Wave of (Open Street Map) Vandalism in South Korea

Wave of (Open Street Map) Vandalism in South Korea(openstreetmap.org)

89 points by shortrounddev2 162 days ago | 20 comments

unsigner 162 days ago |

Freely available and openly editable maps might be one of the things that we take for granted, but are simply an abberation of a brief period of peace and civility; now we'll return to the default hobbesian state of affairs.

See also: beautiful, detailed aerial photos of oil refineries posted by amateur drone photographers to public sites. Submarine cables and oil tankers, carrying the world economy on their shoulders without any protection out there at sea.

Loudergood 162 days ago | |

Security by obscurity is an illusion. Bad actors, especially state actors, will have no problem getting this data. We should make this data public so it's expected to be public, and then planners will take the risks more seriously.

otabdeveloper4 162 days ago | | |

Do you think James Bond-style special agents are doing the state actor operations, like in the movies?

It doesn't work like that. The vast majority of the time it's regular stupid people that are doing the heavy lifting (often unwittingly) for state actor operations.

So yes, security by obscurity works. It makes the state actor's job that much harder.

threatofrain 162 days ago | | |

Bad actors, especially state actors, will have no problem getting this data.

Everything that costs will cost to the degree that it costs. Putting the chocolate milk on the top shelf is enough to encourage children to buy less chocolate milk. The data you're talking about? The place I work at is the one doing the hard boots on the ground labor for aerial data, and from that perspective nothing is easy or free.

One can make great arguments about why people should have access to data notwithstanding all risks, but surely not that security by obscurity is mere illusion.

cr125rider 162 days ago | |

The US Navy posted all over the Gulf of Aden says “ahem?”

poguemahoney 162 days ago | | |

Yes, it's a good thing all cables and tankers were relocated to the Gulf of Aden under the follow the protection doctrine.

ninalanyon 160 days ago | |

> default hobbesian state of affairs.

Is it really the default?

subversiontaco 161 days ago |

The Korean gov’t employs small Korean AI companies to build bots thats endlessly scrape the internet and harass websites that post unfavorable content about Korea. They label it as “korean error news,” but the standard boils down to more or less “anything that speaks of Korean in negative light.”

This gives off the same vibes. But this is Korea. They will probably give up in a month or so and move on to whatever else they think will help make them rich overnight.

idoubtit 162 days ago |

So, a handful of persons "believe that OpenStreetMap is a creation of Chinese communists" and are removing specific data from OpenStreetMap, and the OP explains why this is stupid but innocuous.

But that's not the first time that a community is tagged "Chinese communists" and attacked as such. Now imagine if some maga/alt-right/whatever leaders asked their followers to attack the "communist" OpenStreetMap by injecting a bit of false data everyday. Could OSM defend itself as easily?

lolc 162 days ago | |

Ask Wikipedia how they are dealing with this shit. Openstreetmap is a rather unlikely target, so it's news.

akimbostrawman 161 days ago | | |

they aren't because they are long fully captured

otabdeveloper4 162 days ago | | |

> Ask Wikipedia how they are dealing with this shit.

They aren't. Wikipedia has been taken over by special interest groups and political agencies for a long, long time now.