Search for 'anti national', 'sedition' and Google Maps takes you to JNU

Google Maps, which in the past has been attacked with several bogus edits, appears to have been marred again by another embarrassing incident.

The latest goof in Google Maps comes in the wake of the recent Jawharlal Nehru University (JNU) controversy that led to the arrest of JNU Students' Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, and Anirban Bhattacharya, on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy.

Type in words like "anti national", "sedition" or "leftist" in Google Maps, and it will take you to Jawharlal Nehru University. While there could be more keywords redirecting you to the same location, but we, so far, have been able to verify only these three apart from the legitimate ones.

While in the past many such incidents where Google provided users with botched up results appeared to have occurred because of the phoney edits suggested by users via the company's crowd-sourced map making tool, the latest incident doesn't seem to have been caused because that.

It, in fact, seems to have happened because of the frequent use of terms like "anti national" and "leftist" in reviews of the JNU location on Google Maps along with numerous news stories around the recent incidents at the university that had mention of these terms.

This is more so because similar suggestions made by users via map making tools are still pending and remain unpublished. Go to Map Maker and search Jawaharlal Nehru University. Under details you will find that users have made requests to make the university searchable by terms like "Anti national", "Jihadi University," and "Psychiatric Hospital" - but all of them are still listed as Pending.

Last year in May, Google, with the aim to prevent fake edits, had made its Map Maker service temporarily unavailable. The move had been made after the embarrassing incident wherein the Maps showed an image of an Android mascot urinating on an Apple logo. The image appeared briefly at a Pakistani location before it was removed.

Before that in April, someone had revised the map of the White House in Washington to include a new business called "Edwards Snow Den," an apparent effort to draw attention to former national security contractor Edward Snowden, who had leaked a trove of secret documents on US surveillance.

Google lets people modify maps in the spirit of tapping into intimate, local knowledge to make them more accurate and detailed, but the service is sporadically abused by some mischievous users.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

IntellectBeat

Search This Blog