Retake the Lake: A Chrome browser plug-in that corrects “Lake America” to “Lake Ontario”

I opened Google Maps today and scrolled northward to the old hometown of Toronto to see if the news reports were actually true. Unfortunately, it was. The big blue blob between Toronto and Rochester was incorrectly labelled Lake America. The U.S. changed the name in its own GNIS database in August following an executive order from the most petty of presidents. Google, which ties place names to each country’s official source, dutifully (and boot-licking-ly) started showing the new one to users with US IP addresses. If you’re in Canada and you view Lake Ontario in Google Maps, you’ll still see its proper name. Everyone outside the US sees both. I’m in Tampa, which is in Florida (“the America of America”), so I got the new, incorrect name. So I did what any reasonable person with VS Code, programming skills and a history of hacktivism would do. I wrote a Chrome extension. It’s called Retake the Lake, it’s on GitHub, and building it turned out to be a much better story than I’d expected.…