloggers might choose to be members of more than one of these. The more the merrier. People will soon figure out who is believable.
Not that any of them (countries or news orgs) are perfect but none of them are as blatantly biased as Fox news.
Well a I have to assume you are speaking from total ignorance here. Why? Because you said so yourself:
I don't watch ANY of your 24 hr news feeds for my news.
I can get the BBC here, as well as the CBC, Al Jazeera, and I am internet close to anything else. If you think Fox is biased, you clearly haven't seen MSNBC. Oh! My! God!
First, off, I don't head to Fox first, or even CNN, and certainly not NBC. I'm generally aware of most stories before they even break on the national news. I watch the BBC, CBC, I surf newspapers from all over the world, even Al Jazeera, Pravda, etc.
However, every time one of my (way ot liberal) friends starts the liberal Fox New Lies rant, I invite them over to watch the nightly news. We each start with 10 bucks on the coffee table.
Every time they call something a lie, they have to prove it with an un-impeachable source right then and there using the internet.
If they can, they get the money. If they can't, I get it. They've lost so much that they refuse the wager. I probably lost once or twice, only to have Fox correct themselves in the next hour.
So here's the assignment for every Fox Hater: Post back to this thread with a current news event (today) where Fox told a lie, and cite an un-impeachable source that proves it a lie. Today, not 6 months from now. Prove it. You lose if any of the other big networks also make the same statements. You lose if Fox states that they can't yet corroborate the facts, but are just stating what are un-confirmed reports from people at the scene.
I think most haters are still going to hate, because Fox does not feed them what they want to hear, but they aren't' going to find any lies.
Um, Fox corroborates their stories before they air them.
YOU might not like what they say, (and really it boils down to that, doesn't it), and YOU might find their sources suspicious, but I suspect you had no problem believing CBS.
Obsidian would now have to show that Cox had actual knowledge that her post was false when she published it
Something about this just seems wrong. How may times have people had their lives ruined by false accusations in the Press only to have the accusations shown to be false. Richard Jewel is a good example. Seems to me that just being a notable person should not be a free pass for folks in the Press to ruin them, accidentally or otherwise.
True, Obsidian would normally under these circumstances, have to show negligence, either that the information was false or that she had no information at all, and was merely slandering Obsidian.
However, Cox (apparently) tried to hide behind journalism privilege, without providing evidence in court, perhaps trying to protect her sources, or perhaps because she really never had any verifiable information. Its not clear from TFA.
But had she substantiated her claims, that's when journalistic protections should kick in. And had that she provided proof, it would have worked for a private citizen as well, although the private citizen might not get to protect sources.
The problem here is that Cox did not have entirely clean hands. From TFA:
Cox has a history of making allegations of fraud and other illegal activities "and seeking payoffs in exchange for retraction.
So once again, we are in a situation where this might be the Law of the 9Th, but it may well not fly elsewhere.
Virtually everybody these days has linux running on site with no tech support at all. Tell me, when was the last time you saw a tech support person show up to fix your wifi writer? Guess what it runs. Linux.
...and suddenly the pages stop working altogether. It is trivial to make a page that is empty and use JavaScript to load the contents of the page. If these guys resort to AdBlock-detectors, why do you think they would allow NoScript to circumvent that?
Do we care? After all if they spend all this time trying to defeat Adblock and No-script they probably don't really have much to offer anyway. If they just tone down the amount of ads people would go to these lengths to get rid of them.
If they could get that out of the FCC database, why put an app on a phone and log this.?
After all, if you look at their map, they are simply showing where people were standing (driving) at the time their phone reported, and no tower locations are shown. Look here, https://location.services.mozilla.com/map#15/47.3771/8.5373 maximum zoom into Zurich. You have streets mapped, but no tower data at all. They are replicating street maps, not tower or wifi maps.
Follow the first link in the story. The biggest text on the page says COVERAGE MAP and when you follow the other links it is clear that their intent was a coverage map, not a data-point map where Joe Sixpack happened to see a Cell Tower.
also, if you know the location of towers fairly accurately, you only need one data point to determine the reception radius all around the tower for the specific phone/device you are using
Exactly. The phone knows what tower it was connected to. The phone knows its current signal/noise ratio. The phone knows how much power it needs to use to be heard by the tower. And the phone know where it is, rather precisely if GPS is on.
If you are measuring -75dBm where you are standing, its reasonable to assume a far bigger circle of reception than if you are seeing -101dBm. In neither case is there a reason to assume reception disappears at the ditch beside the road you are walking.
This whole thing appears like it was built by programmers without a single clue about radio propagation. I got into a email argument with one of the developers of an Android app about this very thing, and no amount of explaining could get him to understand that the signal 6 bales of hay into a field will be just a usable as the one on the highway center line. It was like talking to third grader.
Agreed, I have no problem with using both approaches.
But they should at least buy a real radio engineer a cup of coffee and find a reasonable estimation of the radius or reception around any given location when the device is measuring a given dBm. Assuming the signal falls to zero at the edge of the roadside is silly.
Its a frequent problem with these phone based mapping programs, that the coverage area they map is way too small, especially when they are mapping cell towers. They usually assume a reception circle about the width of a road. So they end up mapping roads, and frequently apply magical thinking to show no coverage areas simply because nobody walked there running their app.
They will show coverage on all sides of an open field, but unless someone walks a zigzags path thru that field they will simply assume there is no coverage there. I prefer carrier maps. Even guesswork by real radio engineers is better than spotwork by silly apps.
These mapping programs, when mapping cellular service would be better off mapping HOLES (no coverage areas) of each type (2g, 3G, LTE, CDMA, etc). The task would be smaller, and the data presentation far more useful. They would just log GPS position where there was no signal and send that when they again found a signal. Presentation would show service available until you actually had some measurements that said it wasn't.
That way at least the farmer or hunter working off road would have a more reliable idea of where there is likely cell service, and everybody would have a better idea of where they are unlikely to service.
Assuming it is all quiet in the forest when trees fall simply because you weren't standing there to hear it is a interesting philosophical exercise but a pretty stupid way to run a mapping service.
Slashdot Mirror
The experts think the rock was "Tiddleywinked" by the rover's own wheels while turning or maneuvering on the ground.
One possible location where it might have come from is also pretty obvious when you get wider field photographs than the sensational press like so publish.
For instance, Compare this is a wider field shot of the ares BEFORE the appearance:
Pic 1: http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/3528/1P441385599EFFCADPP2385R1M1.JPG
To a wider shot of the area AFTER the appearance.
Pic 2: http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/3540/1P442453328EFFCAEFP2594R1M1.JPG
Notice that scuff mark in the lower left corner of the Pic 2, and find the same location in
Pic 1. (Its diagonally down and to the right of the "bald eagle head shot" in Pic 1.)
A little trench has been exposed, dirt turned over and some material is missing. A rock is clearly missing from this hole.
Could the rock have been un-Marsed from this hole by a wheel, and thrown that far, landing it upside down such that we see an un-weathered surface? Not saying for sure this is where it came from, (hole looks a little small), but a simple widefield view will probably reveal similar candidate sources.
I Hope JPL holds off on releasing any new imagery until the conspiracy nut jobs work their way into a screaming lather. The deflation is so much more fun that way,
But we can demand technology kill switches.
Just as security was bolted onto the internet to make up for the lack of it being designed in, we shouldn't find ourselves in a position of having to bolt security onto our televisions, cars, and robotic servants.
This particular algorithm has a lot of uses. We'd want that garbage sorting automaton to the entire system stop dead in its tracks when a human hand came through in the stream of cans and bottles and waste paper being dumped into the maw of a waste sorting facility. But we don't want machines roaming the streets looking for what might be an enemy soldier, and trying to distinguish between that and someone hanging the wash on the line to dry.
Agreed, the CAs are a weak spot, which governments and spies can easily co-opt. Single point of trust also become something of ponzi racket, taking your money but still not sure of who you are, and surrendering the keys to the castle upon any governmental whim.
As for the webs of trust, I'm not sure that matters for most people. The concept is cool, but unless you are signing code or some such, it really doesn't matter in everyday life. When I send email to my family members, business associates, etc. and encrypt it by default, I'm certain their key is good, simply by the flow of communication over time.
For example, when I communicate with someone in India about ordering $5000 worth of carved jade, the fact that someone showed up at a key signing party with something approximating credentials and convinced other people, who I don't know, that he was who he claimed to be, really provides no additional protection. Its a nice idea, but unworkable in the larger world.
I submit that a web of distrust is equally effective. I may distrust a new merchant, I may distrust his keys, I may insist on samples, on references in other countries, I may insist on shipping confirmation of a bonded shipment by a carrier I choose from known companies, even specifying which office of that carrier is to be used, and payment by a money transfer method that affords me feedback without providing direct access to my account.
By distrusting every link in the chain, the materials, the merchant, the shipper, the banks, I build trust over time, such that, future shipments can happen with a simple encrypted message. I've essentially LEARNED to trust this unknown person.
This is the HUMAN method. It is the natural method, its worked for centuries.
Like I've said in the past, mankind simply can't seem to stop itself from building Skynet piecemeal. Too dumb and trusting to think all those interesting things could ever be made into weapons or instruments of control.
The alternate response is that if RSA did knowingly weaken commercial security, then you more or less have to stop trusting them.
And if they didn't Knowingly weaken security, but rather did so unwittingly, then you also have to stop trusting them.
If they are that incompetent they had no clue, they probably don't belong in the business.
They only came out and told people to stop using their broken software AFTER Snowden made it known that it was compromised.
NIST is pretty much in the same predicament.
If people who disagreed with the NSA were arrested, or lost their jobs, or were audited, or were deported, or disappeared in the middle of the night, we would know about it. Those things can't be kept secret.
Sure they can be kept secret. And we don't know how many people fall into this category. But any such losses would be simply lost in the local mystery that every town has, namely the huge number of missing persons.
Take a look at these numbers reported by CNN using data from the FBI NCIC.
There a a vast forest of people missing in which you could hide a lot of "disappeared" people. Someone quietly working in a field without a huge public exposure (whether white hat or black hat) could go missing from his basement lair, get reported, and forgotten by all but his mom and the world would never take notice.
Well they could have started with a better name.
Trustycon sounds like an oxymoron right out of the gate, like someone's idea of a sick joke.
The problem we have is that the industry is defined now, whereas when it was starting out, there
were not entire infrastructures available for every task. Just getting a new mechanism employed by
web servers and web browsers has a huge inertia today. And the industry has made almost zero
headway in the task of getting people to even sigh e-mail by default, let alone encrypt it.
Now that email clients update themselves, rather than being installed and never touched
again, the single thing that get most people's correspondence out of the hands of governments and
advertising giants is opportunistic encryption built into the clients.
It doesn't matter how secure your algorithms are if people won't use it.
If that's a problem, you haven't got enough computer for EITHER task.
Watch your processor utilization while messing with music. Its loafing.
Its just not a problem with modern multi-processor hardware.
I don't read it as a windows 8 problem.
The people I was responding to seem to think you need all separate hardware.
No way that should be necessary, with any modern hardware if the user understands how to manage the system properly. .
The free market already fixed this problem, if you don't like your provider, you're free to chose another. That's what makes capitalism and America great.
-- Ethanol-fueled
I don't know the details in this ares, but I doubt they would e setting up this kind of metered service tiers if they had and competition. Its a telephone coop, which suggests small town rural.
Too often, the situation is that there is no viable competition, as the market is too small or too remote to attract competition, or it has been legislated away by cities granting right of way to exclusive contracts.
Pretty much this. Not sure who these "other users" are, but if they are children, you're going to regret giving them access to your dev machine
Wait, has windows 8.1 slipped so far in the security department that you can't isolate one user from another?
Windows professionals tell me all the time that windows can be protected and locked down just as tightly as Linux. (I don't necessarily believe this, but they get paid the big bucks to do this in their day jobs).
Normal account control features should provide all the protection you need if used correctly. Children should have a limited account, obviously, but permissions should keep any unauthorized users out of protected areas aren't new, unless someone is saying they have been deleted from windows 8.1. (In which case a swift downgrade to Windows 7 might be in order).
A big thumb drive for backups might be in order, obviously, but Windows should be able to provide enough protection for a self study project.
And if this gets overturned or is not the case in other countries I would suggest that bloggers form a collective media organisation - Independent Media United. :)
As a side bonus they could use it as a blogging community, buy hosting in bulk or whatever....
This. Probably the best idea in the whole thread.
Seriously, one or more associations, unions, collectives would be great. Hosting them in on place, no so much.
But having an organization that has to at least pay lip service to keeping their bloggers members honest, and not
involved in shake-downs (Cox was accused by the Judge of this very tactic: Retraction for Money) would go a long
way.
The organizations would not even have to be view-point neutral. Just Organized and encouraging SOME sort of
standards in reporting. Confirmation of claims, statement when the story is all of single source, Cross reference to
other (and perhaps competing) sources. Follow-up corrections and retractions when events prove them wrong.
All those things we expect, (but often don't get) from print media.
Bloggers might choose to be members of more than one of these. The more the merrier.
People will soon figure out who is believable.
Not that any of them (countries or news orgs) are perfect but none of them are as blatantly biased as Fox news.
Well a I have to assume you are speaking from total ignorance here. Why? Because you said so yourself:
I don't watch ANY of your 24 hr news feeds for my news.
I can get the BBC here, as well as the CBC, Al Jazeera, and I am internet close to anything else.
If you think Fox is biased, you clearly haven't seen MSNBC. Oh! My! God!
First, off, I don't head to Fox first, or even CNN, and certainly not NBC. I'm generally aware of most stories before they even break on the national news. I watch the BBC, CBC, I surf newspapers from all over the world, even Al Jazeera, Pravda, etc.
However, every time one of my (way ot liberal) friends starts the liberal Fox New Lies rant, I invite them over to watch the nightly news.
We each start with 10 bucks on the coffee table.
Every time they call something a lie, they have to prove it with an un-impeachable source right then and there using the internet.
If they can, they get the money. If they can't, I get it.
They've lost so much that they refuse the wager. I probably lost once or twice, only to have Fox correct themselves in the next hour.
So here's the assignment for every Fox Hater: Post back to this thread with a current news event (today) where Fox told a lie, and cite an un-impeachable source that proves it a lie. Today, not 6 months from now. Prove it. You lose if any of the other big networks also make the same statements. You lose if Fox states that they can't yet corroborate the facts, but are just stating what are un-confirmed reports from people at the scene.
I think most haters are still going to hate, because Fox does not feed them what they want to hear, but they aren't' going to find any lies.
Um, Fox corroborates their stories before they air them.
YOU might not like what they say, (and really it boils down to that, doesn't it), and YOU might find their sources suspicious, but
I suspect you had no problem believing CBS.
Obsidian would now have to show that Cox had actual knowledge that her post was false when she published it
Something about this just seems wrong. How may times have people had their lives ruined by false accusations in the Press only to have the accusations shown to be false. Richard Jewel is a good example. Seems to me that just being a notable person should not be a free pass for folks in the Press to ruin them, accidentally or otherwise.
True, Obsidian would normally under these circumstances, have to show negligence, either that the information
was false or that she had no information at all, and was merely slandering Obsidian.
However, Cox (apparently) tried to hide behind journalism privilege, without providing evidence in court,
perhaps trying to protect her sources, or perhaps because she really never had any verifiable
information. Its not clear from TFA.
But had she substantiated her claims, that's when journalistic protections should kick in.
And had that she provided proof, it would have worked for a private citizen as well, although
the private citizen might not get to protect sources.
The problem here is that Cox did not have entirely clean hands. From TFA:
Cox has a history of making allegations of fraud and other illegal activities "and seeking payoffs in exchange for retraction.
So once again, we are in a situation where this might be the Law of the 9Th, but it may well not fly elsewhere.
Another ignorant idiot.
Virtually everybody these days has linux running on site with no tech support at all.
Tell me, when was the last time you saw a tech support person show up to fix your wifi writer?
Guess what it runs. Linux.
So clearly you know nothing about Linux either.....
...and suddenly the pages stop working altogether. It is trivial to make a page that is empty and use JavaScript to load the contents of the page. If these guys resort to AdBlock-detectors, why do you think they would allow NoScript to circumvent that?
Do we care?
After all if they spend all this time trying to defeat Adblock and No-script they probably don't really have much to offer anyway.
If they just tone down the amount of ads people would go to these lengths to get rid of them.
If they could get that out of the FCC database, why put an app on a phone and log this.?
After all, if you look at their map, they are simply showing where people were standing (driving) at the time their phone reported, and no tower locations are shown. Look here, https://location.services.mozilla.com/map#15/47.3771/8.5373 maximum zoom into Zurich. You have streets mapped, but no tower data at all. They are replicating street maps, not tower or wifi maps.
Follow the first link in the story. The biggest text on the page says COVERAGE MAP and when you follow the other links
it is clear that their intent was a coverage map, not a data-point map where Joe Sixpack happened to see a Cell Tower.
also, if you know the location of towers fairly accurately, you only need one data point to determine the reception radius all around the tower for the specific phone/device you are using
Exactly.
The phone knows what tower it was connected to.
The phone knows its current signal/noise ratio.
The phone knows how much power it needs to use to be heard by the tower.
And the phone know where it is, rather precisely if GPS is on.
If you are measuring -75dBm where you are standing, its reasonable to assume a far bigger circle of reception than if you are seeing -101dBm.
In neither case is there a reason to assume reception disappears at the ditch beside the road you are walking.
This whole thing appears like it was built by programmers without a single clue about radio propagation. I got into a email argument with one of the developers of an Android app about this very thing, and no amount of explaining could get him to understand that the signal 6 bales of hay into a field will be just a usable as the one on the highway center line. It was like talking to third grader.
Agreed, I have no problem with using both approaches.
But they should at least buy a real radio engineer a cup of coffee and find a reasonable estimation of the radius or reception around any given location when the device is measuring a given dBm. Assuming the signal falls to zero at the edge of the roadside is silly.
You are right, of course, it merely follows people, it says nothing of signal paths, and can't distinguish no-signal areas from un-visited areas.
And showing a map when there are so few participants is pretty silly.
For cell reception, this is useless.
For wifi mapping, this is redundant.
Its a frequent problem with these phone based mapping programs, that the coverage area they map is way too small, especially when they are mapping cell towers. They usually assume a reception circle about the width of a road. So they end up mapping roads, and frequently apply magical thinking to show no coverage areas simply because nobody walked there running their app.
They will show coverage on all sides of an open field, but unless someone walks a zigzags path thru that field they will simply assume there is no coverage there. I prefer carrier maps. Even guesswork by real radio engineers is better than spotwork by silly apps.
These mapping programs, when mapping cellular service would be better off mapping HOLES (no coverage areas) of each type (2g, 3G, LTE, CDMA, etc). The task would be smaller, and the data presentation far more useful. They would just log GPS position where there was no signal and send that when they again found a signal. Presentation would show service available until you actually had some measurements that said it wasn't.
That way at least the farmer or hunter working off road would have a more reliable idea of where there is likely cell service, and everybody would have a better idea of where they are unlikely to service.
Assuming it is all quiet in the forest when trees fall simply because you weren't standing there to hear it is a interesting philosophical exercise but a pretty stupid way to run a mapping service.