Iran Plans To Launch an 'Islamic Google Earth' 181
Shipwack sends this quote from the Guardian:
"The Iranian authorities have long accused Google Earth of being a tool for western spy agencies, but now they have taken their attacks on the 3D mapping service one step further — by planning the launch of an 'Islamic' competitor. ... The minister, however, gave little information on what he meant by an Islamic 3D map. 'We are developing this service with the Islamic views we have in Iran and we will put a kind of information on our website that would take people of the world towards reality Our values in Iran are the values of God and this would be the difference between Basir and the Google Earth, which belongs to the ominous triangle of the U.S., England and the Zionists [a reference to Israel].' Experts, however, have serious doubts about the project. An IT consultant who has worked on Iran's national internet project in the past said the announcement was merely an excuse to obtain funds and secure working contracts for the future. 'They have claimed to run their service in four months and said their data centre capacity will reach Google's size in three years,' he said. 'Three-year project, no business model and only relying on government funding, a piece of cake indeed. To have a data centre with such capacity and security level they need power stations, cooler systems, bandwidth, etc, which will require billions of dollars of investment that doesn't fit with Iran's sanctions-hit economy.'"
That's how they will do it (Score:5, Funny)
They have long wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map and this is how they will do it. Just make their own maps and pretend they don't exist. Now if only they would do support virtual terrorism instead of real terrorism.
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Re:That's how they will do it (Score:5, Informative)
You are aware right, that Iranians are not Arabs?
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The Persian empires were even worse.
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I thought it was Alexander, 26 centuries ago.
Re:That's how they will do it (Score:5, Funny)
The Moors were stopped...
Oh no, I'm so sorry it's the Moops. The correct answer is the Moops.
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Don't forget the Reconquista [wikipedia.org], the re-taking of Iberian peninsula (a/k/a/ the Caliphate of Cordoba) from the Islamic invaders [wikipedia.org].
Regarding the "Halal Earth" I bet you won't be able to find suntanning women (no links provided!), but how about people in for instance France at a cafe terrace drinking wine?
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Or the US southeast with all their pork BBQs?
French Resistance vs. Iraqi Resistance memes (Score:4, Interesting)
Leave aside that the US would still be a British colony if the French hadn't supported the revolutionaries as part of their war with Britain.
The reason we've had the "France surrenders" and "Freedom Fries" memes spread around by the US press since 2002 or so is that France didn't support Bush's war on Iraq, and the Bush League didn't want people comparing the Iraqi resistance to the WW II French Resistance, who were total badasses defending their country against invaders. Bush's propaganda push was that after the US beat Saddam, any Iraqis who didn't hail us as liberators were terrorists who deserve to be stomped into the ground because they hated our freedom.
Oh, yeah, the French Foreign Legion? They were colonialists who were generally on the side of evil, but they were also badasses.
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Nonsense; we've been sneering at the French (and they sneering right back) since at least WWII. "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" goes back to 1995.
Re:French Resistance vs. Iraqi Resistance memes (Score:4, Interesting)
WW II French Resistance, who were total badasses defending their country against invaders
And a tiny fraction of the French population, much of which instead spent the war handing over their Jews to the Nazis, especially the (100% French) right-wing Vichy regime. Compare this to the Danes, who also pre-emptively surrendered and were generally nonviolent during their occupation - unlike France, they were not a military/industrial empire and would have been overrun no matter what - but helped nearly their entire Jewish population escape to Sweden and refused to cooperate with the Germans. After the war, France was treated as a "winner" in part because of the political smarts of de Gaulle, and in part to make them feel better and secure their cooperation against the Soviet Union, but in fact the war was won almost entirely by the US, UK (and affiliated nations), and USSR.
The "France surrenders" meme was around long before the run-up to the Iraq war, which is part of why it caught on so quickly (it didn't hurt that a large fraction of Americans are credulous morons happy to believe anything bad about everyone who opposed Bush's lunacy). WWII wasn't the last time France was completely embarrassed; the battle of Dien Bien Phu was another low point.
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The French were defeated, as were the British, in the early stages of the war. The British had to flee from Dunkirk with the French covering their escape. Both militiaries were in poor shape at the time, underfunded, undermanned and with old and unreliable equipment. If Hitler had started an invasion of Britain immediately he would probably have won, but instead he made a huge error in starting an air war that there was little prospect of winning from the start.
That's why I don't really get the "surrender m
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ALL RIGHT we'll create our own Google Earth! (Score:5, Funny)
Or HOOKERS!
or Israel.
or gays.
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Or porn.
Or anyone using it.
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I was going to go with something "flat earth" but this is much better. Well done.
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Now if only they would do support virtual terrorism instead of real terrorism.
I rather hope they don't do that either. Did you see the next story? [slashdot.org]
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That was honestly what I was thinking when I read the summary.
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I figure they'll just replace North America with a picture of a camel.
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They have long wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map and this is how they will do it.
Please stop circulating this myth [wikipedia.org] and criticize Iran by its actual statements.
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All those street level images with women in them, they will al be photoshopped to put bhurkas on them.
Wow you just made me think of an excellent idea. Let's start a competing maps site (oh wait we already have openmaps) and lets have a street view with every chick under 30 completely nude. In about two days it will be more popular than google maps.
So it will have burkas instead of smudges? (Score:5, Funny)
Someone up for a corn field portrait of a certain prophet?
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I think they plan to have lots of virgins there.
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I think they have lots of virgins here.
FTFY.
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I think they plan to have lots of virgins there.
Where, exactly?
Re:So it will have burkas instead of smudges? (Score:4, Insightful)
/. sure has a lot of them.
Hey, nobody said anything about them having to be female, right?
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It's great if you have a tiny dick and don't want them to realize how pathetic you are. I think that's why all these assholes are so fascinated about blowing themselves up and killing a bunch of people in the process. Lot's of women that don't realize what they're missing, hell of a fantasy. Personally I hope they wind up in a place with a 300 pound faggot named Bubba.
Islamic 3D Earth (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Islamic 3D Earth (Score:4, Funny)
I think an Islamic 3D Earth is a great idea! The big difficulty in the plan will be convincing the Islamic folks to go live there . . .
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More polygons?
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Don't you mean more cowbell?
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OH GOD THEY TOOK CHRISTOPHER WALKEN HOSTAGE????
Quick, someone go to Tehran and pretend to make a movie!
no one would believe you want him as an actor in your movie.
Re:Islamic 3D Earth (Score:5, Funny)
1. Create 3D map image.
2.
3. Prophet!
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Wasn't that what Iraq tried to do when it invaded Kuwait? We all know how that turned out.
Re:Islamic 3D Earth (Score:5, Funny)
the fact that in the Qur'an, the earth is said to be flat. ... therefore, once it states something, nothing - not even scientific proofs - can negate it.
OK: what impact (pun intended) does that have when an islamic rocket scientist tries to calculate an ballistic missile trajectory?
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Unlike for Christianity, where the bible doesn't have divine origins,
Incorrect. Christian fundamentalists insist that the Bible is inerrant, and the divine/inspired word of God. Many other Christians will insist it is inspired by God (which sounds like "divine origins" to me). These two groups probably comprise the majority of Christians in the USA.
Re:Islamic 3D Earth (Score:5, Insightful)
"These two groups probably comprise the majority of Christians in the USA."
no,. they don't. There just the loudest sects of that particular cult.
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Not from what I've read, though my prior statement probably needs a modifier: "excepting Catholics". According to statistics I've seen, the mainline Protestants have been losing members steadily, while the fundamentalists and "non-denominational" evangelicals have been growing fast, so much so that the latter now outnumber the former. The Catholics probably comprise around 1/3. So, maybe not a clear majority, but definitely a large and growing minority.
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Um, so are you making the case that most Christians in the USA neither believe the bible is inerrant word of God, or inspired by God?
Forgive me, but citation please?
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No, they can't. They'll argue that those aren't contradictions at all. Google it: there's websites full of explanations for why these contradictions really aren't, according to them.
Sunni vs Shia, but also Persian vs Arab, Turk (Score:3)
Iran's propaganda issues aren't just about Shia vs. Sunni or Muslim vs. The Great Satan America and The Previous Great Satan England, but also about Persians vs. Arabs, Turks, and other Muslims. Persians have been in the Empire business for more than a millennium before Islam.
Also, the Persians had the benefit of Greek culture after Alexander the Great invaded them, and probably well before, and the Greeks not only knew that the world was spherical, but had a pretty good estimate of its size.
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The earth is flat, within bounds. So they're right. Just don't sail off the edge.
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I think Burpmaster was referring to the fact that in the Qur'an, the earth is said to be flat.
Bullshit. The Qur'an says no such thing.
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Really? That dude is THAT incoherent and inconsistent?
No wonder the world's such a mess.
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I think Burpmaster was referring to the fact that in the Qur'an, the earth is said to be flat.
Are you sure about that? The Earth was understood to be round before Islam. I don't know if that understanding was in the Arab world at the time.
Yes [answering-islam.org].
I know what it will look like... (Score:4, Insightful)
It will look something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map [wikipedia.org]
Only, it will probably be centered in Mecca.
Is this from the Onion or SNL? (Score:2)
It reads like it was written by an Onion "journalists" ...
Although I will tell you it is scary when some says "Our values in Iran are the values of God" It is odd how the values of God always seem to take on the values of the subject adherent.
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It is Battle of the Bands! (Score:2)
We have the Axis of Evil and they have the Ominous Triangle.
Who can rock hardest?!!!
Who can guitar solo the longest?!!!
Who has the most gonzo drummer?!!!
It is like Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey but everybody forgot to be excellent to each other!
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What exactly is a gonzo drummer? Stoned and completely off time?
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What exactly is a gonzo drummer? Stoned and completely off time?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94B59BC66603620A [youtube.com]
Quickly! (Score:4, Funny)
Time to draw some giant Mohammed cartoons in the desert, Nazca-style!
So there's "Islamic" geography now? (Score:2)
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Is that like extremist "Christian" geography? (Or astronomy, for that matter?)
If you read the OP correctly, we are in the correct bottom.
Which can be good or bad, depending on the context.
a tool for western spy agencies? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure western spy agencies have access to much better tools than Google Earth. You probably could claim that Google Earth is a produce of tools for western spy agencies. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with Google Earth.
Wouldn't it be much simpler to just point out what part of Google Earth does not represent reality?
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Actually, the system we used in Iraq recently made me WISH for a siprnet google earth.
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You thought the RDF was just a metaphor, you silly person.
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Oh Jesus Chris, I already read iJobs. I really do not need to hear the phrase "reality distortion field" one more time in my life.
I'm confused... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this just a huckster trying to make a few bucks off nationalist suckers by offering to draw a map with a few contentious names and borders modified(the sort of thing that a script kiddie could do by hacking together a KML layer for google earth in about 10 minutes; but I digress...) or is there some sort of 'Islamic geography' that has serious issues with basic tenents of what we know about our dear home geoid?
I'm honestly curious... It certainly isn't uncommon to have mere nationalist spats over mapping; but that's just standard political bluster.
Religious convictions that are seriously opposed to empirically demonstrable facts about the world, though, tend to be fairly amusing and sometimes quirky. You've got your flat earthers, your YECs, your geocentericists(does the Tychonic system get any love anymore?), your 'baraminologists', faith healers of a zillion different flavors, people who are pretty sure that Jesus and/or the 'lost tribes of Israel' ended up in North America, you name it, we've got it...
Is this just the tedious nationalism, or does folk islam have some weird bug up its ass about the-world-as-observed-from-orbit?
Re:I'm confused... (Score:4, Informative)
Many years ago I knew a Lebanese Muslim cartographer, who worked with one of my relatives (a geographer), and I actually talked to him about this sort of thing. The short version is that most of the the modern world maps he worked with were exactly the same as Western maps, centered on the Greenwich meridian because of the conventional measure of longitude and so as to avoid splitting up big landmasses. The avowedly Muslim ones would be just the same, only centered on Mecca or, more often, on the point on the equator due south of Mecca.
Centering the map on Mecca generally means cutting off Antarctica and the southern end of Argentina. Mecca is at about 21 N, so you can potentially get the north pole down to about 48 S (Tierra Del Fuego ends at about 56 S). The more normal practice of centering on the equator south of Mecca means that the edges of the map run through the eastern Pacific and cut Alaska off from the rest of the US, putting it and Hawaii at the far right of the map, while the Yukon stretches to the left edge of the map. That's not a huge difference from the standard Western map. It looks like it because of the distortions of the Mercator projection, but it's not generally a big deal. Centering the map on the Greenwich meridian is a convention; centering it on Mecca's meridian is a different one.
(It's interesting to note that maps are centered on Greenwich simply because latitude is measured from there, and yet the Greenwich meridian is very close to being an ideal central spot if you're interested in avoiding splitting any landmasses. A map centered on a Hamburg or Tunis meridian would perfectly split the Bering Strait, but Greenwich is pretty good. The world's mapmakers got lucky with that one.)
One would of course assume that an Iranian map would have some, shall we say, "provocative" interpretations of national boundaries and place names in the eastern Mediterranean.
On a semi-related note, in the geography-related fields it's demographers who are most prone to the nationalist (etc) political difficulties and shenanigans. My relative's department had a demographer from somewhere in East Africa who in the 1980s had to leave his home country after making population estimates that showed the wrong tribe as having a very high population. It's a lot easier to insist on lies about population numbers than on lies about the contours of the planet Earth.
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Dude --
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Addition: in Europe maps are drawn with Europe in its center. In America maps are drawn with America in its center.
Nah, Most US maps have North and South America on the left, Africa dead center and Eurasia sprawled atop her. (Like the cheap whore it is.) Oz is in the right bottom, Anartica center very bottom and islands peppered around the continents.
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This just in: Australians are bottoms.
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We do tend to draw pictures of globes with America in the center (or top-center), though.
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Addition: in Europe maps are drawn with Europe in its center. In America maps are drawn with America in its center.
Nah, Most US maps have North and South America on the left, Africa dead center and Eurasia sprawled atop her. (Like the cheap whore it is.) Oz is in the right bottom, Anartica center very bottom and islands peppered around the continents.
Centring maps on the Greenwich meridian seems to be the globally accepted standard for creating world maps. The advantage of this the page is split on the anti meridian where there are no significant land masses.
But it doesn't matter where you split maps, as long as the map is geographically correct. I.E. if you're travelling on the pacific ocean, you don't give a crap if the map is split in the middle of Africa or the Americas as long as it's accurate and you get the complete pacific.
Re:I'm confused... (Score:4, Insightful)
another sign that blind nationalism is really out of hand: when people base their criticisms on map orientation
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There's also the fact that Google blurs out people's faces in streetview images, while Iran's Islamic streetview would blur out everything but the faces.
America (Score:5, Funny)
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I think you misspelled 'Satan'.
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Spain (Score:2)
So will Spain be replaced by the Caliphate of Córdoba?
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It's called Al-Andalus, you insensitive clod.
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There can be only one Caliphate and only one Caliph, seeing how the title is for the leader of all the faithful (they may disagree on who that should be, but each group would still only accept one).
And Cordoba was an Emirate.
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"Abd-ar-Rahman III (Abd al-Rahmn ibn Muhammad ibn Abd Allah) [wikipedia.org] was the Emir and Caliph of Córdoba (912–961) of the Ummayad dynasty in al-Andalus. Called al-Nasir li-Din Allah ("the Defender of God's Faith"), he ascended the throne in his early 20s, and reigned for half a century as the most powerful prince of Iberia. Although people of all creeds enjoyed tolerance and freedom of religion under his rule, he repelled the Fatimids, partly by supporting their Maghrawa enemies in North-Africa, and partl
I would God would create a PKI... (Score:3)
it's thetans, all the way down... (Score:2)
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I think, the best course of action when someone is claiming to speak for God, would be to A) run far, far away, as fast as you can, and if possible B) have their loony asses committed.
For the good of the species.
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What sacrilege is this?!
God already created the most effective PKI verification system EVER. It's so simple and effective even a cave man could use it.
If someone says something is according to God's will, is done in His name, or is speaking on behalf of God: They Are Lying!
Let me guess (Score:2)
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What about the four elephants on the back of giant space turtle?
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Ahh, Great A'Tuin, the astrochelonian. Yes.
All the way down.
Terrorist view (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I know not all people from that part of the world are terrorists. But that is a lot less funny.
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Introducing mullaearth (Score:2)
I think it is great to have more countries get off their collective asses and start publishing competing geospatial datasets and stop smooching off the devil/great satan/colonial empire..ad nauseum.
The problem is if your an Iranian citizen you are likely to be better off with the spookes behind google earth vs mullaearth from the perspective of local oppression especially if "competition" really means we're also going to block google earth so you have no choice.
Google data center (Score:3)
So they're going to be bigger than Google's data center in 3 years? That's interesting, because nobody really knows how big Google's data centers are. I'd be willing to bet that most of the server admins at Google have no idea how many servers they have. The current estimates are approaching 2 million servers though. I have a very hard time believing that Iran is going to be able to build 2 million servers and the required infrastructure to run 2 million servers in the next 3 years.
I'm also curious why they'd need that many servers to run a mapping service. Their service would pretty much be guaranteed to have fewer users than Google, and provide only a fraction of the services that Google does. So I guess they're admitting that they don't really know anything about utilizing servers effectively. Or perhaps we should assume the more likely scenario -- that they're completely making all of this up.
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Re:Google data center (Score:5, Informative)
I'd be willing to bet that most of the server admins at Google have no idea how many servers they have.
(Googler here) You'd be wrong, actually. Google is a very numbers-oriented place; I can see the totals, including CPU, disk, RAM, etc. The numbers are... large.
I wish Iran all the best with their endeavor, but I'm skeptical.
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I call shenanigans! I actually still have a 1 Gig SCSI drive from 1990 and it is only 1U in height!
Real reason is probably the firewall (Score:4, Insightful)
Sir Tim nailed it (Score:3)
"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web. . . . Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."
-- Sir Tim Berners-Lee, "US backing for two-tier internet" in BBC News (7 September 2007)
Pictures taken from low globe orbit. (Score:2)
What will it look like? (Score:2)
Every entry is either (Score:2, Informative)
Kill the fucking Jews
or
Rape your daughter then kill her.
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Kill the fucking Jews
or
Rape your daughter then kill her.
Very true
Lesson from Arab Spring? (Score:2)
I read an article a long time ago on how some Internet tools were changing things, but not the tools that you'd think. It was about Tripod and Google Earth [ethanzuckerman.com]. Tripod was taken over as the tool of the Underground. Google Earth had people in Arab countries (yeah, I know Iran's not Arabic, just read the article) question how their land policies favored the very few connected and screwed everyone else. One of the countries explicitly mentioned? Tunisia. I thought about that a lot during the Arab Spring.
So, even G
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Holy Bit Batman! (Score:2)
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Thank God, I was starting to worry that the right answer was "Kali Cultist".
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will they use gimp or photoshop?
No, they would never use such un-Islamic tools. Of course the maps will be hand-drawn.