Item — HN Reader

That's a somewhat misleading headline.

From the article:

Agence France-Presse quoted a Waze official as saying the device setting to warn about areas “dangerous or prohibited for Israelis to drive through” was off.

“In this case, the setting was disabled. In addition, the driver deviated from the suggested route and, as a result, entered the prohibited area,” the official told the news agency.

3 comments

Also:

"It remained unclear how the soldiers could have stumbled into the middle of the camp, sandwiched between Jerusalem and Ramallah. To reach Qalandiya, the soldiers would have had to pass by the so-called separation barrier and through an Israeli checkpoint."

Something seems fishy here. The lines following it do not convince me we got the whole objective story:

"In the camp, they were “stormed by a mob of people with rocks and molotov cocktails,” Lerner said. Their jeep was blocked from turning around and caught fire. The soldiers fled in separate directions.

One of the soldiers had a mobile phone and within 30 minutes was located by several backup units of soldiers and Israeli police. The second soldier was found an hour later in the vicinity of an Israeli settlement."

Two soldiers from a non-combat unit get stormed by a mob armed with stones and Molotov cocktails, their car catches fire, but they survive until relieved 'within 30 minutes' (presumably, that's at least 15 minutes later)? I find that hard to believe.

Yes, the content of the article seems to contradict the headline. Isn't it the opposite of the headline? Soldier who ignored Waze ended up in a dangerous firefight?

Or just maybe, militar personnel ough to rely on their government's reconn/intel reports instead of using customer grade apps that were never designed for wartime usage.

Military issue equipment is often low quality[1][2]. Intel and recon is oft contracted to a similar standard. I'm not surprised that they choose Waze over the alternative.

[1] Much of my military (USA) issued gear was replaced by commercial or handmade gear [1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/16/178813/-

Wait, are there military "Waze" deployments? That'd probably be pretty useful, yes? In addition to the routing information, a military could have an "enterprise" Waze that contained a bunch of intel marked on a map based on reports from the field.

There are military GIS systems, probably not Waze :)