
Glitch Cities: Buildings, Mysteriously Deleted from Chinese Street View - cmarschner
http://weburbanist.com/2016/08/09/glitch-cities-buildings-mysteriously-deleted-from-chinese-street-view/
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cantagi
Skeptical. The Chinese government can afford to hire people who have better
photoshop skills than this to censor these buildings. Baidu should also be
able to do a better job of censorship than this. To me this looks like some
kind of algorithmic failure on the part of Baidu, perhaps the output of some
convnet designed to remove watermarks and close foreground objects.

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maxander
There are _lots_ of streetview (or Total View or whatever) images, though.
Wouldn't be surprised if done official had said streetview had to be censored
and then vastly underestimated how large an undertaking that was, so there's
then only a handful of underpaid guys tasked with photoshopping out the whole
nation's sensitive infrastructure.

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notacoward
It's so clumsy, it makes me wonder whether it's being done by a poorly written
program instead of actual people. For example, it's hard to imagine even a
very stupid person cloning a nearby metal roof and not a patch of sky, as is
evident in one of the pictures.

Another possibility is that someone's deliberately drawing attention to these
structures, using a bit of reverse psychology. If that was their goal, then
the fact that we're talking about it means it worked. ;)

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fiatpandas
It appears that the deletions are related to national security
(infrastructural targets). Cooling towers, gas storage, bridges, etc. Although
not sure what to make of that heavily guarded fire station. Perhaps it's a
front for something.

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auganov
You mean guarded cause of that little fence and a guard post? Like literally
almost every compound in China has these, so definitely wouldn't call it
"guarded" by international standards.

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anotheryou
To me it looks like hand drawn masks + a batch script for something like
photoshops auto-fill "healing brush tool".

(photoshops tool actually handles edges differently though, so it's not that)

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bArray
Very strange indeed. The Chinese government rarely seem to act as a well oiled
machine. This is probably some initiative somebody took that will come to bite
them.

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seanmcdirmid
It isn't. A lot of commands from above but total local implementation, or even
local governments doing their own thing since the emperor is so far away.

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xyzzy123
Wow. The implementation is so bad, it's actually highlighting sensitive
infrastructure.

