'Cree.py' Social Engineering Tool Pinpoints A Person's Physical Location | Hacker News Reader

'Cree.py' Social Engineering Tool Pinpoints A Person's Physical Location

ilektrojohn.github.com

125 pointsssclafani29 comments

Neat. It's pretty much exactly what Color is trying to do, except it cost $41 million less to make.

Speaking of Color, you can use Color it in combination with this locator and this:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/color-hack-allows-users-...

to massively multiply your creep factor.

People love the new "everything is social" movement (twitter, FB, etc) and now color. The problem is that people don't realize what they are exposing and the conflict of interest is that these companies want EVERYTHING exposed so they can advertise/market.

That's the problem. People just don't get it. Or rather people don't realize the value their personal data has.

Well, I hope this doesn't surprise anyone. I'm running under the assumption that people who use Foursquare and other such geolocation services are fully aware that they can be used to find out where they've been. If that assumption is false, I think I'm going to become a hermit.

Well, it does other stuff like mine pictures for meta tags, the privacy implications of which wouldn't be obvious to a non-techie.

Ah, you're quite right. Then maybe this will bring broader attention to their implications.

which is a supremely optimistic assessment :-)

Well, Firesheep got an NYT article, who knows! :)

It has gotten some attention from mainstream media already , and that's nice imho. People should get "scared" and aware . http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/smartphone-apps-tracking-ke...

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2011/03/11/05

although I share your hope that people would think more about the implications of their online actions, I'm way more pessimistic even if this is covered in popular main stream media. the numer of people really thinking about such things out of the very few actually reading this in the media, I sadly suppose, is/would be insignificantly low.

And I doubt most people realise;

Twitters tweet location

* Coordinates when tweet was posted from mobile device [side note: is this feature 'enabled' by default on some mobile clients?]

* Place (geographical name) derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. Place gets translated into coordinates using geonames.com

* Bounding Box derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. The less accurate source, a corner of the bounding box is selected randomly.

is this feature 'enabled' by default on some mobile clients?

Pretty sure it's disabled by default on the official android client, but I'm sure somewhere there's some client that has it always on.

This is awesome. Kinda scary for you guys that use geolocation with everything though. I personally try to avoid it.

Geo-tagging your photos is kinda cool, and it's a feature that I would find interesting if I had a device that supported it, but I would make _sure_ to strip those tags before publishing the photos anywhere.

Startup idea: Strip.py?

>>Strip.py

Write in Erlang. Surprisingly, Strip.er and Stripp.er are free...

Eritrea is an unusually disgusting dictatorship afaik, so they'll probably be happy to sell domain names (along with body parts of people with the wrong opinions). Lots of English words end in 'er', right? Another business idea -- offer to administer the top domain.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.er

I don't think they're for sale, actually.

Would make a good Mac App Store ... app. And, perhaps, web service.

After all, privacy is the new green. On the other hand, you'll need to educate people about the dangers of meta-data, before you can attract them to use your product.

Unrelated, but I've been noticing that sites like whitepages.com and LookupAnyone.com seem to be showing up higher in Google and many have people's home addresses displayed for free. I saw one that seemed to list almost all of the 12 or so addresses I've lived at in the last 15 years, plus a map with a pin at my current address, and a list of all of my immediate family members. This is all data (theoretically) gathered from publicly available records.

If anyone wants to stop by, just call first. I'm sure my number is on those sites as well. :) Makes me feel like signing up for Facebook.

Does anyone remember an application that uses the information gathered by tools like this to predict where a user will be at any given time? I'm not sure I understand the difference between that concept and what this does?

If no-one has actually built it, then I'm really disappointed as it's quite simple - and I would be pretty easy to locate too. We're all creatures of habit.

Twitter icon in the app is awesome.

Neat this like a more general implementation of the latitude tracking program from XKCD: http://xkcd.com/596/

Been running it for about 15 minutes now and its still downloading the tweets/photos. Anyone else experiencing this sort of delay?

Yeap, it gets like this for users with many (>5000) tweets, a big number of which contains some link to image hosting services or foursquare . I guess that the amount of retrieved locations will make up for the wait.

I get the same for people with <1000 tweets, and it eventually terminates with some sort of error. It can't retrieve twitpic photos and returns a 502 for one.

Running it on Windows 7.

I wouldn't be surprised if the error is with Twitter.

Has anyone used this successfully? (Especially on Windows?)

I keep getting errors.

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