John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Apple Maps “Life Threatening,” Say Australian Police

In the photo above, the purple pin is Mildura’s actual location. The red pin is where the application claims it to be.

Add “potentially life-threatening” to the list of shortcomings accumulating around Apple’s new iOS mapping application.

Police in Victoria, Australia, issued a warning Monday discouraging travellers from relying on Apple’s new iOS 6 Maps app to navigate the region. The reason: In the past few weeks, six motorists have ended up stranded deep in a national park, after following the apps directions to the city of Mildura.

“Tests on the mapping system by police confirm the mapping systems lists Mildura in the middle of the Murray Sunset National Park, approximately 70km away from the actual location of Mildura,” police said in a statement. “Police are extremely concerned as there is no water supply within the Park and temperatures can reach as high as 46 degrees (about 114 degrees Fahrenheit), making this a potentially life-threatening issue.”

Another humiliation for Apple, which has endured a bunch of them over the iOS maps debacle. The company is currently scrambling to fix the errors in the application and has sacked at least one manager associated with its botched rollout. In an interview with NBC last week, CEO Tim Cook said Apple is putting “the weight of the company” behind fixing Maps.

Apple declined comment.

Previously:

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald