Google Publishes Detailed Map of North Korea

Blog spam. I don't see how Mashable added any value to the original announcement by Google: <a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.ca/2013/01/publishing-more-detailed-maps-of-north.html" rel="nofollow">http://google-latlong.blogspot.ca/2013/01/publishing-more-de...</a>

Hard to judge these things by eye, particularly if not a local, but it doesn't look as detailed as OpenStreetMap's (which is also crowd-sourced):<p><a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=39.0174&#38;lon=125.7408&#38;zoom=13&#38;layers=Q" rel="nofollow">http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=39.0174&#38;lon=125.7408&#...</a>

The ariel imagery still isn't as good as Bing, but the new road layouts are much better. However they don't appear to have the river traces which Bing has.<p>It's interesting because after reading Escape from Camp 14 last year I looked in to visiting the DPRK, considering the moral rammifcations of directly giving cash to the country via one of the approved tourist agencies.<p>Luckily before I had to decide if it was OK, I found the rules about being a tourist.<p>No Smartphone. No Radio devices of any kind (no GPS!). No Computers. No digital storage above 4GB. No digital camera with "powerful" lens (they never did clarify).

Wow, they've even labelled gulags:<p><a href="http://goo.gl/maps/6IiCp" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/maps/6IiCp</a>

Finally! I have been waiting ages for this functionality. Every time I browsed to North Korea it was just a blank gray collection of pixels.<p>Next step street view!

Has anyone noticed all the blue roofs in satellite maps of North Korea and China? A quick search hinted that all industrial buildings are painted blue, much in the way construction vehicles are yellow.<p>At first glance, it looks like a mapping detail injected by Google Maps. Anyone have more information on these blue rooftops?<p>Example (Sinuiju, North Korea): <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=North+Korea&#38;hl=en&#38;ll=40.086855,124.378796&#38;spn=0.011574,0.022724&#38;sll=44.913398,-93.220024&#38;sspn=0.085704,0.181789&#38;oq=north+korea&#38;t=h&#38;hnear=North+Korea&#38;z=16" rel="nofollow">https://maps.google.com/maps?q=North+Korea&#38;hl=en&#38;ll=...</a>

I find it curious that so many roads/streets in Pyongyang have names, it's a relatively new thing that's still hardly universal in Seoul.

Wait a minute, mapmaker is available in North Korea? Last time I checked, it was not available in Europe. Strange priorities ...

Has NK said anything about this? I thought it was considered a bad idea to do so (retaliation of some sort).

there are no people/ cars/ anything in most (all?) of the images doesn't anyone else find it strange that its a ghost country?

Why no Street View? I kid, I kid...