Comment by pj_mukh
4 days ago
As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD.
This is mostly an ideological battle.
Interestingly, I have some weirdly relevant direct experience to share here.
Pokémon Go was released at the beginning of July 2016. A week later, the Air Force kicked off its Red Flag exercise in Nellis AFB outside of Vegas. For the several thousand active duty folks participating, this is a month-long TDY from their normal base to Vegas. The premise is a large-scale war simulation, and it encompasses essentially all major wartime functions. I was directly involved in supporting drone operations (including live strikes) during this exercise.
The thing that’s funny about your comment is that because Pokémon go was just launched a week prior, a huge percentage of the participants were playing it in their downtime between exercises. You have to understand: these are thousands of 20/30-somethings (and occasionally even teenagers), meeting back up with friends from all over the world in Vegas. On and off base, people are socializing, having fun, and playing games. While phones were limited to outside of SCIFs, most of the base had no such restrictions. I recall wandering around base at 2am with friends playing it.
What’s funny is the same was happening with our deployed friends as well at the same time. This was a game that all their friends back home were playing, and when deployed, you need all the morale you can get. There were technically OPSEC policies this all probably violated but this was before any blowback from Strava accidentally revealing military bases or other similar incidents, so there was no specific guidance or moratorium on it.
All this to say, I understand what you’re trying to arrive at via deduction, but I think your understanding of the world in this case may be a bit too limited to meaningfully speak to this. That said, is the headline sensationalist? Probably.
military folk love their acronyms! i had no idea what "TDY" was. for others like me who may not know their military acronyms:
AFB = air force base
TDY = temporary duty
SCIF = sensitive compartmented information facility
OPSEC = operational security
Ha certainly, and thank you for translating! Weirdly my first experience with the term TDY came from an internship at the Red Cross, where I showed up and they informed me my manager would be gone for the entirety of my internship “on TDY”. I had no idea what I meant, until months later I learned she was on maternity leave. I’ve never heard it used that way since, but it’s always stuck with me.
In the military it’s basically whenever they send you off on training or even deployment can be considered a type of TDY. Usually they’re pretty competitive to get selected for, as it’s a huge break from daily monotony, and often comes with some relatively significant financial incentive (hazard pay, tax free income, per diem, relocation $).
temporarily deployed yonder
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Pokémon Go being a military base opsec psyop is certainly a possibility. Just not what the original article is talking about.
Even the Pokémon Go world model headlines were stretching the reality of what the model captured.
If you’ve played the game, the scanning function is only for what they call Pokestops: These are points of interest that you can walk to and get items in the game. The game gives you points if you walk in a circle around one and take a short video.
They’re relatively sparse. At most, they captured some 3D models of some things like signs, small landmarks (up close) and the fronts of some buildings.
The images captured by something like Google Maps are a million times more useful for someone trying to construct a world model with a lot of coverage. The Pokémon Go captures would be useful if you wanted something like a detailed 3D scan of the sign in front the student building or something.
Aside from the scanning function, they likely have many geolocated images from people catching pokemon in AR mode.
Source?
If this is happening it would be easy to detect by the upload bandwidth spiking during AR mode.
The 3D scan mode is a specific feature you have to use in the app that uploads 100s of megabytes afterward. It advises you to go on WiFi to do it.
If the AR mode was secretly uploading images that would be a scandal in itself.
I don’t think people who play a lot use the AR mode when catching Pokémon. It’s easier without it, and saves some battery. But I could be mistaken.
Readers here really need to learn how to cut through hype better than they do. Pokemon go data is limited in far more ways. Many points of interest couldn't even be scanned like this because they were mural on the sides of buildings and don't even have more than one side. At least at first, there was no punishment for not actually scanning anything at all. You could walk in a circle with your phone pointed at the ground and it would still count that and give you points. People played in the dark or in crowds that didn't want to be filmed and this was the only way Niantic could make a feature like this that awarded prizes palatable to everyone. Beyond that, the points of interest don't even all exist. Plenty of the original database from Ingress is still present on the PoGo maps in Dallas and much of it hasn't existed in the real world for a decade, but players have no incentive to remove them because the more that exist in the game, the more you can get from playing since they're the points that spawn everything you might want to collect while playing. This became especially noticeable during the Black Lives Matter hubbub a decade back when old monuments to Civil War heroes erected during the Civil Rights era were torn down. All of those were POI in Ingress and PoGo and they still are, but they're gone from the real world.
I feel like users and readers instinctively know these limitations. We work with digital maps all the time that are out-of-date. Google and Apple don't and can't know any and all road closure and vehicle accidents in real time. Your car's radar road mapping service is as up-to-date as anything, but you still may be the first person to ever encounter a sinkhole or pothole that just appeared and it won't be on the map until you discover it. Satellite data is even more out of date because it can't be as frequently updated. There aren't anywhere near as many sensors in orbit or aerially as there are on the ground.
I haven't played PoGo in a while, but Niantic used to have human moderators and also tried to crowd-source some quality control on these world models because they knew 99% of the scans they received were bunk, either of nothing, the wrong thing, the right thing but in the dark or from an obstructed angle. I have no idea how good a job they ever did of cleaning that up, but it's a difficult task and it's never done because the world is always changing. There's only so much you can do here. Technology isn't magic.
If you take these things together, they may be able to use the scanning feature to verify the existing stops. If it's non-existent no one could scan it, and they could remove those stops
> The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver.
Currently active theaters. And now there are detailed locations of our cities. We might not get killbots today but we will get pacificationbots.
I remember reading in the news that Pokémon Go was quite popular in Palestine.
If GP has access to this dataset it would be interesting to know how sparse is the data in that area.
If the data was spatial - shapes and layouts of buildings and streets and such - that dataset is no longer current.
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> And now there are detailed locations of our cities.
The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).
It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs.
The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.
The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).
That's not the impression I get from the TV ads.
The ads they run show people walking along sidewalks and through forested paths and through parks in AR mode.
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Yep, the autocracies of the past only resolved when the ruling machinery needed something from the population. They needed farmers, workers, soldiers, etc.
There are clear parallels in the modern world of societies when the ruling machinery doesn't need those things from their population - petrostates. The people in these states tend to be viewed as subjects, not citizens. That's where we are headed
A corporate council of emperor kings with armies of pacification bots. The tiny sliver of window we have to ensure this doesn't happen is rapidly closing and there seems to be no movement toward ensuring that this doesn't culminate with the entire power of this new revolution in the hands of a small class of near demigods.
Hopefully they will let us live comfortably like pets as sterile creatures that will slowly die out and not be replaced. This could limit human misery in the future.
No, because they are different things for different purposes.
Visual navigation is prone to degradation. Keeping the "map" updated requires constant visits. (I know because my team worked on the patent for a method for updating said maps.)
Also Pacification bot would be run by the military who most lilkey have GPS.
Finally, For ground based bots, SLAM is actually more useful, rather than pre-built map based navigation.
Kill bots are used right now in Ukraine, including ones with no operator in the loop (too slow)
Details?
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Optimistically, it sounds like the USA data could be used to assist USA domestic defense drones, fighting against an invading foreign nation.
Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered
> Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered
that was in the cards in the early 2000s when the Patriot Act got passed, mate.
now they just have the muscle (drones) to back it up.
welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia
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Don't worry about pokemon go. Worry about the lidar unit on top of the UPS truck.
> And now there are detailed locations of our cities
That has already existed for decades.
story broke yesterday that Ukraine deployed its first fully AI system, no human interaction, and it scored its first kill
i think killbots are absolutely a possibility, and very soon.
rightwing pundits and meme makers are already unironically quoting Zechariah 13:8
> The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
But presumably the images/models at ground level can be used to train/improve the general performance of Vantor's aerial (satelite based) navigation system so it works better elsewhere?
No the tech doesn’t work like that AFAIK. The most common use case is exactly localization (think “HD maps” for autonomous cars).
It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
There maybe some hyper corner case uses. Maybe the billion scans in New York City help them generalize across different phone lenses characteristics, but phone and drone lenses are so different.
Would love to hear some specifics if I’m wrong here.
Your hypothesis is correct.
there was a startup that pitched the idea of using Satellite data to do ground based navigation. (https://sturfee.com/vps) they didn't get bought out by either google, niantic or facebook, so it can't of worked that well.
Niantic's stuff is a pre-built map that the client will reference to get a position. Its essentially a massive feature matching exercise. The problem with using airborn photos is that you miss a bunch of features you can't see. (samy thing trying to match ground features from the air.)
THe lens calibration issue isn't actually that much of a problem _for the client_. if you have a rough idea of the lens (exif data really helps there) then you can still get meter accurate (and a few degrees heading) its a bit more of a problem for generating the initial map, but Structure from motion with good motion priors goes a long way to make it less of a problem
Now, Niantic are proposing that you can train a model that can relocalize generally without a detailed map, I think thats a bit far fetch, especially to do at any large scale. (ie bigger than a cubic kilometer)
> It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
The headline, which I do understand is in question, talks about training, not using the scans as a database. It is likely that you are right that the scans are not being used to provide localization data, but that is also not what the headline is pointing to.
The headline specifically speaks to using the scans for training. While I do not have any inside baseball, the problem space is often solved using neural nets and other machine learning algorithms. On the surface it seems likely that they would benefit from training data that doesn't necessarily need to be from where the conflict is actually taking place. A base world model, for example, can be developed from data collected anywhere in the world. Its is not an entirely different universe when you step into another country.
But you are suggesting that the algorithms used are entirely classical (i.e. no AI/ML)?
You are creating a 3D model when you scan using Pokémon Go. Difference in lenses doesn't matter, that only matters for the scanning step.
well the article writes AS IF the whole intention was to:
"get data for drone warfare" ...in 2021 (before the russian invasion...)
but did we even EXPECT drone warfare to influence the war THIS MUCH back then?
well not me -- I actually thought russia would beat the crap out of ukraine within a month (even after the failed spetsnaz attack on zelensky)
the article's assumptions only makes sense IF some people had time machines, or if CIA has some know-everything future prophet
(not to mention: drones need TOP TO BOTTOM view, not bottom-to-top view)
anyway, my verdict: sensational yellow journal article, nothing more/less
Drone warfare has been discussed publicly since more than a decade, what Ukraine proved was just how effective that really is, but it was already known and understood. In any case mapping the world doesn’t only benefit drones, it’s something always valuable to the military. Drone navigation is just one use case
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Well, define "drone warfare"- the CIA and the Pentagon has been operating Predators and friends for a long while.
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> overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone-driven Theaters of War would be a tiny sliver
Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?
Which of those are active theaters of war? Pokemon Go wasn't that big in Iran or Lebanon and even there, there aren't any reports of significant drones deployed there.
The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).
As I’m thinking about this, I suppose Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap are about as problematic as Niantic’s data.
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>Which of those are active theaters of war?
All of them but Japan?
MEA has stuff going on beyond Iran, Lebanon or whatever country the US decides to invade this week. India has two nuclear neighbours with border disputes and weekly scuffles, sometimes a downed jet fighter or two. Taiwan is probably the biggest geopolitical tension/war/invasion possibility of our time. Korea is in a stalemate unfinished war for decades. Japan has its own very real dispute scenarios with China.
I know drone scans from Pokemon Go probably won't help in the Himalayas or South China Sea, but those regions are far from trouble free
I was in Taiwan when it came out there. It was insanely popular. I was camping at some random place and it was crowded with random people and families even at 2am all collecting 'em all.
or ukraine or russia, and ofc people in africa dont have phones or internet -_-.
ofc going by the entire surface of the earth its not a lot of places, but i would never call such a thing statistically insignificant..
Vantar: "None of these places in our training data are in active theaters of war!"
Also Vantar: "The superpower of generative AI is that data in one task generalizes to other tasks!"
Pretty sure Pokemon Go and Ingress was played in Kiev long before the war
This is a good point. Legacy data might be the most valueable here
not really, in war, where there has been lots of changes, the maps degrade pretty quickly.
Good thing we’re not selling this data to the Russians?
Yeah they just exfiltrated it for free.
As a Pokemon go player, I would say it isn't.
There's even a Pokemon exclusive to the middle east region: sandstorm pattern Vivillion. Lots of players there.
"The Middle-east" isn't a war zone. Even the parts of the middle-east that are, don't have any drone deployments. Lebanon maybe? Reports are thin.
Maxar is/was primarily a satellite data company, and to say Pokemon data would add any major value in any of today's active drone deployments with the level of Satellite coverage Maxar already has is a wide stretch.
Moreover, ground forces in the area would need pretty heavy jamming tech in place too for this kind of data to be useful. It's a sliver of a sliver of a sliver situation.
> "The Middle-east" isn't a war zone.
According to Wikipedia, more than half of the Middle East countries are either belligerents or were otherwise attacked in the ongoing war.
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I think pretty heavy ubiquitous jamming is absolutely a feature of modern warfare now. Ukraine is a model of what's to cone
Obtaining it never means having to scan anything at any time.
That's true, it's obtained from gifting.
But what I mean is that there are enough players there to be significant part of the ecosystem. The war made obtaining those Vivillion harder.
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>As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?)
are you saying that drone training in quiet residential neighborhoods is not training? are you saying self driving cars can only drive in theaters where they've been trained, because autonomous training is always specific by neighborhood? are you saying that if a particular region has some novel terrain that all previous training must be discarded?
> The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).
For now.
This is a massively weak argument. It's like its own strawman, one does not see this often, lol.
If you train a soldier in the US, is he unable to do those things outside the US?
""As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).""
Can you elaborate?
GPS can be faulty in cities.
Pokémon Go scans, are primarily in cities.
The mapping in the article, is specifically saying to use visual cues when GPS is faulty.
How is this not directly 1-1 overlapping, the gap and the solution.
VPSs are much more effective at navigation at ground level in cities compared to GPS because of multi-path interference.
However that data has a half life and needs to be refreshed.
For flying drones, ground level data is really not that useful. mainly because you can't see it, because its obscured by trees, building and clouds.
But, this is not a new thing. Google, Apple, facebook and niantic all have VPSs as do a bunch of other startups.
For Drones you will probably need SLAM to capture the map, and then once you have the initial map, you can keep it updated.
You can experiment at home using https://github.com/colmap
I had assumed this was referring to street level flying drones.
Like you see in drone races. But with a little bomb attached.
Even with half life. That could be years. Depending on changes. Old neighborhoods probably haven't changed.. And, not sure I read that deal had a cutoff, or not. Could they continue getting updates. ?
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So by this conclusion we can assume, that these drones will be somewhere else. Somewhere in heavily populated areas right?
Will the drones at least look like Pikachu?
i thought Maxar was mostly 3d images based on satellite inference. 1/2 of a pixel difference in a morning vs. noon vs. night sat photo can determine shadow and therefore height, etc. etc.
rapid 3d modeling of topography and cityscapes + supplementation with other data, e.g. pokemon. But ultimately that's supplementation, not the main effort.
The current drone-heavy theatres.
That could change in an instant.
It's not like there's a moral high ground about not collaborating with the military. Unless you want to advantage America's adversaries, namely China, Putin's Russia and Iran's current regime. There's always this implicit, sometimes explicit, "war bad" childish political philosophy in posts like this. In reality war is a given and you have to be prepared to have the upper hand.
"War is a given" if your foreign policies dictate that outcome. It's not something always unavoidable but it isn't inevitable either.
The United States is one pretty warmongerish nation by any account.
> The United States is one pretty warmongerish nation by any account.
Compared to other modern nations, but compared to history vary peaceful.
War is bad. And our reality isn’t some unchanging truth. Our actions and choices, or apathy, help shape our reality.
It is not childish to aspire to be better.
You can explain that to the Ukrainians and tell them how they shouldn't have American technical superiority like Starlink and the American AI and data in their drones to survive another day.
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the EU has demonstrated for decades that by balancing trades, equality and human rights it can prevent conflicts from happening.
Seems to me that most of our friends in the balkans that have memory of the past wars are overall pretty happy about the current state of things, and there hasn't been wars to contend Alsace-Lorraine in 80 years, is it a record already?
War is very much not a given in the civilized world
To be more precise, two decades, from 1999 when EU countries bombed Yugoslavia and occupied Kosovo.
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That's why they have a full blown war in their borders and they're powerless without American hardware and intelligence. Also they're right now scrambling to allocate huge investments in weaponry, of course late, but better than never.
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I guess nuclear weapons were just inevitable the moment the first quarks were assembled into a proton, right?
if it can be used to murder people it will be.
the only reason we dont have antimatter weapons or gravity guns is because we haven't figured out how.
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"war is a given" =/= "we should seek out wars"