Chatroulette + GeoIP + screengrabs = Chatroulette Map | Hacker News Reader

Chatroulette + GeoIP + screengrabs = Chatroulette Map

chatroulettemap.com

109 pointsjoshwa76 comments

A dick-map! Great!

This needs statistics: dicks per square kilometre, dicks per million inhabitants …

Edit: There is a surprisingly low number of dicks in this map. Lots of bored teenagers/mid-twenties.

Go to the center of paris. That blob is pretty much all dicks.

Well for the 1 pic that is on the entire continent of Africa... it's dickless, but that guy was well on his way to getting his tackle out.

It would quite funny to replace the pins on the map with d*cks for those users showing off their wares.

What a gross invasion of people's privacy as enabled by collecting information they already willingly submitted.

If chatroulette proper is an unwavering stare into the faces and bodies of the internet, chatroulette map is stripping one further layer of anonymity away. It's also terrifying to think what'll happen when this collides with registered sex offender counts.

Does anyone else find this disturbing in a Big Brother sort of way?

Very disturbing. I'm not going on Big Br-... chatroulette again.

It's just geoip though, so it's accuracy is low.

>It's just geoip though, so it's accuracy is low.

I do hope so, there's a man 2 streets away from me, masturbating into the camera.

For the record, it seems that the UK is a world leader in this regard.

I think all 13 of the pictures clustered in London are like that.

Still, Chatroulette provides a mapping from IPs to faces, which I'm sure could be used for evil. There are any number of things you could cross reference IPs against (email headers, web server logs, etc)

That was the first question I had, "whoa, is GeoIP that accurate?" Sadly the best I could quickly find was this ( http://www.maxmind.com/app/city_accuracy ) which says that, as of 11.19.2008, GeoIP correctly resolves to 25 miles of the actual location 83% of the time.

There are at least 100 towns within 25 miles of my house. One of them is New York City. I guess I'm not concerned about GeoIP's accuracy... this is one of the advantages of living in a very dense area.

That, coupled with my complete lack of desire to ever use this website should keep me safe.

Yeah, it's just like that reality show where there are cameras so you can see people inside their house.

Okay, I don't know about chatroullete anymore. I just came across (on the OP) a girl doing naughty naughty things... maybe this has already been considered, but what if she's not of age? Am I now guilty of possessing kiddie porn? The way current laws are written and enforced, who knows...

I highly doubt it. Chatroulette has been mentioned on all sorts of Real News sources, and it's well known (and easy to explain) that you don't personally choose what you're viewing over it. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury that would really agree to throw the book at you for accidentally coming across something illegal there.

Then again, I'm no lawyer, and crazier things have happened...

No, your fine.

Just when I thought Chatroulette couldn't possibly get any creepier. Well done indeed!

How about laying a few of the details of this mashup's creation on us. Did you automate the "next" somehow to get lots of screengrabs with minimal work?

Someone should code up a Firefox plugin that pops up a map with a dot on the person you're chatting with.

And then if someone's doing something nasty just freak them out by telling them their address!

...apparently there are 7 people chatting from Rosedale Cemetery in LA, on Normandie and W Washington.

Does that cemetery happen to be dead center in the middle of LA?

I heard that people are just dying to get into that place.

I've been in the webcam business since day one, this is one of the reasons why we make it purposefully hard to get to the real IP of our users.

Only after you jump through a fair number of hoops can you expose your IP, if by then you aren't warned yet you probably can't read.

We've had some stalking issues due to this in the past as well, especially the 'early days'.

The IP address is in the filename of the image!?!

And the first part looks suspiciously like a timestamp...

Edit:

In [4]: datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(1267675073)

Out[4]: datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 4, 0, 57, 53)

Wow: "We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using student's names in their hostnames. We've decided, at least for the time being, to hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable information was found in some entries"

They put student names in their hostname? That's... bad.

Virginia Tech used to do that, back in the late 90s. 99% of people didn't know that, so when you initiated a direct connection via IM (or ICQ back then) you could find out all sorts of fun information.

Well, clicking around for two minutes I ended up seeing a group of map points that all resolved to...a domain specifying the res hall of a major university. I'd say that destroys any hope of quasi-anonymity.

I'm in Maine right now. Here's a warning message from chatroulettemap.com that I see when I visit:

"We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using student's names in their hostnames. We've decided, at least for the time being, to hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable information was found in some entries."

this is why I'm scared of the South http://grab.by/2YNw

I spend too much time on the internet — I immediately recognized the both the paraphilia (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Plushie) and the object with the dick in it (Pocahontas's pet raccoon).

Be careful, both the links above are NSFW. I accidentally clicked on them to jump from my chair :) Luckily nobody were around.

I actually saw that during my one ChatRoulette session a couple of weeks ago. Whew, thank God it's just a clip someone is running.

...where are all the Russian users?

Well, given that they're connecting through VMs that run in other countries...

Russians are not that dumb to use such services.

Chatroulette is by far the most useless thing that has been created on the Internet. I wish I could have the memories of using it erased from my brain, and the electricity it takes to run the site and the computers connected to it back as well.

It seems that you have never been to zombo.com.

that is pretty useless, but my vote is still for Chatroulette

If I was still going to school, i'd get on Chatroulette and ask people for answers to my homework.

Whoa, are Chatroulette users connected directly to each other rather than proxying the streams through Chatroulette's servers? Certainly the former would be more efficient, but if so then it's not as anonymous as it first seems.

Yes, it uses some sort of newish P2P stuff in Flash.

Yeah, it's called Stratus and provides P2P for flash player 10+

There's a bit more info here: http://laughingsquid.com/chatroulette-map-not-so-anonymous-a...

Doesn't this defeat the purpose of anonymous chat?

I think the point is that it's not that anonymous to begin with.

unless you are wearing a Nixon mask or your dog/cock/cartoon is on on the screen.

Finally, a constructive use of Geo Location!

I presume this site is created by the Chatroulette people themselves, as surely they'd be the only ones with access to the IPs of users?

[Edit: Just tried Wireshark with chatroulette and you can see the UDP packets going to/from the other user, I guess this isn't always the case if you're both behind NAT gateways]

I posted a comment to this effect here about 3 weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128322

I can confirm that the UDP stream is not always available and that I was behind a NAT during my testing.

Apparently Chatroulette involves a direct connection between individuals, so it's possible to determine the IP address of the person you are connected to.

For it not to be a direct connection, Chatroulette would require some pretty heavy resources to stream everyone's video.

As per http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/chatroulettes-found... :

"Network throughput is 7 gigabits a second." which would sort of line up with ~20K users at ~50K video streams.

I have an open Chatroulette session and Wireshark running at the same time. A lot of traffic is running by me in Wireshark as users connect and disconnect. What am looking for that tells me the other person's general location? Which, out of all those scrolling IPs, is the one of interest?

I think it was found that people were directly connected or the ip address was forwarded.

Why would you think that? The domains chatroulette and chatroulettemap don't seem to be related. The real site has is own nameservers and is registered out of the UK. The map is served by Dreamhost and is registered out of Colorado. The real site was created by a talented young person. The map site was probably created by a talentless old person (sorta like the HN demographic).

So I zoom in my geographic area and there's these two points on the map. One is this like 60 year old guy looking at his computer. His neighbor however is masturbating. Imagine if it were my neighbor. Guess it's not so anonymous anymore.

Imagine if you were 60 years old!

This calls for a Zillow mashup.

This is going to give HR departments an extra method of determining who to employ, at least. And given the number of people exhibiting their penises, I'm foretelling another drop in employment.

Also, whoever runs this site, if he plays his cards right, is surely going to be a millionaire by next Monday.

Also, in Milano (Italy) there seems to be one house that houses all Chatroulette users. That's either a really, really freaky place to live, or Geo-IP has a pretty bad coverage of Italy.

Small bug report (assuming this is your mashup): clicking on the "zone" nodes in Chrome centres them but doesn't pop up the screengrabs.

Works in Firefox though. 10 clicks in, first penis sighting. Sigh.

Adding a whole new level to the creepiness of Chatroulette. Exactly what it needed!

If only those dudes knew their location could be pinpointed, maybe it would make it a bit more bearable.

Interesting the very large number in the D.C., NYC and LA area, and the very low number in the Bay Area.

Relatively popular on the border of Nunavut and Manitoba though.

Might be the time of day data was collected?

Chicago's pretty dead, too.

how do you know if you have been grabbed and why hasn't someone who knows about computers built an application so you can easily hide your ip? london would be a huge market for that...and for the record i find lol cats more useful than chatroulette

how does this work?

Chatroulette uses p2p for video. So, I guess this new app simulates a client by connecting to chatroulette server, getting a new peer, geolocating his IP and taking a screenshot.

Since when does flash support this? And does it depend on upnp or something?

Just when I thought I understood Flash... now I'm confused again.

Check this: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/

What are the mechanics of this peer-to-peer interaction with both peer nodes being Flash browser plug-ins?

Check this: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/

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