this argues strongly in favor of keeping archives of successive generations of Google’s base layer. Added bonus: placemarks of time-sensitive artifacts like planes in flight could be metatagged to a specific generation of imagery.

As part of a general amnesty, houses built before 2001 on plots of illegally sold land were “regularised”, and thus allowed to be resold on the market. Somebody with government connections got the bright idea of “backdating” some houses built after 2004, pretending that they were there since 2000, so that they could benefit from the amnesty and sell them. Digital Globe imagery from 2004 in Google Earth quickly put paid to that lie.

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