Screenshot of a LinkedIn post from the OpenStreetMap account marked “URGENT.” The post asks for technology journalists to cover a story about new risks to open data. It explains that OpenStreetMap is experiencing unprecedented bot scraping activity: instead of a few IPs making very large numbers of requests, there are now hundreds of thousands of coordinated IP addresses each making a small number of requests, making blocking ineffective. The post quotes senior site reliability engineer Grant Slater, who says OSM is being hammered by scrapers using residential proxy or embedded SDK networks, creating real costs for the volunteer-run project. Hashtags include #opendata, #OpenStreetMap, #AI, #Bots, and #Abuse. The post ends by noting the irony that OSM data is free to use, yet these bot attacks pose an unnecessary risk to the entire project.
Open Street Maps might be seeing some trouble according to their LinkedIn, as further attacks on open data increase. OSM has been absolutely critical to public health and public service tools for years.
#MapSky #geography
