Cyber attacks in the OSM space

[apm-wa (Allan Mustard)]

@Peter_Elderson

For OSM to open up the larger world of end user map data applications, it must offer a more stable, more reliable, more available data with quality assurance. That means, it cannot happen that one malicious common user this easily corrupts the delivered end product and hits all the end user applications. If OSM does not offer that, this larger world is not within reach. There is a strategic choice here, I am not sure if this choice has been made.

Any solution has to keep the mapper side as open as possible.

That is why I would prefer to solve this conundrum at the data delivery side. And I don’t think it suffices to point out that anyone can set up a filtering system and a cleaned-tile server, because the decision makers will then, as they do now, generally prefer a paid service with no-attack guarantees.

This is precisely why Overture has appeared. It addresses this exact need, for quality assurance of data provided to end users. What I find interesting as an economist is that the current OSMF budget for supporting the project is roughly a million dollars, while the Overture budget for building a cleaned-up version of OSM data augmented by additional data from other sources is multiple millions of dollars.