@1rick draws your tech blogger’s attention to some more mapped Mandarinese coming out from the People’s Republic’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping. Apparently, some online maps are considered “detrimental to the country’s national security”. (Most likely, maps cutting off Taiwan, or showing the two sides of the straits in über-different colours, are getting Beijing more than a little upset.)

Here’s what’s required of maps, according to the article on TheNextWeb (from ReadWriteWeb quoting Xinhua):

To be in accordance with the new standards, any map must be hosted within the confines of the country, on a server that has no history of security breaches within the past 3 years. The rest of this year will be spent weeding out content that doesn’t adhere to these rules.

Your tech blogger also happens to be super geek in the Subways, but it’s likely that quick maps around the station won’t set off too many alarms — as long as there are, say, no military camps around this-or-that exit. If it’s a map of a closed station with a trillion sensitive locations and they’re all marked, then — needless to say — he’ll be in a bit of trouble.

(But frankly, with the Daxing extension to Line 4 set to open this autumn all connected to commercial establishments, it’s more commercialesque than even.)

Best estimates give the number of map sites on the Chinese Interwebs at around 42,000. There are big players — MapBar, Map123, Baidu and, of course, Google. As we’re seeing more map sites in China, we’re also seeing a more active government trying to stomp out content that’s not supposed to be spread out in the first place.

By the way, on iPhones, the map and the satellite images are off by a fair bit — and even your location’s a bit “out of focus”. We guess it’s just part of the great plan!