
Trap Streets - jonathansizz
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/47/bridle.php
======
dmbaggett
Fun fact: at ITA Software we put "trap flights" into the data so we could tell
when people were using our data without our knowledge. These were flights
between totally obscure city pairs, that departed a single day of the year at
3am. (No scheduled flights depart between 0300 and 0359 local time anywhere in
the world.)

~~~
wtbob
You might wish to delete this comment, as it could be used by a competitor to
easily filter out such flights…

~~~
pavel_lishin
It's probably a trap comment. I'd wager the actual trap data is not as
described there.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Above is probably a meta-trap comment. I'd wager the whole discussion exists
only to create an impression that this is a crowded space and dissuade
potential competitors from entering the market.

~~~
dmbaggett
Got me!

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tfgg
In the past I've used a trap unicode character in a name in a public wiki-
style CC-BY licensed database of politicians to confirm that a site was (not
maliciously) failing to credit us.

This resulted in the person who was using our data reverting the unicode
character edit in our database, probably because it was breaking their import
scripts.

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TuringTest
I strongly suspect that the place where I live was used as a trap street by
Google Maps for years.

It is a newly constructed apartment building in the outskirts of a small town.
A small alley at the corner of the street where I live, which doesn't have any
apartment numbers, was shown heavily distorted in the map (actually stepping
over my building).

Beyond a desire of accuracy, I complained to the Google Maps because the
distortion was extending to the part of my street where my apartment's
doorstep is located, and delivery men were having problems to find my address.
After several months sending bug reports, they finally fixed the corner
layout.

I think this is an actual example of trap street because the accumulation of
symptoms (supposedly no one living at that particular point, low traffic
street, remote area, recent construction). If I'm right, this example shows
that placing such traps can have an impact on the people living there.

~~~
tghw
You can edit data in Google Maps directly. It still has to be approved, but it
often goes faster than trying to do it with bug reports.

[https://www.google.com/mapmaker](https://www.google.com/mapmaker)

~~~
Splines
I've done this - works pretty well and is easy. I added my address since it
was new construction and friends were getting routed about a mile away to a
different street.

Satisfying to say "remember how google maps couldn't find my address? I fixed
it". A bit of the IKEA effect going on there.

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joshuaheard
Governments should not own copyrights. A copyright is the ownership to a
published work. However, taxpayers paid for the creation of the work, so they
are the actual owners. Since everyone owns the work, there is no enforceable
right.

~~~
tfgg
While I agree with the conclusion that mapping data should be free, since it's
useful infrastructure and will _probably_ help the entire economy more than it
costs to make it free, I don't see how your argument necessarily follows.

Governments can own things in a way that doesn't mean that everyone has
property rights over it -- just a democratic right to influence how it is
used. The government owns the pavement, that doesn't mean I can dig it up and
take it away (copyright is different from this, but just to illustrate
"government propety" != "everyone's property")

In the case of mapping data, a government can choose the invest money in a
product, which it then sells to a subset of the population. Charging means
that taxpayers pay less. It also means there are direct customers that can
drive the development of the product along the economically highest impact
lines.

~~~
msandford
You have to have some context in order for the argument against government
owning copyrights to make sense.

1\. Copyright was created in order to encourage the creation of things that
might not otherwise be created were copyright not to exist; books, magazines,
etc that without copyright nobody would have incentive to produce as anyone
could just COPY it without investing the time to create it first

2\. Copyright is thus a legal construct for ensuring that the people who did
some creative or laborious act had SOME way of getting paid, namely rationing
it economically

3\. The government has already paid for the work to be done through taxes and
this power is basically absolute; if you disagree try and not pay taxes and
see how long you stay out of prison

4\. Charging people for things the government does may or may not be more
economically efficient, it really depends on the cost associated with the
infrastructure to accept payments and ration out the goods versus the cost of
simply publishing for free, in recent times it's gotten cheaper to publish and
cheaper to accept money

5\. The idea that the government has any right to ration _information_ as
opposed to _physical goods_ is a tough sell because once the information is
created and the marginal cost of replicating it is zero or very close to, what
is the charging mechanism for?

I totally get why it might be better to ration roads or schools or whatever;
they're tangible things and there's not an infinite amount of them. But
everyone in the US can have a copy of the map for effectively free once it's
been created so there's not a lot of good argument (at least in my opinion)
why it shouldn't be free.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Copyright was created in order to encourage the creation of things that might
not otherwise be created were copyright not to exist; //

I'm really not so sure about this: initially, like in the Statute of Anne it
was to protect publishers so they could profit from the work. This has a side-
effect of encouraging creation in that content creators know they have the
chance to make money rather than just having their work duplicated freely.

But in current renditions of copyright law the public domain is (or was) an
important element - works that would otherwise have been held privately can be
duplicated when the work is older, enriching the public domain just as patents
enrich[ed] the public domain with information about inventions.

I think your assertion goes a step too far. WRT the US Constitution'd
"copyright" clause [which I'm imagining you had in mind] isn't a million miles
away but "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" could as easily be
about making knowledge public as it is about rewarding authors of "Writings".

~~~
jsprogrammer
>initially, like in the Statute of Anne it was to protect publishers so they
could profit from the work

How do you reconcile that claim with the opening of the Statute of Anne:

>Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently
taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be
Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the
Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their
very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families...

The problem was that publishers would just keep printing and selling, without
compensating, or even informing the author. Copyright is a restriction on
those who produce the physical artifact. It's probably one reason why those
who produce the physical artifacts have been gobbling up copyrights for
decades.

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pierrec
HN's obsession for trap locations is starting to become uncanny.

I'm not going to complain about it, though - no matter how obscure and niche
it is, I gotta agree that it remains an interesting topic. How far can we push
the obsession? Surprise me!

~~~
ibmthrowaway271
It's a common topic posted by people looking for a big boost of karma.

1\. Find the most popular topics (by points) in HN 2\. Manually filter out
'event' topics (e.g. product releases, time specific news items, etc) that
won't work when reposted 3\. Wait until a topic hasn't been raised for a while
and post a unique URL (either a related URL that hasn't been posted as a topic
but maybe appeared in the discussion, or an existing URL that is made unique)
4\. Hope for big boost of karma

Which is why we often see many of the same old subjects being brought up again
and again. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm sure that some are being
posted by people trying to get their karma scores up.

Reminds me, where's that list of pg's essays...

~~~
gknoy
[http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html)
;)

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buro9
The relevant Wikipedia article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right)

The question of how to enforce "Database Rights" boils down to proving that
the data is both yours (through the use of fake data like trap streets), and
that the act of compiling the data is non-trivial.

------
cfontes
Another interesting story about the same topic

[http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an...](http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an-
imaginary-town-becomes-real-then-not-true-story)

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pella
relevant links:

* [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street)

* [http://gizmodo.com/the-fake-places-that-only-exist-to-catch-...](http://gizmodo.com/the-fake-places-that-only-exist-to-catch-copycat-cartog-1695414770)

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than
My new favorite trap is the MOUNTWEAZEL, a lexicographical trap street
embedded in dictionaries to catch infringers.

Good episode of the The Allusionist podcast:
[http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/mountweazel](http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/mountweazel)

