Google Releases Detailed New Map of North Korea

[Frodo]

This should be interesting:

Google releases detailed map of North Korea, gulags and all

Posted by Chico Harlan on January 28, 2013 at 9:25 pm

Until Tuesday, North Korea appeared on Google Maps as a near-total white space — no roads, no train lines, no parks and no restaurants. The only thing labeled was the capital city, Pyongyang.

This all changed when Google, on Tuesday, rolled out a detailed map of one of the world’s most secretive states. The new map labels everything from Pyongyang’s subway stops to the country’s several city-sized gulags, as well as its golf courses, hotels, hospitals and department stores.

According to a Google blog post, the maps were created by a group of volunteer “citizen cartographers,” through an interface known as Google Map Maker. That program — much like Wikipedia — allows users to submit their own data, which is then fact-checked by other users, and sometimes altered many times over. Similar processes were used in other once-unmapped countries like Afghanistan and Burma.

In the case of North Korea, those volunteers worked from outside of the country. They used information that was already public, coming from existing analog maps, satellite images, or other Web-based materials.

North Korea was the last country almost virtually unmapped by Google.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I feel like this could have some significant ramifications.
(Not really off-topic either.)

[Simfan34]

This seems like an awfully bad-faith thing to do just days after conducting a visit to the country. Not that I really care. But it might make them wary of future Western business delegations, fearing such embarrassments.

[minionofmidas]

I feel like this could have some significant ramifications.
(Not really off-topic either.)

You think google has information the US government didn't have already? Or are you under the false assumption that googlemaps is accessible from inside North Korea?

[DemPGH]

And of course they just recently issued forth a lot of bluster and fire-breathing toward the USA and South Korea. Interesting. If "citizen cartographers," I think the message goes, can do this, imagine what the USG can. A quiet way of saying, "You're not as up to par as you think, so shut up," IMO.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I feel like this could have some significant ramifications.
(Not really off-topic either.)

You think google has information the US government didn't have already? Or are you under the false assumption that googlemaps is accessible from inside North Korea?

What it can do is inform the policy discussion about North Korea to be more detailed outside of those US government officials that have access to that information.

[Јas]

It's not the most detailed publically available map of North Korea.
It's not even the most detailed publically available map of North Korea from Google.
See the 6 year old project North Korea Uncovered for that.