Osint Amateur Hour | Hacker News Reader

Osint Amateur Hour

secjuice.com

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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...

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

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...

Thanks for that, enjoyable watch over a coffee. I'm currently looking into planning a kayak trip with some friends. Nice to see with a bit of imagination there is still some adventure to be had.

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. :-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

So why isn’t that an issue in the US where addresses are openly listed and homeowners aren’t harassed?

Realtors in the US typically have an exclusive contract with the seller and the seller must pay the commission however the house is sold. Without a contract like that (seems common in Europe), a buyer can bypass the realtor and work directly with the seller. The listing agents hide the address to try to prevent that from happening.

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

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 :)

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.

There are only 4 or 5 large cities in SA, though, so even if you didn't get lucky guessing Pretoria first time round it wouldn't take that long to check all their skylines for that distinctive building.

> I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.

If you look closely, you can see stenciled markings on the yellow poles. These felt like official markings to me so I tried to figure out how to use the markings to narrow down the list of candidate cities.

According to Wikipedia, the _Burger_ newspaper is distributed only in three regions: Western, Eastern, and Northern Cape. There are not too many large-ish towns in these district.

So I made a list of all towns with >50k inhabitants. Looking at those cities on Street View one by one, I found there are only two towns where the yellow poles have the exact same typeface of stencil numbers on them: East London and Uitenhage.

So I took a closer look at either town. (After a few misses, you quickly get a feeling where to find the parts of towns where the roads actually have traffic lights). With a bit of luck, I actually managed to locate the first picture just by randomly clicking on corners. Its coordinates are 33.7648S/25.4012E.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This one? "Trump Tweets Sensitive Surveillance Image Of Iran" https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-twe...

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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