Hacker News Reader

Comment by Geee | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering why Google is so stupid to use their own IP address for these dirty jobs? I guess that's the real mistake the contractor was doing from Google's point of view. They were probably instructed to use random proxies around the world, but somehow this particular 'contractor' didn't manage to do that.

View on HN

So you think the senior evil overlords at Google made a affirmative decision to deliberately sabotage OpenStreetMap to make it look bad in comparison to Google Maps. And that they instructed their agents to cover their tracks.

Seriously?

If so, that were some particularly inept secret agents...

That's exactly what I'm thinking. I mean, I know corporate espionage exists, but really. If this was really your goal why traceable sabotage? Why not break the logical connectivity at big intersections so they render correctly but break navigation algorithms? Why not offset a city 100m to the south to break GPS matching? "Deleting main roads" from a traceable IP is just... dumb.

Yes, seriously. If you have used OSM, you know that its data is much better already than that of Google Maps.

Planting an idea that OSM is not trustworthy i.e. diminishing it's perceived value by random sabotage is the best way to keep it from growing.

So you think a bunch of contractors got together to sabotage a competitor for shits and giggles?

This isn't writing like 'dick dick dick' on Snooki's WikiPedia page. No one vandalizes OSM data for fun. They do it if they have an incentive to do so. This incentive must have been provided by Google management.

Given that people vandalize crowd-source databases every day for shits and giggles; yes, pretty much exactly that. The linked message seems to imply that vandalism is a fairly routine thing even for OSM, so I'm not seeing where you get that "No one vandalizes OSM" bit from.

And yes, it is a massive coincidence that the vandals share the same IP address as the people who sabotaged Mocality, isn't it? Industrious workers, aren't they?

Stop defending what cannot be defended.

OK, I'll bite. I'm not "defending" anything really. This was bad behavior. I'm saying that asserting based on the existing evidence that this is some sort of "conspiracy" on the part of Google is, well, borderline insane. It just doesn't add up, sorry. The cost/benefit sides of the equation are all out of whack. The purported implementation is just plain dumb.

The only way to get to your "cannot be defended" conclusion is to start from a "I hate Google" position and color the evidence as you read it. So let me guess: you're an iOS nut, right? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com