[HN Gopher] Osint Amateur Hour
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Osint Amateur Hour
Author : duck
Score : 71 points
Date : 2020-06-19 07:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.secjuice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.secjuice.com)
| fortran77 wrote:
| Of course the sleuths on twitter think they can identify people
| from clues in photos and often get it wrong with dangerous or
| disastrous results.
|
| See: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52978880
|
| And: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/spike-lee-
| sued-...
|
| And, of course, reddit and the boston bomber.
|
| Do this for fun, but don't get your pitchforks out
| pintxo wrote:
| Doing this quite often as we are currently looking for a new
| house. Real estate offerings here in Germany often omit the
| actual address. So some research on the actual location is
| needed. It's fun and reduces the list of possible objects easily
| without communicating with the realtor.
| thepangolino wrote:
| Any idea on why the address is not provided?
|
| I just find this practice really annoying and I don't see how
| it helps sell a property.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| It prevents people from showing up randomly and ringing
| doorbells. The realtor can control the process, inexperienced
| and stressed sellers are not confronted with strangers
| 'negotiating'. Mostly it's in the interest of the realtor
| that their position as a middleman is accepted.
| kortilla wrote:
| So why isn't that an issue in the US where addresses are
| openly listed and homeowners aren't harassed?
| pintxo wrote:
| Standard approach is to check the provided pictures for any
| containing the roof or parts of it. Color of the tiles, the
| form of windows etc are good features to look for on a google
| maps satellite view.
|
| This usually brings up several possible matches. These can
| often be reduced by checking any interior pictures Including
| windows showing the immediate surroundings. Adding nearby
| buildings as features to look out for.
| phreeza wrote:
| If you enjoy this kind of thing, you may like the Geoguessr game
| (https://www.geoguessr.com/), and this guy on youtube who is
| really good at it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xApbqwtnSzs&list=PL_japiE6QK...
| pintxo wrote:
| Goeguessr is the best. Remember the day it put me right in
| front of a street sign basically stating the exact location.
|
| But then in the next game you are placed right on midway island
| with no clues but sand and some birds...
|
| Fun times
| schoen wrote:
| Those are amazing! It's striking to me how much better my
| language knowledge is than his (for example, confidently
| distinguishing different languages from their scripts) but I'm
| pretty sure I would do much worse overall.
|
| I feel like he could benefit from ten minutes to two hours
| looking at
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition...
|
| because it could greatly improve his speed and accuracy on that
| part. :-)
| polytely wrote:
| That guy (GeoWizard) has an amazing video series where he
| attempts to cross the whole country of Wales while walking in a
| straight line [0], it is honestly one of the best things I've
| ever seen on the internet.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w986ni7_g&list=PL_japiE6QK...
| jiofih wrote:
| How do you go about completing the challenge?
|
| Identifying its SA is extremely easy with the Dutch text and
| newspaper names. There is no real hint this is Pretoria and not
| somewhere else. The satellite photos don't have enough resolution
| to help find the stop lights (which appear not too common looking
| at street view).
|
| You can kind of see a double roof in the building in the
| background, and the road arrangement, but it would take days to
| manually look at every city intersection.
|
| I guess the easiest approach is to post the image on a forum /
| twitter and get locals to chime in :)
| executesorder66 wrote:
| There is no Dutch text. It is Afrikaans.
|
| And as a South African, I would immediately know it was SA just
| by the look of the traffic lights and street signs.
|
| I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the
| first photo.
|
| In the article there is the line: "Some quick Googling revealed
| several universities in Pretoria, and I decided to wing it and
| take a closer look at the Pretoria skyline."
|
| That's glossing over a very important part of figuring it out.
| Because once you know which city it makes it much easier.
| aj3 wrote:
| A red square is a shop sign. Apparently there are a number of
| these "friendly shops" around in ZA, unfortunately they don't
| have website and Google Maps does not list all of them. You can
| also see part of the text on the building "*ville mansions".
| Again, Google Maps does not have this building nor
| Bing/OpenStreetmaps, but still it's possible that there is some
| sort of registry of ZA businesses which you could query to get
| potential addresses. It is also clearly spring on the second
| photo and the shadows are well defined, so you can approximate
| time of day (midday) and street directions (shadows point north
| or so). You can see that these are four way crossroads with at
| least one road being just two lanes wide, there are at least
| two buildings on the corners and along one side of the road
| there is a longish green zone / possibly a park. I think there
| is a bus stop on the road with the park as well. Not sure what
| are the FH markings on that yellow thingy and what's that blue
| square with yellow something. These might be street signs that
| are specific to some region/city, so just browsing random
| locations in ZA could turn something up.
|
| This info wasn't enough for me to figure out the location, but
| it's something. If I was serious about the challenge or there
| was way to monetize this, I could write OpenStreetMaps / Google
| Street View scraper that would figure out the location in a
| matter of minutes.
| TheHeretic12 wrote:
| 4Chan is notorious for doing this successfully, with even less
| detail to start with. The large anonymous crowd of viewers and
| poster is highly likely to contain people who can identify even
| the smallest detail. Within the past few years, a few remarkable
| ones stand out to me:
|
| 1. Locating terrorist training camps by high voltage power lines
| visible in the background.
|
| 2. Shia LeBeouf's IRL Super Capture the Flag, "He Will Not Divide
| Us," located and vandalized no less than 5 times. The last one
| used astronavigation principles, and visible contrails from
| airplane traffic.
|
| 3. Identifying muggers in crowds based on nothing more than
| biking gear and facial hair.
|
| The one thing these had in common, was a sustained call for
| effort. By keeping the limited original details available and
| obvious, people in every timezone and demographic could view
| them. This greatly increases the odds of specialist knowledge or
| community insiders being able to add information to the detail,
| which goes back to the general audience, forming an action
| feedback loop.
|
| Amatuer hour indeed, but when you have 10000 random people you
| get results pretty quick.
| wizeman wrote:
| Yes, but then again, Reddit also did the same thing right after
| the Boston marathon bombing and as I recall it went pretty
| badly, as they ended up identifying the wrong person as the
| culprit and his mom ended up receiving threats from random
| people (he was missing at the time). He was later found dead in
| a river and it turned out he had killed himself.
| GEBBL wrote:
| Cool write up! It reminds me of the amateur osint that was
| carried out after Donald Trump showed the aerial photo of the
| Iranian power facility (iirc) and people were able to work out
| the exact coordinates and flight path of the satellite that took
| the photo from using the shadows on the ground. Amazing.
| kl4m wrote:
| This one? "Trump Tweets Sensitive Surveillance Image Of Iran"
| https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-twe...
| ricardo81 wrote:
| First clue I noticed from the 1st photo was they seem to drive on
| the left hand side, which is fairly rare. The language on the
| signs obviously is a great clue.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Not just language, but brands can help a lot as well.
| Newspapers, obviously, but even a brand of soda can narrow
| things down.
|
| I think a better approach on his second step would have been to
| search "<major city> skyline", preferably in order from largest
| population to smallest. South Africa isn't that big. I think it
| pays to be more methodical and work with the information you
| know, before speculating. Speculating is great if you're stuck,
| but I think he mostly just got lucky there.
| bradknowles wrote:
| But they never took that information and went back to the first
| photo to figure out where it was taken.
|
| Or am I missing something?
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(page generated 2020-06-20 23:00 UTC)