Strange. The BirdsEyeView are much better pictures of the roof so what does it buy them to block out the lower resolution pictures.
I think this clearly llustrates the futility of trying to censor these images. There are so many alternative sources that censoring a picture (or many information source for that matter) would just slow a determined person down.
I don't beleieve that they were trying to censor anything, but rather imagine that this is a color or contrast adjustment gone bad. Notice how all the eraser marks stop at dark spots... I imagine there was some sort of reflection or out of gamut area related to these bright white roofs that was being corrected.
If you click the "Show Labels" checkbox you can see the image without the gray overlay that the MS map layer superimposes, and the transparent area becomes much less noticeable.
Anonymous
@ 2006-03-06 16:53:13
I think maybe Flea is on to something. There doesn't seem to be anything on the roof that would be sensitive enough to spend time blocking it out...
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I think this clearly llustrates the futility of trying to censor these images. There are so many alternative sources that censoring a picture (or many information source for that matter) would just slow a determined person down.
If you click the "Show Labels" checkbox you can see the image without the gray overlay that the MS map layer superimposes, and the transparent area becomes much less noticeable.
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=39.940121~-74.845433&style=h&lvl=18
http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=39.939324~-74.778078&style=a&lvl=18&scene=2158223
you can see that there are similar issues in the black areas as well, which would lend more evdence to the contrast adjustment theory.