How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy Small Business

As reported by Wired: Washington DC-area residents with a hankering for lion meat lost a valuable source of the (yes, legal) delicacy last year when a restaurant called the Serbian Crown closed its doors after nearly 40 years in the same location. The northern Virginia eatery served French and Russian cuisine in a richly appointed dining room thick with old world charm. It was best known for its selection of exotic meats—one of the few places in the U.S. where an adventurous diner could order up a plate of horse or kangaroo. “We used to have bear, but bear meat was abolished,” says proprietor Rene Bertagna. “You cannot import any more bear.”

But these days, Bertagna isn't serving so much as a whisker. It began in early 2012, when he experienced a sudden 75 percent drop off in customers on the weekend, the time he normally did most of his business. The slump continued for months, for no apparent reason. Bertagna’s profits plummeted, he was forced to lay off some of his staff, and he struggled to understand what was happening. Only later did Bertagna come to suspect that he was the victim of a gaping vulnerability that made his Google listings open to manipulation.

He was alerted to that possibility when one of his regulars phoned the restaurant. “A customer called me and said, ‘Why are you closed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday? What’s going on?’” Bertagna says.
It turned out that Google Places, the search giant’s vast business directory, was misreporting the Serbian Crown’s hours. Anyone Googling Serbian Crown, or plugging it into Google Maps, was told incorrectly that the restaurant was closed on the weekends, Bertagna says. For a destination restaurant with no walk-in traffic, that was a fatal problem.

“This area where the restaurant is located is kind of off the beaten path,” says Bertagna’s lawyer, Christopher Rau. “It’s in a wealthy subdivision of northern Virginia where a lot of government employees live on these estates and houses with two- or three-acre lots … It’s not really on the way to anything. If you’re going there, it’s because you've planned to go there. And unless you know that the place is going to be open, you’re probably not going to drag yourself out.”

Bertagna immigrated to the U.S. from northern Italy when he was young. He’s 74 now, and, he says, doesn't own a computer—he’d heard of the Internet and Google but used neither.

Suddenly, a technological revolution of which he was only dimly aware was killing his business. His accountant phoned Google and in an attempt to change the listing, but got nowhere.

Bertagna eventually hired an Internet consultant who took control of the Google Places listing and fixed the bad information—a relatively simple process.

But by then, Bertagna says, his business was in a nose dive from which he couldn't recover—service suffered after the layoffs, and customers stopped coming back. He shuttered the Serbian Crown in April 2013.

Bertagna puts the blame for his restaurant’s collapse on Google, and he’s suing the company in federal court in Virginia. His lawyer’s theory is that a competing restaurant sabotaged the Google Places listing to drive away the Serbian Crown’s customers, and he argues that Google turns a blind eye to such shenanigans. Google’s lawyers scoff at the lawsuit. “The Serbian Crown should not be permitted to vex Google or this Court with such merit-less claims,” they wrote in a filing last month. (Google didn't respond to repeated inquiries for this story)

For a number of reasons, the claim is probably doomed in court. But the premise of the lawsuit—that the Serbian Crown was sabotaged online—isn't as far fetched as it might seem.

Beneath its slick interface and crystal clear GPS-enabled vision of the world, Google Maps roils with local rivalries, score-settling, and deception. Maps are dotted with thousands of spam business listings for nonexistent locksmiths and plumbers. Legitimate businesses sometimes see their listings hijacked by competitors or cloned into a duplicate with a different phone number or website. In January, someone bulk-modified the Google Maps presence of thousands of hotels around the country, changing the website URLs to a commercial third-party booking site (which siphons off the commissions).

Small businesses are the usual targets. In a typical case in 2010, Buffalo-based Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry saw its Google Maps listing changed to “permanently closed” at the exact same time that it was flooded with fake and highly unfavorable customer reviews.

We narrowed it down as to who it was. It was another jeweler who had tampered with it,” says Barbara Oliver, the owner. “The bottom line was the jeweler put five-star reviews on his Google reviews, and he slammed me and three other local jewelers, all within a couple of days.”

Oliver’s Google Maps listing was repaired, because she had something Bertagna didn't have: a web consultant on retainer feeding and caring for her Internet presence. That consultant, Mike Blumenthal, says he’s countered a lot of similar tampering over the years.

“I had a client whose phone number was modified through a community edit,” says Blumenthal, who closely tracks Google Maps’ foibles in his blog. “It was a small retail shop—interior design. I traced it back to a competitor who left a footprint.”

These attacks happen because Google Maps is, at its heart, a massive crowd-sourcing project, a shared conception of the world that skilled practitioners can bend and reshape in small ways using tools like Google’s Mapmaker or Google Places for Business.

Google seeds its business listings from generally reliable commercial mailing list databases, including infoUSA and Axciom. Once it’s in Google’s index, a business owner can claim a listing through Google and begin curating it for free, adding photos, hours of operation, a website address. Once your have that relationship with Google, the company will up-sell you on paid advertising, which, after all, is Google’s financial lifeblood.  

But if you ignore your Google Maps listing, you’re inviting trouble. Ordinary users can submit community edits to your listing with details like operating hours—as Barbara Oliver discovered.

A screenshot of a spam locksmith positioned in the ocean three miles off the San Francisco coast.

Blumenthal says Google has gotten much better at policing malicious edits, to the point where they’re rare today. “Most of these problems of community edit abuses were in the 2010 and 2011 range,” he says. Fake map listings are a less tractable problem. Google allows anyone to enter a new business into Maps, and to place it wherever they like. The company keeps the listing invisible until it’s been verified through old fashioned snail-mail. Google sends out a postcard with a PIN code, and the business owner activates the listing by typing in the PIN.

The system has loopholes though, and troves of money-hungry spammers looking for weaknesses. In February, an SEO consultant-turned-whistle-blower named Bryan Seely demonstrated the risk dramatically when he set up doppelganger Google Maps listings for the offices of the FBI and Secret Service. Seely channeled the incoming phone calls through to the real agencies while recording them.

The stunt got a lot of attention. The Secret Service told Seely he was “a hero” for showing them the vulnerability. But despite the coverage Seely says some of his methods remain operable today. He proved it to me by creating a cheeky Google Maps listing in my name at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “The heat died down and almost all of the holes are still open,” Seely says.

Seely’s guess is that Serbian Crown was indeed a victim of Google Maps sabotage. “People do it all the time—people have even offered me money to get listing spammed or banned,” he says. “There are legitimate businesses being put of out business.”

Demonstrating causation between a bad Google Maps listing and Serbian Crown’s decline is going to be hard, though. For one thing, the restaurant’s Yelp listing—also a big factor in choosing a dinner reservation—is packed with abysmal, almost frightening, reviews. And there are any number of reasons a restaurant—even an old, established one—can fail, as Google’s lawyers pointed out an angry June 17 motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

“As the complaint tells it, The Serbian Crown restaurant was forced to close its doors not because of rising rents, difficulty sourcing ingredients, declining quality, poor service, changing tastes, poor business decisions, increased competition, or any of the other myriad reasons that can cause an established restaurant to struggle,” wrote attorney Creighton Macy, of the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

“Rather than accept that restaurants, even longstanding ones, sometimes fail, the owner of this particular restaurant looked around for someone to blame,” the lawyer wrote. “Who did he settle on? Google.”

Even if Bertagna can prove the facts, as a legal matter Google is probably untouchable because of Google Maps crowdsourced nature. A federal law called CDA 230 gives Internet services broad immunity from claims stemming from user-contributed content.

For his part, Bertangna says he hopes to reopen his restaurant some day and begin serving lion again. “It’s like a veal. We served it with a white mushroom, sauce and vegetables.”  Google Maps is not optimistic about his chances. Today Serbian Crown’s listing reads simply, “Permanently closed.”

Power Loss Created Trouble Aboard Galileo GNSS Satellite

As reported by GPSWorld: Galileo GSAT0104, the fourth in-orbit validation (IOV) satellite, has been set “unavailable until further notice” according to the European GNSS Service Centre. International observers (not associated with the European Space Agency, ESA) including those of the International GNSS Service tracking the satellite have not detected a signal from GSAT0104 since May 27. A constellation update appeared June 26 at www.gsc-europa.eu/system-status/Constellation-Information.

Speculation by unofficial sources is mounting that something is wrong with the satellite, in particular with its passive hydrogen maser, used for timing the signal for synchronous transmission with other Galileo satellites. The hydrogen maser has “a known problem” according to one source. This is why the web site shows GSAT0104, also known as FM04 and E2, as currently using a rubidium atomic frequency standard.

European Space Agency (ESA) officials further stated on July 3 that they would power-on the satellite again sometime this week (July 7–11) to continue investigating the problem. That investigation has been ongoing since the shutdown but has not identified a cause; officials state they have established that it is not related to the on-board atomic clocks.

The four IOV satellites currently aloft differ in both technology and manufacturer from the next phase of Galileo satellites to be launched. Two of these newer generation are at the Guyana spaceport awaiting a possible late August lift-off date.

Don't Fly Your Drone in Front of the NYPD

As reported by The Verge: Two men were arrested for flying a drone too close to a New York Police Department helicopter in New York City, but the police and the drone pilots are telling different stories.

The cops say the drone was flying 2,000 feet over a major bridge just after midnight earlier this week. The drone pilots say they weren't flying nearly that high.

Wilkins Mendoza, 34, and Remy Castro, 23, say they were flying their DJI Phantom 2 only about 300 feet in the air when a police helicopter started pursuing the little drone. "We're trying to get the drone away from the helicopter, and it keeps on following the drone," Remy's brother Jonathan told The New York Daily News. "We have video proof that we are not following him, he's following us."

The DJI Phanton 2 can reach heights of 2,000 feet, but it's more commonly flown at much lower altitudes. Its limited battery life also would have forced it to land after about 20 minutes.

The two pilots have been charged with felony reckless endangerment, a serious crime that implies a risk of death and disregard for human life. The drone came within 800 feet of the helicopter, close enough to lead to a collision if the drone were above or in front of the helicopter.

Drones, or quadcopters, are treated like model aircraft. Flying them is legal for now, as the Federal Aviation Administration considers which rules and standards should apply to the new class of flyers.

Uber Cuts The Price Of UberX By 20% In New York City, Making It Cheaper Than A Taxi

As reported by Business Insider: Now we know why car-hailing app Uber raised a whopping $1.2 billion in funding: It's starting a price war with its rivals.  

Uber announced in a blog post on Monday it would cut the prices of its UberX service in New York City by 20% — but it’s only for a limited time. 

Uber says this makes it cheaper to use UberX than taking a traditional yellow taxi.

It provided a comparison chart to show how much cheaper UberX will be for drivers commuting to various parts of New York City.

UberX, Uber’s cheaper service usually hosted by regular people driving basic sedans rather than fancy black cars, also cut its rates by 25% last week in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. As a result of that announcement, Uber said its service was effectively “45% cheaper than a taxi.”

Consumers like Uber’s aggressive pricing strategy but competitors — and some of its own drivers — are not as happy. Uber drivers have complained about price cuts, arguing they actually work for less than minimum wage (the company argues otherwise, stating drivers can be paid anywhere between $75,000 and $90,000). They’ve also said Uber’s rating system is inherently flawed and unfair, since drivers that receive bad ratings from their passengers — with any reason, or none at all — can get booted from the service without warning.

There have been protests of Uber in San Francisco, London, and Milan. 

Even though the price cuts are temporary, one wonders what would happen if Uber tried price cuts again in the future since the drivers are the ones that suffer from lower costs. It’s an interesting model, but its sustainability remains a big question mark for the disruptive car service. 

Airbus Patents Windowless Cockpit

As reported by GisMag: Imagine showing up at the airport to catch your flight, looking at your plane, and noticing that instead of windows, the cockpit is now a smooth cone of aluminum. It may seem like the worst case of quality control in history, but Airbus argues that this could be the airliner of the future. In a new US patent application, the EU aircraft consortium outlines a new cockpit design that replaces the traditional cockpit with one that uses 3D view screens instead of conventional windows.

There’s a reason why cockpits are traditionally in the nose of a plane – not the least of which is the pilot being able to see where they're going. In addition to flying, being up front provides a clear view forward and downward for landing and taxiing. That’s all very useful, but it does tend to ruin the aerodynamics of the aircraft’s nose, which would ideally be lancet shaped. As aircraft have grown larger and more complicated, the nose has come to also include the radome, crew rest area and the front landing gear, and the current cockpit design reflects this.

Another problem is that aerospace engineers hate windows. They may be popular with passengers who like to see outside, and pilots, who like to not bang into things, but engineers see them as nothing but points of weakness in what should, ideally, be a solid cylinder. If nothing else, they’ll point to the alarming Comet airliner crashes of the 1950s, which were traced back to poor window design fatally weakening the fuselage. Windows mean heavy reinforcements and multiple layers of glass and plastic to strengthen hull integrity. In addition, placing the cockpit in the nose reduces the cabin size, where every inch is measured in thousands of dollars lost per flight.

The Airbus patent shows a windowless cockpit that removes the windows or reduces them to partial views of the outside world. Instead, exterior views are provided by a display formed by back projection, lasers, holograms, or OLED imaging systems fed by cameras outside the fuselage. In addition, there are stereo cameras for taxiing and parking, and augmented reality can be used to highlight weather conditions, navigation beacons, air routes, hazards, and other information. There are even holographic displays of a globe displaying navigation and weather data, and a Star Wars-like holographic projector that Darth Vader would enjoy.

The idea of a windowless cockpit may seem a bit mad at first, but there are some real advantages if Airbus can pull it off and get the public to accept it. The proposed system widens the pilot’s field of view, which is always good, and provides more flexibility about what information is displayed and how it's displayed. It reduces the weight of the aircraft, therefore increasing fuel efficiency, and it increases the flexibility of aircraft design. Security can also be increased by making the cabin as hardened as possible – even separating it entirely from the passenger cabin.

At the moment, the windowless cockpit is just a concept, but if the public is willing to go along with it, the smooth airliner could be the plane of the future.

In Germany, A Robot Valet Will Park Your Car

As reported by Mashable: In Germany, high tech has come to airport parking.

Last week, Düsseldorf airport (DUS) introduced robot valets to take the hassle out of parking for travelers.

Travelers can leave their cars at the arrival level of the ParkingPLUS structure. As they leave, they confirm on a touch-screen that no one is in the car. The robot valet, nicknamed "Ray," takes it from there.

The robot measures the vehicle, picks it up with a forklift-like system, and takes it to the back area, where it will position it in one of the 249 parking spots reserved for automated valets. The machine is capable of carrying standard cars weighing up to 3.31 tons.

The robot valet is even connected to the airport's flight data system, and by checking customer trip data with the database, Ray knows when the customer will return for the vehicle. A traveler can note any itinerary changes in a parking app, which is available for iOS and Android.

Düsseldorf's airport is relatively small, and officials touted the convenience of heading to the terminal from the parking structure entrance. Ray "makes the distances between planes and passengers’ vehicles even shorter," according to a statement from the airport.

“Our product is especially appealing to business travelers, who arrive at the airport shortly before the flight, seek efficient parking, and return within a few days," said Thomas Schnalke, the airport's managing director.

The introductory rate for robot valet parking at Düsseldorf is 29 euros ($39.59) per day or 4 euros ($5.46) per hour. Although the airport is targeting business travelers in a hurry, the service is open to anyone.

If airport customers use the robot valet, airport officials said they would consider expanding the system.

Ray was produced by Serva Transport in the Bavarian town of Grabenstätt. Serva previewed the robot valet in 2013; Düsseldorf is the first installation of the system.

Truck of the Future Aims to Drive Itself

As reported by CNN Tech: Tractor-trailer drivers, if you text while driving in the middle of the freeway, then the future may belong to you.

If you can afford a Mercedes truck, that is.

The German vehicle maker sent an 18-wheeler barreling down the Autobahn recently, while the driver surfed the Internet for food recipes on tablet computer -- at least that's how media photos told the story.

Its test drive was brief, covering about three miles, German media reported.

The trucker's hands didn't touch the wheel and his eyes were fixed on pork cutlets. But that could be the way some drive in the future, perhaps in the next decade or so.

That's the message of the prototype "Future Truck 2025," which Mercedes says is the first self-driven freight vehicle. It may seem illogical right now, but the hands-off idea is aimed at eliminating human error.

Special cameras and multiple radar systems watch the road, the sides of the road, and cars and trucks behind the vehicle.

Future Truck is also envisioned to communicate with other vehicles and connect to growing sources of online information as Big Data balloons on the road.

Its computerized controls will also make it more fuel efficient, Mercedes boasts.
Once the truck merges into traffic, it won't accelerate to clichéd Autobahn breakneck speeds. The system will throttle it to a meek 50 mph, Mercedes says.

Many of the component parts to put a vehicle like this into production are already available in trucks on the market: Systems that help drivers keep their distance from other drivers, active braking assistance, guidance and mapping systems, and fine-tuned cruise control and tons of other hi-tech tchotchke.

If a puttering slowpoke pulls out in front of Future Truck 2025, it will slow down automatically to keep off of its bumper, but the 18-wheeler won't pass it by itself.

That's when the driver will have to turn off the ball game, put down the iPad or lay away the knife and fork, then take the wheel.

But he'd be ill advised to goof off too much, because two cameras and a sensor under his seat will monitor his activities.

Mercedes says that the trucker will still be expected to be responsible for controlling the vehicle. But by then they won't be called that anymore.

In 2025, they'll be promoted to "transport managers."