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MICHAEL T. JONES, RIP

January 18, 2021 Stefan Geens

The driving force of Google Earth, Michael T. Jones, passed away today, January
18, 2021. I happened on the news via this post from Brian McClendon.

Simply put: This blog and its stories would never have happened were it not for
Michael.

When I first encountered Keyhole Earth late in 2004, I took a violent liking to
it — this was science fiction made real overnight, a stunning transformative
technology that had arrived far sooner than I would have expected.

Keyhole Earth became a social phenomenon as Google Earth, not least for how it
shaped our self-image as global citizens and as inhabitants of a global natural
ecosystem, or how it brought geospatial power to the people.

I was fortunate enough to meet Michael on several occasions, and every time he
was unfailingly generous with his time, his hospitality and his willingness to
open up about his passions for technology and geography.

I was half expecting to see him again one day, so I could thank him for giving
us this radical new way to see the world. R.I.P. Michael.


Uncategorized


WHAT DOES CRIMEA TELL US ABOUT GOOGLE?

April 15, 2014 Stefan Geens 1 Comment

[TL;DR: Google appears to be voluntarily tampering with its maps to appease the
local populations of Russia and Ukraine, rather than being forced to do so by
local laws, which was the case until now.]  

What can we infer about Google’s technology, politics and business from
observing its approach to mapping Crimea, a few weeks after the invasion and
subsequent annexation of the region by Russia?

Technology: We’ve long known Google has the ability to serve different mapping
datasets to different Google top-level domain properties. For example,
different-language versions of Google Maps will show you different toponyms.
However, some local versions of Maps also differ in their boundaries: In China,
ditu.google.cn shows Arunachal Pradesh as being Chinese, rather than disputed;
in India, maps.google.co.in shows Aksai Chin as being Indian, rather than
disputed. And in South Korea, maps.google.kr prevents you from zooming in on
satellite imagery. For each of these locations, however, the default
international maps.google.com defaults to a accurate, uncensored reference map —
where the borders are shown as disputed, and where you can zoom in on the
satellite imagery as much as you like.

Now we have evidence of yet two more examples where localized Google Maps differ
from the global reference version in their boundaries — in Crimea, for Russian
Google Maps but also, surprisingly, for Ukrainian Google Maps.

Let’s have a quick discovery phase re how Crimea looks in different versions of
Google Maps:

International Google Maps: The new facts on the ground are reflected in a dark
dashed line, indicating contested territory:



Russian Google Maps: The new border between Russia and Ukraine puts Crimea
inside Russia. No dispute is indicated.



Ukrainian Google Maps: Crimea is part of Ukraine. The line defining Crimea light
gray and dashed; it is the same kind of line demarcating other Ukrainian
oblasts. No dispute is indicated.



Politics: In every documented case until now — in China, in India and in South
Korea — Google’s explanation for showing a dataset that diverges from the
reference map has been that is is obliged to observe local laws, and in the case
of China and India, local laws dictate that locally-published maps (including
Internet maps) must show borders drawn a certain way. For South Korea, the
dispute with North Korea legally precludes showing high-resolution imagery.

Why does Google do this? Because it has a local presence — perhaps a sales
office, or a development team — and so can be held accountable in local courts
of law. In countries where Google does not have a presence, it does not care
whether it observes local laws — look no further than North Korea, where the
recent addition of concentration camps to the default layer of Google Maps is
unlikely to pass local legal tests. Equally interesting, however, is that in
countries where Google has a presence, but where there are no local laws
mandating how maps shows national borders, Google has until now not adulterated
its maps, because it is not legally obliged to do so. A fantastic case in point
is the border between Thailand and Cambodia, most of which is in dispute. Both
Thai Google Maps and Cambodian Google Maps show the two conflicting border
claims side by side, in both datasets — a wonderful example of how more context
on a map is always a good thing.

It is worth noting that in all cases where Google does show tainted maps, these
are only shown locally. None of these defects bleed into the international map
dataset shown to the rest of us. Meanwhile, citizens of India, China and South
Korea who choose to type maps.google.com into their browser will always get an
accurate map.

Business: So why does Google show Crimea as part of Russia to the Russians, and
as part of Ukraine to the Ukrainians?

Let’s look at Russia first: According to NPR and Russia Today, Google has
flashed the “they made us do it” card:

> “The Google Maps team is doing its best to objectively mark disputed regions
> and landmarks. In relevant cases the borders of disputed areas are marked in a
> special way. In countries where we have a localized version of our service, we
> follow local laws on representing borders and use of landmark names,” Svetlana
> Anurova of Google Russia told ITAR-TASS.

Unfortunately, while this statement is true in the narrowest reading, it is also
wholly disingenuous, because it does not apply to Russia, where there is no law
that compels local map publishers to show Russia’s borders in a certain way.
Unlike in India and China, The Economist does not get censored in Russia when it
maps a relevant area as disputed. And for what it’s worth, Article 29 of
Russia’s constitution explicitly protects the freedom of ideas and speech:

> Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of ideas and speech. […] No one may
> be forced to express his views and convictions or to reject them. […] Everyone
> shall have the right to freely look for, receive, transmit, produce and
> distribute information by any legal way. […] The freedom of mass communication
> shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be banned.

So on what possible grounds could Google argue that it must show Crimea as
indisputably Russian, as opposed to being subject to a dispute, which is what
every reasonable observer agrees on — including Putin’s envoy to the UN Security
Council, merely by showing up?

One possibility: The Lugovoi law. According to the Moscow Times, this law, which
came into effect February 1, 2014, allows Russia’s Federal Mass Media Inspection
Service to block websites that “contain calls for unsanctioned acts of protest”.
In the opinion of the Moscow Times, this new law clearly violates the Russian
Constitution. But the same Article 29 of that constitution limits speech in the
following ways:

> The propaganda or agitation instigating social, racial, national or religious
> hatred and strife shall not be allowed. The propaganda of social, racial,
> national, religious or linguistic supremacy shall be banned. […] The list of
> data comprising state secrets shall be determined by a federal law.

It would admittedly be a stretch to argue that disputed areas are a state
secret. But in the strange new world of Putin’s Russia, I can almost fathom
somebody arguing that showing the “wrong” borders instigates national hatred to
the extent that it amounts to a call for “unsanctioned protest”. And apparently,
that is exactly what one Russian Deputy intends to do.

Google has clearly decided not to test whether this bizarre interpretation of a
bizarre law would stand in court. I suspect Google might even win were it to
stand its ground.

Instead, I think the real reason why Russian Google Maps shows Crimea as
undisputedly Russian is that the annexation is popular inside Russia. Showing
Crimea as disputed territory would likely lead to calls for boycotts of Google’s
services in Russia. Quite possibly, local Googlers also feel it is just and
right for Google Maps to show Crimea as undisputedly Russian. More charitably,
Google HQ might fear for the safety of its local employees. But these are not
the reasons Google has given for its caving in to Russia’s increasingly dogmatic
world view. Perhaps Sergei Brin, whose early experiences of persecution in
Russia ultimately led him to take the moral high ground in China and pull the
plug on Google.cn in 2010, has yet to tackle this issue.

And then there is Ukraine: Another major hint that these maps were tampered with
not due to legal coercion but in order to protect Google’s existing business in
an environment of charged nationalism is the fact that the Ukrainian Google Maps
also differs from the international version. To the best of my knowledge (and no
little Googling), Ukraine also has no law constraining the depiction of its
borders on maps. And yet in Ukraine too, Google’s map aligns with the prevailing
popular sentiment.

Google should take a stand for accuracy in every situation it is not compelled
to do otherwise. Acknowledging that Crimea is disputed territory must not be
made tantamount to taking sides in this conflict. Surely the Ukrainians and
Russians can agree that they fundamentally disagree on who should own Crimea.
That truth should be reflected on the map.




Uncategorized


MH370: GOOGLE ADDS SATELLITE SEARCH IMAGERY TO GOOGLE EARTH; BLACK BOX HEARD?

April 5, 2014 Stefan Geens 9 Comments

Two new pieces of information today relevant to the ongoing search for Malaysian
Airlines MH370: There is a potential location for the black box, and Google
Earth now shows recent satellite imagery of the search area in its default
layer.



1. Black box heard? A Chinese patrol ship has picked up pings that match those
of a black box, both on Friday and again on Saturday, according to China’s CCTV.
The approximate location is 25°S, 101°E, which is further north than where the
bulk of search efforts have been expended so far, but uncannily close to the
circumference of the original “ping arc” generated from the Inmarsat-3 F1
satellite, which shows a possible range of locations for MH370 when it last made
contact on an hourly basis.

I’ve now added that rough location to existing data for past searches, and
appended the original ping arc and projected reach of MH370. Here is the
resulting file, to download and open in Google Earth.

2. Search imagery added: Starting up Google Earth today, I was surprised to find
the region of the search displaying very recent satellite imagery, taken taken
between March 18 and 31, 2014 as part of the search for MH370. The dates are
displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the app, and the imagery is
credited to CNES/Astrium, which manages the SPOT satellite program. I don’t know
how long this imagery has been there, but since there hasn’t (yet) been an
announcement on Google Lat Long blog, I’m assuming this is a quite recent
addition. To see the imagery at its best, turn off the water surface layer. The
images are quite contrasty, so you may want to turn up the brightness of your
screen.

One thing to keep in mind: The search locations far to the south may still be
relevant for finding floating debris, even if the bulk of the wreck has sunk
much further north, due to prevailing currents.

Uncategorized


MH370: AMATEUR HOUR AT THE MALAYSIAN REMOTE SENSING AGENCY?

March 26, 2014 Stefan Geens 13 Comments

The Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency (MRSA) today released an annotated satellite
image purporting to show a debris field in the Southern Indian Ocean, near the
area where the plane is believed to have perished.

Unfortunately, using only the information contained by the image, it can easily
be proven to be self-contradicory, and hence useless.

I’ve been collecting satellite imagery of possible debris sightings in a Google
Earth file as they are shared with the press, using the coordinates displayed on
the image to georeference them as accurately as possible.

The image released today by Malaysia superimposes three areas in high-resolution
from breaks in the cloud in a mostly cloudy image, accompanied by their
coordinates.



Click to enlarge



On the image, these three areas form a long and narrow obtuse triangle (which
I’ve highlighted in orange). When I plotted their associated coordinates on
Google Earth, it quickly became clear that they do not at all correspond to the
same shape. The triangle on Google Earth is completely different.

A subsequent quick casual inspection of the coordinates in the image shows their
arrangement to be geographically impossible. Here is the view in Google Earth of
the same points, their coordinates accurately georeferenced.



Click to enlarge



With their placement known to be wrong, I took a closer look at the
high-resolution areas in the image and compared them to their adjacent smaller
counterparts. The do not in fact seem to be related. The cloud layers bear no
similarity.

This image is either a fabrication — a piece of fiction cynically concocted to
feed the journalists and families of the victims — or it is an honest mistake by
somebody who perhaps should step aside for the greater good of this recovery
mission.

Uncategorized


MH370: UPDATED ROUTE, FINAL RADAR PLOT (UPDATED)

March 22, 2014 Stefan Geens 13 Comments

UPDATE March 22: Keith Ledgerwood, who devised the theory that MH370 may have
shadowed another plane, argues (convincingly) that the track shown to the media
and families in the photo below is not of MH370 but of either UAE343 or SIA68,
both of which were in the area at the time. If this is true (which it appears to
be), then it is an astonishing piece of misdirection by the Malaysian military
representative to the families of the victims and the press. The following post
now needs to be treated as possibly based on misinformation, alas.

UPDATE March 23: The New York Times, however, still treats the plot in the image
below as coming from MH370. So at the very least, there are two conflicting
official accounts of the path MH370 took.

ORIGINAL POST: We now have one more official source of information to go on: Via
Twitter, a photo, shown to Chinese media in Beijing on March 21, of a Malaysian
military radar image showing MH370, pinpointing its last plot at 02:22 MYT
(UTC+8):



To analyse the image properly, I took a screenshot of the same area from
SkyVector‘s amazing aeronautical charts, overlaid and aligned that SkyVector
screenshot onto Google Earth, then overlaid and aligned the photo of the radar
image onto the SkyVector screenshot, then annotated the SkyVector screenshot as
precisely as possible, in order to position the last known plot accurately in
Google Earth.

Here is the resulting KMZ file for you to use. (Open it in Google Earth, then
select individual elements and play with the opacity slider in the sidebar to
compare alignments.)

This allows us to draw some interesting inferences. But first, the data: Here is
the SkyVector screenshot of the same area (annotated by me, click to enlarge):



Some analysis:
The radar image is not unambiguous, at least not without additional official
context. But it does label a specific place at a specific time: MH370, at 02:22
MYT, at or even beyond the MEKAR waypoint. The green trace “line” to the left of
the annotated circle connects the VAMPI waypoint (previously named as a waypoint
for MH370) to MEKAR. A route from IGARI on the other side of the Malaysian
peninsula to VAMPI and then on to MEKAR would be a straighter route than the
previously mooted one, which had MH370 turn a sharp right at VAMPI to GIVAL — a
turn of more than 90 degrees — which always looked somewhat odd. (If these
waypoints sound confusing to you, do read this post for context.)

One thing that aligning the photo with the SkyVector screenshot lets us do is
notice that the green “line” and the annotation arrow extends slightly beyond
MEKAR. If so, MH370 was on its way to NILAM — where its path would have crossed
route P627, which skirts past the northern edge of Sumatra and into the Indian
Ocean in a WSW direction. The last known bearing of MH370 is thus far less
suggestive of a northerly route.

If we now connect the dots, from the position at 01:02 MYT as plotted by
FlightAware, to IGARI, to VAMPI and then on to just past MEKAR at 02:22 MYT, we
get a distance of roughly 1090km (see the KMZ file to check), flown in 80
minutes. That’s a speed of 820km/h, approximately, which is feasible.

What about that circle annotation in the photograph and the green “line” to the
right? Absent an official account from the press conference, here’s my take: The
circle is meant to highlight empty space, and thus show that the two green lines
are two separate tracks from 2 separate planes. That would also explain the
second arrow annotation on the right, which presumably leads to a label for
another plane. Note too that these two green “lines” have slightly different
bearings. But if anyone has an official clarification, I would love to hear it.

UPDATE: Keith Ledgerwood was able to convince me, with images not in the public
domain, that the second arrow notation referred to the same track. So there are
no two planes.

UPDATE March 22 22:37 UTC: I’ve found the original image on a Chinese media
website. I’ve edited the post above to reflect this. Unfortunately, the caption
doesn’t provide much in additional context. Here it is via Google Translate.

Uncategorized


MH370 – AIRPORTS IN FLIGHT RANGE ON GOOGLE EARTH

March 17, 2014 Stefan Geens 14 Comments

Over the weekend, several initiatives mapped airports that could serve as
potential landing spots for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. WNYC first
mapped large airports within MH370’s flight range onto Google Maps; then David
Strip used data from OurAirports to cast a wider net of potential landing spots
and put that in Google Maps.

That’s a good idea, but Google Earth is perhaps the more versatile tool for
doing some proper research, especially as it has historical data with which to
compare new satellite data as it arrives.

So I also made a KML file for Google Earth with potential airports, from the
same OurAirports data, but casting an even wider net — over 3500 potential
landing spots. Here it is. (Use it in conjunction with the suggested search
location KMZ file published in the previous post.)



What does this file contain? All Asian airports, minus Russian airports, plus
Western Australian airports. I’ve taken out seaplane bases and heliports, but
left in closed airports. I cleaned up the data for two Western Australian
airports with faulty coordinates.

Why keep small and closed airports? Because in a search,  this file should
essentially be used to rule out potential airports. If MH370 landed somewhere
(as opposed to crashing) then that airport will most likely turn out not to be
on this list, or else be a small or closed airport that has recently undergone
expansion. (However: Keep in mind when scouring Google Earth that satellite data
may be a few years old).

I used Google Outreach’s Spreadsheet Mapper to convert the orignal data to KML.
At just over 3500 data points, I was definitely pushing the limits of that
technology. Here is the spreadsheet I used for this KML file.

Uncategorized


FLIGHT MH370 — SEARCH DATA IN GOOGLE EARTH

March 15, 2014 Stefan Geens 173 Comments

[Update April 5: New post: Google adds satellite imagery to Google Earth; Black
box heard?]

[UPDATE March 22: I have updated the KMZ file for Google Earth to show the
latest imagery released by China, pinpointing another possible peace of debris
from MH370. I’ve now also added the imagery itself to the placemark’s info box.]

[UPDATE March 20: Here is the KMZ file for Google Earth showing the exact
location of those two artifacts (BBC News) noticed on satellite imagery taken by
DigitalGlobe on March 16.  (On casual inspection, they look to me to be sun
reflections off slightly bigger-than-average waves.) If this is indeed the
missing MH370, they are  further south than the final ping arc and estimated
range circle — and that would be because MH370 could have kept on flying for up
to another hour after the final ping, because of the currents, as these images
were taken 8 days after when MH370 would have crashed, and perhaps because the
fuel reserves lasted longer than thought.]



[UPDATE March 17: New post: MH370 – Airports in flight range on Google
Earth with over 3500 Asian and australian airports]

[March 17, 17:45 UTC: Updated at end of this post with added context re the
reason for the two arcs.]

The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 has had me glued to the
Internet. Now over a week into the mystery, more specific data has begun to
emerge regarding MH370’s apparent flight path and possible last locations, from
two distinct sources. I felt I could contribute by adding these as accurately as
possible to Google Earth, for others to use. Here’s the resulting KMZ file for
Google Earth. Read on for the context.

The most recent source of data was released on March 15, from an Inmarsat
satellite in geostationary orbit above the Indian Ocean, which tracked a final
ping from MH370 to an arc of possible locations on Earth. The information,
released by the Malaysian government, did the rounds of Twitter (and the NYT) in
this form:



(According to the experts on the Professional Pilots’ Rumour Network, the degree
lines shown in the diagram depict how high above the horizon the satellite is
when viewed from that location. That’s why right below the satellite the angle
is 90°.)

Looking up possible Inmarsat satellites on Wikipedia led to one exact match:
Inmarsat-3 F1, which sits 35,700km above the equator at E64.5°. This is the
exact view that satellite has of Earth:



Using this KML circle generator, I then recreated the circle from the diagram
(in orange in Google Earth), which turns out to have a radius of 4,750km.  I
also added the points demarcating the start and end of the two arc lengths, as
depicted on the diagram.

On March 14, sources described to Reuters the details of Malaysian military
radar data, which saw MH370 follow specific waypoints as it veered across the
Malaysian peninsula and then set course for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,
before going out of radar range.

The coordinates for these waypoints (and some amazing maps to go with them) can
be found on SkyVector:

IGARI: N6°56.20′ E103°35.10′
VAMPI: N6°10.92′ E97°35.14′
GIVAL: N6°59.99′ E97°59.99′
IGREX: N9°43.47′ E94°24.99′

I then converted these to decimal degrees before adding them to Google Earth.

To these coordinates, we can of course add the coordinates of KUL, Kuala Lumpur
International Airport (N2.73° E101.71°) and also the last recorded position of
MH370 on Flight Aware, a public flight tracking service, which placed the plane
almost exactly half-way between KUL and IGARI. These six points together allow
us to reconstruct the flight path for the first two hours or so, depicted as a
path in Google Earth.

Finally, I’ve added a second circle (in white on Google Earth): This circle has
the IGREX waypoint as its center, and it bisect the two furthest points on the
two Inmarsat arcs depicted in the diagram. That circle’s radius turns out to be
4,400km. Given the cruising speed of a Boeing 777-200 at 905km/h, that circle
depicts the distance MH370 would have flown in just under 5 hours from there
(assuming a straight line).

As new information becomes available, I will try to update this post as well as
the KML file.

UPDATE March 17, 17:45 UTC: As per this blog post on TMF associates, the
interruption in the arc near the Gulf of Thailand is due to the Malaysian
government’s own calculations that MH370 flying at its slowest possible speed in
a straight line would not be in this region. This, however, assumes that MH370
would henceforth fly in a straight line, which it obviously had not been doing.
So in practice, the entire orange ping arc inside the white range circle is a
valid search location.



(It had previously been mooted that the interruption in the arcs was because
another Inmarsat satellite would have picked up MH370’s ping had the plane been
that far east. But in fact the interruption is not centered on the equator, as
it would have had to be had it been due to a bisection from another
geostationary satellite).


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