China Blocks Foreign Companies From Mapping Its Roads for Self-Driving Cars (thedrive.com) 110
The Chinese government is blocking foreign companies from mapping its roads in great detail, according to a Financial Times (paywalled) report. The restrictions, which reportedly do not apply to Chinese firms, are being instituted in the name of national security. China is concerned about spying. From a report: China has restricted the recording of geographic information for more than a decade because it believes giving other countries access to that information constitutes a security risk. Geographic surveys can't be performed without permission from the government, and many digital cameras don't record GPS coordinates for geotagging, as they do in other countries, according to Fortune.
Then the cars aren't truly self-driving (Score:5, Insightful)
and data roaming fees can add up fast with that (Score:2)
and data roaming fees can add up fast with that (your car is locked to ATT that will be up to $15/meg in canada)
Re:Then the cars aren't truly self-driving (Score:4, Insightful)
they should be able to operate with GPS info and knowing how roads are "networked."
Just like human drivers without maps and any knowledge of the neighborhood, right? Very efficient!
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needing to have mapped out lanes for interchanges is bad vs being able to read markings / sings on the fly.
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That's nice and all, but what happens when you plug in a location (i.e. address, name of location, etc) and the software has no idea where the fuck that even is?
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Just like human drivers without maps and any knowledge of the neighborhood, right? Very efficient!
Before people took snapshots of their dinner and pasted it over the internet, getting lost was easily the most effective way to find the best restaurants.
Younger generations will never know the joy of pulling over, hanging out the window and begging for directions.
Re:Then the cars aren't truly self-driving (Score:5, Insightful)
The more clues it has, the better. This applies to humans also.
But the bigger issue here is unfair competition: local firms get extra info that foreign firms don't. Being we have a huge trade gap, partly because of this kind of favoritism, I hope the Trump administration makes an issue out of it and threatens sanctions.
This is the kind of thing voters hoped Trump would focus on, instead of Twitter fights with athletes. He used to always rail against China's trade practices. Let's hope the Good Trump comes out instead of the Distracted Trump.
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The original article is on China not letting anyone other than themselves use maps of their roads.
You morphed it into a diatribe on how much you hate America.
It sounds as if you are the one with a problem. Do restaurant menus remind you how much you hate America?
Does looking at a tree remind you of your awesome dislike of the USA?
I would imagine, at parties, you're the annoying "Avoid that guy, all he does is bitch about America" guy, standing alone in the corner, fuming.
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We are not blocking the sea by making up maritime laws and censoring our citizens from political discussions and complaints. Prick that!
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More accurately, western companies are free to use Baidu Maps. It's just that Google etc. are but allowed to create detailed maps.
It's a big problem, no doubt. Even for foreigners traveling in China, they can't get good English maps. For developers the English documentation is lacking.
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No, but IF the US gov't says military-related roads are off-limits to commercial mapping systems, then they should be off-limits to ALL commercial mapping systems, regardless of country of owners or headquarters.
Every other country favors local firms. The US should either follow suit or crack down on such practices with
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They can get busted in a given country IF a gov't forbids collecting, using, and/or selling such for maps and location services. Whether Google specifically is cheating or not, I cannot say.
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And, really, let's be honest ... the entire US foreign policy/trade policy is "America First" and is entirely built on American exceptionalism and local firms getting a leg up.
What you'll have to learn is in tandem to the notion of American Exceptionalism is the rest of the world not giving a fuck and refusing to treat you like spoiled children who feel entitled to a better deal.
American Exceptionalism has nothing to do with interactions with any other country, it is merely an exploration of how and why some little upstart nothing of a country managed to go from a deceleration of independence in 1776 to one of the top 2 world powers in 1976.
Other countries have been around for hundreds of years longer, so it it not the age. The individual people are no different from people anywhere else in the world, so it is not the people. Other countries in the Americas were not greatly impac
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Except your peckerwood of a president is pretty much trying to do exactly that.
Aww, how cute, you guys still believe that is what is happening.
You should pay attention to the news a little closer ... Trump doesn't know abou
Re:Then the cars aren't truly self-driving (Score:4, Informative)
So far, trump has shown more favortism towards china and russia than either W or O. Hell, he PROMISED to stop China's dumping and once his kids got their IP from china, he turned china into his best friends, while they are laughing at what a traitor Trump is.
But, CHina will crack down further in a short bit and prevent any western car maker from having self-driving vehicles in CHina. They really are a danger esp. since CHina is in a cold war with the west.
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I don' think Trump cares because it doesn't matter..
IF you somehow think that having access to the road networks in China is of some importance to the USA, I can assure you that it's not. Most folks in Chia don't have the resources to buy a car to start with and most that do live in the city and don't need one. Self Driving cars are of almost zero importance to them. They won't buy them, so who cares about this?
Now if you think there is some military reason to have China's road networks clearly mapped a
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China is the worlds largest car market, outstripping both North America and the EU. Heck China is almost big as the EU and North America combined (24M vs 32M (15+17))
Re: Then the cars aren't truly self-driving (Score:3)
I am many things, but certainly not a Trump voter, but I am starting to feel some tit-for-tat is necessary. If the Chinese block access to foreign firms or increase levies, while their companies get free reign both at home and internationally, then something is wrong.
A policy should be instated indicating that if a foreign nation provides unfair access, then the same should be coming. At the same time if we already do create unfair barriers, then we should accept that is fair game another country will to do
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Well, Trump doesn't really believe in tit-for-tat either.
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This is the kind of thing voters hoped Trump would focus on, instead of Twitter fights with athletes. He used to always rail against China's trade practices. Let's hope the Good Trump comes out instead of the Distracted Trump.
Unfortunately Trump badly misunderstands the realities of the situation with North Korea. China has somewhat more leverage than it will use and but not as much as western governments assume. Neither Russia nor China want the North Korean problem resolved at all. China doesn't really want things to get worse, but they do enjoy seeing the USA reeling about what to do there, as does Russia. Neither country really wants anything to happen that makes the US stronger. Having the US distracted by a minor powe
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Re:Then the cars aren't truly self-driving (Score:5, Insightful)
"If a car needs a detailed map to drive itself, instead of responding to visual cues like signs, curb position, road markings, then it's not truly "self driving."
What it if it doesn't 'need', what if it just 'benefits from' it?
I mean, are you personally better at driving on streets that you know? You know which lights are stupid, the road with really bad potholes, you know about the blind driveway on the corner of X, you know that there's a school at Z where kids are often playing. You know there's always a lineup that backs out onto the road from the starbucks at Q between 7am and 9am, and that the construction at F is makes left turns hard, etc. You know every driveway, twist, turn, and ramp, and elevation change, where its safe to pass, where its safe to pull over, where to get gas, where to park.
Are you really just as comfortable looking at an out of date map for a city you've never been to?
You don't need the extra information, but it sure helps.
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Your post makes no sense.
detailed maps vs super mapped roads (Score:2)
detailed maps (like google maps) vs super mapped roads (street view with all signs, curb position, road markings mapped out and updated all the time)
Right now street view can be 1+ years out of date.
Re: Then the cars aren't truly self-driving (Score:2)
...satellite images for China can easily be half a kilometer offset. Not to mention that maps are often incomplete or severely outdated. Western companies including Google just don't have access to good cartographic data on China
This stream of words with no actual thinking involved is rather amusing.
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...and knowing how roads are "networked."
So maybe they'd need a database of information about the locations of roads and how they're connected to one another... say, a map?
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In fact, after reading your comment, I searched and here is the results :
Average size :
China - 4.287 in
Japan - 4.299 in
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One modern spy sat fly over could probably do more than a year of on the ground mapping.
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Every phone, face and road. MI6 and the CIA then have a larger database of staff working at mil sites to try and make an offer to buy secrets.
How to stop Western intelligence services setting up front companies and doing collect it all?
Just keep them all out. Mil sites and staff are safe from new road level collection methods.
google maps does not even line up right in china (Score:2)
google maps does not even line up right in china.
It's like there forced to be off a bit.
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Ask the Illuminati
Really? (Score:2)
Maybe it's even simpler, How much does Google want to pay?
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Shades of Stalin (Score:5, Informative)
Reading this reminded me of Stalin ordered that the Soviet Union never published accurate maps of the country for fear of spying/invasion/bombing. This went on until the USSR's break up.
Not surprisingly, Stalin ordered the creation of very detailed maps of the rest of the world to aid in spying/invasion/bombing: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/... [wired.com]
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And you can bet that China is about to block Tesla from getting information from their vehicles. After all, they ARE mapping out the roads.
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Reading this reminded me of Stalin ordered that the Soviet Union never published accurate maps of the country for fear of spying/invasion/bombing. This went on until the USSR's break up.
Not surprisingly, Stalin ordered the creation of very detailed maps of the rest of the world to aid in spying/invasion/bombing:
Well there was a time where this mattered you had to send spy planes and shit. These days anything as large as a road is trivially mapped out by satellite images, hell you even got commercial satellites like WorldView-3 [wikipedia.org] with a 0.31m (12 inch) resolution. It's a fair assumption that the US military got even better stuff. Granted, you might claim the horizontal view from a car will tell you more I doubt it's really for that kind of security. For one, it's a way to make domestic companies take the Chinese mark
Protection for Local Buisnesses (Score:2)
National security for China? (Score:2)
smart on CHina's part (Score:3)
As such, I fully expect china to block ANY self-driving western company car from China. Likewise, the west would be very wise to follow their steps on this.After all, China is just as likely to use their manufactured buses and vehicles as weapons and spy devices as well.
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Why make it a war?
Because it's friendly competition if it's between equal parties in the marketplace. Once the state steps in to back one player, it becomes war.
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It is the CHinese GOV that is in a war with the west. They desire to remain in power, not just of China, but ideally, of the world. Right now, they are taking on Japan, S. Korea, Phillipines, Vietnam,
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>The ability to map the streets and then have a self-driving car with multiple cameras, move around, means that these vehicles can be used for weapons,
Well, it certainly means you don't have to recruit as many drivers for bombing missions. Still, that's more of a domestic terror threat than a foreign invasion threat - and I'd expect terrorists to co-opt local self-driving vehicles so they don't have to buy them themselves.
As for mapping, I'm pretty sure any nation that can put a satellite in orbit can g
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China is working hard on being able to take our America's sats, and China is counting on America taking out China's. That is why China is working on developing nuke powered drones that can fly around 100K' in the air and just quietly relay pix, comms and then finally lasering away.
Camera's can't see the roads anyway due to smog (Score:5, Funny)
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That's why cars need radar. We'll soon be back to that libertarian paradise of the 50's where the smog is too thick to see and thousands die due to pollution.
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>We'll soon be back to that libertarian paradise of the 50's where the smog is too thick to see and thousands die due to pollution.
Interesting thought (at least to me) - could there be a market for a night club where there's a (non-hazardous) artificial fog specifically to limit visibility so cameras are ineffective beyond a few feet?
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Exactly. I mean, why should clean air be free? If clean air is such a valuable thing, people should have to pay for it.
I know where I'm buying my next camera from (Score:2)
China...
Geographic surveys can't be performed without permission from the government, and many digital cameras don't record GPS coordinates for geotagging, as they do in other countries, according to Fortune.
This sounds like a critical privacy feature, which is lacking in non-Chinese cameras.
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I normally keep the GPS tagging turned off in my camera but the next trip to China it's going to stay on the whole time. That'll show 'em.
Tariffs (Score:1)
In a previous generation, this would be handled with tariffs. No wonder we can't negotiate a trade deal for shit. The Chinese know we don't have the backbone to actually impose tariffs and restrictions on their trade. We are toothless and the Chinese are eating our lunch. This country needs to have its balls reattached.
Calling BS on this (Score:1)
What does this say about their offensive plans? (Score:2)
People worry about the things that they would think of doing to others being done to them.
So, if they are afraid of others having detailed plans of any streets, not just specific areas, it stands to reason that they make use of detailed plans of the streets of their neighbors in their own offensive plans.
People marching don't need detailed plans. What kind of attack would benefit from detailed plans of everything as opposed to just detailed plans of specific targets? Maybe they plan some fully automated, ma
This is an easy fix (Score:2)
If China won't allow foreign competition in China, we simply don't allow Chinese Competition in $country until they do.
If I were to wager a guess, it's less about National Security than it is the inability to manipulate a foreign business like they do their own.
Good luck with that. (Score:2)
good example.. (Score:2)