But it's about to change. Today I stumbled upon information about supposed marks for the airstrikes on Google Maps.
I tried cheking information myself and found it very believable. Replicate as follows:
1. Search for Dnipro on Google Maps
2. Enter фермерське господарство (means farm on Ukrainian, but there are no farms there) in search
3. Do not press enter and look for auto-complete: Those are supposed targets.
Those marks are unusual: you can’t even report them. I never seen anything like this.
Video demonstration here:
https://youtu.be/OHGsFCfuB_k
This may save lives, including people I know. That’s why I need your help.
Important Edit: I have to clarify that in my opinion these are more probably marks for saboteurs to make real-world marks on the specified locations.
Examples here: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/russia-invades-ukraine-secret-symbols-seen-in-ukraine-point-to-escalation-of-violence/ZRZPD5W7WRAWD3U32C4PHB273I/
can we corroborate this with chinese and/or non-western media? it’s hard for me to believe anything at all during a war.
For people with Ukrainian and/or Russian language the raw sources like Telegram work nice. I initially used the sources very actively to cross-reference Ukrainian TV, and it was checking fine for me, so i mostly settled on the Ukrainian TV. Russian TV is even not in the ballpark of the truth, it is even not on the same planet.
edit: toned down the rantiness & add sources:
Also, Chinese media don't show any images of war as far as I know (just reading Global Times from time to time to have an opinion from 'the other side')
I do not know why you think it would be worth listening to anything they claim.
Spotters might very well use Google map to get coordinates but to communicate that via Google Maps itself would be strange. I don't see how fire control would not want to know what they are marking for prioritisation.
I requested more info, but she is likely sleeping.
Checking the points I get on gmaps (following your instructions) and then googling these farms, they seem to be real businesses, and the address matches what gmaps give me. First point I get can be checked on [1].
[1] https://youcontrol-com-ua.translate.goog/catalog/company_det...
Arsalov arrested: https://warsawinstitute.org/deputy-chief-russias-general-sta...
It seems likely that corruption has left them with a non-working system. It happens often enough even in Western procurement.
apparently some of Russian forces are using unencrypted civilian analog radio
https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619303717142529?t=...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahemerson/russia-goo...
“In ukraine”? Russian troops might be located there, also VPNs, and non-GPS geolocation is not exactly reliable (at least in my european experience where I’m essentially never geolocalised correctly and the subsequent localisation is always incorrect, any location within a few hundred miles of a border is a crapshoot).
“Out of ukraine or russia” would be trivially bypassed via a vpn as well.
At the very least, they are defacement, and google should pull them. Hopefully someone from their maps abuse team will take a look. HN search of articles in the last 24 hours should find the comments I’m referring to.
I don't know if these considerations are relevant but would urge OP to contact someone in Ukraine about it.
None of this makes sense.
I know it feels good to feel like you're helping but I think you're being trolled by assholes on the internet.
Separately, having coordination done via "www.google.com" DNS & SSL ClientHello makes it all but impossible to block without disconnecting the Internet for the entire country, at a time when access to information within the country is more essential than ever.
Everything about this sadly makes sense
Especially Google not keeping their word. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30524898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30525030
If you know Russians this makes 100% perfect sense...
The solution isn't to remove it. Just move the locations slightly to an empty field nearby.
Does it? My 'knowledge' of war comes from movies, TV and video games, which is obviously nonsense. I know that. I know that my belief that military tech is a bit like the things you see in Call of Duty or a Marvel blockbuster is wrong, and that it's all special effects and creative license to make things look 'cool'. Learning that soldiers on the ground in an active warzone pull out a phone and use Google Maps wouldn't actually surprise me at all. They're cheap, reliable, and understood by everyone. The only reason I can think of not to use it is because Google can be forced to block your access. Maybe they don't care about that?
There's a lot of weird stuff happening, I find this plausible enough.
I don't listen in to Ukrainian radio so I cannot verify but I am sure someone here knows more if they want to tell. It seems at this point it is already a very open secret.
It looked Something like this:
“MORNING IN KHARKIV 25/02”
Footage of armed vehicles moving on the city streets
1.2 million views
If chances of this true are 10% and this is indeed true, giving it some attention is worth it.
Edit: by attention I mean somebody from Google who can check things up
There’s also no way they could reasonably think I was a spammer because I had a decades old google account that existed within months of gmail existing. They probably know what I’ve eaten every day for the past 20 years.
That’s all to say, google is a giant machine, and if it decides your version of reality is wrong, don’t bother, no human on their side will probably ever look at it because humans are expensive.
These simply seem to be the addresses where a "farm business" is registered, as can be confirmed on a company-info-aggregator site [1]. I assume, in a lot of cases (especially for family owned farms), these are actually homes of the owners, to simplify all the mail and other paperwork. Actual farms can be located anywhere, probably outside of town. It might even be multiple farms (multiple pieces of land).
To answer your point about why these seem different (e.g. you cannot report them), I think it's because they are automatically scraped by google from the official company-info sites in each country. Seems to be a similar situation in other countries, as far as I can tell.
[1] this is the info of the first item on gmaps I get - address matches the location I'm shown https://youcontrol.com.ua/catalog/company_details/21897611/
[0] https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619303717142529?s=...
I'm back to process info and make edits.
I couldn't stay online due to injured hands from gadgets overuse.
> OP, why do you think a farm business (which gmaps are showing the location of) should be in the same place where farm land is? These simply seem to be the addresses where a "farm business" is registered, as can be confirmed on a company-info-aggregator site [1]. I assume, in a lot of cases (especially for family owned farms), these are actually homes of the owners, to simplify all the mail and other paperwork. Actual farms can be located anywhere, probably outside of town. It might even be multiple farms (multiple pieces of land). To answer your point about why these seem different (e.g. you cannot report them), I think it's because they are automatically scraped by google from the official company-info sites in each country. Seems to be a similar situation in other countries, as far as I can tell. [1] this is the info of the first item on gmaps I get - address matches the location I'm shown https://youcontrol.com.ua/catalog/company_details/21897611/
curl-up was right - these are all addresses of legally registered farms and they are Googlable.
I did not think about googling the names or how farms are registered or why Google has such weird marks.
I thought they are similar because it's the way to find them and not because they are from one trusted source.
Also, all marks I've seen were close to Russian troops. But the only border of Dnipro that's completely safe is west.
Google parses open data. I was not aware of that.
Thanks for the help and sorry for the wasted resources.
P.S. Those marks still look weird nevertheless. Not reportable or edible. The only article they link to is useless. Maybe it's worth fixing.
I'm out of resources (hands) to continue typing. Thank you all <3
I think it's too hard to notice parent comment.
Maybe mods could pin it?
@dang
No special skills or tools needed, and the on-line behavior is really hard to distinguish from 'expected' behavior. Its a pretty nice, and really easy to use, covert channel.
It seems like out of an abundance of caution you would not want your service to be used for this. Same for bing and other maps.
Am I missing something here?
Generalising the search for `*=фермерське` does not yield much more (around Kyiv, for example): https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1gBA
You can pan and zoom the map and repeat the search with the 'Run' button on the top left, but I often get a time-out when searching for regions spanning more than ~50 km.
For such a thing they probably have to get approval from the state department or someone else correct?
Google doesn't have to get approval from the state department to discontinue services.
I mean, if anything, you can imagine the situation where say CIA was doing some operation in a country, and at the same time there was some sort of mass disinformation campaign by some "enemy" actor, and Google decided to discontinue services, but that interfered with the CIA's operation somehow, maybe by cutting CIA off from intelligence and capability against the actor. So you imagine that it would be desirable there would be some co-ordination of things, to avoid stepping on toes. I mean, right? That's reasonable, isn't it?
turns out many people just blindly followed.
So closing/blacklisting accounts might not be the best solution, you could just make all the route instructions take them back to Russia.
>> “The tags in Google Maps were created on Feb 28th, and people noticed that the tags match the places the missile strikes today,”
Start placing 10, or a hundred times as many of these signs around non-important objects. Drown the signal in noise.
Some consideration is needed for how to keep these symbols believable, without accidentally marking certain people for being bombed. Still, I think if you have marked 60% of roofs in a town with these signs, then some-one will realize something is wrong.
(comment cannot be removed, only edited)
