Surely, the community-run, mapping project Open Street Maps won’t rename it like Google did… right?.. right!!!
Cringe
Licking the boots of their new slave master 🫡
Fuck you google
Petition to rename Washington into Turdington.
Fuck Google.
I’ve been working on de-Googling for a while anyway, but this is definitely the last straw that’s gonna get me to finish the job.
Good they make themselves even more untrustworthy, loss of value
Watching these corporate collaborators fall all over themselves to enact the profoundly stupid and short-sighted whims of a sodden, rotting corpse when they could just…not do that…has been one of the most surreal experiences of my life.
The sad thing is, thanks to their capture of both parties, I have no conceit they’ll actually experience any consequences for it. We have handed power to some of the least-deserving ghouls the Wharton School of Business ever squeezed out.
I’m not even sure it’s collaboration for the dumb shit like this. It’s just not worth spending millions of dollars litigating over something that doesn’t actually fucking matter. Not litigating the name change itself, but whatever bullshit Trump decides to do for his temper tantrum for being ignored.
It will just be changed back eventually.
We… Voted for this?!? Whoops.
Twice!
Hi, I work in the map industry. We generally don’t get to decide what names to use for features. We apply what the local official name is (to simplify). That’s why if you’re in country A, feature X might be named something different than if you’re in country B. You can imagine this would (and has) caused many conflicts around the world if we didn’t display the local official name. (Switch your region via VPN and you can see this in action)
If Google renamed it to Gulf of America, no Google didn’t, not really … They just inserted the new official name for that feature according to GNIS.
Mapquest isn’t changing it because an executive order doesn’t change the name outside of the US executive branch. They can easily ignore petty GNIS changes.
Google is just gargling Trump’s nuts because they want to.
Waze hasn’t either, otherwise imma be done with it all
Hate to break it to you but google owns Waze.
Trump is not a king, and outside of the executive branch, his executive orders have no binding power.
Google et. al. Are, last I checked, not part of the executive branch, and are under no obligation to abide by Trump renaming bodies of water.
They’re doing it because they want to. Because they know it will make Trump happy.
It’s the official GNIS name now, and is usually just piped into the maps. There aren’t people actually deciding which names to use at Google, HERE, whatever, etc … we just push sources in.
They’re doing it because they want to. Because they know it will make Trump happy.
sure, ok … guess you know more than my 20+ years experience at a digital map company that actually taught google how to make their maps.
Google deciding to continue using a dataset that has been completely captured by a megalomaniac at the head of an authoritarian regime is on them. I cannot stress enough that they do not have to use GNIS, as evidenced by all the other map apps that, y’know, don’t.
Except it’s not official. An executive order means the executive branch has to use that name. Nobody else does.
The Google Maps change does only seems to be visible for people with US IPs. But I assume that Apple Maps, Mapquest, Mapbox, Bing (TIL Bing has a map feature), etc all use GNIS to label features too, right? None of them have changed the name yet. Seems unlikely that all of them would still be out-of-sync with upstream, and let Google drink their milkshake like this.
According to this Wired article:
In fact, the map for the federal government’s Geographic Names Information System database, which informs these changes, still showed Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning, with a note that the maps are “in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.”
Sure looks to me like Google made the change before the basemaps were updated. It’s now 23:40 EDT Sunday, and GNIS still says Lake Ontario…so yeah, I think this is on them. Dear Leader told them to jump, and they rushed to show him how high they could get.
unlikely that all of them would still be out-of-sync with upstream
It’s not like we all have one live server that ingests source changes and the customers will see it immediately. There is a massively delay, release schedules, etc.
Sure looks to me like Google made the change before the basemaps were updated
But yea, you could be right on this specific point
It’s not like we all have one live server that ingests source changes and the customers will see it immediately. There is a massively delay, release schedules, etc
Good! Sounds like there’s plenty of time built in to the system for impact analysis, change management, QA, and the like, to avoid pushing unnecessary updates that end up pissing everyone off.
Who gets to determine if they’re unnecessary updates?
EDIT/Update: ‘Lake America’ is currently under discussion from our Geopolitical Policy Board.
So switch it back, all Nazis must (redacted)
deleted by creator
it would be funny if Canadians started referring to South Canada instead of America
Nah, that’d be an insult to our country. We need not be associated with the dumpster fire south of us.
Canada should announce that they’ve changed the names of all the Great Lakes to Canadian names, like Lake Toronto, and Lake Ottawa. Make sure there’s a Lake Saskatchewan, because there is no way Trump can read or pronounce it, so that will really piss him off. Maybe he’ll painfully stroke out and croak, and we can all read about it the Big Beautiful Obituary.
Nah, if they really want to get under his skin, they should rename the lakes to Lake Obama, Lake Hillary, Lake Comey, and so on.
I wish Trump decides to rename something in Europe and Google complies so another jump in degooglelization takes place there…
Meh, still not as bad as China. Their maps have Taiwan, Nepal, Mongolia, and about half the Pacific Islands labeled as China. But they get a free pass on everything so it’s cool.
I’m Canadian and I switched to maps.here.com, a European service as it provides good transit info. We need to move away from American hegemony.
HERE Maps will include the change, I 100% guarantee it. They have Gulf of America pushed to prod servers. (switch to US vpn location and you will see it)
source: I may or may not work for them 🫠
I thought they relied on open street map
HERE Maps? Absolutely not. OSM is a competitor to HERE.
How they get information about places like restaurants, shops etc?
external sources like Yelp, Trip Advisor, Localeze, FB
As long as they only change it in the US, that’s fine with me. I’d still rather support the EU.
FYI… Changing it in the US only is exactly what Google is doing, just like with the Gulf.
Like I said when Zuck et al were on the inauguration stage kissing the orange ass: what’s the point of fuck you money if you never say fuck you?
They do. They say ‘fuck you’ every day to the workers they exploit, the hungry and poor they prey upon, and to all of us when they help themselves to our personal data to sell. That’s the point, they’re bad people to the core. Billionaires have enough money to do literally anything and everything for the rest of their entire lives, and instead focus on controlling the rest of us and getting more of our money. They are parasitic scum…
Getting more fuck you money
They’re saying “fuck you” to us, not to them.
For android users recommend CoMaps, or “OSMand”, both are open source and privacy focused. Both use openstreetmaps data, CoMaps just have what I think is a cleaner interface. Both have offline maps, turn-by-turn navigation and frankly a lot more customization since it’s not corporate owned. No ads, and no businesses who pay being stuffed in your eyes first when maps load.
Both are much improved since trying to ditch maps a few years ago and basic local business info wasn’t available, now it looks to be much improved and it’s a great time to jump.
Hope this helps someone.
Or mapy.cz
Mapy.cz relies on open street map, but it has advantage that you can add reviews and photos to places.
I think its the best replacement right now, but it needs more community
There’s also Organic Maps.
CoMaps was forked from Organic Maps. There was some drama because the Organic Maps shareholders were demanding profit or something, idk. CoMaps is like the community edition, so they aren’t beholden to any shareholders.
Ah right, i forgot.
