alt Hacker NewsIt’s really interesting how perception of openness changes over time. During cold war publishing this information would send one directly to gulag.
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It’s a double edged sword - secrecy leads to accidental damage by fishermen & anchors, so generally you want your cables and pipes charted.
There are cables not on this map that are uncharted for things like acoustic monitoring & finger printing of vessels.
In the EU all that data, including high res LiDAR data has to be made publicly available by the responsible authorities. also high res aerial imagery which with the lidar together you can use to build a 3D model of the surface and ground of military buildings/area in blender, because even that in many cases is not excluded or censored. It’s already used for “criminal activities” by metal detectorists and grave robbers a lot haha but it shouldn’t be too hard for foreign intelligence to render some maps for egoshooters from them to train their soldiers for missions in specific locations
I know I will never live to see a site like this that documents all of the innards of airports. Airport layouts are my special interest.
With the recent blackout in Berlin, I've heard requests to hide these information.
Yeah, and it feels like we’re sliding back the same way.
I saw a nice presentation by Michael Cruickshank with an intelligence background that was using public geospatial data like what this is based on to model how climate change would affect power outages in an African city. In that case he was trying to figure out where all the power infrastructure was that would be affected in a flooding and then model network effects to figure out which parts of the city would end up being affected. Really interesting work.
Michael presented at the Berlin Geomob. His website has a more general overview of what he does: https://www.michaelcruickshank.me/recentwork. That does not seem to include a lot of detail on what he presented. Possibly because he is trying to be responsible here.
The security angle did come during the presentation. This is not the type of information that a lot of governments would want to make public but also something that could help them. You can mine a lot of intelligence from public data. And his approach of doing some kind of scenario modelling on top of the open data actually is interesting. That's something that can be used for good and for evil. And obviously something that a lot of intelligence agencies are probably already doing.