While we enjoy the fruit of technology, lets not forget the fact that technology is fallible and sometimes, it takes the simplest of “tricks” to fool technology. Case-in-point: Berlin artist Simon Weckert hauled 99 smartphones in a handcart, duping Google Maps into believing that this is a traffic jam.
What happen was, the 99 smartphones in the handcart were all reporting their locations and movement to Google’s servers. This gave the servers the impression of a huge cluster of slow-moving traffic (more like walking pace), which is then duly reported on the map as red lines.
For those who are not familiar, orange and red on Google Maps indicates severity of the traffic which can be useful for drivers to choose the appropriate route. However, in this case, it was dud. To be fair, this fallibility is a result of the crowdsourced nature of Google Maps and should be nothing be alarmed, or is it?
Images: YouTube (Simon Weckert).
Source: boing boing.