
What’s going on with WhatFreeWords? - polemic
https://justpaste.it/39hat
======
Reason077
If What3Words wants to be ubiquitous, and relied on for things like navigation
and emergency services, then it ought to be an open standard, with a published
algorithm and open-source implementation.

If they’re going to be dicks about keeping it proprietary then maybe it’s time
for someone to come up with an open alternative.

~~~
lol768
>If they’re going to be dicks about keeping it proprietary then maybe it’s
time for someone to come up with an open alternative.

There's
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code)
from Google (AKA Plus Codes). They have a useful wiki article which compares
existing systems: [https://github.com/google/open-location-
code/wiki/Evaluation...](https://github.com/google/open-location-
code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems)

~~~
slavik81
Notably missing from the evaluation is MGRS, the coordinate system used by
NATO for more or less the same purpose.

I like it because if you have the coordinates of a landmark, you can easily
estimate the coordinates of other nearby locations entirely in your head, and
the system encodes precision so you can indicate uncertainty.

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

~~~
ssambros
With it's pros being the ability to know how close the points are just having
the 2 coordinates and arbitrary precision.

Who knows how far away epic.region.music and epic.global.music are from just
the names? While 18SUJ2163104440 and 12SVC0452723150 are 6 grid zones apart
east to west.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
That's a handy property for the 3 people on Earth who have the algorithm
behind it memorized, but the rest of the world would prefer to be able to
easily read, write and share the codes.

~~~
AWildC182
The algorithm is absolutely trivial ->
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Grid_Reference_System)

It's actually quite pleasant to use and allows you to just truncate to the
level of precision you want. S/He just posted the 1m resolution string when
18-SU-J-216-044 would get you to 100m.

All this said, I think the real issue is that we refuse to _PICK_ a standard
and so every device with a GPS and ever map has one or two of

-MGRS

-UTM (almost identical to MGRS)

-LL DD MM' SS.ss"

-LL DD.dddd...

-LL DD MM.mmmm...'

etc.

If you make a device that can output or accept a location string, make sure it
can handle all LL cases and UTM/MGRS.

~~~
dmix
I think we have different definitions of trivial. Or you put a lot of trust in
the average persons intelligence or more importantly laziness.

------
codezero
Just playing around with this data set, I can't understand why What3Words is
so exciting. The dataset includes words with plural versions, different tenses
of the same word, and words that are combinations of shorter words that are
also in the data set.

If I'm listening to an emergency responder at ship.wreck.shipwreck, or was
that at shipwreck.ship.wreck

There are probably a lot of ways to accidentally get confusion with such
poorly groomed word combinations. Maybe they've come up with a clever way to
make such combinations exist in the middle of the ocean, which would be a
great place for a shipwreck.ship.wreck anyways :)

~~~
solstice
Also, the word "wreck" seems really inappropriate because of the silent w.

~~~
Freak_NL
> Okay Sir/Madam, where are you?

I'm at
[https://what3words.com/broken.spies.wreck](https://what3words.com/broken.spies.wreck)
!

> There is no 'rack', did you mean
> [https://what3words.com/broken.spice.back](https://what3words.com/broken.spice.back)
> ?

No 'wreck'! As in shipwreck!

> Got it!
> [https://what3words.com/broken.spice.wreck](https://what3words.com/broken.spice.wreck)
> !

------
eruci
Well, so far w3w strategy of bribing third world countries into "adopting"
their system (Mongolia) and feeding stories to journalists about emergency
services and others using their system - seems to have had the effect of
bringing w3w into the spotlight, including many stories on HN.

Now the legal game of whack-a-mole against their leaked wordlist and code is
producing a similar effect. Good for them for making it this far with a very
flawed encoding scheme.

------
ponytech
I took one of the library provided on whatfreewords and included into my (work
in progress) website as a conversion tool:

Convert coordinates location to 3 words : [https://freews.org/location-
to-w3w](https://freews.org/location-to-w3w)

Convert 3 words to coordinates location : [https://freews.org/w3w-to-
location](https://freews.org/w3w-to-location)

I have no idea if it is useful or if it does break some copyright laws but I
thought it could be fun :)

------
kerkeslager
So, I'm a bit confused.

[https://whatfreewords.org](https://whatfreewords.org) seems to be up and
running just fine.

~~~
yorwba
The text above the title says "anonymous · 16d", which I assume means it was
posted 16 days ago.

------
kerkeslager
People keep talking here about free (libre) alternatives like Open Location
Codes or geohashes, but these _aren 't_ alternatives, because they aren't
human readable in the same way. The closest thing I've found is the now-
defunct 3Geonames[1] project which exists only in presentation archives as far
as I can see, and that's only _partly_ human readable.

[1]
[https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_3geonames...](https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_3geonames/)

~~~
thelittlenag
(disclosure: i work for qalocate.com)

At QA Locate we've been working on a solution to this that we call
GeohashPhrase. It encodes a geohash as a sentence.

There are some light docs you can reference here:
[https://www.qalocate.com/resources/](https://www.qalocate.com/resources/)

And we have a video on the tech here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlscJ8MOPjM)

I'm working on some better preliminary docs, but working code takes priority
;-)

Btw, the GeohashPhrase will be open source and free to use.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
The main issue in this space is that we need _a_ standard, not a "better"
standard.

Adding another standard makes the problem worse, not better.

The task of representing a pair of numbers is trivial, solvable in countless
different ways, and none of the solution is clearly superior to the others. It
matters much more to have a commonly agreed solution, than what the solution
is.

~~~
kerkeslager
> The task of representing a pair of numbers is trivial

The task of representing a pair of numbers is also not what _any_ of these
systems do.

"Two numbers" work because they're taken from an infinite set. Longitude lines
are not parallel. Near the poles, moving a degree is only a few inches, while
near the equator it is miles. This works for latitude and longitude, because
these numbers are taken from the infinite set of real numbers between 0 and
180--if you want to represent more precision near the equator, you just add
more digits on after the decimal point, and if you want to represent less
precision near the poles, you just ignore the excess digits. In practice, on
computers, they're represented as doubles, which have enough precision that we
don't need to care that they aren't reals.

However, if you're mapping into a finite set, this falls apart quickly. The
finite set for W3W is the set of permutations of 3 words taken with
replacement from a set of 40,000 words. This gives them 40,000^3 combinations,
which means they can represent points about 9 feet apart all over the world if
they distribute these points fairly uniformly. But if they just trivially
convert them from latitude and longitude, they won't be uniformly distributed
--they'll be distributed tightly packed at the poles, and distributed loosely
packed near the equator. This means your locations won't give much precision
near the equator (where more people live) and will be more precise than GPS
can measure near the poles (where almost nobody lives).

You can add more precision at the equator by adding more words to your word
list, but it's already 40,000 words, which is more than humans can reasonably
check, which is why there are a lot of homophones and sound-alikes in the
list. You could also add more precision at the equator by adding more words,
but it's obviously more desirable to say, "elephant.cheese.traffic" than
"elephant.cheese.traffic.indigo.query.crenelation.trample". It would be much
better if we could take some of the points we mapped to the poles, where we've
got way more precision than we need, and put those points near the equator,
where we don't have enough precision.

So now you're looking at the mathematical problem of packing points on a
sphere[1]. It's not a solved problem, but there are good enough approximations
(and "representing a pair of numbers" is not one of them).

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9600801/evenly-
distribut...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9600801/evenly-distributing-
n-points-on-a-sphere)

------
grizzles
The way to take What3 to the woodshed would be with an actual standard.
Publish a new dictionary of per spoken language mappings to Google's
plus.codes. Something like xaddress.org on top of plus.codes. Call it
twowords. You get the best of both worlds, human friendly nav for Uber like
apps, compact codes for shipping / logistics / universality.

~~~
jimofl
Wouldn't it be kind of like "DNS for locations" where any string phrase could
be associated with the OLC/Plus Code (many human descriptive names to one
location identifier)? Better, what if you could then universally translate
between that and the many other kinds of location encodings, both human
descriptive and computer identifier?

That's what we do at QA Locate with our LNS (Location Naming Service) and our
ULT (Universal Location Translator). See our technical two pagers located
here:
[https://www.qalocate.com/resources/](https://www.qalocate.com/resources/)

------
paulgb
I want to side with whatfreewords here, but as a matter of law* I think the
takedown was legitimate. Even though they reimplemented the algorithm, they
include the what3words word list which what3words can (rightfully, IMHO) argue
is their protected intellectual property.

*IANAL

~~~
pgeorgi
Many legal frameworks have an interoperability clause which would allow using
that list for the sole purpose of interop.

What W3W seems to be doing is taking down the sites on trademark grounds (that
is, "what three words" and "what free words" being too similar).

They might have a case there, and whatfreewords might be better off distancing
themselves a bit in naming. Call it "Simple Locator", state somewhere on the
website (not the headline) that it's a scheme "compatible to what3words (which
is a trademark by ...)" and they lose that angle of attack.

~~~
otakucode
When it comes to trademark, companies are compelled to act. Failing to defend
your trademark will make you incapable of defending it in the future. The DMCA
can NOT be used for trademark disputes, however. The DMCA exclusively deals
with copyright.

Normally, the "interoperability" defense is used to protect instances of
circumventing copyright protection mechanisms, not for copying itself. For
instance, that was the defense in the case where Lexmark brought a DMCA claim
against a third party ink cartridge manufacturer, claiming that by making
their ink work, they circumvented protection mechanisms Lexmark claimed
existed to protect their copyrighted firmware code in their ink carts. The
court didn't buy it, Lexmark lost, it was established that you can do that
kind of circumvention. But this copying of the word list... it's different in
a couple fundamental ways, and I don't know if there has been a case that has
dealt with this sort of thing.

~~~
pgeorgi
Given that they also sent a claim regarding a map feature on the .com site
that wasn't provided by that site, I'm not sure if any of the claims they
throw at ISPs (DMCA or not) are even legit.

The main issue is that the "free" team can't counter-claim without losing
anonymity, so as far as bogus DMCA claims go, they're quite powerless.

That's why I went for the WIPO dispute, which is based on their trademark and
IMHO has the most leg to stand on, instead of relying on the unwillingness of
the counterparty (whatfreewords) to defend themselves.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
Up until reading this article I was a big fan of w3w and was even thinking
about including their geocoding into our XMPP clients.

Now I think best course is for whatfreewords to change coding algorithm (there
are ways to improve, I think), and host a competing open source geocoding
service.

------
tpaschalis
I think that the main bottlenecks for a competing geocode system is being
open-source, simple to understand, and having an available API to start off
quickly.

Geohash [1] is public-domain, features variable-precision encoding of
coordinates, and can speed up some computational processes like neighbor-
finding and proximity searches, so I think it ticks a lot of boxes.

Throw in a NATO-alphabet style in order to transform to words, and voila!

If anyone wants to play around I have built a ready-to-use API for Geohash [2]
that is and will remain free

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash)

[2] [http://geohash.world/](http://geohash.world/)

------
alexhektor
You can definitely give an answer in the WIPO dispute, and I would absolutely
try to do so. The WIPO is a joke though in my opinion - there is no appeal
process whatsoever. We lost a case that we should have clearly won with
jdownloader.com (our domain being .org, and us having started the project and
having all the copyrights registered..) There was no way for us to answer in
any way to the claims that the defendant made, and the decision was final..

In any way - I would definitely try to write an appeal.., but of course a
lawyer and legal advise would be very helpful..

~~~
otterley
Out of curiosity, did you hire an attorney experienced in litigating these
disputes?

------
jonatron
Why not just create an alternative that doesn't break copyright, trademark and
patent law?

~~~
EGreg
There is. It’s called geohash.

~~~
kerkeslager
There may be an alternative, but Geohash is not it. Geohashes look like
"u4pruydqqvj", which is questionably useful for situations very different from
situations where you'd want "pinks.haunted.graves".

~~~
EGreg
It would be better if we took geohash and transformed it into words organized
from a dictionary. Because the closer things are the more they share a common
prefix.

------
kodablah
> A good way to host the site would be to put it on a Tor onion service [...]
> If you know how to help set this up please get in touch.

This is not very difficult. The Tor website explains it pretty clearly [0].
Alternatively since y'all are familiar with Go, there is a library [1] that
makes listening on an onion address almost as easy as a regular address.

0 - [https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-
service.html....](https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-
service.html.en) 1 -
[https://github.com/cretz/bine](https://github.com/cretz/bine)

------
verall
I seriously do not understand how people read about W3W and not feel icky just
by being near. Right off the bat the talk about fleecing..ahem, selling their
service, to developing nations. The whole thing is a PR operation, a CRUD
database, and a sales team sufficiently soulless to wine and dine governing
structures in developing nations to reap the juicy public dollars.

Who gives a damn about copyright infringement. These guys should be in prison.
I have yet to hear a problem it solves that wouldn't be solved better by a
post office.

------
dmix
DMCA is so easy to abuse.

------
IshKebab
> To ensure that we did not violate the What3Words company's copyright, we did
> not include any of their code, and we only included the bare minimum data
> required for interoperability.

Yeah copyright doesn't work like that. You don't get to violate it just
because you need to for interoperability (unfortunately). An example of this
is console emulators which aren't allowed to distribute boot ROMs.

Whether What3Words has anything that is copyrightable is another matter.

~~~
teraflop
> Yeah copyright doesn't work like that. You don't get to violate it just
> because you need to for interoperability (unfortunately).

This is only sort of true; it's a messy and complex area of law. For instance,
interoperability was one of the defenses Google raised in the Oracle lawsuit
over Android's use of Java APIs. (It ended up not helping them much, on the
grounds that Android isn't actually that interoperable with other Java
implementations, which is different from interoperability not being a usable
defense at all.)

And the DMCA has specific exceptions allowing reverse-engineering for the
purposes of interoperability.

~~~
gpm
And using your copyright on a list of words to try and get a monopoly on a
system of specifying location might well constitute copyright missuse and
invalidate the entire copyright.

But raising any of these defenses involves extensive lawyers and court cases
and the acceptance of the considerable risk that you will lose the suit.

------
tgsovlerkhgsel
Now we have 17 competing standards...

~~~
coderheed
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."

------
saagarjha
Question: who are the people running this? Why are they so intent on staying
anonymous? It seems to have bitten them multiple times…

~~~
dewey
> Why are they so intent on staying anonymous?

Because the company would sue them right away? That's why they have to hop
from hosting provider to hosting provider because the company is taking the
sites down.

