As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD.
Interestingly, I have some weirdly relevant direct experience to share here.
Pokémon Go was released at the beginning of July 2016. A week later, the Air Force kicked off its Red Flag exercise in Nellis AFB outside of Vegas. For the several thousand active duty folks participating, this is a month-long TDY from their normal base to Vegas. The premise is a large-scale war simulation, and it encompasses essentially all major wartime functions. I was directly involved in supporting drone operations (including live strikes) during this exercise.
The thing that’s funny about your comment is that because Pokémon go was just launched a week prior, a huge percentage of the participants were playing it in their downtime between exercises. You have to understand: these are thousands of 20/30-somethings (and occasionally even teenagers), meeting back up with friends from all over the world in Vegas. On and off base, people are socializing, having fun, and playing games. While phones were limited to outside of SCIFs, most of the base had no such restrictions. I recall wandering around base at 2am with friends playing it.
What’s funny is the same was happening with our deployed friends as well at the same time. This was a game that all their friends back home were playing, and when deployed, you need all the morale you can get. There were technically OPSEC policies this all probably violated but this was before any blowback from Strava accidentally revealing military bases or other similar incidents, so there was no specific guidance or moratorium on it.
All this to say, I understand what you’re trying to arrive at via deduction, but I think your understanding of the world in this case may be a bit too limited to meaningfully speak to this. That said, is the headline sensationalist? Probably.
Even the Pokémon Go world model headlines were stretching the reality of what the model captured.
If you’ve played the game, the scanning function is only for what they call Pokestops: These are points of interest that you can walk to and get items in the game. The game gives you points if you walk in a circle around one and take a short video.
They’re relatively sparse. At most, they captured some 3D models of some things like signs, small landmarks (up close) and the fronts of some buildings.
The images captured by something like Google Maps are a million times more useful for someone trying to construct a world model with a lot of coverage. The Pokémon Go captures would be useful if you wanted something like a detailed 3D scan of the sign in front the student building or something.
Readers here really need to learn how to cut through hype better than they do. Pokemon go data is limited in far more ways. Many points of interest couldn't even be scanned like this because they were mural on the sides of buildings and don't even have more than one side. At least at first, there was no punishment for not actually scanning anything at all. You could walk in a circle with your phone pointed at the ground and it would still count that and give you points. People played in the dark or in crowds that didn't want to be filmed and this was the only way Niantic could make a feature like this that awarded prizes palatable to everyone. Beyond that, the points of interest don't even all exist. Plenty of the original database from Ingress is still present on the PoGo maps in Dallas and much of it hasn't existed in the real world for a decade, but players have no incentive to remove them because the more that exist in the game, the more you can get from playing since they're the points that spawn everything you might want to collect while playing. This became especially noticeable during the Black Lives Matter hubbub a decade back when old monuments to Civil War heroes erected during the Civil Rights era were torn down. All of those were POI in Ingress and PoGo and they still are, but they're gone from the real world.
I feel like users and readers instinctively know these limitations. We work with digital maps all the time that are out-of-date. Google and Apple don't and can't know any and all road closure and vehicle accidents in real time. Your car's radar road mapping service is as up-to-date as anything, but you still may be the first person to ever encounter a sinkhole or pothole that just appeared and it won't be on the map until you discover it. Satellite data is even more out of date because it can't be as frequently updated. There aren't anywhere near as many sensors in orbit or aerially as there are on the ground.
I haven't played PoGo in a while, but Niantic used to have human moderators and also tried to crowd-source some quality control on these world models because they knew 99% of the scans they received were bunk, either of nothing, the wrong thing, the right thing but in the dark or from an obstructed angle. I have no idea how good a job they ever did of cleaning that up, but it's a difficult task and it's never done because the world is always changing. There's only so much you can do here. Technology isn't magic.
Deeply sickening that modern society is such that we have to make room in our brains for objectively outlandish connections like these. That a children's cartoon and game about cute little companions has to in any way be involved in the same sentence as the flattening of a city and genocide is just... pure insanity. The world has truly, collectively, lost its fucking mind.
You can connect any two things into a sentence regardless of the state of the world. This is way off of where the problems actually are.
Edit: Some people have downvoted this without giving a reason, but I'm going to double down. Any time you have disasters or large crimes, you can connect them to children and children's things. Thinking there's anything to learn about the specific fact that you can make that connection is a mistake. It's letting the real problem spill over in a way that misleads your common sense. It's an inherent part of bad things happening that they also affect children. No matter what state the world is in.
No, because they are different things for different purposes.
Visual navigation is prone to degradation. Keeping the "map" updated requires constant visits. (I know because my team worked on the patent for a method for updating said maps.)
Also Pacification bot would be run by the military who most lilkey have GPS.
Finally, For ground based bots, SLAM is actually more useful, rather than pre-built map based navigation.
The controversy elsewhere in these comments is over whether it’s recording, and the server is slurping up, the video footage, during AR mode. We know they do so on the “scans” they have you do, where you walk around something taking video, but I don’t think there’s proof that having AR on = uploading to the server. Should be easy to prove one way or the other by observing bandwidth usage.
If you want to kill some redacted that are sitting in a trench inside the killzone but don't want to risk your own life, the ground drone with a machine gun (remote operated as of now) goes there. It was April this year when the news were saying a position was taken over by remote drones alone. With news being Ukrainian propaganda you can of course take it with a grain of salt, but it's probably at least somewhat true.
Ground drones however are targeted by the FPV drones (wired or radio controlled), so the new thing is to have a thing with automatic targeting to shoot those. Then again, I at least heard about using something open-cv (yes, some of those run actual linux) shaped on the FPV drone itself, as it really helps with the amount of jamming going on.
I thought that was still human-in-the-loop? The drone's onboard computing identifies a potential target from a distance such that EW isn't effective, the human confirms it, and the drone moves in closer to attack. At this point jamming doesn't matter because the drone already has its orders.
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”
Because there are never any civilians caught in the middle of two warring armies, right? I think the ICC will be getting real busy soon.
That alone doesn't cut war crime definition to get attention to ICC and isn't really different from the usual aerial bombing. You drop the bomb from a plane or 100 of them somewhere around the densely populated area and don't know who they kill, as there is no connection to the drone.
Civilians dying in an armed conflict doesn't cut the definition of warcrime by itself. Deliberate targeting and intentional destruction of civil infrastructure that supports life or something like it is.
Then of course there is stuff that ICC isn't getting busy about which is clearly above the threshold -- the regular drone safaris in and around Kherson (city with pre-war population circa quarter million people) happening for the last few years.
Dunno - if you look at the graphs https://ourworldindata.org/democracy the long term trend over a couple of centuries has been towards democracy, though with a bit of a reversion over the last 15 years or so. A lot of the bad has come out of Russia which is struggling a bit these days.
The real cyberpunk dystopia is going to be a lot less glamorous than it is in the stories- mostly just unending poverty, war, and death for the vast majority of us.
Yep, the autocracies of the past only resolved when the ruling machinery needed something from the population. They needed farmers, workers, soldiers, etc.
There are clear parallels in the modern world of societies when the ruling machinery doesn't need those things from their population - petrostates. The people in these states tend to be viewed as subjects, not citizens. That's where we are headed
A corporate council of emperor kings with armies of pacification bots. The tiny sliver of window we have to ensure this doesn't happen is rapidly closing and there seems to be no movement toward ensuring that this doesn't culminate with the entire power of this new revolution in the hands of a small class of near demigods.
Hopefully they will let us live comfortably like pets as sterile creatures that will slowly die out and not be replaced. This could limit human misery in the future.
> The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
But presumably the images/models at ground level can be used to train/improve the general performance of Vantor's aerial (satelite based) navigation system so it works better elsewhere?
No the tech doesn’t work like that AFAIK. The most common use case is exactly localization (think “HD maps” for autonomous cars).
It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
There maybe some hyper corner case uses. Maybe the billion scans in New York City help them generalize across different phone lenses characteristics, but phone and drone lenses are so different.
Would love to hear some specifics if I’m wrong here.
there was a startup that pitched the idea of using Satellite data to do ground based navigation. (https://sturfee.com/vps) they didn't get bought out by either google, niantic or facebook, so it can't of worked that well.
Niantic's stuff is a pre-built map that the client will reference to get a position. Its essentially a massive feature matching exercise. The problem with using airborn photos is that you miss a bunch of features you can't see. (samy thing trying to match ground features from the air.)
THe lens calibration issue isn't actually that much of a problem _for the client_. if you have a rough idea of the lens (exif data really helps there) then you can still get meter accurate (and a few degrees heading) its a bit more of a problem for generating the initial map, but Structure from motion with good motion priors goes a long way to make it less of a problem
Now, Niantic are proposing that you can train a model that can relocalize generally without a detailed map, I think thats a bit far fetch, especially to do at any large scale. (ie bigger than a cubic kilometer)
> It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
The headline, which I do understand is in question, talks about training, not using the scans as a database. It is likely that you are right that the scans are not being used to provide localization data, but that is also not what the headline is pointing to.
The headline specifically speaks to using the scans for training. While I do not have any inside baseball, the problem space is often solved using neural nets and other machine learning algorithms. On the surface it seems likely that they would benefit from training data that doesn't necessarily need to be from where the conflict is actually taking place. A base world model, for example, can be developed from data collected anywhere in the world. Its is not an entirely different universe when you step into another country.
But you are suggesting that the algorithms used are entirely classical (i.e. no AI/ML)?
Drone warfare has been discussed publicly since more than a decade, what Ukraine proved was just how effective that really is, but it was already known and understood. In any case mapping the world doesn’t only benefit drones, it’s something always valuable to the military. Drone navigation is just one use case
Which of those are active theaters of war? Pokemon Go wasn't that big in Iran or Lebanon and even there, there aren't any reports of significant drones deployed there.
The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).
MEA has stuff going on beyond Iran, Lebanon or whatever country the US decides to invade this week. India has two nuclear neighbours with border disputes and weekly scuffles, sometimes a downed jet fighter or two. Taiwan is probably the biggest geopolitical tension/war/invasion possibility of our time. Korea is in a stalemate unfinished war for decades. Japan has its own very real dispute scenarios with China.
I know drone scans from Pokemon Go probably won't help in the Himalayas or South China Sea, but those regions are far from trouble free
"The Middle-east" isn't a war zone. Even the parts of the middle-east that are, don't have any drone deployments. Lebanon maybe? Reports are thin.
Maxar is/was primarily a satellite data company, and to say Pokemon data would add any major value in any of today's active drone deployments with the level of Satellite coverage Maxar already has is a wide stretch.
Moreover, ground forces in the area would need pretty heavy jamming tech in place too for this kind of data to be useful. It's a sliver of a sliver of a sliver situation.
I am a daily player, I have scanned something once, the rewards were minuscule, I never did it again. I have that specific vivillon which was hard to get because not many players were from the relevant area even before the current events, and I just can't see how the war is related to any of this.
i thought Maxar was mostly 3d images based on satellite inference. 1/2 of a pixel difference in a morning vs. noon vs. night sat photo can determine shadow and therefore height, etc. etc.
rapid 3d modeling of topography and cityscapes + supplementation with other data, e.g. pokemon. But ultimately that's supplementation, not the main effort.
""As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).""
Can you elaborate?
GPS can be faulty in cities.
Pokémon Go scans, are primarily in cities.
The mapping in the article, is specifically saying to use visual cues when GPS is faulty.
How is this not directly 1-1 overlapping, the gap and the solution.
I had assumed this was referring to street level flying drones.
Like you see in drone races. But with a little bomb attached.
Even with half life. That could be years. Depending on changes. Old neighborhoods probably haven't changed.. And, not sure I read that deal had a cutoff, or not. Could they continue getting updates. ?
>As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?)
are you saying that drone training in quiet residential neighborhoods is not training? are you saying self driving cars can only drive in theaters where they've been trained, because autonomous training is always specific by neighborhood? are you saying that if a particular region has some novel terrain that all previous training must be discarded?
It's not like there's a moral high ground about not collaborating with the military. Unless you want to advantage America's adversaries, namely China, Putin's Russia and Iran's current regime. There's always this implicit, sometimes explicit, "war bad" childish political philosophy in posts like this. In reality war is a given and you have to be prepared to have the upper hand.
You can explain that to the Ukrainians and tell them how they shouldn't have American technical superiority like Starlink and the American AI and data in their drones to survive another day.
the EU has demonstrated for decades that by balancing trades, equality and human rights it can prevent conflicts from happening.
Seems to me that most of our friends in the balkans that have memory of the past wars are overall pretty happy about the current state of things, and there hasn't been wars to contend Alsace-Lorraine in 80 years, is it a record already?
War is very much not a given in the civilized world
That's why they have a full blown war in their borders and they're powerless without American hardware and intelligence. Also they're right now scrambling to allocate huge investments in weaponry, of course late, but better than never.
Full blown war: putin scared that more territories will want to join the EU block. No internal wars and more countries wishing to enter the block.
Powerless without american hardware and intelligence: You wish. Big tech is spending so much lobbying our governments in fear of us leaving them for open solutions, or god forbid paying fair amount of taxes.
And regarding intelligence, we would have been so much better without the CIA & co spying our politicians and messing with our governments, aiding and sponsoring domestic right wing terrorism for the past 50 years.
We have international treaties that ban biological and chemical weapons. Other weapons that are regulated include anti-personnel mines, cluster bombs, and blinding lasers. Expanding bullets are banned in military uses as are incendiary weapons against civilian targets.
That's the state today. Throughout history there's been a long negotiation about what weapons have been allowed in combat.
I assumed that in urban USA the map would be fairly complete and opportunities for edits would be somewhat rare. My assumption was very wrong. The app showed a dozen quests just outside of my office building. Thanks for suggesting it!
There’s always things to improve or to add. Road surfaces, benches, trash bins, table tennis spots, etc.
StreetComplete on Android helps make some common tasks really easy to do.
Yes. Or you can license it for specific purposes. But in general open data refers to data that is open to use by anyone, for any purpose, without restrictions except in some cases attribution.
A license only means something if you can enforce it. This means you can catch violations, and get courts to enforce it in a way that means something. If you can't catch a violation it is de facto allowed. What a license can restrict is limited by law, and so depending on the terms the court may say "you are not allowed to restrict that: they are allowed, go away". Or the court may impose a fine that is small enough everyone considers it a cost of doing business. How this plays out depends on the violation as well: if the violator can show they did their best to not violate that is very different from intentional violation. (I'm convinced the GPL will be broken - when a company shows they have lots of process to prevent the misuse, but a "rogue employee" hid their actions - the company will pay a fine but won't have to give their source code.)
Yes, there other mobile editor that are arguably more featured (EveryDoor, OSM Go, OsmAnd), but StreetComplete has a nice gamification / simplification of UI that makes editing a breeze.
MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/
I stopped scanning pokestops because the effort has outweighed the rewards. A lot of the time, the requests show up as "research tasks" for a point of interest that I quickly passed by and have no interest in returning to, besides the tasks related to taking pictures of your buddy pokemon in augmented reality. Looks like I made the right choice by stopping. They do indicate to you up front that they will use the data, but it's still kind of terrible that you could be indirectly contributing to war efforts. I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
> I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.
The closest stop to me is between a dog park and a school - scanning it would have been an awkward situation, to say the least. And as you said, for rewards that aren't worth it. I got used to having that "Scan" task just sitting at the top of my list, never to be touched. But I noticed earlier this week that it's gone - and scanning stops doesn't give a new scan task.
My 8 year old LOVES Pokemon Go, and we regularly go to a local meet up which is a fascinating microcosm of people of all ages from all walks of life. We’ve met some great people and had some incredible conversations, but I really struggle to see how we can continue in good faith now.
I seriously loath, hate & despise everything about this digital panopticon world being constructed around us.
The data isn't guns though. Guns aren't a dual use technology that have a nonviolent purpose. Data is. The same data that trains military drones can also be used to train the robot that will bring food to grandma when she's so old that she can't walk up the stairs anymore.
I bet the targets don't feel like they're non-violent. The animal that was killed for food doesn't think anything, because it's dead. That's pretty violent. Shooting someone that attacking you in defense was necessary, but it's definitely violent.
All uses of guns are violent. That's what they do. They make holes in things that didn't have holes in them before. There are uses for them that are justified but they're always violent. This isn't an anti-gun screed, this is a words-mean-things rant. Violence is necessary and justified in various situations, which means guns are necessary and justified in various situations, but if you're going to say they're not violent, I can't agree.
If making holes in things that didn't have holes in them before is a sufficient condition for "violence", does that make drills violent too? Or is that taking words-mean-things too far?
Or perhaps can we accept that it is possible to make holes in things without doing violence, and that an object that can make holes in things is not inherently a violent object even though it would be violent if you made holes in things like people or animals, or in property without permission.
Targets are inanimate objects I’m fine with being violent against them just like I’m fine with farting on my chair!
Even if all uses of weapons are violence, sometimes violence is justified. If you disagree happy to violently rob you and disabuse you of your stupid ideas.
Opinions of people who lived sheltered lives are so divorced from reality
Please tell them that 'als Elon Musk zijn starlink uitzet, iedereen de weg kwijt is' incorrect is. GPS is managed by the USA gov and we have our Galileo-alternative
This shouldn't be a surprise. But at this point it feels like if you don't completely avoid participating in digital society, your data will be used against you or groups/countries you support.
Sadly non technical people do not see future risk and any warning prediction is a slippery slope fallacy. Yet we now hear the echo of privacy advocates of the 2000s and 2010s saying "I told you so!"
Agreed. If it's "digital", it will be used for elite power plays, because it's too easy. How else could you mass control/analyse/manipulate millions of people instantly? Digital, digital, digital...
In the conservative worldview, competition is fair dinkem, so the setting for these businesses is just. That's how we got here.
Also in that worldview, we have the responsibility to defend innocent children. Let's if they can follow their own moral code and outlaw this surveillance to protect our kids.
There seems to be low-hanging political fruit here.
Governments have a say on to whom their weapons manufacturers sell weapons. It should be ditto for geospatial intelligence. If you want to map geospatial data in the Netherlands, you get a license from them and store the data locally and have to get permission to exfiltrate.
This won’t stop exfiltration, of course. But it should slow it down, which in the world of geospatial intel, could mean the difference between a drone finding its target and getting lost because of new construction.
An interesting thing is that in Russia, this military data grab by ostensibly 'our western would-be enemies" was supported by viral advertisement by nobody else but the head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.
A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go.
The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that once such an obscurant retrograde declares such an innocent game so evil, it must be something to absolutely install and play in spite!
And such was the way of the Pokemon Go's viral success in Russia.
Sure, I don't expect Kirill himself to come up with that, but he was positively used as a notorious talking head, which whatever it says must be understood to the contrary.
Like in that case when he blamed the rise of toll roads in Russia - "oh brothers and sisters, shalt we allow taking the toll on what should forever be free in Russia?" - the public reacted in the exact same way - a religious zealot told this, so it must actually be a progressive, sane thing to do the opposite.
Interesting: the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now. They're not even pretending anymore. Given that this steady parade of seemingly-planted and promoted derogatory anti-Western stories that has been happening for years originates from You Know Where, it's a revelation that the Russian establishment and secret services are not even pretending anymore.
It should also be pointed out that Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church have been understood to have been cat's paws for Russia's notorious KGB successor agencies for a very long time now.
All very true, and an important point about ROC/KGB ties, but
> the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now.
is a total wind vane which can flip 180° in a matter of days (if not minutes, as in Orwell's scene where they seamlessly switch from being at war with Eurasia to that with Eastasia)...
Come on, Russian "страна наиболее вероятного противника" (the country of the most likely enemy) was always the military name of the US since the Cold War. Now used in military texts and also as a sarcastic cliché
Exactly. Russians seem to understand the word "Nazis" is a less-literate way than the rest of the world.
"Nazi" -- in Russia -- means anybody that Russia hates, resents, is jealous of, or otherwise dislikes. Anybody not explicitly in Russia's thrall is "anti-Russian", considered an enemy, and is hence labelled a "Nazi".
Coincidentally, this "Whoever isn't with us, is against us" thinking is a hallmark of fascist regimes like the actual Nazi Germany, where it was an article of faith.
I still feel like this is a perfect example of why we should be asking for our data to be disclosed to the public. If I take a picture of some public point of interest, they end up tagging it with their metadata and selling it, well, that's what I agreed to by not reading 20 pages of T&C's right?
But the value in that data is in the liveliness right, so at some point, would it not make sense for that data to be considered a public asset?
Why do we not demand this data be released regularly (given that the inverse tech could be developed using this as well)? If it can be used to train things used for war, could it not equally be used to train better lifesaving tech (in which case, the data should be made available to the public)?
It's quite obvious that data is what pays the game. A lot of data about the players )daily routine, commute to work/school, social circles to other players, etc. which allows to derive Job, wealth, etc.), data about surroundings (where do people actually walk, drive, ... etc.)
The story here however I'm not too sure about: Isn't the game mostly played in dense urban areas? - by the time you need military drones there the area will have changed a lot (destruction, fortification, ... and overall be outdated) where I think the civilian drones (delivery, cars, ....) benefit more. While the technology certainly is dual use.
I had assumed the purpose of the data was more in generalising across variegated input sources to better allow the drones to fly on their own in urban settings, aka, adapt more readily to randomness?
Better datasets for multimodal training etc.
I am not joking though, I really would consider any data generated on public assets to be considered "releasable" to the public.
How many people should get killed by self-driving cars because the company making the cars didn't have enough data to train proper models?
I am all for public code. But mind: the whole point of Pokemon go is to collect data. If they have to publish it as open data their business case goes away.
This may be good and we'd still not have the data (but "they" can collect on their own privately/secretly)
It's dual, but its positive aspects are only unlocked after a sufficient human blood sacrifice is made by its overlords, as is the case with all dual use tech.
No it's not. How does 3D printing; what blood sacrifice happened with 3d printers before they were unleashed upon the world? Hard to prove for encryption, though that one's antediluvian. Drones were around and toys for quite a while before they ever killed anyone.
You can ask for whatever you like - nobody's listening.
There is no 'we'. 99%+ of people view the world as a zero sum game where for me to win, somebody has to lose and if I don't do whatever it takes, somebody else will and then I lose, therefore I have no morals or principles or virtues and anyone who does is a liar or a fool.
Everything is a bad faith act, everyone is a selfish bad faith actor and I shouldn't feel bad about being one because everyone else who isn't a fool is too.
This tragically wrong but intuitively correct worldview and much more was explained by Plato long, long ago and just about no one understood any of it. At least the text survived and people with 140+ IQ and an iota of decency can read it and be at peace knowing they're not crazy or foolish.
This is revolting. Given how many kids played and are still playing the game this literally means weaponizing kids playing games. Humanity has been lost somewhere along the way.
What's the AI component here? Pokemon Go dates back to 2016, and there was Ingress before that. Hell, there was Foursquare before Ingress. Strava/similar has leaked military bases' layouts. All of that predates ChatGPT.
1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.
2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.
How does the VPS work?
You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)
Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)
Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)
Now.
Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.
I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.
I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.
However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.
Yea, I find it a lot more believable that they're using this for human +/- AR stuff, not robots. E.g. walking instructions: they have photos of landmarks from many human-friendly angles, and precise positioning isn't important. That's undeniably useful for lookup purposes. Stuff in between can be estimated by GPS/3D building maps that already exist, and that's more than good enough for humans.
I just don't see how they'd convert weird-phone pictures to accurate-enough-for-SLAM purposes, especially with that in-between problem. Like, I could believe you can get a LOT of accuracy out of just photos (just watching occlusion probably gets you sub-centimeter), but in huge areas of the world they have nothing at all to stitch those high-precision areas together accurately. Existing maps and 3D building scans are wildly inaccurate on that scale. Like, it's more than a block between scannable things in my area, sometimes multiple blocks, they're not computing a precise world model from that even with existing data on e.g. openstreetmap. Robots already have enough to know their world-position with on-board SLAM + GPS + existing maps, this won't eliminate (or even reduce) SLAM as a necessity for navigation.
I'm not sure they need the in between areas, so long as the landmarks are inclusive of similar features. In fact, they probably only need a high quality 3D scans of primitive features to perform classification (walls, building, intersections, etc). I haven't played recently, so I'm unsure how distinct each landmark is.
I don’t think the standing committee is objectively that perceptive
But I do appreciate alot about what they are doing and choose to do
Reminds me more of a theme park. Yes, a heavy handed corporation runs it and if you have any dissent it won’t go well, but if you don’t choose to focus on that then it will be a joyous place and you have the opportunity to contribute to that energy and be rewarded by something that simulates a free market
China has the largest intelligence programme in the world and likely has whole teams of people whose job it is to build this type of data. It's not surprising that they are cagey about it being hoovered up by other countries.
Russia is already taking advantage of preloaded terrain imagery, according to the article:
The principle is already turning up on the other side of the front, where a downed Russian drone was found matching live camera feeds against preloaded terrain imagery rather than trusting a single GPS module.
Its using Visual descriptors to generate a pointcloud. Buildings and text are really great for creating descriptors, so when they change you loose key points for "localizing"(ie getting your position). This needs to be updated as those buildings change.
You also need a day/night dataset (although some newer descriptors are day/night resistant)
Yes. Even dealing with "what does it look like in rain? What does it look like in snow?" is hard. Hell... "What does it look like at night" is hard. Hell.... what does it look like at noon vs sundown (no shadow vs long shadows) is hard.
Have you ever seen a commercial use of anything like this? That should give you a hint about how reliable these systems get.
It's easier to take a look via change of dates in google street view, they have almost 20 years coverage. You can see how the data ages and decays or doesn't because it's tied to the place it represents.
Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.
It's the combination of geographical data (maps) linked to its visual representation in the world (footage of structures, roads, landscape features) that is useful.
The geographical data already exists in digital maps. And I would expect competent militaries already have maps of enemy territory. It's the second part that was so far missing.
This combined set allows the training of AI models that can say, "When my surroundings look like x, that looks like y on a map".
So when your drone's GPS gets jammed, it can look at its surroundings, reference its (internal and offline) maps, figure out where it is, and navigate.
There are so many companies these days doing recording for self driving cars and/or street view like applications. Also sites like Flickr collect huge sets of geo tagged photos, as do companies like Meta where tons of geo tagged images are shared each day via their different outlets.
Niantic has the benefit that they can steer "volunteers" to specific points, though.
Maybe Niantic intentionally steered players towards remote locations only reachable on foot, understanding that this data is more scarce and therefore more valuable?
I don't what class of models they use here, specifically, but a generic classifier shouldn't depend on a single feature. And neighbourhoods don't typically get razed or remodeled/painted over in a fortnight.
... Except, well, when it's the doing of this same, so called "defence" industry.
The moral question is if you've unknowingly contributed to war, death and destruction, or if you are actually helping drones to accurately find real targets – which hopefully are not innocent civilians but legitimate military targets.
The depravity of using a fun, uplifting game that targets kids and teenagers to train military drones boggles my mind. "The end justifies the means" continues to reign supreme
Reminds me of that sci-fi short film where kids are playing a VR game controlling virtual avatars looking for and shooting virtual enemies, while in the real world, unbeknownst to them, they are actually piloting robots that are hunting down and killing dissidents.
I'm not sure this is a real problem. Google/Apple already has the world mapped out thanks to our photos in the cloud, and we literally let Tesla and others drive cars everywhere recording everything.
Pokemon Go does not really incentivises this activity. We get a poffin... Nice to have but does not worth the hassle of scanning and looking stupid on the street.
If the article's description evoked applications like old missile guidance system methods based on geographic features... this Wikipedia screenshot's imagery looks like it would also be good for precision drone attacks against urban small civilian structures and select individuals within/around them:
Wartime propaganda poster: "Loose Surveillance Capitalism Children's Game Apps Sink Your Own Darn City, to an AI autonomous drone swarm assault that surgically neutralizes whatever the worst people want to neutralize".
AI, please rework that into a catchier slogan, and render it as a printable US WW2 OPSEC poster style PDF, but without storing my prompt and-- Hey, what's that buzzing soun--
This is what censorship looks like. This is what should get people angry. Not localization changes, but actual government-mandated changes or bans. By censoring the internet, Iran is not protecting its citizens but rather the ruling government.
Or maybe sometimes censorship actually DOES protect its citizens?
That's a funny tantrum. It's barely even censorship cause the game isn't about speech. I can't think of a single reason any country besides the US should've allowed Pokémon Go to operate there, phoning location scans back home.
Well game vendors catering game data to the military is the problem here, not the maps themselves. Maps are good, shady corpo bs isn't. Same shit Spotify pulled by investing into war machinery rather than paying the artists more.
Where are all the edgelords sending me cuckoo signs and tagging me as conspiracy theorist when I said that it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage?
Ah, oh yes, "we all knew it from the start", "they indicated that up front" etc.
Fuck no, everyone was foaming at the mouth how it's just a game and no way in hell an intelligence operation.
P.S. Those who "knew it from the start" yet continued helping Niantic, did you really think that the data will be used for the greater good of the humankind?
> it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage
But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks.
From TFA:
> Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.
I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.
Well if such a conspiracy crackhead like me somehow happened to reach ranks of Niantic team, I'd totally make sure that there is a decoy "huge data upload point with explicit consent" to shift focus from covert data channels that slowly transmit all else using some custom image compression, maybe just some very small fraction of original data that by the mass nature of acquisition would mathematically still reconstruct the original data, or the fraction of that data that is enough to build a world model.
Videos are inherently large. There are better compression algorithms than what phone cameras generate by default, but video reencoding is slow, and the results still too large for "covert data channels".
Normal players would have noticed the bandwidth and CPU usage, and volunteers have already agreed to data sharing, so there's no point in keeping secrets. Same as claims that the Facebook app listens to people talk: someone would have caught it by now.
Also, AR capture was never very popular, mostly a gimmick for new players. The game was already a battery and power hog even without it.
Why videos though? Photogrammetry is about still images. You don't need ALL angles of a target from a single user. Other users pile the needed data up, guided by their own pokemon locations.
Yeah and for niantic to achieve good photogrammetry with their random collection of photos taken from different angles, on different days, etc they would need some kind of ground truth to train on, which is implausible. You'd need to collect a parallel dataset of high-quality videos for traditional photogrammetry and .. hang on.
I was able to create a full 3d model of my window plant almost free of obscured areas from a few dozens still photos taken all around it, back in 2018, using the Capturing Reality photogrammetry app on a mobile i7-3610QM CPU with 8Gb RAM, in about 40-60 minutes.
And that's pretty mundane general public software, do we know for sure which algorithms are used by Niantic?
> and for niantic to achieve good photogrammetry with their random collection of photos taken from different angles, on different days, etc they would need some kind of ground truth to train on, which is implausible.
I'd say... the versatility of photos provides the "ground truth" on its own when combined to one single dataset. Say you want to program a guided drone shooting through urban areas, you want it to work under all sorts of conditions - day, night, rain, snow, the sun visible from all possible angles and throwing shadows.
A dataset that you can get from something like Street View? You can at best generate that once a year at enormous expense. Still valuable because a Street View car likely has a multitude of highest-quality GNSS receivers and possibly RTK navigation aids, but to make the dataset usable for 24/7/365 navigation you absolutely need a huge, huge amount of backfill.
>Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft
>Van den Hoven did not condemn battlefield VPS outright. If it helps Ukraine win a just war against an aggressor, he said, that is a good development. His worry is the system falling into the wrong hands
Nvidia wants to create a digital twin of the real world that military can use to plan their next military operations. All of those scans of cities and inside buildings will be a virtual world where war makers can plan to a very fine detail how their drones will behave.
This is fitting/perfect. Pokemon go is THE archetypical surveillance capitalism app. Be a drone in surveillance capitalism, know that your behavior will be used like this. Drones generally don't know or care though. Drones just have fun with tech yay fun awesome. Pokemon, gotta catch them all!!
And here I am, trying to make our product as privacy friendly as possible. Trying to follow GDPR and the AI act. Trying to respect my users..
And then there are those guys... and they make billions, by giving a flying f*ck about ethics or what so ever. And NO ONE will hold them accountable. NO ONE! Because either they lack the power, or they are bought and in it on the scheme.
I accept that the world is like that. Just like International Law has always been nothing more than an academic exercise, business doesnt care about anyone besides profit. Its fine. Its just sad also...
I keep being negative about Digital Tech in general[1]. But this is worse than my habitual negativity towards D. Tech sans AI (AI is a whole chapter onto itself).
And what can be done? The comments usually say a big fat nothing.
- Any fool already knew this comments: “shouldn’t be a surprise”
- I guess I should call my representative comments
- Just boycot tech comments
Usually nothing much actionable. Building the Ad/Surveillance/Privacy Invasion society? Very actionable, good pay, many mouths fed and FIRE accomplished by HN posters. There’s even at least one acronym for this life achievement.
Shoutout to digital activists that are doing something. I’m but an armchair complainer on this front.
Truly dystopian. The Pokémon Company should share the blame for licensing their brand in this way without proper safeguards to prevent the data being used for this, particularly given the background of the Niantic founders
Can you imagine scanning your house, your school, your playground, thinking you're catching Pikachu, then have a drone hit it based on your own footage? Pretty terrifying.
To an extent, but realistically it wasn't really reasonable to expect a cutesy Pokemon game to be used for this ten years later. If you had told the average Pokemon Go player this ten years ago you would have been called crazy. The Pokemon Company should have done more to protect their brand (I would hope for regulation too on player-generated real world data like this)
Niantic is what happens when a boardroom is somehow more evil than the ridiculous caricatures we sometimes see in Hollywood. “Alright gentlemen: we need to make a lot of money quickly harvesting every drop of data from kids and adults alike en masse using something they all love that is family-friendly. We are selling it to the military of course, because they’ll pay us tons of money for it. Who’s in?”
I’m so torn between naked admiration for the sheer Machiavellian audacity of this play, and discomfort with how vulnerable everyone is to this kind of creative abuse.
> The games went to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The map went to defense.
The map went to offense. Nobody needs scans of someone else's country for "defense".
At this point it's a given that any data source that can bring an edge in a conflict is being used for exactly that. Things that film and scan surroundings are the newest addition. When a fleet of cars is taking cm or mm resolution scans of entire cities or even countries the safe assumption is that the data is funneled for intelligence and military purposes.
You should assume any camera recording will turn into a model one way or another, if not for gnss denied navigation, it will be on facial recognition or such.
AFAIR, there is a chain of companies which connects Niantic to govt agencies, they were selling this data to Uncle Sam from the beginning(even before Pokemon GO)
Yes, it would not be unreasonable to say that funding originating from In-Q-Tel has "CIA roots".
If someone claimed to have a CIA background solely on the basis that In-Q-Tel funded their mapping software, they'd be a charlatan. Just as a guy selling toilet paper to the CIA is not necessarily someone embedded in the intelligence community.
This is one of the most dystopian things I've heard in a long while.
I mean, we have a lot of weird shit going down right now... like AI being used to automate art BEFORE it's being used to automate dangerous and menial jobs, but knowing that people are being killed with help from data generated by millions of kids and young adults playing a fun, cute videogame is just so freaking dark and weird.
We are a very strange species and I don't have a great deal of hope for our future.
Zoom was free for a reason. The audiovisuals harvested during lockdown were used to help produce the fake videos/simulations of humans we are seeing today.
As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD.
This is mostly an ideological battle.
Interestingly, I have some weirdly relevant direct experience to share here.
Pokémon Go was released at the beginning of July 2016. A week later, the Air Force kicked off its Red Flag exercise in Nellis AFB outside of Vegas. For the several thousand active duty folks participating, this is a month-long TDY from their normal base to Vegas. The premise is a large-scale war simulation, and it encompasses essentially all major wartime functions. I was directly involved in supporting drone operations (including live strikes) during this exercise.
The thing that’s funny about your comment is that because Pokémon go was just launched a week prior, a huge percentage of the participants were playing it in their downtime between exercises. You have to understand: these are thousands of 20/30-somethings (and occasionally even teenagers), meeting back up with friends from all over the world in Vegas. On and off base, people are socializing, having fun, and playing games. While phones were limited to outside of SCIFs, most of the base had no such restrictions. I recall wandering around base at 2am with friends playing it.
What’s funny is the same was happening with our deployed friends as well at the same time. This was a game that all their friends back home were playing, and when deployed, you need all the morale you can get. There were technically OPSEC policies this all probably violated but this was before any blowback from Strava accidentally revealing military bases or other similar incidents, so there was no specific guidance or moratorium on it.
All this to say, I understand what you’re trying to arrive at via deduction, but I think your understanding of the world in this case may be a bit too limited to meaningfully speak to this. That said, is the headline sensationalist? Probably.
Even the Pokémon Go world model headlines were stretching the reality of what the model captured.
If you’ve played the game, the scanning function is only for what they call Pokestops: These are points of interest that you can walk to and get items in the game. The game gives you points if you walk in a circle around one and take a short video.
They’re relatively sparse. At most, they captured some 3D models of some things like signs, small landmarks (up close) and the fronts of some buildings.
The images captured by something like Google Maps are a million times more useful for someone trying to construct a world model with a lot of coverage. The Pokémon Go captures would be useful if you wanted something like a detailed 3D scan of the sign in front the student building or something.
Aside from the scanning function, they likely have many geolocated images from people catching pokemon in AR mode.
Source?
If this is happening it would be easy to detect by the upload bandwidth spiking during AR mode.
The 3D scan mode is a specific feature you have to use in the app that uploads 100s of megabytes afterward. It advises you to go on WiFi to do it.
If the AR mode was secretly uploading images that would be a scandal in itself.
Readers here really need to learn how to cut through hype better than they do. Pokemon go data is limited in far more ways. Many points of interest couldn't even be scanned like this because they were mural on the sides of buildings and don't even have more than one side. At least at first, there was no punishment for not actually scanning anything at all. You could walk in a circle with your phone pointed at the ground and it would still count that and give you points. People played in the dark or in crowds that didn't want to be filmed and this was the only way Niantic could make a feature like this that awarded prizes palatable to everyone. Beyond that, the points of interest don't even all exist. Plenty of the original database from Ingress is still present on the PoGo maps in Dallas and much of it hasn't existed in the real world for a decade, but players have no incentive to remove them because the more that exist in the game, the more you can get from playing since they're the points that spawn everything you might want to collect while playing. This became especially noticeable during the Black Lives Matter hubbub a decade back when old monuments to Civil War heroes erected during the Civil Rights era were torn down. All of those were POI in Ingress and PoGo and they still are, but they're gone from the real world.
I feel like users and readers instinctively know these limitations. We work with digital maps all the time that are out-of-date. Google and Apple don't and can't know any and all road closure and vehicle accidents in real time. Your car's radar road mapping service is as up-to-date as anything, but you still may be the first person to ever encounter a sinkhole or pothole that just appeared and it won't be on the map until you discover it. Satellite data is even more out of date because it can't be as frequently updated. There aren't anywhere near as many sensors in orbit or aerially as there are on the ground.
I haven't played PoGo in a while, but Niantic used to have human moderators and also tried to crowd-source some quality control on these world models because they knew 99% of the scans they received were bunk, either of nothing, the wrong thing, the right thing but in the dark or from an obstructed angle. I have no idea how good a job they ever did of cleaning that up, but it's a difficult task and it's never done because the world is always changing. There's only so much you can do here. Technology isn't magic.
> The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver.
Currently active theaters. And now there are detailed locations of our cities. We might not get killbots today but we will get pacificationbots.
I remember reading in the news that Pokémon Go was quite popular in Palestine.
If GP has access to this dataset it would be interesting to know how sparse is the data in that area.
If the data was spatial - shapes and layouts of buildings and streets and such - that dataset is no longer current.
:(
Deeply sickening that modern society is such that we have to make room in our brains for objectively outlandish connections like these. That a children's cartoon and game about cute little companions has to in any way be involved in the same sentence as the flattening of a city and genocide is just... pure insanity. The world has truly, collectively, lost its fucking mind.
"The world has truly, collectively, lost its fucking mind."
What time you have in mind, that was really better?
(I believe the 90s were at least way more optimistic)
> in any way
You can connect any two things into a sentence regardless of the state of the world. This is way off of where the problems actually are.
Edit: Some people have downvoted this without giving a reason, but I'm going to double down. Any time you have disasters or large crimes, you can connect them to children and children's things. Thinking there's anything to learn about the specific fact that you can make that connection is a mistake. It's letting the real problem spill over in a way that misleads your common sense. It's an inherent part of bad things happening that they also affect children. No matter what state the world is in.
No, because they are different things for different purposes.
Visual navigation is prone to degradation. Keeping the "map" updated requires constant visits. (I know because my team worked on the patent for a method for updating said maps.)
Also Pacification bot would be run by the military who most lilkey have GPS.
Finally, For ground based bots, SLAM is actually more useful, rather than pre-built map based navigation.
> And now there are detailed locations of our cities.
The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).
It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs.
The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.
The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).
That's not the impression I get from the TV ads.
The ads they run show people walking along sidewalks and through forested paths and through parks in AR mode.
The controversy elsewhere in these comments is over whether it’s recording, and the server is slurping up, the video footage, during AR mode. We know they do so on the “scans” they have you do, where you walk around something taking video, but I don’t think there’s proof that having AR on = uploading to the server. Should be easy to prove one way or the other by observing bandwidth usage.
> And now there are detailed locations of our cities
That has already existed for decades.
Kill bots are used right now in Ukraine, including ones with no operator in the loop (too slow)
Details?
If you want to kill some redacted that are sitting in a trench inside the killzone but don't want to risk your own life, the ground drone with a machine gun (remote operated as of now) goes there. It was April this year when the news were saying a position was taken over by remote drones alone. With news being Ukrainian propaganda you can of course take it with a grain of salt, but it's probably at least somewhat true.
Ground drones however are targeted by the FPV drones (wired or radio controlled), so the new thing is to have a thing with automatic targeting to shoot those. Then again, I at least heard about using something open-cv (yes, some of those run actual linux) shaped on the FPV drone itself, as it really helps with the amount of jamming going on.
I thought that was still human-in-the-loop? The drone's onboard computing identifies a potential target from a distance such that EW isn't effective, the human confirms it, and the drone moves in closer to attack. At this point jamming doesn't matter because the drone already has its orders.
from 1 day ago:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou...
The article is from 1 day ago, talks about something that happened two years ago, and includes this quote
> “We tried it,” says drone-maker[…]. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].”
That alone doesn't cut war crime definition to get attention to ICC and isn't really different from the usual aerial bombing. You drop the bomb from a plane or 100 of them somewhere around the densely populated area and don't know who they kill, as there is no connection to the drone.
Civilians dying in an armed conflict doesn't cut the definition of warcrime by itself. Deliberate targeting and intentional destruction of civil infrastructure that supports life or something like it is.
Then of course there is stuff that ICC isn't getting busy about which is clearly above the threshold -- the regular drone safaris in and around Kherson (city with pre-war population circa quarter million people) happening for the last few years.
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy.
Everything! Everything! Like all the deer, all the rabbits, all the decoys! Obviously we trust Kokhanovskyy
> ICC will be getting real busy soon
How likely is your opinion to change in the light of the information that, according to the article, it's Ukraine who uses these drones?
I think the ICC will be getting real busy soon.
The ICC judges have less real-world power than a Pop Idol judge.
The ICC only works if every nation plays by the rules. Fewer and fewer do these days.
I love how Western media will just print anything the Ukrainian government tells them with zero confirmation.
Optimistically, it sounds like the USA data could be used to assist USA domestic defense drones, fighting against an invading foreign nation.
Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered
> Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered
that was in the cards in the early 2000s when the Patriot Act got passed, mate.
now they just have the muscle (drones) to back it up.
welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia
Dunno - if you look at the graphs https://ourworldindata.org/democracy the long term trend over a couple of centuries has been towards democracy, though with a bit of a reversion over the last 15 years or so. A lot of the bad has come out of Russia which is struggling a bit these days.
The real cyberpunk dystopia is going to be a lot less glamorous than it is in the stories- mostly just unending poverty, war, and death for the vast majority of us.
Yep, the autocracies of the past only resolved when the ruling machinery needed something from the population. They needed farmers, workers, soldiers, etc.
There are clear parallels in the modern world of societies when the ruling machinery doesn't need those things from their population - petrostates. The people in these states tend to be viewed as subjects, not citizens. That's where we are headed
A corporate council of emperor kings with armies of pacification bots. The tiny sliver of window we have to ensure this doesn't happen is rapidly closing and there seems to be no movement toward ensuring that this doesn't culminate with the entire power of this new revolution in the hands of a small class of near demigods.
Hopefully they will let us live comfortably like pets as sterile creatures that will slowly die out and not be replaced. This could limit human misery in the future.
story broke yesterday that Ukraine deployed its first fully AI system, no human interaction, and it scored its first kill
i think killbots are absolutely a possibility, and very soon.
rightwing pundits and meme makers are already unironically quoting Zechariah 13:8
> The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
But presumably the images/models at ground level can be used to train/improve the general performance of Vantor's aerial (satelite based) navigation system so it works better elsewhere?
No the tech doesn’t work like that AFAIK. The most common use case is exactly localization (think “HD maps” for autonomous cars).
It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
There maybe some hyper corner case uses. Maybe the billion scans in New York City help them generalize across different phone lenses characteristics, but phone and drone lenses are so different.
Would love to hear some specifics if I’m wrong here.
Your hypothesis is correct.
there was a startup that pitched the idea of using Satellite data to do ground based navigation. (https://sturfee.com/vps) they didn't get bought out by either google, niantic or facebook, so it can't of worked that well.
Niantic's stuff is a pre-built map that the client will reference to get a position. Its essentially a massive feature matching exercise. The problem with using airborn photos is that you miss a bunch of features you can't see. (samy thing trying to match ground features from the air.)
THe lens calibration issue isn't actually that much of a problem _for the client_. if you have a rough idea of the lens (exif data really helps there) then you can still get meter accurate (and a few degrees heading) its a bit more of a problem for generating the initial map, but Structure from motion with good motion priors goes a long way to make it less of a problem
Now, Niantic are proposing that you can train a model that can relocalize generally without a detailed map, I think thats a bit far fetch, especially to do at any large scale. (ie bigger than a cubic kilometer)
> It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
The headline, which I do understand is in question, talks about training, not using the scans as a database. It is likely that you are right that the scans are not being used to provide localization data, but that is also not what the headline is pointing to.
The headline specifically speaks to using the scans for training. While I do not have any inside baseball, the problem space is often solved using neural nets and other machine learning algorithms. On the surface it seems likely that they would benefit from training data that doesn't necessarily need to be from where the conflict is actually taking place. A base world model, for example, can be developed from data collected anywhere in the world. Its is not an entirely different universe when you step into another country.
But you are suggesting that the algorithms used are entirely classical (i.e. no AI/ML)?
You are creating a 3D model when you scan using Pokémon Go. Difference in lenses doesn't matter, that only matters for the scanning step.
well the article writes AS IF the whole intention was to:
"get data for drone warfare" ...in 2021 (before the russian invasion...)
but did we even EXPECT drone warfare to influence the war THIS MUCH back then?
well not me -- I actually thought russia would beat the crap out of ukraine within a month (even after the failed spetsnaz attack on zelensky)
the article's assumptions only makes sense IF some people had time machines, or if CIA has some know-everything future prophet
(not to mention: drones need TOP TO BOTTOM view, not bottom-to-top view)
anyway, my verdict: sensational yellow journal article, nothing more/less
Drone warfare has been discussed publicly since more than a decade, what Ukraine proved was just how effective that really is, but it was already known and understood. In any case mapping the world doesn’t only benefit drones, it’s something always valuable to the military. Drone navigation is just one use case
yeah if the article was about "helping the infantry", then I would have 100% agreed.
but... drones? that's just yellow journalism optimized for SEO keyword (and anyone who clicks an article with 'drone')
Well, define "drone warfare"- the CIA and the Pentagon has been operating Predators and friends for a long while.
those predators and friends are really high-altitude drones, and for them these low-altitude (human) level pics don't give them any advantage
Very likely. I'm just saying, people in the CIA seeing where the tech might be going and hedging their bets is not that unlikely.
> overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone-driven Theaters of War would be a tiny sliver
Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?
Which of those are active theaters of war? Pokemon Go wasn't that big in Iran or Lebanon and even there, there aren't any reports of significant drones deployed there.
The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).
>Which of those are active theaters of war?
All of them but Japan?
MEA has stuff going on beyond Iran, Lebanon or whatever country the US decides to invade this week. India has two nuclear neighbours with border disputes and weekly scuffles, sometimes a downed jet fighter or two. Taiwan is probably the biggest geopolitical tension/war/invasion possibility of our time. Korea is in a stalemate unfinished war for decades. Japan has its own very real dispute scenarios with China.
I know drone scans from Pokemon Go probably won't help in the Himalayas or South China Sea, but those regions are far from trouble free
As I’m thinking about this, I suppose Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap are about as problematic as Niantic’s data.
Yes, and star maps can do the same when its night and clear. This is way over blown.
> star maps can do the same when its night and clear
Works less well if you want to use structures for radar cover.
or ukraine or russia, and ofc people in africa dont have phones or internet -_-.
ofc going by the entire surface of the earth its not a lot of places, but i would never call such a thing statistically insignificant..
Pretty sure Pokemon Go and Ingress was played in Kiev long before the war
This is a good point. Legacy data might be the most valueable here
not really, in war, where there has been lots of changes, the maps degrade pretty quickly.
Good thing we’re not selling this data to the Russians?
Yeah they just exfiltrated it for free.
As a Pokemon go player, I would say it isn't.
There's even a Pokemon exclusive to the middle east region: sandstorm pattern Vivillion. Lots of players there.
"The Middle-east" isn't a war zone. Even the parts of the middle-east that are, don't have any drone deployments. Lebanon maybe? Reports are thin.
Maxar is/was primarily a satellite data company, and to say Pokemon data would add any major value in any of today's active drone deployments with the level of Satellite coverage Maxar already has is a wide stretch.
Moreover, ground forces in the area would need pretty heavy jamming tech in place too for this kind of data to be useful. It's a sliver of a sliver of a sliver situation.
> "The Middle-east" isn't a war zone.
According to Wikipedia, more than half of the Middle East countries are either belligerents or were otherwise attacked in the ongoing war.
Even with the relatively small countries in the middle east, a country is a large place and so being attacked doesn't make the whole a war zone.
I think pretty heavy ubiquitous jamming is absolutely a feature of modern warfare now. Ukraine is a model of what's to cone
Obtaining it never means having to scan anything at any time.
That's true, it's obtained from gifting.
But what I mean is that there are enough players there to be significant part of the ecosystem. The war made obtaining those Vivillion harder.
I don't understand how it's related.
I am a daily player, I have scanned something once, the rewards were minuscule, I never did it again. I have that specific vivillon which was hard to get because not many players were from the relevant area even before the current events, and I just can't see how the war is related to any of this.
> The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
For now.
Will the drones at least look like Pikachu?
i thought Maxar was mostly 3d images based on satellite inference. 1/2 of a pixel difference in a morning vs. noon vs. night sat photo can determine shadow and therefore height, etc. etc.
rapid 3d modeling of topography and cityscapes + supplementation with other data, e.g. pokemon. But ultimately that's supplementation, not the main effort.
The current drone-heavy theatres.
That could change in an instant.
""As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).""
Can you elaborate?
GPS can be faulty in cities.
Pokémon Go scans, are primarily in cities.
The mapping in the article, is specifically saying to use visual cues when GPS is faulty.
How is this not directly 1-1 overlapping, the gap and the solution.
VPSs are much more effective at navigation at ground level in cities compared to GPS because of multi-path interference.
However that data has a half life and needs to be refreshed.
For flying drones, ground level data is really not that useful. mainly because you can't see it, because its obscured by trees, building and clouds.
But, this is not a new thing. Google, Apple, facebook and niantic all have VPSs as do a bunch of other startups.
For Drones you will probably need SLAM to capture the map, and then once you have the initial map, you can keep it updated.
You can experiment at home using https://github.com/colmap
I had assumed this was referring to street level flying drones.
Like you see in drone races. But with a little bomb attached.
Even with half life. That could be years. Depending on changes. Old neighborhoods probably haven't changed.. And, not sure I read that deal had a cutoff, or not. Could they continue getting updates. ?
Vantar: "None of these places in our training data are in active theaters of war!"
Also Vantar: "The superpower of generative AI is that data in one task generalizes to other tasks!"
>As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?)
are you saying that drone training in quiet residential neighborhoods is not training? are you saying self driving cars can only drive in theaters where they've been trained, because autonomous training is always specific by neighborhood? are you saying that if a particular region has some novel terrain that all previous training must be discarded?
This is a massively weak argument. It's like its own strawman, one does not see this often, lol.
If you train a soldier in the US, is he unable to do those things outside the US?
So by this conclusion we can assume, that these drones will be somewhere else. Somewhere in heavily populated areas right?
It's not like there's a moral high ground about not collaborating with the military. Unless you want to advantage America's adversaries, namely China, Putin's Russia and Iran's current regime. There's always this implicit, sometimes explicit, "war bad" childish political philosophy in posts like this. In reality war is a given and you have to be prepared to have the upper hand.
"War is a given" if your foreign policies dictate that outcome. It's not something always unavoidable but it isn't inevitable either.
The United States is one pretty warmongerish nation by any account.
> The United States is one pretty warmongerish nation by any account.
Compared to other modern nations, but compared to history vary peaceful.
War is bad. And our reality isn’t some unchanging truth. Our actions and choices, or apathy, help shape our reality.
It is not childish to aspire to be better.
You can explain that to the Ukrainians and tell them how they shouldn't have American technical superiority like Starlink and the American AI and data in their drones to survive another day.
the EU has demonstrated for decades that by balancing trades, equality and human rights it can prevent conflicts from happening.
Seems to me that most of our friends in the balkans that have memory of the past wars are overall pretty happy about the current state of things, and there hasn't been wars to contend Alsace-Lorraine in 80 years, is it a record already?
War is very much not a given in the civilized world
To be more precise, two decades, from 1999 when EU countries bombed Yugoslavia and occupied Kosovo.
They also instigated and executed the coup in Libya.
That's why they have a full blown war in their borders and they're powerless without American hardware and intelligence. Also they're right now scrambling to allocate huge investments in weaponry, of course late, but better than never.
Full blown war: putin scared that more territories will want to join the EU block. No internal wars and more countries wishing to enter the block.
Powerless without american hardware and intelligence: You wish. Big tech is spending so much lobbying our governments in fear of us leaving them for open solutions, or god forbid paying fair amount of taxes.
And regarding intelligence, we would have been so much better without the CIA & co spying our politicians and messing with our governments, aiding and sponsoring domestic right wing terrorism for the past 50 years.
They're supplicants to NATO, a pathetic situation America shouldn't be striving to replicate.
I guess nuclear weapons were just inevitable the moment the first quarks were assembled into a proton, right?
if it can be used to murder people it will be.
the only reason we dont have antimatter weapons or gravity guns is because we haven't figured out how.
We have international treaties that ban biological and chemical weapons. Other weapons that are regulated include anti-personnel mines, cluster bombs, and blinding lasers. Expanding bullets are banned in military uses as are incendiary weapons against civilian targets.
That's the state today. Throughout history there's been a long negotiation about what weapons have been allowed in combat.
"war is a given" =/= "we should seek out wars"
If you are looking for something to channel that energy into, you could help improve open street map using streetcomplete: https://streetcomplete.app/
I assumed that in urban USA the map would be fairly complete and opportunities for edits would be somewhat rare. My assumption was very wrong. The app showed a dozen quests just outside of my office building. Thanks for suggesting it!
There’s always things to improve or to add. Road surfaces, benches, trash bins, table tennis spots, etc. StreetComplete on Android helps make some common tasks really easy to do.
Surely military drones will use OpenStreetMap data? Even the Russians and Iranians can use it for whatever purpose they like.
Yes. Just like editing wikipedia will help train models that are used for data classification in north korea or whatever.
It's a feature of open data, it's open and usable by anyone.
... for any purpose.
Yes. Or you can license it for specific purposes. But in general open data refers to data that is open to use by anyone, for any purpose, without restrictions except in some cases attribution.
A license only means something if you can enforce it. This means you can catch violations, and get courts to enforce it in a way that means something. If you can't catch a violation it is de facto allowed. What a license can restrict is limited by law, and so depending on the terms the court may say "you are not allowed to restrict that: they are allowed, go away". Or the court may impose a fine that is small enough everyone considers it a cost of doing business. How this plays out depends on the violation as well: if the violator can show they did their best to not violate that is very different from intentional violation. (I'm convinced the GPL will be broken - when a company shows they have lots of process to prevent the misuse, but a "rogue employee" hid their actions - the company will pay a fine but won't have to give their source code.)
With attribution
I wonder how many of these drones deliver a .txt copy of the GPL along with their payload.
Only if you publish something.
Yes, there other mobile editor that are arguably more featured (EveryDoor, OSM Go, OsmAnd), but StreetComplete has a nice gamification / simplification of UI that makes editing a breeze.
MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/
StreetComplete is a top app.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a project like mapillary or streetcomplete that forbids military use.
How can I channel my energy into preventing my data from being used for military purposes?
I stopped scanning pokestops because the effort has outweighed the rewards. A lot of the time, the requests show up as "research tasks" for a point of interest that I quickly passed by and have no interest in returning to, besides the tasks related to taking pictures of your buddy pokemon in augmented reality. Looks like I made the right choice by stopping. They do indicate to you up front that they will use the data, but it's still kind of terrible that you could be indirectly contributing to war efforts. I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
> I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.
The closest stop to me is between a dog park and a school - scanning it would have been an awkward situation, to say the least. And as you said, for rewards that aren't worth it. I got used to having that "Scan" task just sitting at the top of my list, never to be touched. But I noticed earlier this week that it's gone - and scanning stops doesn't give a new scan task.
That's what makes this feel so off
My 8 year old LOVES Pokemon Go, and we regularly go to a local meet up which is a fascinating microcosm of people of all ages from all walks of life. We’ve met some great people and had some incredible conversations, but I really struggle to see how we can continue in good faith now.
I seriously loath, hate & despise everything about this digital panopticon world being constructed around us.
The data isn't guns though. Guns aren't a dual use technology that have a nonviolent purpose. Data is. The same data that trains military drones can also be used to train the robot that will bring food to grandma when she's so old that she can't walk up the stairs anymore.
They don't have equal weight.
Even 100s of yummy grandma-cheeseburgers is not worth feeding private data brokers detailed maps of our own communities.
Nowadays some of them are just as likely to sell the data to the other side.
Nowadays the other side may get access to them without us even knowing.
Nowadays the other side may get access to them without us even knowing.
Yep... collecting domestic geo data is a double-edged sword.
> The data isn't guns though. Guns aren't a dual use technology that have a nonviolent purpose.
Counterexample, guns could be a (non-violent) hobby. I’m not pro guns or violence but just pointing out the logical issue here
Shooting guns for target practice is fun and non violent.
Guns feed families and protect people too.
They are dual use like all tech from knives to nukes.
Peel a potato with your glock and ill buy your pedantry.
I bet the targets don't feel like they're non-violent. The animal that was killed for food doesn't think anything, because it's dead. That's pretty violent. Shooting someone that attacking you in defense was necessary, but it's definitely violent.
All uses of guns are violent. That's what they do. They make holes in things that didn't have holes in them before. There are uses for them that are justified but they're always violent. This isn't an anti-gun screed, this is a words-mean-things rant. Violence is necessary and justified in various situations, which means guns are necessary and justified in various situations, but if you're going to say they're not violent, I can't agree.
If making holes in things that didn't have holes in them before is a sufficient condition for "violence", does that make drills violent too? Or is that taking words-mean-things too far?
Or perhaps can we accept that it is possible to make holes in things without doing violence, and that an object that can make holes in things is not inherently a violent object even though it would be violent if you made holes in things like people or animals, or in property without permission.
Your words are violence.
Targets are inanimate objects I’m fine with being violent against them just like I’m fine with farting on my chair!
Even if all uses of weapons are violence, sometimes violence is justified. If you disagree happy to violently rob you and disabuse you of your stupid ideas.
Opinions of people who lived sheltered lives are so divorced from reality
They literally said, "Violence is necessary and justified in various situations, which means guns are necessary and justified in various situations"
I believe some of the data was added to their scaniverse app.
I guess this also explains how they were paying for the free 3d model photogrammetry processing that app does.
This article is based on reporting from Trouw: https://www.trouw.nl/redactie/PokemonGo/
I was interviewed for the Trouw piece and briefly quoted. This isn't to detract from the DroneXL piece, which adds its own angle.
Based on the prose of the DroneXL piece, I think it would be more accurate to say that Claude adds its own angle.
Please tell them that 'als Elon Musk zijn starlink uitzet, iedereen de weg kwijt is' incorrect is. GPS is managed by the USA gov and we have our Galileo-alternative
This shouldn't be a surprise. But at this point it feels like if you don't completely avoid participating in digital society, your data will be used against you or groups/countries you support.
Mainly if you allow a government and / or corporations to do so, but unfortunately democracy and the like only gives you so much influence on that.
Sadly non technical people do not see future risk and any warning prediction is a slippery slope fallacy. Yet we now hear the echo of privacy advocates of the 2000s and 2010s saying "I told you so!"
Agreed. If it's "digital", it will be used for elite power plays, because it's too easy. How else could you mass control/analyse/manipulate millions of people instantly? Digital, digital, digital...
Kids training drones that will kill other kids.
There is a level of evilness on that difficult to grasp. What kind of society puts that burthen on their own children?
Inequality has given power to the few deranged and depraved. No ethics, no morality, just self gratification and excess.
Or maybe kill themselves, since most scans are from the cities they live in.
Shit. I guess that it can always be worse.
In the conservative worldview, competition is fair dinkem, so the setting for these businesses is just. That's how we got here.
Also in that worldview, we have the responsibility to defend innocent children. Let's if they can follow their own moral code and outlaw this surveillance to protect our kids.
There seems to be low-hanging political fruit here.
Governments have a say on to whom their weapons manufacturers sell weapons. It should be ditto for geospatial intelligence. If you want to map geospatial data in the Netherlands, you get a license from them and store the data locally and have to get permission to exfiltrate.
This won’t stop exfiltration, of course. But it should slow it down, which in the world of geospatial intel, could mean the difference between a drone finding its target and getting lost because of new construction.
An interesting thing is that in Russia, this military data grab by ostensibly 'our western would-be enemies" was supported by viral advertisement by nobody else but the head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.
A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go.
The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that once such an obscurant retrograde declares such an innocent game so evil, it must be something to absolutely install and play in spite!
And such was the way of the Pokemon Go's viral success in Russia.
(edits for factual precision)
Apparently that story was manufactured and promoted by someone else, don't you think?
Sure, I don't expect Kirill himself to come up with that, but he was positively used as a notorious talking head, which whatever it says must be understood to the contrary.
Like in that case when he blamed the rise of toll roads in Russia - "oh brothers and sisters, shalt we allow taking the toll on what should forever be free in Russia?" - the public reacted in the exact same way - a religious zealot told this, so it must actually be a progressive, sane thing to do the opposite.
Streisand effect marketing 4d chess move by Niantic?
I'd say a common sense "cui prodest" inquiry leads to a much simpler answer, but to each his own.
I'd like to know that much simpler answer.
Or by a three-letters-agency...
Interesting: the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now. They're not even pretending anymore. Given that this steady parade of seemingly-planted and promoted derogatory anti-Western stories that has been happening for years originates from You Know Where, it's a revelation that the Russian establishment and secret services are not even pretending anymore.
It should also be pointed out that Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church have been understood to have been cat's paws for Russia's notorious KGB successor agencies for a very long time now.
All very true, and an important point about ROC/KGB ties, but
> the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now.
is a total wind vane which can flip 180° in a matter of days (if not minutes, as in Orwell's scene where they seamlessly switch from being at war with Eurasia to that with Eastasia)...
Come on, Russian "страна наиболее вероятного противника" (the country of the most likely enemy) was always the military name of the US since the Cold War. Now used in military texts and also as a sarcastic cliché
Moreover, it's adversary, not enemy.
The Russians seem to refer to most people not helping them as enemies. Often as nazis too.
Exactly. Russians seem to understand the word "Nazis" is a less-literate way than the rest of the world.
"Nazi" -- in Russia -- means anybody that Russia hates, resents, is jealous of, or otherwise dislikes. Anybody not explicitly in Russia's thrall is "anti-Russian", considered an enemy, and is hence labelled a "Nazi".
Coincidentally, this "Whoever isn't with us, is against us" thinking is a hallmark of fascist regimes like the actual Nazi Germany, where it was an article of faith.
This post was made by NAFO gang
Ad-hominem attack.
Can you do better?
No ad hominem, just meme post because ironically post about nazis operates with made up national stereotypes.
I still feel like this is a perfect example of why we should be asking for our data to be disclosed to the public. If I take a picture of some public point of interest, they end up tagging it with their metadata and selling it, well, that's what I agreed to by not reading 20 pages of T&C's right?
But the value in that data is in the liveliness right, so at some point, would it not make sense for that data to be considered a public asset?
Why do we not demand this data be released regularly (given that the inverse tech could be developed using this as well)? If it can be used to train things used for war, could it not equally be used to train better lifesaving tech (in which case, the data should be made available to the public)?
It's quite obvious that data is what pays the game. A lot of data about the players )daily routine, commute to work/school, social circles to other players, etc. which allows to derive Job, wealth, etc.), data about surroundings (where do people actually walk, drive, ... etc.)
The story here however I'm not too sure about: Isn't the game mostly played in dense urban areas? - by the time you need military drones there the area will have changed a lot (destruction, fortification, ... and overall be outdated) where I think the civilian drones (delivery, cars, ....) benefit more. While the technology certainly is dual use.
I had assumed the purpose of the data was more in generalising across variegated input sources to better allow the drones to fly on their own in urban settings, aka, adapt more readily to randomness? Better datasets for multimodal training etc.
I am not joking though, I really would consider any data generated on public assets to be considered "releasable" to the public. How many people should get killed by self-driving cars because the company making the cars didn't have enough data to train proper models?
I am all for public code. But mind: the whole point of Pokemon go is to collect data. If they have to publish it as open data their business case goes away.
This may be good and we'd still not have the data (but "they" can collect on their own privately/secretly)
> While the technology certainly is dual use.
It's dual, but its positive aspects are only unlocked after a sufficient human blood sacrifice is made by its overlords, as is the case with all dual use tech.
No it's not. How does 3D printing; what blood sacrifice happened with 3d printers before they were unleashed upon the world? Hard to prove for encryption, though that one's antediluvian. Drones were around and toys for quite a while before they ever killed anyone.
You can ask for whatever you like - nobody's listening.
There is no 'we'. 99%+ of people view the world as a zero sum game where for me to win, somebody has to lose and if I don't do whatever it takes, somebody else will and then I lose, therefore I have no morals or principles or virtues and anyone who does is a liar or a fool.
Everything is a bad faith act, everyone is a selfish bad faith actor and I shouldn't feel bad about being one because everyone else who isn't a fool is too.
This tragically wrong but intuitively correct worldview and much more was explained by Plato long, long ago and just about no one understood any of it. At least the text survived and people with 140+ IQ and an iota of decency can read it and be at peace knowing they're not crazy or foolish.
The world is so messed up right now that this is not even the least bit surprising. In fact it's on point.
This is revolting. Given how many kids played and are still playing the game this literally means weaponizing kids playing games. Humanity has been lost somewhere along the way.
Humanity hasn’t been lost, it’s been conquered.
Enter AI, a new era of soulless wonder.
Intelligentia Artificiosa.
Ingenium Artificum.
— Dreams of Silicon and Sorrow
What's the AI component here? Pokemon Go dates back to 2016, and there was Ingress before that. Hell, there was Foursquare before Ingress. Strava/similar has leaked military bases' layouts. All of that predates ChatGPT.
Ingress still exists and has a similar scanning mechanism.
> Hanke formed Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010, then spun it out in 2015.
Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.
Spyware Mitosis?
I'm glad I always quickly scanned the dirt. At some point I gave up completely when I heard they started banning people for dirt scans.
In the latest season they've gotten rid of the scan rewards, so I guess they got all the data they needed.
I worked at a VPS competitor of niantic.
I am conflicted on this report.
1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.
2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.
How does the VPS work?
You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)
Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)
Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)
Now.
Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.
I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.
I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.
However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.
Yea, I find it a lot more believable that they're using this for human +/- AR stuff, not robots. E.g. walking instructions: they have photos of landmarks from many human-friendly angles, and precise positioning isn't important. That's undeniably useful for lookup purposes. Stuff in between can be estimated by GPS/3D building maps that already exist, and that's more than good enough for humans.
I just don't see how they'd convert weird-phone pictures to accurate-enough-for-SLAM purposes, especially with that in-between problem. Like, I could believe you can get a LOT of accuracy out of just photos (just watching occlusion probably gets you sub-centimeter), but in huge areas of the world they have nothing at all to stitch those high-precision areas together accurately. Existing maps and 3D building scans are wildly inaccurate on that scale. Like, it's more than a block between scannable things in my area, sometimes multiple blocks, they're not computing a precise world model from that even with existing data on e.g. openstreetmap. Robots already have enough to know their world-position with on-board SLAM + GPS + existing maps, this won't eliminate (or even reduce) SLAM as a necessity for navigation.
I'm not sure they need the in between areas, so long as the landmarks are inclusive of similar features. In fact, they probably only need a high quality 3D scans of primitive features to perform classification (walls, building, intersections, etc). I haven't played recently, so I'm unsure how distinct each landmark is.
(Visual Positioning System)
Pokémon being used for war efforts is prime South Park material, too bad they already did that.
A game aimed at children supporting military intelligence is prime cyberpunk material. No doubt fiction beat us to that as well.
Sure did.. it’s called Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card).
And before that, The Last Starfighter
And before that: "The book originated as a short story of the same name, published in the August 1977 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact."[1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game
i remerber china bans it many years ago... and many people dont understand why.... never trust a USA product!
and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU
I don’t think the standing committee is objectively that perceptive
But I do appreciate alot about what they are doing and choose to do
Reminds me more of a theme park. Yes, a heavy handed corporation runs it and if you have any dissent it won’t go well, but if you don’t choose to focus on that then it will be a joyous place and you have the opportunity to contribute to that energy and be rewarded by something that simulates a free market
China has the largest intelligence programme in the world and likely has whole teams of people whose job it is to build this type of data. It's not surprising that they are cagey about it being hoovered up by other countries.
They gotta name a drone after Charizard now
It is even worse, tax money is used for the military.
I know it's sarcasm, it's a valid point. We all already contribute to the war efforts of our governments.
Of our own governments. Which makes sense, under the assumption that having a military is a necessary evil, how else would they be funded?
This is about players all over the world contributing scans of their own countries to US military, though.
Russia is already taking advantage of preloaded terrain imagery, according to the article:
The principle is already turning up on the other side of the front, where a downed Russian drone was found matching live camera feeds against preloaded terrain imagery rather than trusting a single GPS module.
https://dronexl.co/2025/06/10/russian-ai-drone-nvidia-sony-u...
This is ancient tech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
It sounds like image matching may be newer. Still you could probably do that with any old satellite image.
How useful is spatial data over time, does it decay or age much?
Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important?
Genuinely don't know much in this space.
Its using Visual descriptors to generate a pointcloud. Buildings and text are really great for creating descriptors, so when they change you loose key points for "localizing"(ie getting your position). This needs to be updated as those buildings change.
You also need a day/night dataset (although some newer descriptors are day/night resistant)
Yes. Even dealing with "what does it look like in rain? What does it look like in snow?" is hard. Hell... "What does it look like at night" is hard. Hell.... what does it look like at noon vs sundown (no shadow vs long shadows) is hard.
Have you ever seen a commercial use of anything like this? That should give you a hint about how reliable these systems get.
It's easier to take a look via change of dates in google street view, they have almost 20 years coverage. You can see how the data ages and decays or doesn't because it's tied to the place it represents.
Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.
It's the combination of geographical data (maps) linked to its visual representation in the world (footage of structures, roads, landscape features) that is useful.
The geographical data already exists in digital maps. And I would expect competent militaries already have maps of enemy territory. It's the second part that was so far missing.
This combined set allows the training of AI models that can say, "When my surroundings look like x, that looks like y on a map".
So when your drone's GPS gets jammed, it can look at its surroundings, reference its (internal and offline) maps, figure out where it is, and navigate.
Compred to what? Datasets at this scale are rare. You're not comparing against another ideal dataset, you're comparing against having nothing.
There are so many companies these days doing recording for self driving cars and/or street view like applications. Also sites like Flickr collect huge sets of geo tagged photos, as do companies like Meta where tons of geo tagged images are shared each day via their different outlets.
Niantic has the benefit that they can steer "volunteers" to specific points, though.
Maybe Niantic intentionally steered players towards remote locations only reachable on foot, understanding that this data is more scarce and therefore more valuable?
I don't what class of models they use here, specifically, but a generic classifier shouldn't depend on a single feature. And neighbourhoods don't typically get razed or remodeled/painted over in a fortnight.
... Except, well, when it's the doing of this same, so called "defence" industry.
The moral question is if you've unknowingly contributed to war, death and destruction, or if you are actually helping drones to accurately find real targets – which hopefully are not innocent civilians but legitimate military targets.
At this point is there really a difference between death and destruction and "legitimate" military target? It's a slippery slope
The depravity of using a fun, uplifting game that targets kids and teenagers to train military drones boggles my mind. "The end justifies the means" continues to reign supreme
One of the reasons I stopped playing Pokémon GO.
Anyone who checked the origins of the company knew where this was going to go. Your data for sale.
There were already questions about what they were doing with the data of their prior game in the security and privacy space prior to Pokémon.
Reminds me of that sci-fi short film where kids are playing a VR game controlling virtual avatars looking for and shooting virtual enemies, while in the real world, unbeknownst to them, they are actually piloting robots that are hunting down and killing dissidents.
a dark update of ender's game
I thought that was just Ender's Game
If I were a (potentially) hostile foreign power, I'd use a game to enlist people in the target country to record sensitive locations.
I'm not sure this is a real problem. Google/Apple already has the world mapped out thanks to our photos in the cloud, and we literally let Tesla and others drive cars everywhere recording everything.
Pokemon Go does not really incentivises this activity. We get a poffin... Nice to have but does not worth the hassle of scanning and looking stupid on the street.
Once the data has trained a model, it also becomes almost impossible to meaningfully audit or undo
If the article's description evoked applications like old missile guidance system methods based on geographic features... this Wikipedia screenshot's imagery looks like it would also be good for precision drone attacks against urban small civilian structures and select individuals within/around them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go#/media/File:Po...
Wartime propaganda poster: "Loose Surveillance Capitalism Children's Game Apps Sink Your Own Darn City, to an AI autonomous drone swarm assault that surgically neutralizes whatever the worst people want to neutralize".
AI, please rework that into a catchier slogan, and render it as a printable US WW2 OPSEC poster style PDF, but without storing my prompt and-- Hey, what's that buzzing soun--
August 2016: Iran Becomes First Country to Ban Pokémon GO
https://www.avclub.com/iran-becomes-first-country-to-ban-pok...
Really smart decision, in hindsight.
This is what censorship looks like. This is what should get people angry. Not localization changes, but actual government-mandated changes or bans. By censoring the internet, Iran is not protecting its citizens but rather the ruling government.
Or maybe sometimes censorship actually DOES protect its citizens?
That's a funny tantrum. It's barely even censorship cause the game isn't about speech. I can't think of a single reason any country besides the US should've allowed Pokémon Go to operate there, phoning location scans back home.
classic use case for gamification.
every time I see any startup run "games" on some aspect of daily life, it's going to go into killer robots in the end.
"We shouldn't have maps because you can use them in war." seems like a wrong way to look at this problem.
Well game vendors catering game data to the military is the problem here, not the maps themselves. Maps are good, shady corpo bs isn't. Same shit Spotify pulled by investing into war machinery rather than paying the artists more.
What is the difference, in your mind, between mapping data and what was shared?
Where are all the edgelords sending me cuckoo signs and tagging me as conspiracy theorist when I said that it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage?
Ah, oh yes, "we all knew it from the start", "they indicated that up front" etc.
Fuck no, everyone was foaming at the mouth how it's just a game and no way in hell an intelligence operation.
P.S. Those who "knew it from the start" yet continued helping Niantic, did you really think that the data will be used for the greater good of the humankind?
> it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage
But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks.
From TFA:
> Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.
I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.
Well if such a conspiracy crackhead like me somehow happened to reach ranks of Niantic team, I'd totally make sure that there is a decoy "huge data upload point with explicit consent" to shift focus from covert data channels that slowly transmit all else using some custom image compression, maybe just some very small fraction of original data that by the mass nature of acquisition would mathematically still reconstruct the original data, or the fraction of that data that is enough to build a world model.
Videos are inherently large. There are better compression algorithms than what phone cameras generate by default, but video reencoding is slow, and the results still too large for "covert data channels".
Normal players would have noticed the bandwidth and CPU usage, and volunteers have already agreed to data sharing, so there's no point in keeping secrets. Same as claims that the Facebook app listens to people talk: someone would have caught it by now.
Also, AR capture was never very popular, mostly a gimmick for new players. The game was already a battery and power hog even without it.
Why videos though? Photogrammetry is about still images. You don't need ALL angles of a target from a single user. Other users pile the needed data up, guided by their own pokemon locations.
and photogrammetry from crowd-sourced disparate still images was the biggest, flashiest "public" display of the technology: https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...
Good point, maybe that could be done. But that's not what TFA is about, so you're not vindicated yet.
Yeah and for niantic to achieve good photogrammetry with their random collection of photos taken from different angles, on different days, etc they would need some kind of ground truth to train on, which is implausible. You'd need to collect a parallel dataset of high-quality videos for traditional photogrammetry and .. hang on.
I don't understand why you insist on videos.
I was able to create a full 3d model of my window plant almost free of obscured areas from a few dozens still photos taken all around it, back in 2018, using the Capturing Reality photogrammetry app on a mobile i7-3610QM CPU with 8Gb RAM, in about 40-60 minutes.
And that's pretty mundane general public software, do we know for sure which algorithms are used by Niantic?
> and for niantic to achieve good photogrammetry with their random collection of photos taken from different angles, on different days, etc they would need some kind of ground truth to train on, which is implausible.
I'd say... the versatility of photos provides the "ground truth" on its own when combined to one single dataset. Say you want to program a guided drone shooting through urban areas, you want it to work under all sorts of conditions - day, night, rain, snow, the sun visible from all possible angles and throwing shadows.
A dataset that you can get from something like Street View? You can at best generate that once a year at enormous expense. Still valuable because a Street View car likely has a multitude of highest-quality GNSS receivers and possibly RTK navigation aids, but to make the dataset usable for 24/7/365 navigation you absolutely need a huge, huge amount of backfill.
From Room 641A to Snowden, the speed with which the narrative shifts from "that's conspiracy nonsense" to "we knew it all along" is neck-snapping.
Every. Single. Time.
https://archive.is/0WxtP
This is all for your security! Right? Right…?
Incredible how Nintendo is okay with this
>Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft
>Van den Hoven did not condemn battlefield VPS outright. If it helps Ukraine win a just war against an aggressor, he said, that is a good development. His worry is the system falling into the wrong hands
The professor is quite flexible with his "ethics"
That was the conspiracy story about pokemon go when it first came out! That it will be used by the military!
Nvidia wants to create a digital twin of the real world that military can use to plan their next military operations. All of those scans of cities and inside buildings will be a virtual world where war makers can plan to a very fine detail how their drones will behave.
These fools are compromised by nation states and the data isn’t just in their hands. This is why you shouldn’t collect certain types of data.
This is fitting/perfect. Pokemon go is THE archetypical surveillance capitalism app. Be a drone in surveillance capitalism, know that your behavior will be used like this. Drones generally don't know or care though. Drones just have fun with tech yay fun awesome. Pokemon, gotta catch them all!!
And here I am, trying to make our product as privacy friendly as possible. Trying to follow GDPR and the AI act. Trying to respect my users..
And then there are those guys... and they make billions, by giving a flying f*ck about ethics or what so ever. And NO ONE will hold them accountable. NO ONE! Because either they lack the power, or they are bought and in it on the scheme.
I accept that the world is like that. Just like International Law has always been nothing more than an academic exercise, business doesnt care about anyone besides profit. Its fine. Its just sad also...
I keep being negative about Digital Tech in general[1]. But this is worse than my habitual negativity towards D. Tech sans AI (AI is a whole chapter onto itself).
And what can be done? The comments usually say a big fat nothing.
- Any fool already knew this comments: “shouldn’t be a surprise”
- I guess I should call my representative comments
- Just boycot tech comments
Usually nothing much actionable. Building the Ad/Surveillance/Privacy Invasion society? Very actionable, good pay, many mouths fed and FIRE accomplished by HN posters. There’s even at least one acronym for this life achievement.
Shoutout to digital activists that are doing something. I’m but an armchair complainer on this front.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480840
surprised pikachu face
Complaints in this thread, yet no one will boycott Nintendo for doing this. Ultimately, they allowed this data to be collected and then sold.
Truly dystopian. The Pokémon Company should share the blame for licensing their brand in this way without proper safeguards to prevent the data being used for this, particularly given the background of the Niantic founders
Can you imagine scanning your house, your school, your playground, thinking you're catching Pikachu, then have a drone hit it based on your own footage? Pretty terrifying.
Maybe Nintendo lawyers could show their skin for a good cause at once.
Do you really think Niantic didn't make sure their actual partners didn't agree to their business model?
If there is enough retaliation that Ninendo is connected for using kids to build war machines, I am sure things can change.
Indeed, but should we always assume data of any type we generate for services can be used for malicious means?
To an extent, but realistically it wasn't really reasonable to expect a cutesy Pokemon game to be used for this ten years later. If you had told the average Pokemon Go player this ten years ago you would have been called crazy. The Pokemon Company should have done more to protect their brand (I would hope for regulation too on player-generated real world data like this)
I think this is where brand licensing gets more complicated than it usually appears
Niantic is what happens when a boardroom is somehow more evil than the ridiculous caricatures we sometimes see in Hollywood. “Alright gentlemen: we need to make a lot of money quickly harvesting every drop of data from kids and adults alike en masse using something they all love that is family-friendly. We are selling it to the military of course, because they’ll pay us tons of money for it. Who’s in?”
Much like Skype and Zoom were quietly used to train up fake versions of human beings.
I’m so torn between naked admiration for the sheer Machiavellian audacity of this play, and discomfort with how vulnerable everyone is to this kind of creative abuse.
Whose to say that this wasn't the plan all along?
Watch Dogs: Legion
Just wonderful.
> The games went to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The map went to defense.
The map went to offense. Nobody needs scans of someone else's country for "defense".
At this point it's a given that any data source that can bring an edge in a conflict is being used for exactly that. Things that film and scan surroundings are the newest addition. When a fleet of cars is taking cm or mm resolution scans of entire cities or even countries the safe assumption is that the data is funneled for intelligence and military purposes.
Eh, the maps could be used for true domestic defense...but examples of foreign invasions on USA soil are scarce...
You should assume any camera recording will turn into a model one way or another, if not for gnss denied navigation, it will be on facial recognition or such.
Niantics founder has CIA roots... None of this is surprising.
https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/302386307352562
AFAIR, there is a chain of companies which connects Niantic to govt agencies, they were selling this data to Uncle Sam from the beginning(even before Pokemon GO)
> Niantics founder has CIA roots
This is not at all an honest way of saying "Niantics founder raised money from In-Q-Tel"
Being founded with funding from the CIA's venture capital arm seems tantamount to "CIA roots"
> Being founded with funding from the CIA's venture capital arm seems tantamount to "CIA roots"
For the company, it’s a stretch but tenable. Saying the “founder has CIA roots” solely because they took an In-Q-Tel cheque is just wrong.
Yes, it would not be unreasonable to say that funding originating from In-Q-Tel has "CIA roots".
If someone claimed to have a CIA background solely on the basis that In-Q-Tel funded their mapping software, they'd be a charlatan. Just as a guy selling toilet paper to the CIA is not necessarily someone embedded in the intelligence community.
Isn't Oxide Computer also funded by In-Q-Tel?
everything sucks :(
This is one of the most dystopian things I've heard in a long while.
I mean, we have a lot of weird shit going down right now... like AI being used to automate art BEFORE it's being used to automate dangerous and menial jobs, but knowing that people are being killed with help from data generated by millions of kids and young adults playing a fun, cute videogame is just so freaking dark and weird.
We are a very strange species and I don't have a great deal of hope for our future.
Zoom was free for a reason. The audiovisuals harvested during lockdown were used to help produce the fake videos/simulations of humans we are seeing today.
Same mentality.
"If something is free, you are the product."
Nowadays you are the product regardless of how much you are paying.
Pokémon Go can be pretty expensive with micro-transactions.
upon seeing the title i was only wondering - whose drones.
"Gotta... Kill em all?"
Hate to say I called this years ago....
It is a shameful use of tech.
To those who were playing Pokemon Go ten years ago.
Thanks for playing. (You got played)
Insane.
People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.
Turns out intelligence gathering is pretty boring routine work, not Bond-esque spy stuff or stakeouts in camo nets and face paint.
In 2016 this wasn’t obviously happening/common knowledge. Remember to blame the perpetrators, not the victims.
In Russia people who warned about it were mocked as paranoid boomers. Today I wonder how many of them were paid or just encouraged to do the mocking.
Huh? You still don't know how this works, do you?
I mean, you can blame whoever you want, even Pikachu. Neither Niantic nor even one person cares who you blame.
Funny how "conspiracy theorists" were once again right
Sentiment here is blowing this waaay out of proportion. It's not new technology, and its not particularly scary or dystopian.