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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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

> 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?

Pretty sure Pokemon Go and Ingress was played in Kiev long before the war

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 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.

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.

""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.

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!"

>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?

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?

So by this conclusion we can assume, that these drones will be somewhere else. Somewhere in heavily populated areas right?

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.

I assumed that in urban USA the map would be fairly complete and opportunities for edits would be somewhat rare. My assumption was very wrong. The app showed a dozen quests just outside of my office building. Thanks for suggesting it!

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a project like mapillary or streetcomplete that forbids military use.

Surely military drones will use OpenStreetMap data? Even the Russians and Iranians can use it for whatever purpose they like.

Yes, there other mobile editor that are arguably more featured (EveryDoor, OSM Go, OsmAnd), but StreetComplete has a nice gamification / simplification of UI that makes editing a breeze.

MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/

How can I channel my energy into preventing my data from being used for military purposes?

> I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.

That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.

The closest stop to me is between a dog park and a school - scanning it would have been an awkward situation, to say the least. And as you said, for rewards that aren't worth it. I got used to having that "Scan" task just sitting at the top of my list, never to be touched. But I noticed earlier this week that it's gone - and scanning stops doesn't give a new scan task.

That's what makes this feel so off

I believe some of the data was added to their scaniverse app.

I guess this also explains how they were paying for the free 3d model photogrammetry processing that app does.

Based on the prose of the DroneXL piece, I think it would be more accurate to say that Claude adds its own angle.

Please tell them that 'als Elon Musk zijn starlink uitzet, iedereen de weg kwijt is' incorrect is. GPS is managed by the USA gov and we have our Galileo-alternative

Or maybe kill themselves, since most scans are from the cities they live in.

In the conservative worldview, competition is fair dinkem, so the setting for these businesses is just. That's how we got here.

Also in that worldview, we have the responsibility to defend innocent children. Let's if they can follow their own moral code and outlaw this surveillance to protect our kids.

Mainly if you allow a government and / or corporations to do so, but unfortunately democracy and the like only gives you so much influence on that.

Agreed. If it's "digital", it will be used for elite power plays, because it's too easy. How else could you mass control/analyse/manipulate millions of people instantly? Digital, digital, digital...

Apparently that story was manufactured and promoted by someone else, don't you think?

Interesting: the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now. They're not even pretending anymore. Given that this steady parade of seemingly-planted and promoted derogatory anti-Western stories that has been happening for years originates from You Know Where, it's a revelation that the Russian establishment and secret services are not even pretending anymore.

It should also be pointed out that Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church have been understood to have been cat's paws for Russia's notorious KGB successor agencies for a very long time now.

It's quite obvious that data is what pays the game. A lot of data about the players )daily routine, commute to work/school, social circles to other players, etc. which allows to derive Job, wealth, etc.), data about surroundings (where do people actually walk, drive, ... etc.)

The story here however I'm not too sure about: Isn't the game mostly played in dense urban areas? - by the time you need military drones there the area will have changed a lot (destruction, fortification, ... and overall be outdated) where I think the civilian drones (delivery, cars, ....) benefit more. While the technology certainly is dual use.

You can ask for whatever you like - nobody's listening.

There is no 'we'. 99%+ of people view the world as a zero sum game where for me to win, somebody has to lose and if I don't do whatever it takes, somebody else will and then I lose, therefore I have no morals or principles or virtues and anyone who does is a liar or a fool.

Everything is a bad faith act, everyone is a selfish bad faith actor and I shouldn't feel bad about being one because everyone else who isn't a fool is too.

This tragically wrong but intuitively correct worldview and much more was explained by Plato long, long ago and just about no one understood any of it. At least the text survived and people with 140+ IQ and an iota of decency can read it and be at peace knowing they're not crazy or foolish.

This is revolting. Given how many kids played and are still playing the game this literally means weaponizing kids playing games. Humanity has been lost somewhere along the way.

Spyware Mitosis?

Yea, I find it a lot more believable that they're using this for human +/- AR stuff, not robots. E.g. walking instructions: they have photos of landmarks from many human-friendly angles, and precise positioning isn't important. That's undeniably useful for lookup purposes. Stuff in between can be estimated by GPS/3D building maps that already exist, and that's more than good enough for humans.

I just don't see how they'd convert weird-phone pictures to accurate-enough-for-SLAM purposes, especially with that in-between problem. Like, I could believe you can get a LOT of accuracy out of just photos (just watching occlusion probably gets you sub-centimeter), but in huge areas of the world they have nothing at all to stitch those high-precision areas together accurately. Existing maps and 3D building scans are wildly inaccurate on that scale. Like, it's more than a block between scannable things in my area, sometimes multiple blocks, they're not computing a precise world model from that even with existing data on e.g. openstreetmap. Robots already have enough to know their world-position with on-board SLAM + GPS + existing maps, this won't eliminate (or even reduce) SLAM as a necessity for navigation.

I'm not sure they need the in between areas, so long as the landmarks are inclusive of similar features. In fact, they probably only need a high quality 3D scans of primitive features to perform classification (walls, building, intersections, etc). I haven't played recently, so I'm unsure how distinct each landmark is.

(Visual Positioning System)

A game aimed at children supporting military intelligence is prime cyberpunk material. No doubt fiction beat us to that as well.

I don’t think the standing committee is objectively that perceptive

But I do appreciate alot about what they are doing and choose to do

Reminds me more of a theme park. Yes, a heavy handed corporation runs it and if you have any dissent it won’t go well, but if you don’t choose to focus on that then it will be a joyous place and you have the opportunity to contribute to that energy and be rewarded by something that simulates a free market

I know it's sarcasm, it's a valid point. We all already contribute to the war efforts of our governments.

This is ancient tech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM

At this point is there really a difference between death and destruction and "legitimate" military target? It's a slippery slope

Its using Visual descriptors to generate a pointcloud. Buildings and text are really great for creating descriptors, so when they change you loose key points for "localizing"(ie getting your position). This needs to be updated as those buildings change.

You also need a day/night dataset (although some newer descriptors are day/night resistant)

Yes. Even dealing with "what does it look like in rain? What does it look like in snow?" is hard. Hell... "What does it look like at night" is hard. Hell.... what does it look like at noon vs sundown (no shadow vs long shadows) is hard.

Have you ever seen a commercial use of anything like this? That should give you a hint about how reliable these systems get.

It's easier to take a look via change of dates in google street view, they have almost 20 years coverage. You can see how the data ages and decays or doesn't because it's tied to the place it represents.

Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.

It's the combination of geographical data (maps) linked to its visual representation in the world (footage of structures, roads, landscape features) that is useful.

The geographical data already exists in digital maps. And I would expect competent militaries already have maps of enemy territory. It's the second part that was so far missing.

This combined set allows the training of AI models that can say, "When my surroundings look like x, that looks like y on a map".

So when your drone's GPS gets jammed, it can look at its surroundings, reference its (internal and offline) maps, figure out where it is, and navigate.

Compred to what? Datasets at this scale are rare. You're not comparing against another ideal dataset, you're comparing against having nothing.

I don't what class of models they use here, specifically, but a generic classifier shouldn't depend on a single feature. And neighbourhoods don't typically get razed or remodeled/painted over in a fortnight.

... Except, well, when it's the doing of this same, so called "defence" industry.

a dark update of ender's game

Well game vendors catering game data to the military is the problem here, not the maps themselves. Maps are good, shady corpo bs isn't. Same shit Spotify pulled by investing into war machinery rather than paying the artists more.

This is what censorship looks like. This is what should get people angry. Not localization changes, but actual government-mandated changes or bans. By censoring the internet, Iran is not protecting its citizens but rather the ruling government.

Or maybe sometimes censorship actually DOES protect its citizens?

> it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage

But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks.

From TFA:

> Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms.

I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.

From Room 641A to Snowden, the speed with which the narrative shifts from "that's conspiracy nonsense" to "we knew it all along" is neck-snapping.

Every. Single. Time.

Can you imagine scanning your house, your school, your playground, thinking you're catching Pikachu, then have a drone hit it based on your own footage? Pretty terrifying.

Maybe Nintendo lawyers could show their skin for a good cause at once.

Indeed, but should we always assume data of any type we generate for services can be used for malicious means?

I think this is where brand licensing gets more complicated than it usually appears

Niantic is what happens when a boardroom is somehow more evil than the ridiculous caricatures we sometimes see in Hollywood. “Alright gentlemen: we need to make a lot of money quickly harvesting every drop of data from kids and adults alike en masse using something they all love that is family-friendly. We are selling it to the military of course, because they’ll pay us tons of money for it. Who’s in?”

Eh, the maps could be used for true domestic defense...but examples of foreign invasions on USA soil are scarce...

AFAIR, there is a chain of companies which connects Niantic to govt agencies, they were selling this data to Uncle Sam from the beginning(even before Pokemon GO)

> Niantics founder has CIA roots

This is not at all an honest way of saying "Niantics founder raised money from In-Q-Tel"

Zoom was free for a reason. The audiovisuals harvested during lockdown were used to help produce the fake videos/simulations of humans we are seeing today.

Same mentality.

Nowadays you are the product regardless of how much you are paying.

Pokémon Go can be pretty expensive with micro-transactions.

Turns out intelligence gathering is pretty boring routine work, not Bond-esque spy stuff or stakeouts in camo nets and face paint.

In 2016 this wasn’t obviously happening/common knowledge. Remember to blame the perpetrators, not the victims.