It looks like the sheepview footage was just a ploy to get google to bring the actual streetview equipped vehicles to the island. I don't think the sheepview data is on google maps.
Oh no, not from Google! You're right, I should read the original page.
Results from opening the original page, without adblock, and scrolling down to read the article:
Over 1000 requests, 30MB, and 2m later I killed it early to save my poor browser (it's ok, FF, I won't let them do that to you again). 121 unique domains, including a dozen from google, as well as amazon, yahoo, facebook, maybe 10 other ad networks I didn't recognize, at least 10 analytics sites, and over a dozen separate CDNs. 2 separate auto-playing videos. As I scrolled back up it reloaded the ad slots a second time.
AMP? 145 requests and 3MB in 5s. 42 unique domains, fewer google domains. One ad. Nothing autoplayed.
Still not pretty, but I know which one I prefer. I'm not trying to argue HN link submission policy here, I'm just saying AMP might be net good on the web and maybe we should consider leaving it next time for the good of other readers.
And to be fair this website probably has one of the highest adblock user ratios of any online (both html/amp go down to 80/40 requests with uBlock Origin enabled) so this doesn't affect us as much proportionately. But at least AMP is doing something with this dumpster fire.
Love this idea. Now I am wondering why google doesn't have an app to allow individuals to update google street view content themselves. My house was built this year and the maps still don't show the road or the new houses. I would love being able to walk around the neighborhood with my phone and get an updated map, at least until the real google car comes by.
Whilst that's a nice idea in principle, we all know that it would get be taken advantage of. People would probably try and get themselves/their animals on Street view.
OpenStreetCam is actually a project by Telenav, not part of OSM per se. However, as Telenav built their business on top of OSM data and their staff are real OSM anoraks, it was envisioned as a way to contribute more data to OSM.
correct me if I'm wrong, but I also had the impression that the OpenStreetCam data was licensed in a way that is at least a lot better for the public than Google's totally restricted proprietary terms…
The Mapillary situation seems complex. What's clear is that volunteers shouldn't be assisting Google get still further ahead of the more open alternatives.
The full 360 street view imagery is probably not easy to contribute to since you need a specialized camera and GPS orientation information. But I think Google Maps does accept normal still images from members of the public, at least for businesses.
Did you read the article? It was a publicity stunt by the tourism board to get Google over there to map their islands. Additionally, the OpenStreetCam domain is owned by TeleNav.
While TeleNav staff developed OpenStreetCam, the images are under an open license (unlike Google), and in fact the OSC project was set up after the OSM community complained that Mapillary, a previous open Google Street View competitor, wasn't open enough.
Out house is nearly 11 years old and doesn't feature in Google Maps Satellite view - in fact I actually rely on Google being wildly out of date so I can compare what used to be hear with a more up to date view from Bing or Apple.
>Now I am wondering why google doesn't have an app to allow individuals to update google street view content themselves.
I've always wondered if Google could partner with the US Postal Service and piggyback off their fleet for continuous streetview updates. Those mail trucks already drive the 99% of roads (that are not highways) every day and the maps would get updated more often. To save money, they also wouldn't have to attach cameras to every truck. Just move them from vehicle to vehicle on a rotational basis to eventually cover 100% of the routes.
Heck, Google Inc probably wouldn't even have to pay all of the costs. They could make a convincing case to the Federal government that upgrading the USPS mail trucks with cameras would give law enforcement and civil planners up-to-date geographic data. Therefore, they'd get a multi-billion government grant to implement it.
Or, they could also partner with Uber/Lyft. It just seems like the USPS (or FedEx/UPS) fleet has more consistent vehicle dimensions for attaching a multi-camera rig.
> the USPS to be recording every street every day.
Oh, I wasn't thinking that every street every day would get recorded. I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos. (I haven't done a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so maybe I'm wrong and they actually can).
I was just thinking that there are many streetviews (especially rural areas) in Google Maps captured in 2007. My street is from 2013. Using another entity's expansive fleet of vehicles, those maps could be updated more frequently... like once a month instead of every 4 to 10 years. Also, the USPS trucks are already burning the gas driving all those roads so it's a waste of fuel to have another car drive the same route just for photos.
As for fears of surveillance, it's going to depend on:
(1) if the citizens feel they also get benefit from the updated data. E.g. web surfers on Zillow see a house for sale and they would prefer to see a streetview of the neighborhood from last month instead of 5 years ago. Same for scoping out a company's address for a job interview.
(2) Are USPS cameras perceived as a minor extension of traffic cameras at every extension that citizens drive through every day and the police car dash cams that record a continuous loop as they patrol the city? Or it's a major step change in data collection that the public would reject. I don't know.
> I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos.
If you keep taking pictures of the same things over and over, you get a really high compression ratio.
Not to mention that you have the option to throw out the old data.
4,000,000 miles of roads
(4.12 million minus 164,000)[1][2]
5280 ft per mile
200 ft as guess of distance between snapshots
60,000 bytes as estimate for 1 jpg sized for "near HD"[3]
15 photos per set [3]
... total is ~95 TB per day.[4] The Youtube stat from 2015 quoted 24 TB per day.[5] The total Google Maps in 2012 size was 20 PB.[6]
So, 95 TB is within the realm of possiblity but it seems like coordinating the logistics in the USA to upload that much from trucks every day would be a huge hurdle. (The Youtube 24TB is worldwide uploads and not just USA.) Since the vast majority of the streetview images for a particular day won't be requested by anyone, it wouldn't be a good return-on-investment to pay for that much disk space.
Obviously, the total goes up if I underestimated the intervals (100 ft instead of 200 ft) or underestimated the jpg size (new generation of HD cameras output 200000 bytes for still images). The total goes down if a significant chunk of those 4 million miles don't need streetviews. There are probably other factors I'm missing. (What's that famous Google interview question again? "How many gas stations are there in the USA?"[7])
95 TB a day would cost Google roughly a million dollars a year. For a company that routinely makes tens of billions, it's not a gigantic amount, and I'm not so sure they wouldn't make it back in extra views - "nearly live" Street View would be an incredible tool. But they wouldn't even have to save all the data for that - just keep it flowing.
As to the logistics of data transfer - why not move the data physically? You're already carrying it around in all the mail trucks. Most of the logistics are already taken care of by the existing postal infrastructure. Just take the SD card out at the depo and put it on the next mail vehicle going towards Google.
Or, to paraphrase Andy Tanenbaum, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a postal truck with a shoebox of microSD cards hurtling down the highway".
*Fun fact - a shoebox full of 128 gigabyte microSDs has a capacity of nearly 9 petabytes!
Let consumers/business request the update on a geospatial grid square, and pay some amount that could in turn be profit shared with USPS.
ie: a county could pay for its counties streets to save man hours for sqft appraisals, with just change detection, for the annual property appraisal updates.
One issue is in the rural areas they delivery mail in their own cars, not USPS mail trucks. But ultimately Google could loan/lease their cars to those drivers.
Security paranoia aside that would be a great way to keep Google Maps up to date even if it was just done quarterly. And frankly I'm sure the US Post Office could use the revenue from whatever Google would pay to do the mapping.
I investigated targeting individual Uber drivers for street view mapping. Problem is that Uber drivers circle around the same area a lot, so it is not optimal to use professional 360 set. On the other hand, there is no good consumer grade camera for 360 street view mapping yet, although it keeps getting better.
In Denmark, several municipalities have hired garbage-collection trucks to test mobile coverage (danish article with images at https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/regionale/oestjylland/skraldebiler...) and some utility companies have done the same with recievers for short-range transmitters placed in water/power/heating meters.
I like the idea from the point of view of 'making things better', but from the philosophical perspective of publicly funded entities should not give benefit and preferential treatment to private and proprietary enterprises and systems.
I think if the USPO was capturing this data, then it should be available to everyone.
>publicly funded entities should not give benefit and preferential treatment to private and proprietary enterprises and systems.
It wouldn't be a "gift" from the USPS. It would be a mutually beneficial financial contract. (E.g. 5 year
multi-million dollar contract to mount Google cameras.)
Similar to how private events pay the government for extra police officers to direct traffic or supplement security. Or how the Pentagon charged the Top Gun film production $25,000 to turn an aircraft carrier around.[1] Government entities have set the precedent that they will sell services to private companies.
The citizens' access to the USPS photos would a given and be part of the contract.
I don't think those two examples are very good for your argument. One is about public safety and the other is basically about military recruitment. There is a lot more precedence for those sorts of things than there is for mounting Google cameras to USPS trucks.
Well, there's a precedence for the government wanting to preserve jobs. USPS lost $5.6 billion last year.[1] A rich Google contract wouldn't solve all their financial problems but conceivably, USPS would hire extra workers to help manage the camera equipment, the photos, and interface with Google Inc.
If not that reason, the government could come up with other justifications. (The US government is very good at coming up with justifications for anything.)
In any case, getting some extra revenue from trucks already burning up huge amounts of fossil fuel to deliver mail seems like an eco-green win/win.
It's a good idea, but they can't have their cake and eat it too. If it's so good for society that they get taxpayer money, the data should be freely licensed. Conversely, if they expect to monetize the data, then we should charge them a very stiff fee for having the monopoly on postal-van cameras (I find it unlikely the postal service would agree to let multiple companies mount equipment on their vehicles, if they'd even let one).
You have it backwards. The postal service mounts their own cameras on the vans and then sells that data to companies wanting to build mapping applications.
Cost per truck is greater than the value of updating the roads every day. However, having one truck per post office that gets rotated through the routes might be worth it, or even better a few trucks that get rotated through each post office. But, even then the post office avoids a lot of roads in the US.
So after the sheep did some recording for us, the punchline is that they were enslaved, slaughtered, and consumed? Ha ha ha. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be amusing. Not to say that this article should be a PETA champion, but it's a pretty profound example of human arrogance and a complete lack of empathy.
I've obviously miscommunicated here quite badly. That's something I apologize for. Just to clarify:
1. My intention wasn't to hijack a discussion but to create an isolated discussion in a comment block. Hijacking, to me, would've been to reply to every other comment with the same thing.
2. The comment is still related to the article; specifically the rhetoric.
3. I wasn't aware that discussing morals is frowned upon in HN.
Its interesting how when its a regular professional photographer, he gets his life ruined by copyright lawyers, PETA, etc. but when its Google, nobody cares.
I personally think "abusing" copyright is too strong of a word here. The key test on whether this sort of work is copyright worthy is the "threshold of originality" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality). I can see it possible to argue this passed the threshold for the monkey selfie case (obviously that's debatable, and the person was not successful, but it is not a completely outrageous argument in my opinion).
It's definitely a murky area of copyright law, and one I can see increasingly getting muddier as art becomes more and more machine assisted.
Threshold of originality is not the issue here. That's more applicable to things like security camera footage. 17 USC §102(a) confines copyright to "works of authorship." Without an author, there is no copyright. To date, only natural persons and corporations have been held to be authors.
In addition to what icebraining said: Under current law, these images wouldn't be copyrighted by the sheep, nor by the tourist agency. But the tourist agency gave them to Google. Google didn't take/steal/expropriate them. So why do you single out Google for your opprobrium?
Shameless plug: our company (tensorflight.com) works on extracting building information from a few sources including street view. E.g. we extract a number of stories building have based on street view image. Please get in touch at kozikow@tensorflight.com if you have any idea for the collaboration.
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