About a week ago, vandals began defacing the map in South Korea. Over the course of that week, I rolled back hundreds of changes, and with the help of the site鈥檚 moderators, I banned over 50 malicious accounts. In fact, the problem arose not even a week ago, but about a month ago. Back then, South Korean media reported that one account had allegedly leaked the locations of all the country鈥檚 military bases to the public on Openstreetmap. (link) Even then, this false media claim struck me as disgusting, but it didn鈥檛 cause any major problems. Almost simultaneously, another Korean media report about Openstreetmap appeared: allegedly, an error in the domestic mapping services NaverMap and KakaoMap displaying a river in North Korea was linked to Openstreetmap鈥檚 activities: (link) It鈥檚 hard to say whether this is a deliberate attack on OpenStreetMap or whether the Korean journalists simply lack the basic journalistic training to understand the issue. I鈥檓 leaning toward the latter, as if there was a deliberate intent, they would have acted more intelligently. But the result is what matters. This news quickly found its way into the ultra-conservative circles of the Korean right, who are obsessed with conspiracy theories, set up their accounts under the hashtag #YoonAgain, and believe that OpenStreetMap is a creation of Chinese communists and Russian Putinists. They say that yesterday, Russia bombed Ukraine with OpenStreetMap, and tomorrow, North Korea will start bombing the South. So they raided OpenStreetMap with the goal of once again saving (and embarrassing) their country. But what鈥檚 funniest about this whole situation for me is that it wasn鈥檛 even Korean military bases that were vandalized, but power plants. Apparently, some employee at one of them (or even at a ministry) was such a crazy person that he managed to convince his superiors that there was data somewhere online that needed to be urgently deleted. He didn鈥檛 send an official request, didn鈥檛 write on the forum...
First seen: 2025-12-06 23:20
Last seen: 2025-12-07 01:21