[HN Gopher] A Critical Analysis of the What3Words Geocoding Algo...
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A Critical Analysis of the What3Words Geocoding Algorithm
Author : ColinWright
Score : 144 points
Date : 2023-09-02 07:31 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| mwexler wrote:
| I was surprised by the claims of the "ease" of sending your GPS
| coordinates. I had no idea how to do this before this post. I dug
| around a bit to see what I had missed.
|
| Some apps make this easier than others, with Google Maps still a
| mystery. In an emergency, or if I really needed a try location,
| I'd feel more comfortable with the dirt-simple nature of w3w then
| remembering how to find the lat/long and copying or saying all
| the digits (there are a lot of them!)
|
| Apple Maps surprised me by being the easiest. It shows lat/long
| under the "My Location" pane which appears when I tap the blue
| dot. They make it easy to copy /paste.
|
| Google Maps on iOS replaces that with a "Plus code". I can't find
| where my lat/long is in this thing, and gave up. (Hints and
| Spoilers welcome!)
|
| Over the years, I have tried other map apps which I pulled up to
| see how they handled lat/long:
|
| * Maps.me acts similarly to Apple Maps, tap the blue dot.
|
| * Here We Go maps makes you drop a pin at your location, but then
| displays lat/long. Magic Earth has same problem/approach. Who
| would remember how to do that in a rush?
|
| * Organic Maps over engineered this one: tap the blue arrow and
| lat/long appears, but when you tap it to copy, it changes to a
| new format each time (no commas, an alph-numeric I don't know, a
| url, a UTM, an MGRS, and then back to lat/long). Turns out you
| can press and hold to get a copy menu.
|
| * Google Earth displays the lat/long right on the screen... But
| it's not copyable.
|
| W3w may have implementation problems, but it does a great start
| on simplifying the answer to a verbal "where are you?". The rest
| of these, esp Google Maps, just aren't quite there yet.
| MaxMatti wrote:
| My last two (android) phones showed a screen that included my
| current coordinates whenever I call any emergency number. I
| would say putting your phone on speaker and reading out the
| numbers that are right there on the screen could be considered
| "easy".
| rozab wrote:
| Google Maps pushes Plus Codes instead, they appear for every
| location:
|
| https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/
|
| But normal co-ords also appear for me when I long tap anywhere
| mwexler wrote:
| Got it. You have to press and hold to get to the "non-Google"
| standard info. Thanks for the pointer!
| verytrivial wrote:
| It's a disappointing experience, isn't it? You can only get a
| raw lat/long if Maps can't generate an address. If it does,
| you're out of luck for lat/long -- it's gone from the UI as
| far as I can see.
| rplnt wrote:
| The one single reason, no need to look any futher, for why it
| shouldn't be used by public services is because it's a private
| for profit operation. A simple concept that might have been
| useful, but is closed, so it won't be.
| [deleted]
| mort96 wrote:
| And, to my understanding, the concept is patented, so nobody
| else can make an open version of it. So yes, the concept is
| kept from being useful through the power of the state.
|
| I really don't like patents.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Patents are a great idea, and essential to technological
| progress. It's a bargain you make with the state: in return
| for publishing complete details on your idea, you get a
| twenty-year monopoly on use of the idea. You get value for
| your research, and the public gets full access to the idea
| after twenty years.
|
| Patents as currently implemented are a problem. Too many are
| granted for too-vague ideas; patent trolls buy those vague
| ideas and then milk them for rent; companies game the system
| to get far more than the specified twenty years of
| exclusivity.
|
| So, it's a mixed bag.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| IANAL - but (in most countries) you can't patent a concept or
| an idea - only specific implementations of an idea (I.e. a
| physical invention) - software patents and business-process
| patents notwithstanding.
|
| But that doesn't stop companies (especially those with a weak
| technical moat) from abusing the system.
| mort96 wrote:
| "You can't patent a concept or an idea" also doesn't
| prevent patent offices from granting patents on concepts
| and ideas.
|
| IMO, if we are to have patents at all, the patent offices
| should be robust, well-funded systems which make sure that
| no patent that's not genuinely a novel _implementation_ of
| an idea gets granted. In reality, it seems like patent
| offices more or less accept anything that 's written in
| dense enough lawyerese, and it's up to the legal system to
| slowly invalidate the bad patents _after_ they 've done a
| ton of harm.
|
| The fault here doesn't lie with the companies, but with the
| whole patent system where governments are way too quick to
| give out a state-backed monopoly of an idea. I find the
| whole practice despicable.
|
| Here's the What3Words patent:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/CA2909524A1/en
|
| The first claim of the patent is: > 1. A
| computer implemented method of producing a location
| identifier comprising: > receiving at a processor
| geographical coordinates of a location; > at said
| processor performing the steps of: > converting the
| geographical coordinates into a single unique value n;
| > converting the single unique value n into a unique group
| of a plurality of > values; and converting the
| plurality of values into an equal plurality of >
| respective words; and making the plurality of words
| available as a location > identifier.
|
| It's hard to imagine anything remotely based around the
| idea to "convert a location to a set of words" which
| doesn't infringe on that claim.
| [deleted]
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Or more specifically, private company having monopoly on
| addressing - with any decoding/encoding between location and
| mnemonic format - controlled solely by them is not acceptable.
|
| "The algorithm is patented in several countries, preventing
| anyone from implementing a compatible algorithm or developing
| anything like it as a competing standard. Notably the patent is
| not restricted to schemes which use three words, so a
| hypothetical "what4words" would potentially also violate the
| patent.
|
| The wordlist necessary for encoding/decoding what3words
| locations is copyrighted, and is stored in an encrypted form in
| the what3words mobile apps (so decrypting the wordlist would
| likely trigger "anti-circumvention" laws such as DMCA SS1201)."
|
| (from https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words )
| trollied wrote:
| It is for-profit, but they have yet to turn a profit. Their
| financial situation is a disaster. 10s of millions of PS
| burned, with very little income. Look for yourself:
| https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
|
| PS31m loss in FY22.
|
| Cybergibbons has also done a very good critique on how unsafe
| it is. See here: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-
| what3words-is-not-su...
|
| They are also very litigious towards people that call them out.
| lioeters wrote:
| > 10s of millions of PS burned
|
| Sounds like it's been a great "success" for the people who
| did the burning.
| czechdeveloper wrote:
| All the more reason to not use it as they may turn to some
| way of aggressive monetization to fix that.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > they may turn to some way of aggressive monetization to
| fix that
|
| That's the plan all along. The end-game is to become the
| ultimate rent-seeker on the whole concept of addresses, so
| that any device capable of looking up or resolving an
| address is obligated to pay rent to them.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I don't really understand the need for W3W in most cases, at
| least in Europe.
|
| Can someone come up with something convincing?
| stevekemp wrote:
| The UK has had a bunch of news stories about using the app, as
| it "could save your life". For example:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-49319760
|
| But if you need internet access anyway I'm sure that GPS would
| be a better thing to use, and there are also stories about the
| use being questioned for accuracy reasons:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57156797
|
| Really though I think it's a cute hack to use such a small
| number of words to define points - but as a closed source, and
| sue-happy company, there's really nothign to recommend it. Sure
| the average Joe might not be familiar with reading/writing GPS
| coordinates, but over a phone I'm sure an emergency dispatcher
| could walk them through it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I have doubts the first story is true because telling a lost
| victim with unknown bandwidth and battery level to download a
| ~130MB (!) app just to get their location is completely
| irresponsible and people should be fired for this if it
| actually happened.
| politelemon wrote:
| These read like the weekly Apple watch ~~adverts~~
| "technology news articles" on reddit, it keeps saving
| people's lives and receives thousands of upvotes.
| arlort wrote:
| The most convincing use case (for plus codes, not w3w but same
| logic) I've seen is that it can be used instead of an address
| in slums and similar places where addresses aren't
| available/practical
|
| The problem is that it's useless without a phone but if you
| have access to a phone then a gps location is better, unless
| you have to remember it or put it in by hand
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| There's a counterpoint in another comment, [0] that it works
| poorly if you can't clearly hear each word. Plain old
| longitude and latitude numbers perform better in that regard.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359790
| ElFitz wrote:
| > unless you have to remember it or put it in by hand
|
| Or spell it out while in distress.
|
| But it seems w3w fits best in the "interesting but ultimately
| bad idea" bin.
| zaxomi wrote:
| Money (for w3w)
|
| For everyone else: No.
| RowanH wrote:
| I'm from NZ which has logical addressing. Trying to find some
| random business on some random shed, down some random lane in
| the middle of nowhere in the UK can be quite the challenge -
| post codes don't help and "turn left at the white post, go down
| the lane till you get to a crow that's staring south, then
| drive up past the.... " directions are terrible. What3Words has
| been great for finding those places that use it... easier than
| writing down a GPS co-ordinate.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The UK is a special case in that we have quite narrowly
| defined postcodes, each of them restricted to a small area.
| So if you manage to get there you're not far to wherever you
| want to go.
|
| In any case, do people really need to _write down_
| coordinates these days. It 's probably all copy-paste or just
| click a link.
|
| I have just noticed that the Google Maps app now gives you
| the Plus Code of any location.
| growse wrote:
| Why not plus codes? At least that's an open standard that
| won't get rug-pulled.
| delecti wrote:
| I'll try my best attempt at a steel man: It can be a useful way
| to convey location information via language (spoken or written
| word), when there isn't a direct digital connection between
| sources. That's genuinely a non-negligible use case.
|
| So if you see an advertisement for a restaurant at
| giant.purple.monkey, you can get there. Or maybe you're
| coordinating plans on a non-smartphone call. Or you could put
| the location on flyers (a QR code could work, but lots of
| people hate those). Or you're dictating a location to a smart
| assistant (Mercedes-Benz did a partnership, and AFAIK the in-
| car assistant accepts W3W locations; I don't know for sure
| though, I use android auto in mine; disclaimer: I work at MB).
|
| In practice there are problems with plurals, homophones, and
| other similar pronunciations (did he say heavy.monkey.dress
| (near SF) or heavy.monkeys.dress (near LA)). I think
| realistically W3W is almost never the best option, but I do
| quite like the idea. Maybe if they did a better job filtering
| words to avoid collisions, and made it 4 words? I imagine it
| could actually be a pretty memorable way to describe a location
| if it were something like adjective.noun.adjective.noun, and
| with fewer near-collisions in the library (heavy/heady).
| callalex wrote:
| It's very lucrative for a few investors and public funds never
| run out.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Part of the reason, or at least a reason for a gap in the
| market that this could establish itself in, was that some
| countries who had built there own (quasi-)equivalents were
| similarly protective of their "intellectual property" and
| trying to charge for or just being awkward when providing
| geolocation data.
|
| https://longair.net/blog/2021/08/23/open-data-gb-postcode-un...
| paulgb wrote:
| Interesting that the researchers didn't analyze W3W directly
| because it would violate their ToS, but instead constructed their
| own word list. I would think that this sort of criticism of a
| technology used by the government (for emergency services) would
| be acceptable, similar to "fair use" in the US.
|
| Edit: it looks like the list itself is not even available, they
| would have had to reverse-engineer the app, so using a synthetic
| list makes more sense.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's worth noting that some _huge_ limitations /risks of W3W
| are there because of the flaws in their word list choice, so if
| you're analyzing a different wordlist, you explicitly aren't
| looking at a big source of problems.
| regularfry wrote:
| It's interesting because I'm fairly sure that work has already
| been done. Even without criticising the geocoding itself, the
| fact that there are singlular/plural pairs in the word list
| along with easily-confusable homophones says a lot about the
| product.
| [deleted]
| paulgb wrote:
| It looks like a security researcher has looked into it and
| was threatened with legal action for releasing his source
| code.
|
| https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-
| su...
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-legal-threat-
| wh...
|
| Edit: initially I said "sued", which was inaccurate. And the
| repo included the proprietary word list, not just code.
| jonatron wrote:
| Your own previous comment doesn't match this take:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218385
| paulgb wrote:
| Ah, you got me! I didn't realize from reading the
| TechCrunch article that the repo contained the actual
| word list, I stand by my original opinion that the
| takedown was legally valid.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Based on what law? You can't copyright mere facts like a
| list of words.
| growse wrote:
| If creative effort was involved in curating that list,
| sure you can.
|
| A book is just a list of words.
| paulgb wrote:
| You can't copyright the GPS coordinates of cities,
| because those are facts. The data would be the same
| whether you compiled it or not, and it would be absurd to
| grant someone a monopoly on that data.
|
| If you compile a word list yourself, you've created
| something that doesn't describe the factual state of the
| world; you've created something new.
|
| FWIW, before the debacle, even the (apparent) author of
| it appears to have admitted that it flaunted copyright:
|
| > FWIW, I have reverse-engineered the what3words address
| decoding algorithm. If anyone else with the luxury of
| flaunting patents and copyrights is curious, check out
| the demo at https://cardinalhood.github.io/what3words/.
| It's written in JS, and runs in browsers and Node.js.
|
| https://blog.ldodds.com/2016/06/14/what-3-words-jog-on-
| mate/
| mjg59 wrote:
| Whether or not a collection of facts can be subject to
| copyright varies across jurisdiction - in the US you
| can't copyright the phone book, while the EU has a
| specific concept of database rights. What's critical in
| the US case is whether there's any creative expression in
| the collection of facts or whether it's effectively
| mechanical, and whether the w3w wordlist would be
| protected under that would seem like an interesting case.
| karaterobot wrote:
| You can copyright lists of words if their selection or
| arrangement amounts to creative work. I mean, a poem is a
| list of words. A list of words that have been picked
| because they have a certain length or because, when
| combined with other lists, they produce a memorable,
| unique combination may (and I guess _does_ in practice)
| amount to a copyrightable creation.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I believe it's patent infringement. You should never give
| all the secrets of your patented device away, just the
| concept to secure the patent.
| regularfry wrote:
| Well, threatened with legal action and wasn't up for
| fighting it. It didn't get as far as him being sued, and
| while I can't blame him in the slightest for that choice, I
| would have been absolutely fascinated if it did go to
| court. A compatible reimplementation of something that's
| being sold to emergency services being slapped down
| _because it 's compatible_ sounds like the sort of thing
| useful precedent could have come out of.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| There's a reverse engineering of What3Words from a few years
| ago floating around out there called "What Free Words". It
| includes what claims to be their word list. I imagine the
| researcher is familiar with this but has chosen not to include
| it in their research.
|
| (W3W is very aggressive about pursuing possibly spurious IP
| claims to remove any trace of What Free Words. In the past,
| even mentioning it in a comment like this is enough to attract
| a DMCA complaint.)
| [deleted]
| realusername wrote:
| In French and (potentially other languages), I can add another
| criticism on top of the paper, some the words used in the
| dictionary are so obscure that a native speaker would not know
| them. They probably generated them randomly from a dictionary
| instead of asking native speakers.
|
| The whole project has then no real purpose if you have to spell
| unknown words.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| It also doesn't work well with agglutinative languages like
| Korean. The wordlist contains a lot of word sets only
| differentiated by postpositions (e.g. gibbeun _delightful_ vs.
| gibbeum _delight_ ).
| pseudotrash wrote:
| "Cybergibbons" from PentestPartners has done a teardown of W3W in
| 2021 on twitter. It was very spicy and the takeaway was not that
| it is just ugly implementation as some here suggest, but flawed
| by design:
|
| What3Words - The Algorithm
| https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/what3words-the-algorithm...
|
| Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications
| https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...
| thelittlenag wrote:
| Yep. I was (and to some extent still am) part of a startup that
| found a better alternative to W3W. Our solution is the geohash
| phrase, which you can find a discussion of here:
| https://www.qalocate.com/solutions/geohashphrase/
|
| The only major thing W3W has going for it is a very, very good
| marketing department.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Will there be a free, open source system for resolving a
| geohash phrase into a location? The #1 problem with What3Words
| is its proprietary rent-seeking business.
|
| Your link has ambiguous answers to "open source" and "free".
| kmschaal wrote:
| I think What3Words is in principle a nice idea, but it could have
| been implemented much better. I am thinking of the following:
|
| - have a fixed pattern, e.g. adjective.adjective.noun.
|
| - create groups of words and put them in hierarchies. E.g.
| noun->animal->predator
|
| - cover the world with a one-dimensional Hilbert curve
|
| - Increment the noun along the curve. When all nouns are
| exhausted, start with the first noun again and increment the
| adjective in the middle, a.s.o. (analog to how incrementing a
| number with several digits works).
|
| With this approach, the location purple.flying.tiger would be
| next to purple.flying.lion.
| thelittlenag wrote:
| You should check out
| https://www.qalocate.com/solutions/geohashphrase/
| Gys wrote:
| It is not like that by design. Remember, this is backed by VCs
| that already put in a lot of money and in some future will want
| to make a lot of money.
|
| The 3 words idea is patented and the basic idea is to have a
| drm protected database that is needed to find the actual
| location. The play the long game. Ultimately selling access to
| the database will make them money.
| hgomersall wrote:
| That's specifically problematic: what was their location again?
| Uhm, it was purple flying something.. some kind of big cat..
| lion or tiger..
|
| Large conceptual distance between close physical locations is a
| feature not a bug.
| lhl wrote:
| I spent a few minutes exploring a similar. Using the EFF
| wordlist (7776 words designed to be unambiguous)[1] you should
| be able to get down to about 100m^2 blocks (good enough for
| SAR), the BIP39 word list (2048) is a bit too resolution, but
| is a lot easier to pronounce, maybe worth some encoding
| shenanigans to get it to work).
|
| For my POC, I also used a simple 1D hilbert curve. Running a
| simulation and plotting the words, you actually get pretty
| decent resolution, and it's even alphabetical by distance.
| Output from simple demo w/ BIP39 (math might not be correct):
| https://ibb.co/MnmcRFk but you can see that the word order
| actually make sense (although "winner" and "winter" are too
| phonetically similar, but still, gets the point across).
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-
| random-p...
| jokoon wrote:
| Generally, I would say standard addresses are better, because
| streets are already a form of information compression, since you
| always indicate a position on a street, you almost never indicate
| a position in the middle on a forest of a field.
|
| Streets are already transforming 2D information on a 1D line, a
| bit like a hilbert curve.
|
| GPS has a military use because the military go off-road, but
| citizens really don't (99.999% of the time).
|
| So yeah, it's another one of those case where software engineers
| are trying to solve a problem where there was no problem in the
| first place, because they don't like dealing with standard
| addresses.
|
| If you want to share a GPS coordinate, just use geohash, and use
| NATO alphabet if you need to share it orally.
| [deleted]
| Closi wrote:
| > Generally, I would say standard addresses are better, because
| streets are already a form of information compression, since
| you always indicate a position on a street, you almost never
| indicate a position in the middle on a forest of a field.
|
| > GPS has a military use because the military go off-road, but
| citizens really don't (99.999% of the time)
|
| This is true for most of the world but not true for a lot of
| Africa - which does not have a real address system and relies
| on describing where a person lives and then doing a pin drop
| (websites will just accept pin drop).
| jokoon wrote:
| Sure, but this still mean western society should encode
| streets, not coordinates
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| > GPS has a military use because the military go off-road, but
| citizens really don't (99.999% of the time).
|
| Lots of people do go off-road as a hobby. It's still probably
| something like 90% or more, but alternatives to addresses do
| have some utility. W3W happens to be an extremely bad solution
| to somewhat legitimate problem.
| Condition1952 wrote:
| I used to live in a European city where many streets of a given
| neighbourhood belonged to the same lexical field. If somebody
| lived in "Falcon" street, you could go to their neighbourhood
| without knowing the exact street. There were neighbourhoods
| about birds, doctors, journalists, and IDK what else. I do not
| know why people do not do that more often.
|
| Roads that have consecutive numbers are also useful.
|
| These w3w words can be useful for logistics but they seem to be
| useless for human beings.
| NikkiA wrote:
| I live in such a lexical area, and you'd be surprised how
| often we have to explain to DPD 'no, it says <X> Court, not
| <X> Street, not <X> Rise, those are other addresses and we
| don't live there, what is printed on the label? Oh, it's '<X>
| Court'? How surprising'
| bazzargh wrote:
| in my hometown, there's a whole set of streets (<X> Avenue,
| Drive, Place) that got built in the 90s with <X> being the
| surname of the chair of the council planning committee at
| the time, who was about to retire (ie the person who grants
| permission to build those houses). You almost have to
| admire the blatantness of the grift.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Adresses are anything but standard, many words can easily sound
| alike, and in some places that address couldn't be properly
| spoken by a someone not familiar with the language. That's when
| there even are adresses for your location. Many places simply
| don't have one.
|
| As for gps coordinates, they are rather long and enunciating
| long sequences of characters can be quite tedious as anyone who
| has ever had to deal with game cd keys could tell.
|
| That, and most people don't know NATO alphabet.
|
| So I'd, on the contrary, say a geohash-ish approache relying on
| a dictionary of carefully chosen hard to confuse and easy to
| enunciate words has its merits.
|
| But the optimal solution to me would be "press here to send
| your exact location".
| twodave wrote:
| I feel like we could just boil this down to a math problem?
| Classic lat long uses, what? 10 decimal digits? Grouped into 2
| sets of 5? Switching to base 26 can only really eliminate 1 digit
| from each set. That alone should make it pretty clear we aren't
| going to make it much simpler. I suppose you could encode the
| whole thing as one set of 10 digits and maybe represent that as 7
| alphanumeric characters, but now to share it over the phone you
| have to know a phonetic alphabet. Nah, let's stick to numbers...
| joe__f wrote:
| If you're working with three words I don't see why base 26
| would be relevant, I think you'd be looking at n^3 where n is
| the size of the set of words that you're considering. So
| wouldn't you just, split the 2-sphere into N squares of a
| certain size, and then each square has (lat,long) associated
| with it, and then you pick n so that n^3 > N and come up with a
| mapping between your N (lat, long) points and your set of n^3
| three word sentences?
| twodave wrote:
| I guess I wasn't specifically trying to use 3 words but more
| just demonstrate that 10 decimal digits is about as simple as
| it gets in terms of clearly being able to communicate with
| that much precision over a low quality connection.
| joe__f wrote:
| It seems to me that you're demonstrating that What3Words
| doesn't provide precise coordinates on the globe to 3
| decimal places. This is not surprising, given that they
| don't intend to do that, they chop the globe up into
| squares and provide less precision with easier human
| readability.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > What3Words has grown rapidly in popularity over the past few
| years and is used in logistical applications worldwide, including
| by emergency services
|
| It has? It is?
|
| I've known about it for many years and even seen billboards by
| them, yet never seen it used in practice.
| dspillett wrote:
| It has certainly picked up popularity, or at least use, in
| certain outdoor communities. I've noticed running events are
| increasingly noting the W3W address of their registration and
| start locations for instance, and associations related to
| emergency services have allowed themselves to be linked to the
| app (https://www.airambulancesuk.org/news-knowexactlyewhere/
| for instance).
|
| I _thought_ I 'd seen adverts from official emergency bodies
| mentioning W3W, but a quick search finds nothing mentioning the
| fact that call-centres have the facility available that isn't
| directly from W3W, a straight copy from one of their press
| releases, or a discussion about the system's deficiencies (i.e.
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56901363), so that might
| be me having not been cynical enough to identify an astroturf
| campaign!
| croes wrote:
| Especially when you can easily send your exact GPS location if
| you make an emergency call with your smartphone.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Note that GPS can be often unreliable or not precise enough.
| For example, it would be pretty useful to specify correct
| side of river/road/railway. Arriving at wrong side may result
| in needing to do very long detour.
| croes wrote:
| And how do you get those 3 words?
|
| Don't you need GPS to get the coordinates to translate them
| to three words?
| dspillett wrote:
| True, but no pure coordinate encoding system is going to
| help there. You need the user to be able to read a map of
| some sort to:
|
| 1. first verify that the position reading is accurate at
| all
|
| 2. adjust the reading appropriately
|
| 3. note any further navigation issues that could be
| important to people trying to head towards them (even with
| a 100% accurate position that could be a problem).
|
| The selling point of W3W is neither accuracy nor precision,
| but the claim that it reduces transcription errors that
| might send rescuers off in the wrong direction - for
| instance the difference between OSMAP references 680287 and
| 680278 putting you on the wrong side of the river with a
| few mile trip in either direction to get to the other side
| due to where crossing points are (there are no doubt better
| examples than this, I arbitrarily picked an example close
| by where I often run). This claim is disputed by a number
| of people some of whom make a good case (for instance
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56901363) and the
| fact that W3W has often chosen to respond to criticism with
| legal slaps instead of technical explanations suggests to
| me that the criticism is right.
| acc_297 wrote:
| We used it at a remote forestry work camp a year or so ago
|
| It was great for the supervisor to just tell everyone 3 words
| to remember instead of UTC or LATLONG coordinates which I for
| one probably would not have remembered in an emergency
|
| You can kind of shop around for an easy set to remember too if
| you get a weird set of words you can most likely just take the
| grid box next to you
|
| I'm sure it's not perfect but it was very convenient for our
| particular use case
| intunderflow wrote:
| Publishing this from the UK is rather risky given What3Words have
| a tendency to engage in SLAPPs on anyone who pulls back the
| curtain on their product
| urschrei wrote:
| No, it isn't risky in the least. The analysis makes no use of
| proprietary data and illustrates potential problems which arise
| from choices made in the algorithm's design in an abstract way,
| using a different word list from the claimed proprietary one
| that W3W use. The legal threat in question was made because W3W
| claimed that Andrew Toponce was linking to a product which used
| their allegedly proprietary word list in a series of tweets.
| Please don't make unfounded fear-mongering comments about
| academic research - they cumulatively have the same effect as
| the threats you claim to be drawing attention to.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Seems like a great opportunity for a new alternative system.
|
| Preferably with an error correcting code built in. Homophones
| shouldn't really matter, if you mess it up, the ECC could just
| fix it.
|
| Go with 4 words instead of 3.
|
| Take Diceware, treat the words as a base 7775 number, convert to
| binary, you get 50 bits.
|
| You could do some fancy reshuffling, reorder the words by
| similarity(Start with the first, then repeatedly pick the one
| with the smallest edit distance), and do the conversion to an
| integer such that any one word swapped to a close neighbor only
| produces a small change.
|
| My math knowledge is too limited to do this myself unless there's
| something to copy and paste or a brute force hack, but couldn't
| you do that by treating each word as a digit in 7775-ary gray
| code?
|
| Any one word being off to a nearby word, would then just give you
| an error in the low order bits of the latitude.
|
| Then you protect those bits with a hamming code, and have an
| overall 2 or 3 but checksum for everything, so at least some of
| the easy to make mistakes will be corrected, and most will
| probably be detected.
|
| Reliability could probably be better than reading off
| coordinates, still faster, with only one extra word.
|
| Plus the words themselves already have redundancy in them, if you
| make a typo, autocorrect can fix it, and if it gets the wrong
| one, the correction will likely catch it or flag the issue.
| gpt5 wrote:
| Good luck bypassing their patents.
| karussell wrote:
| Is it really "geocoding" what they provide and is the 3 words
| code an "address equivalent"?
|
| Wikipedia says geocoding is:
|
| _the process of taking a text-based description of a location,
| such as an address or the name of a place, and returning
| geographic coordinates, frequently latitude /longitude pair, to
| identify a location on the Earth's surface._
|
| In my opinion the 3 words are already geographic codes and not
| something like an address. It sounds like nit-pick but it shows
| the big problem of how they advertise that their service is a
| solution to vagueness of an address. Because if you have a phone
| with GPS available (or a similar device) you don't need
| "geocoding" because you already have the precise
| latitude/longitude pair. And if you do not have a device with GPS
| you'll also have a problem getting the 3 words.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Studied GIS for 8 years in university and I still cannot
| understand the use case for W3W. It removes information with
| little benefit.
|
| If you have a position using a CRS you've got lots of
| information about where it is relative to other positions in
| the same CRS. If you have a street address, you have
| hierarchical information of that location, and yea you can
| geocode it if you want to exchange topology for position.
|
| If you have a W3W you've got a memorable hash that tells you
| nothing at all until you geocode it. Making a W3W really feels
| like the opposite of geocoding.
|
| Or consider it like this:
|
| A coordinate pair tells you in some unit (degrees, metres, etc)
| where something is relative to other coordinates (or the
| datum).
|
| An address tells you where things are topologically: "it's
| inside this city. Along this street. Beside these other
| addresses." (Usually...)
|
| What does a W3W tell you?
|
| And let me guess... to get any information out of a W3W you
| must use their proprietary system. If that's the case, what an
| absolutely moronic system to use.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >What does a W3W tell you?
|
| I'll bite. Using it as intended, both as a service and a
| physical coordinator (via 3 text chars), reveals a location
| with 3mx3m bounded precision. No other options exist that
| provide a solution to "where's the thing" without losing this
| key precision boundary.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's a memorable hash, yes. But you can't reason about
| anything else using the hash alone, and being slightly off
| can easily send you to the other side of the planet.
| acc_297 wrote:
| It's not a perfect system clearly but we used the 3-word code
| when I worked in forestry because everyone needed to memorize
| some kind of coordinates for emergencies requiring evacuation
| from our camp but nobody had a GPS or a map just an old beat
| up sat phone kept in the glove box
|
| The words we had were pretty good ones something like banana-
| sink-trampoline I don't remember now but using UTC or lat-
| long would definitely have been harder to memorize
|
| If you get a bad set of three words it's not so hard to
| choose a neighbouring set if I remember the grid was pretty
| fine grained I think our foreman "shopped around" for a nice
| easy set somewhere on the nearby logging road reasonably
| close to us
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Instead of memorizing some set of words, have a proper
| emergency plan with a named set of locations. Militaries do
| this all the time.
|
| This basically replaces "okay so this is evacuation point
| Alfa" with "okay so this is evacuation point carrots-bacon-
| ovens"
|
| In either case you still must consult an additional source
| if you need it translated to a coordinate system. And if
| you mix up "oven" with "ovens" you might end up evacuating
| to the other side of the planet.
| acc_297 wrote:
| the 3 words aren't for us they are exclusively for the
| search and rescue team who we talk to when buddy breaks
| his spine and needs an airlift
|
| And you can avoid the ovens vs oven problem by just
| picking a coordinate with good simple words the
| helicopter is fine to find you within a few hundred
| meters of your camp
|
| This system has been used extensively in remote resource
| extraction because humans in the pressure of an emergency
| can recall words and phrases better than numbers
|
| It works pretty well for this use case
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| W3W's use case is to trick governments into adopting their
| service, then collect payments forever more on what should be
| free, non-proprietary addressing infrastructure.
| nateberkopec wrote:
| I volunteered in SAR for five years, and the topic of W3W would
| occasionally come up.
|
| For me, it's just already damn hard to make sure you can hear
| numbers correctly over the radio. In marginal conditions, it's a
| hell of a lot easier to use numbers (and requires less time due
| to not having to repeat or ask for clarification).
|
| Do I really want to be trying to say "arrows.midst.senses" over a
| handheld radio?
| simonjgreen wrote:
| Very similar experience, decade in volunteer SAR with a lot of
| police and fire overlap.
|
| I hold exactly the same opinion as you, however what is very
| telling us that the police and fire services love it. I think
| that's because of the accessibility of the system rather than
| the underlying algorithm or communication.
|
| I am also coming to see w3w locations written more and more as
| a more accessible alternative to coordinates, especially in
| land sales and forestry situations.
|
| I do particularly hate that government services and agencies
| are becoming reliant on a commercially licensed pattern. It
| does not tick the sustainability tickbox for me.
|
| I hate it as much as I love it.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Can you suggest an iOS app that can give geo coordinates
| appropriate for S&R? Ideally whilst offline?
| sakjur wrote:
| The built-in Compass app shows your longitude, latitude, and
| elevation in addition to providing heading.
| switch007 wrote:
| SAR = Search and Rescue
| PeterisP wrote:
| Especially since "arrows.midst.senses" and "arrow.midst.senses"
| are two different locations, and if you mishear it as
| "arrows.midst.sends", that's yet another different valid
| location.
|
| Really, there's all the research done (since the invention of
| early radio?) on what makes a phonetic alphabet or phonetic
| code usable in noisy conditions, and instead W3W effectively
| plants a field of rakes in front of blindfolded people.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Or worse, "arrows.midst.senses" and "arrows.mist.senses"
| gorlilla wrote:
| Arrows.missed.census
| [deleted]
| charcircuit wrote:
| Why are you not sending text messages to each other if it is so
| hard to understand? You can have plenty of error correction to
| make sure the message always is correctly received.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| If they are in a situation in which they can send W3W
| coordinates by text message, then they are in a situation in
| which they can send ordinary numerical coordinates by text
| message.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I don't care what they use. I am stating they are using the
| wrong protocol if there is a chance to introduce errors
| when sending a message.
| permo-w wrote:
| poor implementation aside, the format has its advantages over
| numerical coordinates
|
| besides the greater public awareness of w3w amongst certain
| demographics compared to coordinates, they may be harder to
| hear, but it's much easier to read out three words correctly
| than it is 16-18 numbers
|
| the thing with words is that they're easy to hear in context,
| but take them out of context and they're often indecipherable
|
| perhaps a system that gives each square a coherent-sounding
| sentence could be tried, although I'm sure that would have its
| difficulties too
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Yeah, to avoid that confusion, it won't be three words when
| spoken.
|
| "arrows.midst.senses"
|
| Will become "Alpha, romeo, romeo, oscar, whiskey, sierra.
| Mike, india, delta, sierra, tango. Sierra, echo, november,
| sierra, echo, sierra".
| inopinatus wrote:
| Coherence is unfortunately a subjective matter, as in the
| phrase "too.much.butter" which is syntactically valid but has
| no comprehensible meaning.
| thakoppno wrote:
| The fifth decimal of a GPS coordinate resolves down to 1.1
| meter.
|
| Ten numbers doesn't sound much more difficult than three
| words to me.
| mlyle wrote:
| 12.34567N 89.01234W is 14 digits, 2 points, and 2 signs or
| letters.
|
| Earth is about 2^49 square meters. If you want precision of
| ~8 square meters, you're going to need to convey 46 bits of
| information (or use an optimization that gives less
| resolution over oceans, etc, but that's only going to be a
| small win-- a bit or two).
|
| 46/3.3 = 14 digits, but the latitude/longitude coding is a
| little less efficient because it's not uniform. A plus code
| does it in 11 characters (not including the plus) worth
| each 4.32 bits =~ 47.5 bits.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I'd say that's not so different from using IP addresses
| instead of DNS - generally not too popular (and that's for
| IPv4...)
| Jabbles wrote:
| https://w3w.me.ss/ collects examples of bad experiences with W3W.
| It is linked in the paper.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It really makes no sense to use it for emergency calls. 999/911
| can already access your location by GPS.
|
| I think the issue is that other less emergency numbers can't
| (like 101). That's why they tell you to hang up and call 999
| rather than transferring you.
|
| But I don't know why they just don't add more numbers to the
| "allowed to geolocate you" list. Or even build in a "send my
| location" button in phone calls. You wouldn't even need to
| modify the phone system - it could send DTFM tones.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| Really GPS on the device or just tower trangulation data? Is
| there information availae on how this works? In Austria
| emergency services can not access GPS directly afaik.
| mrcode007 wrote:
| I spoke with someone supplying 911 dispatch systems and
| they said the data is available instantly from
| triangulation data and it is extremely accurate
| IshKebab wrote:
| Really GPS, but it may not be as universal as I thought.
| This 2016 article says it is launching only on Android and
| only in the UK and Estonia.
|
| https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/google-now-automatically-
| provi...
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Note that GPS can be often unreliable or not precise enough.
| For example, it would be pretty useful to specify correct
| side of river/road/railway. Arriving at wrong side may result
| in needing to do very long detour.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Note that GPS can be often unreliable or not precise
| enough._
|
| But the W3W app identifies your position by GPS, meaning it
| is subject to the same general reliability problem via
| inheritance. Yes, it displays a map as well, so you can
| identify that you need to quote a different square, but in
| an emergency situation I'd posit that people are more
| likely to just read off the words and not really take in
| the displayed map. And the same solution works for GPS
| alone anyway - if you are reading your position using a
| phone app it is likely displaying an approximate map also.
| fsh wrote:
| This is such a pointless product anyway. Every smartphone on the
| market can share its precise location in a machine-readable
| format with any other smartphone on the market. They even do it
| automatically when calling an emergency service. Why would you
| ever want to transmit a location by reading a string to someone?
| acc_297 wrote:
| If you are out of cell service and talking to search and rescue
| via a satellite phone
|
| This is the use case I've seen 3words applied most often
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >in a machine-readable format
|
| You're missing the point. The w3w coordinate system is designed
| to be readable by humans. The massive increasing adoption of
| this system should be a large hint that it is useful.
| thelittlenag wrote:
| Oddly enough W3W fails to go far enough in the direction of
| being friendly to humans. Hence all the many criticisms of it
| as a solution.
| ofou wrote:
| Plus Codes are way better because they are open source. S2 is
| kind of analogous (also from Google), but 64-bit integers. I
| wonder if someone will ever come up with an Emoji encoding for
| GPS, regional flags might facilitate everything. It's just a
| random idea.
| throwaway2562 wrote:
| I'm pretty certain W3W are not now profitable and never will be.
| They've raised a ridiculous sum for a service which does not
| appear to be much-in demand.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The whole business was about trying to seek rent on the whole
| concept of addresses. I'm glad to see it not working out,
| though it would've been better if all the people involved had
| enough morals not to pursue such an idea in the first place.
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| in a different world, they might pivot to a wikimedia-like
| "open maps foundation", open-source everything while riding
| the wave of a huge amount of [new-to-them] good will, fat
| 501c3 donations and much smarter people than them helping fix
| their algorithm.
| Recursing wrote:
| For more on this, and why I think we shouldn't advocate for W3W,
| see: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-
| three-... for theoretical reasons and https://w3w.me.ss/ for some
| practical examples.
|
| https://plus.codes seems much better, but sadly it uses random
| characters instead of words, which is much harder for humans to
| remember ( https://xkcd.com/936/ ), so I don't think it will ever
| catch on.
|
| That's pretty sad in my opinion, is the whole concept of using
| words to encode a location now owned by w3w? The implementation
| seems trivial
| dspillett wrote:
| _> is the whole concept of using words to encode a location now
| owned by w3w?_
|
| Essentially, yes. There are patents involved, and W3W are
| rather litigious so if you have a competing idea/implementation
| that doesn't infringe be prepared to expensively defend that
| position.
|
| That hasn't stopped some good parody versions existing though,
| perhaps the best known being https://www.fourkingmaps.co.uk/
| [reporting in from hoes.abortion.cumshot.dope!]
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| > sadly it uses random characters instead of words
|
| It was explicitly designed in that way [1]. It does make harder
| to remember, but I think the memorizability constrains other
| goals too much.
|
| [1] https://github.com/google/open-location-
| code/wiki/Evaluation...
| avidiax wrote:
| This seems like a missing UX feature. Give the NATO (or
| regional) phonetic alphabet for the code, have a synthetic
| voice saying those characters, and maybe have an audio modem.
| Condition1952 wrote:
| What I dislike of plus.codes is that they have replaced GPS
| coordinates on google maps. GPS coordinates are multiplatform
| where only Google maps seems to be able to decode those fancy
| codes
| growse wrote:
| I get both latlng and plus codes when selecting a location on
| the android games client.
|
| Plus codes are an open standard, osmand at least also
| supports them.
| Condition1952 wrote:
| So the problem is not Google maps but the other proprietary
| app. Thanks for the heads up
| snthd wrote:
| Pluscode is a trademark. The actual standard is called "open
| location code" and is unrestricted -
| https://github.com/google/open-location-code/
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| >it uses random characters instead of words, which is much
| harder for humans to remember
|
| Do we really need to remember them, instead of just writing
| them down?
| [deleted]
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