 Welcome to this episode of RC3 Talks here on ChaosZoneTV. ChaosZone is the collection or collective of all the Hacker communities here in Eastern Germany and we are presenting you today Hacking Google Maps by Simon Weckert and Moritz Allert. This talk will be in English, so I will quickly jump to German to announce the translation. This lecture will be live if you want to see it live. If you want to see it live, go to German and click on the bottom right in your video player on translation 1. Now back to English and back to the talk Hacking Google Maps by Simon Weckert and Moritz Allert. Have lots of fun! This is our RC3 series called Hacking Google Maps. Simon Weckert is from Berlin and shares his knowledge about many areas. His focus is the digital world, including everything related to code and electronics under the reflection on current social aspects. Ranging social aspects into technology is in his work areas. In his work he tries to assess the value of technology, not in the sense of current usefulness, but in the direction of future generations. People live within western civilisation and remind them of the obligations attacked to this privilege. Hidden layers like producing and transporting the raw minerals required to create the core infrastructure of all of us. You would before the installation labour of micro workers who perform the repetitive digital tasks that underline new technology are just some of the topics in his project. Moritz Allert is a slave in the university of the arts. In his work he explores the interface between active base and time. Moritz Allert takes care of the interface between urban design and other things from 2015 to 2017. In 2017 he was a part of a virtual at-a-chef B.K. Hamburg and was working towards a PhD in art. He defended his dissertation in the last year. He is the chair of international urbanism and design at Tuberlin. He has taught the atlas of the digital fragments. The format of our R&D is a video essay by Moritz Allert. It links the genesis of early maps, the two interventions of Simon Simon. He has done interventions and they are viral this year. The maps have always been a part of the power in ancient times, in the Middle Ages and today. The history of the maps and the statistical data they show shows how national states behave. You can look at the size of the country and eat the population. The maps have made national pride and the national identity with the country. They have also helped in military and propaganda. Until a few years ago, maps were dominated by states and were particularly used in the military context. The map has always been an instrument of discipline and exercise. The researchers have looked at maps and realized that maps are not objective. Cartography is difficult to follow by rules. In the cartography, certain rules have always been applied. In the past, maps have been used by Google to express how our power relationships express our values and representation of Google Maps. They have centralized and hierarchized data and in 2015 they came out with maps. They have become more and more advanced and more technical. It has little to do with classic analogue maps. Google maps are interactive. They can be scrolled. Our understanding of the map has changed. The question is how they look aesthetically. Smartphones use maps as a form of use. This is a new form of hyper-localization. The virtual world is connected to the physical world and Google map tools have contributed to this. Now we come to the border of countries. We have to think about how they have been used and how they control instruments. We can see here on the map that this is my part, this is your part, how it has been colonized and how it has been used. Maps are such powerful tools to represent a certain world. You can draw the borders. This is a graphic tool. You can take a circle for a city. You can take a black line for a street. And generalize these symbols. This is not an honest representation, but an simplification. If we see a map like this, we can never see how the real world is. This is a meta-projection. Things that are projected there are also perceived. Depending on how the projection is, different forms of projection show the area size. This is taken for political statements, what is important and what is central. Motivation is also expressed. In this project I did last year with the borders of Google Maps. There are different Google Maps versions in Ukraine, Russia, China, India, etc. I wanted to know if Google shows the same information everywhere. And I realized that it is not the case. What you can see on the top is the left side of the map. On the left side is India. On the right side is China. Especially for Kashmir you can see that the borders are different. You can see that it is an old conflict. And it is not 100% sure where the border is. It is important that Google shows the local opinion of the country. So that the local market does not lose anything. And with that you represent the local policy. And you show what you want to be seen locally. On the bottom side is Russia and Ukraine. On the left side is the border between Ukraine and Crimea. And there is Russia. On the other side it is unclear. These are different worldviews. And that makes a contradiction, a imbalance. That means that if different people get different information, they will not be in the same opinion. From a early point of view, Google has installed special APIs with the developers of their tools, with Google map updates and data combinations. MAPMAPS means that the first MAPMAPS showed how new economic models were possible. Google MAPS makes virtual changes in real cities. Use like Airbnb and others have a huge impact on cities and culture. There is also a big impact on how we find romantic partners through Tinder and others. Or through live media apps. Google MAPS shows a new form of digital capitalism and commercialization. Online traffic systems like Uber are unthinkable without Google MAPS. Another market is created by self-driving vehicles. Google MAPS has established a new position for itself. It is about the spread and the discovery of physical places. Stimulation techniques are not only used to simulate virtual worlds, but also to create new realities in the physical field. We can safely say that digitalization has affected the card sector, which was dominated by state before. And there was democratization, but also fragmentation. Economic interests have probably replaced state and military interests. Google MAPS offers new markets to benefit more from the online platforms that use Google MAPS as a basis. With its rules, Google MAPS has established a new platform through which users can interact with cards in a new way. And the power question in the course of the category has to be asked again. It is about surveillance, control and relationships in these cards. These cards function as positive amplifiers and practice power and share knowledge in a combination of knowledge and power. Google simulated cards and models form the reality and perception of physical places. Today, there is no single aspect of life that can be reformed, for example through cards. It is no longer a description of what is going on, but a code and password. Data samples, data, markets, banks. A vision in which the digital map has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one department, one street, one neighborhood. What counts is not the border, but the computer. The universal modulation of the digital card is an instrument of surveillance and control. Every click in the network, every step in space is recorded, everything that moves is recorded. There is information, price, capital, consumers are followed. According to Siegfried Baumann, every person is a wanderer hyperlink. The map mixes the borders. With the smart phone, if I go into communication, Siegfried Baumann describes how mobile things are more flexible and the technology in the areas of life in which she hardly played a role. The new surveillance forms depend on data processing. The new surveillance forms depend on data processing. There is a new transparency in which not only citizens, citizens as such, but every person in all areas of life can be awake, tested, sorted in categories, in a one-sided way. There are activities of the controllers that are more unsuitable for us. This is a post-pagnoptic relationship according to Baumann. And there are new forms of domination. They are also frequent in the media and something. We are now coming to the topic basically where I started. I was interested in how these digital tools influence the way we use the world, how we move in the city and how we change the way we travel. Google Maps started in 2005 with Street View and I would say that these maps have changed our understanding of a map. Google defined our concept of maps and these maps have very little in common with analog printed maps. It is scrollable, expandable, searchable. I would say that since 2005 a lot has changed how we understand maps, how we read them. How a use of digital maps in the selection of digital data and the introduction of real-time maps again in front of printed maps. Imagine a large printed map of Berlin in the moment it appears the environment has already changed that a printed map gives back the current state. So maps can be helpful for a short time but can also limit the use, especially when they are printed. And I think the main goal of Google Maps is to overcome this and to say here we develop a tool that doesn't age anymore and in real time the technology sometimes doesn't like us. I would like to show Google Maps Hacks here. Who doesn't know that? Who didn't see that? At the beginning of this year in February there was the 15th birthday of Google Maps and a week before that I published this project on Twitter and that's where it all started. You see someone walking along a Berlin street and he saw a vehicle behind him and this car is filled with smartphones. Everything else on the phone and what happens here and sometimes it gets faster, sometimes it gets slower then there is virtual traffic and that has the effect on Google Maps that the people who use Google Maps navigation system are guided around here and after a while you could see that the street actually becomes a teacher of cars. It's really interesting how there is such a big advantage that especially the maps have in our decisions how we use them but also how people travel and navigate. This change between slow and fast movement was also a trick because the algorithm maybe 99 cars interpreted as traffic jam so we tried to simulate a stop and go traffic and I would say the performance, the idea got me in the media demonstration in Berlin where I saw that many people in Kreuzberg took the smartphone and Google noticed that traffic showed up even though there was no street, it was foot traffic. It was pretty clear that Google followed the smartphones of the pedestrians and I asked myself how can I create something similar and it was clear that I just needed many phones not necessarily to achieve this effect. Then the question began how do I get so many smartphones but at the beginning it was pretty difficult I thought it had to be used in airports or in companies because phones are often changed I didn't get any answer from people who said yes, use the phone and then I got the idea if I want to create something I can do another performance and ask friends if they can give me their smartphones for one day and I asked them to live for one day without a smartphone that was interesting and then after a while they said yes, I'll give you the smartphone and then we'll see if I can survive one day without a smartphone I don't have 99 friends I also have a smartphone from official smartphone companies and I had a lot of smartphones for one day and when I was walking along the street it was pretty clear that this performance, this hack, worked let's jump out of the presentation because I want to show something else yes, thank you, that was super interesting I think that could lead to a future workshop that shows similar to this workshop how to deal with Google Maps I would only like to ask one question before we open it I think this question is often asked do you know if anything has changed with Google? if the algorithm has changed after your hack is it still possible to do this hack? that is definitely possible there are some third-party drivers if you want to create similar virtual traffic and the thing is that a speaker said that they try to follow everything and in a certain sense they were happy that people were aware of this function for sure I will do I will test the system further maybe after a year and then see if it still works but I think it is pretty difficult for Google to do anything about it yes there are questions from the audience we still have some time before we start with the workshop a technical question about Google Maps the 999 smartphones GPS activation or what is it? yes, you have to activate it there are three ways how smartphones can be used the exact way is GPS as far as I know then we have the localization of mobile radio stations mobile radio stations, this is a triangulation I turned on all three modes and what is also important I didn't have to open Google Maps on these smartphones it was just a running Android system it probably works better when Google Maps works as an app but it is also clear if you are not on your way I have another question thank you for the talk, that was very interesting and you are talking about the 3rd bed driver is there any interesting things that you have seen on YouTube? people who have led you further who have given you a new perspective yes, there are people people who have done interesting things not the YouTubers they have just tried to do it the algorithm also learns and if there is traffic in the same place every week and then you realize when I try to clean the street for my work path, such ideas came up in the comments and I think it is important to show that as an artist I always try to develop my understanding and therefore to make an easy story for a bigger audience and for me it was nice to do that but I also have to mention that there are different ways to simulate we know from Pokemon Go what is there to try to trick the API I think for an audience that is not so well known it would be a bit difficult to convey and I think that is also the reason why these 99 smartphones got a lot of attention because they are very understandable in 2016 there was a Pokemon Go game that was based on localization the inventor of Google founded this game and the users tried to catch this Pokemon Go monster and they tried to catch this Pokemon Go monster and that happened on a changed Google Maps and then it was banned from certain places by the government from schools and from prison hospitals, concentration camps and that was the most profitable smartphone game of all time that can not be expressed in numbers but the continuation of all these citizens and the improvement of the cards on the basis of GPS and the geodata it worked first of all restaurants were sent to restaurants and Google showed that it can control a lot of people and these are virtual technologies that can be used it will be interesting to see how the knowledge that came from this experiment can be used further Pokemon Go there are the individual control in this game and this is a pre-run of the companies that control it Pokemon is a snake and this snake looks like Pikachu and it has...