It's interesting to read this post as a "western world citizen" whose country's boundaries rarely (if never) change (well, I don't think a big part of HN ever heard of its country boundaries ever changed in his lifetime).
It felt eye-opening when I stumbled on this issue some years ago. We were building a Google Maps app for a branch of the UN and my boss told me we needed to hide the map's boundaries and use the ones supplied by the UN. I was rather intrigued and he explained how the boundaries used by Google sometimes clashed with the UN's recognition of boundaries for some countries. So I went and loaded the KML using the UN-official boundaries.
Of course, I see some were quick to jump the "Google is taking too much power" bandwagon, but a story is not just on HN to be told but also to engage our minds to reflect. And to me, the story here seems to be about digital recognition of countries beginning to be almost on par with international recognition, and how the digital world, that we thought (hoped?) would abolish the frontiers between men, is still taking these frontiers in account.
Borders change quite a bit, Yugoslavia broke up, and Czechoslovakia too, both of which I am sure many HN readers are from. East and West Germany merged, even more HN readers from there.
Guilty on this one, especially since Germany is a neighboring country and I didn't even think of it. Which illustrates my point: when our borders never changed, we can have a tendency to take them for granted and not imagine that other countries are struggling to have theirs recognized.
It felt eye-opening when I stumbled on this issue some years ago. We were building a Google Maps app for a branch of the UN and my boss told me we needed to hide the map's boundaries and use the ones supplied by the UN. I was rather intrigued and he explained how the boundaries used by Google sometimes clashed with the UN's recognition of boundaries for some countries. So I went and loaded the KML using the UN-official boundaries.
Of course, I see some were quick to jump the "Google is taking too much power" bandwagon, but a story is not just on HN to be told but also to engage our minds to reflect. And to me, the story here seems to be about digital recognition of countries beginning to be almost on par with international recognition, and how the digital world, that we thought (hoped?) would abolish the frontiers between men, is still taking these frontiers in account.