MapQuest will now show you where Flock cameras are in your neighborhood | Hacker News Reader

MapQuest will now show you where Flock cameras are in your neighborhood

engadget.com

338 pointsbookofjoe50 comments

This shows the license plate readers i added last week on openstreetmap so we know where the data comes from. Nice render on their map - even shows camera direction

i added generic LPR’s - and they show on mapquest, so be aware its not just flock on their map.

To enable the view on mapquest, i could not figure it out on web, used ios app; layers / surveillance

Ios app; https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mapquest-gps-navigation-maps/i...

I believe they have used OSM for a long time yes (over a decade at least), not exactly a secret.

They use OSM and they provide the "free use as much as you like" tileservers for OSM.

This is how you start getting the users back. The Lake Ontario naming situation pushed me to using them. It has been working great in CarPlay. My wife loved the unicorn. I get to avoid (or hunt) Flock cameras. Everyone wins.

> The Lake Ontario naming situation pushed me to using them

I hate the name change too but it did go through official channels, so what else is a map provider supposed to do? Should they have also refused to rename Mt. McKinley to Denali? I mean, I'd actually be proud to see an overtly partisan declaration that they won't honor a single name change from this administration, but that's a much different matter than taking it case by case. I suspect the real reason the rename hasn't happened is that MapQuest's software simply isn't capable of doing it gracefully.

Also, hope you have a good adblocker when you use MQ. They are owned by bottom feeders of a sort that makes Bending Spoons look like the FSF.

What "official channels" exist for renaming things that aren't even within your borders? It's less like renaming McKinley to Denali and more like "renaming" the Atlantic Ocean to the America Ocean. It's blatantly stupid, not acknowledged by most human beings, and won't last five minutes in history, and all of these facts are obvious to anyone who isn't stupid or corrupt, so what is the big mystery? What are they supposed to do besides what? You either adopt a frivolous rename or you don't.

It is actually fairly common for bodies of water that have more than one country on their shores to have different names in different countries. Same goes for mountains and mountain ranges on borders.

Some examples for bodies of water:

• Persian Gulf/Arabian Gulf

• Sea of Japan/East Sea

• South China Sea/West Philippine Sea/East Sea

• English Channel/La Manche

Some examples for mountains and mountain ranges:

• Mount Everest/Sagarmāthā/Chomolungma

• K2/Chogori

• Kjølen/Fjällen (the range on the Norway/Sweden border)

• Krušné hory/Erzgebirge (the range on the Czech Republic/German border)

• The Misty Mountains/Hithaeglir

• The White Mountains/Ered Nimrais

Yes, the renaming by the Trump administration was stupid, and almost certainly will be reversed.

Nevertheless the US government is now required to use those names. If the FAA needs to mention those places in a NOTAM, or NOAA in a weather alert, etc., they use those names now, so it would be a mistake for a map company to just ignore them.

The proposed rename breaks the HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Eerie, Superior) acronym all of us in Michigan learned, and is thus doomed to failure. Because SHAME is a much worse acronym.

> what else is a map provider supposed to do?

Deferring to Government naming is only one possible approach. OpenStreetMap takes another: “the name that people use on the ground”. The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico in OSM and will remain so until popular parlance changes.

> I hate the name change too but it did go through official channels

LOL, the Trump appointed buffoon at USGS who fell over himself to tell Trump in a memo that he'd gone ahead and made it happen even before it was official?

Good thing it's official, then. That's what matters.

Mapquest is reliable for you in CarPlay? I tried it out after the Lake Ontario incident, and it was hanging and crashing left and right.

Just tried it on mine - worked fine. I can’t see a way to end the trip via CarPlay though.

Did you actually use it while making a trip though, or try to use the UI in earnest?

It was a short trip back home - I couldn’t get my CarPlay to recognize anything resembling a “stop navigation” button.

It’s incredible just how quickly Google and Apple folded to the will of their country’s king renaming stuff.

Google and Apple have a policy of showing every user what their own government officially recognises. For the entire history of Google maps there have been disputed borders and names where Google just shows users different results based on their location.

Except Canadians who noticed that it was Lake America?

Oops, sorry, didn’t notice you were in Canada eh?

Likely story. No way Google could tell Canada and the US apart.

And in the EU I get a label with both on Google Maps: "Lake Ontario (Lake America)"

Same for the Gulf of Mexico.

Language is another dimension on top of location when it comes to maps. At least the German maps pretty much translate that label 1:1.

What no? It's pandering. Pandering of course works, that's why it's done. But just because you're the one being pandered to, doesn't mean it's not pandering.

I tried adopting it but at the time (a month and a half ago) it was too slow with the directions updates.

This data all stored in OpenStreetMap via DeFlock and other apps. One thing that should be said is that anyone can plot a camera via these apps whether or not one is actually there or not. I know that OSM community has been dealing with a lot Flock related vandalism because of these apps.

The full export of OSM is about 2TB but the US is only around 100GB even if you go to insane levels. It's disproportionately large because there are a hell of a lot of OSM-ers in the US ;-)

Anyway what we should do is keep a few clean snapshots of the US as a backup, on hosting safely outside the US - or US-owned companies.

The OpenStreetMap project/foundation is based in the Netherlands and UK last I checked.

Yes, but the people who edit the US map data are mostly in the US and we should be providing safe storage and a safe way past the Great Firewall for them.

Halloween is National DeFlock Day -- just spreading the good meme ;)

dam Mapquest? if they make a project that shows me directions, not photos of food at restaurants, ads for fast food, etc ill start using them

Would you pay for it or how else do you suppose they could make money?

Very cool to see, and I'm curious if they'll start logging where Axion cams are next (if DeFlock doesn't already have Axion cameras logged). Also like how MapQuest doesn't lock multiple destinations behind needing an account, at least for the desktop version.

I had no idea MapQuest still existed. How have they survived the past 15 years?

I’d say the majority of their users are probably older. People who started using it based on familiarity from when they first used it a decade ago (or more). I do know my in-laws refuse to use Google/Apple Maps, because it’s “what they know”.

One time someone gave me an old name for a road and Mapquest was the only place that had it. Cool story, I know.

I used their API for several years for a project to get reverse geocoding to turn city names into lat/lon pairs and vice versa.

Like Mapbox, I assume they have a profitable business selling their mapping services to other companies.

Countdown til Flock’s PR firm resets the controversy movement by renaming the company and it takes the public 5+ years to catch on again.

Great idea - it's your "driving directions" app that decides if you drive by these cameras, or not!

MapQuest is acting like Democrats should be acting.

Unfortunately, most liberals are addicted to electing center-right Democrats. I'm looking at you San Francisco.

This is how you normalize it.

TIL that there is a surveillance tech company named Axis Communications and it remains true that our societal self awareness is terrible.

I guess this is Mapquest's business model. Don't cuck to the Trump admin when he changes the name of a body of water on a whim, and show us where obtrusive technology is so we can avoid it. Cool

Anything similar for meta glasses?

You are using Meta glasses and worrying about surveillance? I don’t want to be mean, but if you run around with one of those, I would want to be alerted of _your_ presence..

No.

„No” what specifically? :) You are not worried about surveillance?

Wow. This is one unexpected comeback.

And as a former Google Maps employee... I'm loving it.

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