Originally Posted by
moondog
During one of my flights this past week, I discovered that Baidu Maps --and, presumably other offline maps-- serves as a pretty good flight tracker tool. Until the cell phone ban is lifted early next year, viewing flight progress on our phones will certainly remain a taboo practice (I.e. best to be discrete), but those of you with GPS tablets can presumably avail without the risk of being chastised.
I've been doing this with Google Maps for years, even before WiFi was on any flights. You had to zoom in on areas you wished to see detail and let it download that data, prior to the flight, however.
Now, with WiFi on most planes, I'll let friends track my flight using Gympse.
Originally Posted by
moondog
@sts:
1. I have a great deal of respect for Google because it hasn't kowtowed to the PRC in same manner as Microsoft/Yahoo
2. But, Microsoft/Yahoo demonstrate that BAT does NOT enjoy an unfair advantage
3. Data security and privacy are top concerns for Tencent. Your issue seems semi serious; feel free to message me directly about it
Regarding Microsoft/Yahoo, are you sure? While the US government has not, to my knowledge, restricted private companies from gathering geographic data, street views, etc., in any way, China seems to be stuck in the Cold War era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restri..._data_in_China
Is the problem that Microsoft/Yahoo can't cater to the Chinese market as well as Baidu, or is their mapping operation actually being hindered by red tape? Google's definitely being hindered by red tape.
Also, do you know people on the security team in Tencent? It's not really a Tencent issue; I don't really trust Google with that much data either. Gtalk/Hangouts or whatever they rebrand it as next, still doesn't use end-to-end encryption and Google could, if they wanted to, look into the contents of all of my conversations. I don't like that. Tencent/Wechat is even worse, and actually blocks messages based on the content of said messages (I
was deliberately trying to send controversial stuff, in Chinese, just to see what would happen, but still, it's none of their business especially if it's a private conversation). What all of these services need to do is encrypt data in such a way that they can't even read the messages like Open Whisper Systems' Signal app does.