
Mapbox CEO says the map calling New York City ‘Jewtropolis’ has been 100% fixed - yincrash
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/30/mapbox-vandalism/
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village-idiot
And this is why incorporating user submitted information is a tricky strategy.
On one hand, there sure are a lot more users than employees. On the other
hand, bad actors are often far more motivated and diligent than good faith
actors, and they will try to screw over your system for no good reason.

~~~
_sdegutis
I've come to the conclusion that at least 1% of users are actively malicious
with at least enough free time, resources, and coordination of a small full
time team of professionals. I created and hosted a free self-moderated
community which went well for a little while, until at least a couple people
became obsessed with spamming the site with extreme gore (see the Mr. OP
comment in
[http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight](http://old.reddit.com/r/editfight) which
is relatively tame compared to other things they've done) and evading every
single method I had of stopping or banning them, until I had to just give up
altogether and shut the site down. I feel bad for the moderators on imgur.com
(where I got the majority of my users) because I read somewhere that many of
them now have to go to therapy for some of the things they've seen in doing
their job. Online communities and the moderation of them in the modern
internet is problematic enough that I personally never want to tackle that
again, not even by delegating it to someone else.

~~~
village-idiot
In the long run, I can’t help but wonder if creating the internet was a
mistake. We’ve effectively encouraged the absolute worst elements of society
to come out and have a field day without the social pushback that had kept
them in line for millennia.

~~~
xeromal
If you combine that, social media, and porn, how much of the internet is still
'wholesome'? I think niche forums are my favorite part of the internet left.

~~~
village-idiot
I genuinely think Social Media is going to get us all killed.

Porn might prevent the next generation from being born, worst case.

~~~
krapp
>Porn might prevent the next generation from being born, worst case.

You know it's possible to watch porn _and_ have sexual relationships with
other people though, right?

~~~
village-idiot
Worst case, not expected case.

~~~
krapp
Worst case scenarios have to at least be possible. I don't believe it's
possible that internet porn can or will 'prevent the next generation from
being born', so I reject it as a valid worst case.

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lqet
It continues to amaze me that OpenStreetMap is not massively plagued by this
(I know that MapBox uses OSM as one of many sources, as mentioned in the
article, but the changed name did not appear in the live OSM map, afaik, so I
am guessing it came from somewhere else). In the past, the main explanatory
argument was always that OSM's complicated editing process was the gatekeeper,
but I don't think this is true anymore. With the OSM web editor, it is
extremely simple to edit the map. It would only take a few clicks to
immediately publish (for example) a highway in the form of a swastika to the
live map, but despite using the map multiple times per day, both for private
use and professionally, I have never encountered something like this.

~~~
thinkingemote
It was spotted and fixed within 24 hours in OSM (about 30 days ago), that's
the power of a community driven map.

Mapbox don't keep their maps up to date, and probably used a snapshot of the
data which happened to have gotten in the few hours before it was reverted.

~~~
lqet
Do you happen to know the OSM relation ID that was affected? The "New York
City" relation [1] does not have anything related in its history [2]

[1]
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/175905](https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/175905)

[2]
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/relation/175905/histor...](https://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/relation/175905/history)

~~~
untog
I wouldn't be surprised if it was purged from the history. Otherwise might it
imply that New York City was once given that name, historically?

~~~
rmc
No, the bad edit in question is still there. OSM only "redacts" changes when
there is a copyright problem. The licence was changed in Sept 2012, so there
are lots of redactions from before then from people who didn't agree to the
new licence.

The OSM history of an object shouldn't really be seen as the historical status
of the thing.

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linsomniac
We are just finishing building out our OSM infrastructure, and this morning in
the shower I was thinking how nice it is that we can fix the maps by adding
new construction and new roads (we do real estate for part of our state), and
contribute this directly to OSM and then update tiles from OSM.

Then I came in to read this story.

Yesterday we were trying to figure out what our update strategy would be, if
we would pull daily deltas, do quarterly updates, etc... We discussed the idea
of vandalism and didn't have a good answer for how to prevent it. We thought
about lagging behind the latest changes and then doing a "catch up" if
vandalism was detected. Really what we'd like to do is make changesets based
on the age of the change, except including our most recent changes (because
our reputation is great :-), but I don't even know how to start doing that.

~~~
Firefishy
The vandalism was reverted in 2 hours over 20 days ago. If Mapbox had stayed
current with the diffs we publish, the vandalism would have been gone in a
blink.

~~~
linsomniac
One of the news reports I read said the Mapbox press release said their AI
flags over 70,000 suspicious edits a day as needing human review. Doesn't
sound like much of an AI, and also sounds like the reason they were weeks
behind in getting that update in.

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mvexel
Looks like
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047](https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047)
may have been the source of this. It's the only changeset in the history of
OSM for the area that contains the offending term. It's from August 10, and
was reverted on August 11 in
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61556585](https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61556585)

~~~
Firefishy
Correct. The vandalism was reverted within 2 hours and a data update publish a
minute or 2 later. Mapbox import the original vandalism change only today for
some reason and there seems to have been a delay in importing the revert.

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yifanl
Correct me if I'm missing something, but what's the usecase for user submitted
data on the map?

Do city names change so frequently that they need to be dynamically updated? I
can see some use for it when you get to the neighbourhood level to account for
local nicknames, but not full cities.

~~~
mikestew
_Do city names change so frequently that they need to be dynamically updated?_

Maybe that's the bug. It didn't occur to me until I read your comment [0] that
the system could simply accept user-submitted data only above a certain level
of detail. It won't eliminate the damage, but it would keep it more contained.

[0] OTOH, GIS isn't my day-to-day like it would be if I worked at, say,
MapBox.

~~~
maxerickson
So far human moderation has been a lot cheaper than implementing a reputation
system for editing.

(after all, someone has to be able to edit things like the label for New York)

For instance, there's tens of millions of objects in OSM. Step one to locking
some of them is deciding which ones. That alone is a big project.

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sergiotapia
Hahaha, do they have logs of who did this?

~~~
Firefishy
Yes, here is the changelog:
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047?node_page=3](https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/61555047?node_page=3)

~~~
rrdharan
And here’s the block of the vandal:
[https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/2141](https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/2141)

Kind of interesting to see all the other active blocks in effect and the
corresponding explanatory notes.

