What3Words Sends Legal Threat To a Security Researcher For Sharing an Open-Source Alternative (techcrunch.com) 133
Posted by msmash on Monday May 03, 2021 @11:38AM from the how-about-that dept.
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A U.K. company behind digital addressing system What3Words has sent a legal threat to a security researcher for offering to share an open-source software project with other researchers, which What3Words claims violate its copyright.
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But security researcher Andrew Tierney recently discovered that What3Words would sometimes have two similarly-named squares less than a mile apart, potentially causing confusion about a person’s true whereabouts. In a later write-up, Tierney said What3Words was not adequate for use in safety-critical cases.
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Maybe Google’s system is better?
40.48453468598731, -74.42346811440515
As opposed to:
safety freed solo
AKA https://w3w.co/safety.freed.solo
WhatFreeWords should NOT be suppressed.
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What3Words Sends Ridiculous Legal Threat To Security Researcher Over Open Source Alternative
(Mis)Uses of Technology
from the never-use-what3words dept
Mon, May 3rd 2021 10:47am — Mike Masnick
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The only proper response to this is never, ever use What3Words for anything that matters. Beyond not giving in to censorial, abusive bullies, their legal reaction to a security researcher doing reverse engineering work to help find potentially dangerous problems with What3Words screams loudly to the world that What3Words has no confidence that it’s products are safe. They’re scared to death of security researchers being able to really test their work.
Both of these reasons means that What3Words should be remembered as little more than a failed.dumpster.fire rather than the cool.mapping.idea it could have been.
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Reinke Faces Life 