
Apple Maps Flyover Reverse Engineering - benzinschleuder
https://github.com/retroplasma/flyover-reverse-engineering
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w-ll
I don't think this is satellite data, most likely photos captured from planes.

And I'd kinda be curious to what Microsoft has been working on, I remember
their birds eye was pretty good a few years ago.

Apple I'd believe the are selectively trying to improve their data in areas
that are heavily visited by their users.

Also, I did for the first time see an Apple branded car with a photo sphere on
the roof recently and kinda got excited that they are gonna try and bring
competition into maps / street view that Google has dominated for the last
decade.

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rootusrootus
The Apple street view cars also have LIDAR, so I'm curious to see what their
plan is for that.

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reaperducer
Considering the expense, and especially _time_ , involved in gathering street-
level data, if I was Apple, I'd put every sensor I could think of on those
cars and then let the data scientists figure out a use for it later.

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OkGoDoIt
Didn’t Google get burned by doing that and “accidentally” collecting Wi-Fi
network data?

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-
ad...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-admits-
storing-private-data)

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Hongwei
I recently asked the founder of a pretty big GIS company how they handle
plagiarism. The answer: "we don't bother. [we just monetize services on top of
open data.]"

So it looks like the intentional errors method didn't work out in the end. [1]

Wonder if Apple will be as accommodating though :p

[https://www.gislounge.com/map-traps-intentional-mapping-
erro...](https://www.gislounge.com/map-traps-intentional-mapping-errors-
combat-plagiarism/)

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aaronbrethorst
this is the same person who RE'd Google Earth a couple months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18900080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18900080)

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reaperducer
Coincidence: Half an hour after reading this thread, a white Subaru with
California tags stopped at the red light outside my office window. Big disco
ball on a platform attached to the roof and "Apple Maps maps.apple.com"
stenciled on the window.

I took a picture.

[https://imgur.com/UwK2wYy](https://imgur.com/UwK2wYy)

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pducks32
As someone who works with GIS data and map meshes this is really awesome. Hats
off to the author.

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saagarjha
I’d be interested in hearing how they reverse engineered the data!

~~~
retroplasma
Mostly used popular tools like Hopper, LLDB, Hex Fiend. Xcode's debugger UI
was surprisingly helpful too because it lists current memory allocations of
obj-c instances nicely. Also learned about Frida along the way and would have
used it more in retrospect.

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zhoujianfu
I just like how the example is the end of the Santa Monica pier!

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marmshallow
This is awesome. What are people using it for?

