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- Hacker News
- I get why people want Apple and Google to push back but ultimately there isn’t any logical approach for them to operate that isn’t “name things as the relevant governmental bodies name them”. Otherwise what source of truth is there?
The responsibility here is with a spineless government. An executive order is not a law and a congress that did its job would quickly contract these kind of mad king declarations.
by afavour - How are they determining the relevant government bodies?by maxerickson
- What about researchers at universities? Maintain a list of experts and conduct a poll whenever an event like this happens or enough of the experts request.
Or require an act of Congress. Obviously, we can no longer rely on Executive Orders being careful, thought-out, or lasting changes. Does any mapping organization want to change names back and forth? Does any user want to see these changes?
by vharuck - The government has no right to name geographic features. The names are established by popular usage, not the feds. As such Google and Apple should not listen to the demands of a body which has no right to make them in the first place.by bigstrat2003
- It’s an international body of water that has had the same name for longer than the government that tried to rename it has existed. The renaming was an overtly political act. There are many logical approaches to leaving the name the same, and there is one logical approach to changing it (appeasement)by dghlsakjg
- I tried it out for a trip yesterday. I wanted to love the app—it has a great retro feel, and an ad-free subscription option—but it gave me weird routes and the audio was extremely stuttery.by organsnyder
- Take that Cory Doctrow [0]
[0] - https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/do-webrings-next.html
by alephnerd - I think Cory would be surprised to see how many Mapquest referrers show up in the referrer logs of brick-and-mortar businesses.by reaperducer
- I feel like it wasn't defiance as much as "we need to come up with a story why we don't have any developers who know how to update this".by ghostoftiber
- Finding MapQuest on the PlayStore was a quest all on its own. More specifically, it does not exist on my PlayStore, and I had to install it on my phone remotely through the browser PlayStore.
Review wise, it sits firmly at a single star, so it's possible that Google burried it, although I would not put it past them to rig things.
by Varelion - Recommend you instead use something like OsmAnd. Mapquest pulls data from OpenStreetMaps - might as well use an open source application.by fwip
- I think a lot of people are desperate for tech giants to stand up to the current US administration.by standeven
- As long as tech companies make a stand against superficial culture war fights like this nobody will care that they've caved w.r.t privacy over the last two decades. Sad!
- People have nothing in common with tech giants. Tech giants support whoever is in power, because money. The current tech giants kicked the current President off of their platforms back in the day. Now these tech giants hang out at the White House. Funny how that works.by mulemisterX
- > In 2019, Verizon sold MapQuest to internet advertising company System1.
It's ad companies all the way down.
by chrononaut - And this is a PR piece put out by the ad company that people eat up because orange man bad.
- I enjoy how Bing Maps (and Bing in general) are so unloved that it's not even part of the debate. (Bing Maps hasn't changed - yet - but probably will eventually, since they caved on the Gulf of Mexico)by RajT88
- Not only did I have no idea that Bing or Bing Maps still existed, but the very fact that they ever existed at all had slipped from my consciousness.by buildsjets
- It’s not like Microsoft has artisanal cartographers sitting around deciding what to call every geographic feature. Bing Maps ingests its base map data from providers, which in turn aggregate a bunch of authoritative, commercial, open, and government datasets.
And for things like official geographic names, government naming databases are often one of the authoritative upstream sources. So if the U.S. government changes the name in its official geographic database, it’s not surprising for that change to eventually propagate through map providers and into Bing.
by 0x457 - I've dumped Google Maps for OSM over three years ago and have not looked back. Did this as one of my de-Google steps by choosing a Fairphone.
Looking at a FuriLabs FLX1S to start the next phase by switching to a Linux phone.
I've become a sunk cost to Google by not spending anything on their products or services and always use Ad-Block solution in a private session if I must.
by yndoendo - What do you use on Android instead of Google Maps, OsmAnd or something else?by bpye
- It still says Ontario because there's no one left at MapQuest that knows how to change it.
- That may be, but it's still what many people want.by D-Coder
- They'll get their 15 minutes, but there's no _there_ there. They're owned by System1, a bottom-of-the-barrel advertising company where 1990s web brands go to die (Metacrawler? Startpage.com?? Dogpile?!?!). Their maps are OpenStreetMaps maps.
People think they have their back (because OSM is showing Lake Ontario), but it's just marketing.
by wlonkly - I think people are more going on the "name it what you want" pages doing the rounds on socials, created originally for the Gulf of Mexico and now Lake Ontario, which a lot of people have seen, rather than the name presented by MapQuest's regular map which I don't think many people see.by amiga386
- Doubleclick
Perhaps it would have died, too
But no
- They forgot to scoop up mapbalst!
never mind looks like they got swallowed up by bing maps (that’s where Bing got line drive from, TIL!)
by mc32 - >Startpage.com
I thought that was still the best way to get anonymous google index search results?
by gruez - Dogpile?!? There's a name I haven't heard in what feels like 20 years.
The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me.
by doubled112