[HN Gopher] Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations ...
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Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of
Switzerland's Maps
Author : mhb
Score : 225 points
Date : 2025-12-01 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eyeondesign.aiga.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (eyeondesign.aiga.org)
| sschueller wrote:
| The digital version over at https://map.geo.admin.ch/ has existed
| for many years but it is only a few years now that all Cantos
| have agreed to provide the data for free[1]. There is a lot of
| interesting data such as "Larmbelastung" where you can lookup how
| loud car or rail traffic is at a location.
|
| [1] https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/general-terms-of-use-fsdi
| KronisLV wrote:
| The speed at which that map loads on a slightly old iPhone is
| really pleasant!
|
| Aside from that, having those little Easter eggs in the maps is
| nice, at least more so than fake streets.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Visual steganography.
| mzajc wrote:
| I love this kind of tongue-in-cheek steganography. In a similar
| vein: Vermont Inmates Hide Image Of Pig On Police Decals
| (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/02/03/146358114...)
| Rendello wrote:
| > "'This is not as offensive as it would have been years ago.
| We can see the humor,' said Public Safety Commissioner Keith
| Flynn, a former state trooper and state prosecutor who was
| named commissioner a year ago. 'If the person had used some of
| that creativeness, he or she would not have ended up inside.'"
|
| I read (and re-read, and re-read) the book _You Can 't Win_ on
| recommendation of a HN user. It's about a thief from the late
| 1800s-early 1900s, and the crimes he and his thief buddies did
| were pretty creative. A lot of crime is more brute-force than
| clever, but people can do some pretty interesting things if
| they want something and don't care if they lose everything.
| benchly wrote:
| > _You Can 't Win_
|
| It's pretty entertaining!
|
| And free to read for anyone interested:
| https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A hidden pig? I bet some younger cops covet the cars with
| this logo.
|
| I was once at a military unit where someone hid a golf club
| in a crest for the door to the officers mess. It was spotted
| years later. The officers claimed to "never found out who did
| it", but they also never took it down.
| delichon wrote:
| I agree for the decal, but the map steganography is at the
| expense of accuracy. It's less than professional, like adding a
| small bug to a corner case of your code for a joke.
| andy99 wrote:
| I only skimmed the pictures in the article but the ones I saw
| could have no plausible impact on navigation. They are buried
| within tiny details that are essentially artistic anyway,
| there is no impact on accuracy possible.
| delichon wrote:
| Not none, just very little, like the obscure code corner
| case. If you are thinking about building something nearby,
| or specifically looking for interesting terrain to visit,
| you may be misled. The pig shaped cow spot, on the other
| hand, adds accurate symbology to the decal, with a
| wholesome helping of self deprecation.
|
| To allow de minimis excursions from ground truth is a
| necessary compromise, but purposely introducing them isn't.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Oh please.
|
| Anyone looking to actually do something interesting with
| a piece of land is going to have to a much higher
| resolution map of the site, not use the extreme zoom and
| on a map covering a huge area.
|
| Or they may even go rogue and visit the place! Heavens to
| Murgatroyd!
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I don't think the effect would be serious. I have plotted
| explorations of the wilderness off topo maps--and I
| always head out perfectly well knowing that the map isn't
| a sufficiently accurate representation of reality to
| actually trust it. The flatter the terrain on the map the
| more likely it will prove passable on the ground but
| features can be small enough to not show, yet make it
| impractical to get through.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Trap streets and fake towns are far worse than the examples
| shown here.
| myself248 wrote:
| For something like a glacier, whose face is changing
| constantly anyway, who could even say if it didn't look like
| a marmot for a while? That whole part of the map could just
| say "glacier face" and be cross-hatched since it's unknowable
| at the time of publication, but that's no fun.
| delichon wrote:
| Adding fun to an information stream degrades the signal for
| non-fun payloads. As a rule I prefer maximum signal to
| noise in reference materials.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I've found this is an amazingly high conflict subject in
| life. I once had to manage someone that was one of those
| people that did things like these mappers. It drove me
| insane. I constantly had to tell them to redo their work.
| They loved trying to insert Simpsons(TV SHOW) references
| into everything. I had a serious talk with them about the
| fact that you cannot do things that are "fun" if it
| conflicts with the work
| accuracy/reliability/readability/maintainability. They
| never listened and I had to manage them out. One of only
| two employees I had to get rid of in my career, so far.
|
| I really don't understand these types and why they think
| its "harmless" to do this type of stuff. I don't want to
| create potentially more work for myself and I definitely
| don't want people that work for me to do so.
|
| I've also worked with people that did this many times. It
| seems to be something like 5-10% of the working
| population that has this weird near neurotic compulsion
| to do this sort of "funny-sabotage" at work and cannot
| seem to resist even at the cost of their job.
| 0003 wrote:
| You say you don't understand these types & that this is a
| high conflict subject for you. To offer a perspective, I
| think it has to do with how individuals cope with their
| existence. In every moment, we could be doing something
| more worthy of existence; worse, most of our life is
| sacrificed to working that definitely does not meet such
| lofty criteria. So take these small, but irrational acts
| just as minor self-therapy (vs rebellion) that is
| constructive to the individual -- hopefully it does not
| do any serious harm (I trust your judgement you made the
| right call).
|
| I wager this is going to become more and more common as
| humanity cries against the hyper-specialization and
| hyper-inferred MEANING on work that may be trivial in
| scope when juxtaposed that we really only know that
| ourselves our conscious (or choose your word for whatever
| illusion we're experiencing). I imagine there exists at
| least 1 UBER phd gig worker who did not fully take
| seriously the annotative training work he or she was
| doing, if you're familiar with that article that made
| rounds recently.
|
| People also change with age, and perhaps in 20 years you
| may find yourself doing these same things. Or, maybe now,
| coping differently in different ways, but that people
| find equally incomprehensible -- I know I do.
|
| Just mean the above for good, seriously.
| myself248 wrote:
| What if it didn't conflict with the accuracy/etc? If you
| need names for an example scenario and Alice and Bob are
| already used elsewhere, what would be wrong with Bart and
| Lisa?
| estebank wrote:
| Applications have had easter eggs for ages.
|
| https://play.rust-
| lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
| comrade1234 wrote:
| If you ever come to Switzerland download the swisstopo app. It is
| very detailed and useful for hiking but even in the city too,
| showing the locations of fountains, for example, rural and urban
| official and unofficial hiking trails, closed trails, slopes too
| steep to traverse, etc etc etc.
|
| The Swiss topographical institute is a treasure.
| kakacik wrote:
| This is where screenshots come from, official topo data are
| free. I use them all the time for hiking, ski touring etc. Good
| thing they cover also neighboring mountains a bit (to varying
| detail) so ie France or Italy can be enjoyed just with a single
| app.
|
| Then you go further and realize how much worse free easy to
| find things are. There are variations of opentopomap but they
| lack the finesse of this.
|
| Also available in various other layouts ie biking (veloland),
| canoeing or various winter sports (sadly no outright ski
| touring so I aproximate summer hiking paths, the best to use
| are still physical maps but then you need a hefty stash of
| various zooms at home, pricey too).
|
| But none is perfect - opentopo map has some obscure artifacts,
| see ie here what I found by a chance - some hole too deep to be
| real, near Aletsch glacier or famous Eiger, a mountain slope in
| Bernese alps [1], while official Swiss topo looks like this
| without any such illogical artifact [2]
|
| [1] https://opentopomap.org/#map=15/46.55901/8.07171 [2]
| https://schweizmobil.ch/en/map?season=summer&bgLayer=pk&laye...
| fotcorn wrote:
| Seems like the hiker at the bottom of the article was introduced
| in 1997 and removed only in 2017:
| https://s.geo.admin.ch/be66brq5oby9
| philipallstar wrote:
| > illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo
| in defiance of their mandate "to reconstitute reality."
|
| This is such an odd idea.
| knotimpressed wrote:
| It's a fun idea too!
| TwoFerMaggie wrote:
| Slightly annoying that the magnified parts are directly over
| their original location. This blocks the view to see them in
| their original size and context.
| NaOH wrote:
| Previously:
|
| _Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside
| Swiss Official Maps_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22490017 - Mar 2020 (22
| comment)
|
| _Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside
| Swiss Official Maps_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22461602 - Mar 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside
| Swiss Official Maps_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407413 - Feb 2020 (1
| comment)
| jmward01 wrote:
| I recently read 'The Cartographers' by Peng Shepherd. If you like
| this article and want to read a fun murder mystery about things
| hidden in maps then that is definitely the book for you. (No
| relation to the author here, I just liked the book!)
| qwertox wrote:
| Appending a "for Kids" would turn them into immediate heroes.
| 725686 wrote:
| I haven't read the article, but aren't these introduced to detect
| illegal copies?
| delichon wrote:
| I would think that they are too recognizable for that. It would
| be better to subtly change one insignificant squiggle into
| another.
| bell-cot wrote:
| They're only too recognizable if the someone's paying very
| close attention.
|
| Vs. if they're not, and Swisstopo can point that out - the
| internet can enjoy pillizing the perp.
| fsflover wrote:
| You probably mean this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
| maptime wrote:
| Speaking from experience, it's more often bored cartographers
| trying to inject some fun into mundane activities.
|
| I used to try and write my initials.
|
| Quite often it devolves into a game of seeing what you can get
| past the reviewers
| Aachen wrote:
| Interesting perspective. As an OSM contributor, I've never
| had this thought. You presumably spend up to 8 hours a day
| mapping, all week long (depending on the week perhaps), which
| I can totally imagine gets old. I only map when I feel like
| it and not when I'm bored
|
| And on OSM we don't have boss fights in the shape of
| reviewers. That does sound like a fun challenge :P
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| The marmot, hiker, and fish- alright. I buy it. The others...
| Feels a bit like finding shapes in the clouds.
|
| But I'm no cartographer so maybe these are more obvious to people
| that have the skill.
| CalChris wrote:
| Reminds me of a message hidden in a NOAA weather forecast during
| a government shutdown
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/politics/weather-service-cryp...
| The-Bus wrote:
| As long as they keep their hidden illustrations away from my
| precious Swiss chocolate logos!
| bell-cot wrote:
| ???
|
| Hiding Swiss chocolate logos in their maps could be seen as
| improper. Unless, of course, the chocolate company was paying
| Swisstopo above-board for that placement.
| tokai wrote:
| You have it the wrong way around. Take a good hard look at
| the Toblerone Matterhorn logo.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Hic sunt illustrationes :)
| keepamovin wrote:
| When I was a cartographer in the 1500s I used to hide dragons,
| sea serpents and the occasional heretical inscription in the
| blank bits, because at least back then the Holy Roman Emperor had
| the decency to pretend he didn't notice as long as the tax
| broders were correct.
|
| Now look at us: the Swiss federal cartographers, salaried,
| pensioned, triple-proofread, still cannot resist smuggling a
| naked woman and a cheeky marmot into the official topography. And
| the admisntration? They wait until the perpetrator has safely
| retired on full index-linked benefits, then solemnly announce the
| marmot will be "removed in the next revision cycle, pending
| environmental-impact assessment of the pixel."
|
| This is what passes for rebellion inside the European regulatory
| state: a rodent drawn at 1:25 000 scale that offends precisely no
| one and will be erased by a civil servant who wasn't even born
| when it was sketched. Truly the revolutionary spirit of our
| continent has been reduced to a change-request ticket with
| fourteen mandatory approvers and a carbon-copy to Bern.
|
| I fill in another compliance form and weep for the age when men
| risked the stake for a badly drawn leviathan.
| fat-soyboy wrote:
| Conspiracy theory article
| pugworthy wrote:
| A different kind of map, but 3d level (map) designers seem to
| enjoy doing Easter eggs and hidden things in levels. There are
| the famous Half-Life G-man cameos for example, which aren't quite
| fourth wall as it were, but still something not many know of.
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(page generated 2025-12-01 23:00 UTC)