And then there are those guys... and they make billions, by giving a flying f*ck about ethics or what so ever. And NO ONE will hold them accountable. NO ONE! Because either they lack the power, or they are bought and in it on the scheme.
I accept that the world is like that. Just like International Law has always been nothing more than an academic exercise, business doesnt care about anyone besides profit. Its fine. Its just sad also...
And what can be done? The comments usually say a big fat nothing.
- Any fool already knew this comments: “shouldn’t be a surprise”
- I guess I should call my representative comments
- Just boycot tech comments
Usually nothing much actionable. Building the Ad/Surveillance/Privacy Invasion society? Very actionable, good pay, many mouths fed and FIRE accomplished by HN posters. There’s even at least one acronym for this life achievement.
Shoutout to digital activists that are doing something. I’m but an armchair complainer on this front.
This is not at all an honest way of saying "Niantics founder raised money from In-Q-Tel"
I mean, we have a lot of weird shit going down right now... like AI being used to automate art BEFORE it's being used to automate dangerous and menial jobs, but knowing that people are being killed with help from data generated by millions of kids and young adults playing a fun, cute videogame is just so freaking dark and weird.
We are a very strange species and I don't have a great deal of hope for our future.
Pokémon Go can be pretty expensive with micro-transactions.
People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.
I mean, you can blame whoever you want, even Pikachu. Neither Niantic nor even one person cares who you blame.
It is a shameful use of tech.
MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/
It's a feature of open data, it's open and usable by anyone.
The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD.
This is mostly an ideological battle.
Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?
The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).
There's even a Pokemon exclusive to the middle east region: sandstorm pattern Vivillion. Lots of players there.
Maxar is/was primarily a satellite data company, and to say Pokemon data would add any major value in any of today's active drone deployments with the level of Satellite coverage Maxar already has is a wide stretch.
Moreover, ground forces in the area would need pretty heavy jamming tech in place too for this kind of data to be useful. It's a sliver of a sliver of a sliver situation.
Governments have a say on to whom their weapons manufacturers sell weapons. It should be ditto for geospatial intelligence. If you want to map geospatial data in the Netherlands, you get a license from them and store the data locally and have to get permission to exfiltrate.
This won’t stop exfiltration, of course. But it should slow it down, which in the world of geospatial intel, could mean the difference between a drone finding its target and getting lost because of new construction.
That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.
I seriously loath, hate & despise everything about this digital panopticon world being constructed around us.
I guess this also explains how they were paying for the free 3d model photogrammetry processing that app does.
There is a level of evilness on that difficult to grasp. What kind of society puts that burthen on their own children?
Inequality has given power to the few deranged and depraved. No ethics, no morality, just self gratification and excess.
I was interviewed for the Trouw piece and briefly quoted. This isn't to detract from the DroneXL piece, which adds its own angle.
A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go.
The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that once such an obscurant retrograde declares such an innocent game so evil, it must be something to absolutely install and play in spite!
And such was the way of the Pokemon Go's viral success in Russia.
(edits for factual precision)
Like in that case when he blamed the rise of toll roads in Russia - "oh brothers and sisters, shalt we allow taking the toll on what should forever be free in Russia?" - the public reacted in the exact same way - a religious zealot told this, so it must actually be a progressive, sane thing to do the opposite.
It should also be pointed out that Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church have been understood to have been cat's paws for Russia's notorious KGB successor agencies for a very long time now.
> the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now.
is a total wind vane which can flip 180° in a matter of days (if not minutes, as in Orwell's scene where they seamlessly switch from being at war with Eurasia to that with Eastasia)...
Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.
But the value in that data is in the liveliness right, so at some point, would it not make sense for that data to be considered a public asset?
Why do we not demand this data be released regularly (given that the inverse tech could be developed using this as well)? If it can be used to train things used for war, could it not equally be used to train better lifesaving tech (in which case, the data should be made available to the public)?
The story here however I'm not too sure about: Isn't the game mostly played in dense urban areas? - by the time you need military drones there the area will have changed a lot (destruction, fortification, ... and overall be outdated) where I think the civilian drones (delivery, cars, ....) benefit more. While the technology certainly is dual use.
It's dual, but its positive aspects are only unlocked after a sufficient human blood sacrifice is made by its overlords, as is the case with all dual use tech.
There is no 'we'. 99%+ of people view the world as a zero sum game where for me to win, somebody has to lose and if I don't do whatever it takes, somebody else will and then I lose, therefore I have no morals or principles or virtues and anyone who does is a liar or a fool.
Everything is a bad faith act, everyone is a selfish bad faith actor and I shouldn't feel bad about being one because everyone else who isn't a fool is too.
This tragically wrong but intuitively correct worldview and much more was explained by Plato long, long ago and just about no one understood any of it. At least the text survived and people with 140+ IQ and an iota of decency can read it and be at peace knowing they're not crazy or foolish.
Enter AI, a new era of soulless wonder.
Intelligentia Artificiosa.
Ingenium Artificum.
— Dreams of Silicon and Sorrow
I am conflicted on this report.
1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.
2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.
How does the VPS work?
You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)
Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)
Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)
Now.
Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.
I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.
I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.
However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.
In the latest season they've gotten rid of the scan rewards, so I guess they got all the data they needed.
and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU
But I do appreciate alot about what they are doing and choose to do
Reminds me more of a theme park. Yes, a heavy handed corporation runs it and if you have any dissent it won’t go well, but if you don’t choose to focus on that then it will be a joyous place and you have the opportunity to contribute to that energy and be rewarded by something that simulates a free market
>Van den Hoven did not condemn battlefield VPS outright. If it helps Ukraine win a just war against an aggressor, he said, that is a good development. His worry is the system falling into the wrong hands
The professor is quite flexible with his "ethics"
This is about players all over the world contributing scans of their own countries to US military, though.
https://www.avclub.com/iran-becomes-first-country-to-ban-pok...
Really smart decision, in hindsight.
The map went to offense. Nobody needs scans of someone else's country for "defense".
At this point it's a given that any data source that can bring an edge in a conflict is being used for exactly that. Things that film and scan surroundings are the newest addition. When a fleet of cars is taking cm or mm resolution scans of entire cities or even countries the safe assumption is that the data is funneled for intelligence and military purposes.
Ah, oh yes, "we all knew it from the start", "they indicated that up front" etc.
Fuck no, everyone was foaming at the mouth how it's just a game and no way in hell an intelligence operation.
P.S. Those who "knew it from the start" yet continued helping Niantic, did you really think that the data will be used for the greater good of the humankind?
But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks.
From TFA:
> Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.
I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.
Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important?
Genuinely don't know much in this space.
Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.
The geographical data already exists in digital maps. And I would expect competent militaries already have maps of enemy territory. It's the second part that was so far missing.
This combined set allows the training of AI models that can say, "When my surroundings look like x, that looks like y on a map".
So when your drone's GPS gets jammed, it can look at its surroundings, reference its (internal and offline) maps, figure out where it is, and navigate.
Niantic has the benefit that they can steer "volunteers" to specific points, though.
... Except, well, when it's the doing of this same, so called "defence" industry.
Works less well if you want to use structures for radar cover.
Guns feed families and protect people too.
They are dual use like all tech from knives to nukes.
Normal players would have noticed the bandwidth and CPU usage, and volunteers have already agreed to data sharing, so there's no point in keeping secrets. Same as claims that the Facebook app listens to people talk: someone would have caught it by now.
Also, AR capture was never very popular, mostly a gimmick for new players. The game was already a battery and power hog even without it.
For the company, it’s a stretch but tenable. Saying the “founder has CIA roots” solely because they took an In-Q-Tel cheque is just wrong.
If someone claimed to have a CIA background solely on the basis that In-Q-Tel funded their mapping software, they'd be a charlatan. Just as a guy selling toilet paper to the CIA is not necessarily someone embedded in the intelligence community.
I was able to create a full 3d model of my window plant almost free of obscured areas from a few dozens still photos taken all around it, back in 2018, using the Capturing Reality photogrammetry app on a mobile i7-3610QM CPU with 8Gb RAM, in about 40-60 minutes.
And that's pretty mundane general public software, do we know for sure which algorithms are used by Niantic?
I'd say... the versatility of photos provides the "ground truth" on its own when combined to one single dataset. Say you want to program a guided drone shooting through urban areas, you want it to work under all sorts of conditions - day, night, rain, snow, the sun visible from all possible angles and throwing shadows.
A dataset that you can get from something like Street View? You can at best generate that once a year at enormous expense. Still valuable because a Street View car likely has a multitude of highest-quality GNSS receivers and possibly RTK navigation aids, but to make the dataset usable for 24/7/365 navigation you absolutely need a huge, huge amount of backfill.