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Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the entire thread should have led off with "This is in fact a publicly known hangar in Palmdale and this was known as public information as soon as the unveiling event occurred, and thus this is just an exercise to show how locating the spot could have been possible from just this photo as a technical demonstration."

Because I guarantee there are going to be a hundred clickbait articles by various 'news' sites now in the next few days about the MASSIVE SECURITY BREACH of the USAF and how US SECRETS have been EXPOSED so and and so forth. When nothing about this is actually the case.

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People have been doing photo analysis for a long long time, and have gotten quite good at doing geolocation based on details in the background that the average viewer ignores. Spy agencies are especially good at it. There's many a spy movie that offers glimpses into this, but The Good Shepard comes to mind.

Even as a joking kind of thing, the opposite has been done. There's a famous exchange between Neil DeGrasse Tyson and James Cameron about how the sky in the movie Titanic was wrong. Cameron accepted the challenge, and on a remastered version had the sky replaced to be historically accurate.

It's a game to some people. It's a challenge. It's self rewarding in this case, sometimes there might be actual rewards of sorts. Hell, I've spent more hours than I'd like to admit on Nasa's website where you use the images taken by the astronauts on the space station and align them on the globe. I got nothing out of it other than being entertained by the challenge, learned about some new places on the globe when I would try to find out why that place was interesting to the astronaut to snap that particular image, etc.

> There's a famous exchange between Neil DeGrasse Tyson and James Cameron about how the sky in the Titanic was wrong. Cameron accepted the challenge, and on a remastered version had the sky replaced to be historically accurate.

Very interesting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B6jSfRuptY&t=110s

(Interesting comment for a number of reasons. Thanks!)

> It's a game to some people. It's a challenge.

And for some, it crosses all lines of ethics and morals, like the stalker that deduced the location of a pop idol by looking at the reflection of a building in her eyes [1]. That's utterly crazy.

[1] https://sea.mashable.com/article/6776/a-stalker-found-a-japa...

> It's a game to some people. It's a challenge.

GeoWizard on youtube has a whole series where he tries to pinpoint the exact locations of pictures sent to him by fans. Pretty fun to watch:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWqMVC3JbyONau_0...

There was an xkcd comic set in the future with the exact date calculated from the stars. https://xkcd-time.fandom.com/wiki/Astronomy

It's pretty clearly an exercise in astronavigation.

The livestream event itself mentioned it was taking place at the Northrop facility in Palmdale.

This author is not responsible for what clickbait farms do.

Aside: I'm not even sure this plane will end up doing flight testing somewhere secret in Nevada. They may just do it out of Edwards South Base, which is an "interesting" location not many in the public know about.

> It's pretty clearly an exercise in astronavigation.

Off topic, but it would be really cool if someone build a hobbyist astronavigationsystem using a something like a Raspberry Pi and a camera with a fisheye lens. Sort of an amateur https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/nortronics....

I hadn’t realized that much of the public doesn’t know Edwards. Then again, I’m a SoCal native with a father who was an aerospace engineer…

Edwards AFB was pretty well-known when the Space Shuttle was an active program.

But ... it's been 11 years, kids these days, etc.

Auxiliary Base South is probably less known.

Also all they do is cut it down to a wide band that covers 12 or so states, then compare against known bases (not shown) to narrow it down

I did mention this later in the thread - was just a fun experiment to see if locating it was possible if we didn't know

Sure, but the reason you didn't lead with that, and also the reason you did this for a secretive aircraft and not a new campervan is clicks, no?

To be fair, a secretive aircraft would trigger thoughts about security in a hacker's mind. A camper van does not trigger any such thoughts. It may not be just clicks, with a camper van the whole thread might not even exist. I am not the original poster, so this is just my thought

Even if he did do this for the clicks, so what?

So it's manipulative. Like a sensational headline that buries the mundanity at the end. Lead with "this is already publicly known" so people can make an informed choice about where to direct their attention.

If the point of the article/twitter thread was to reveal the location of the hanger, as if that was previously a secret, then yes perhaps the title is misleading.

But that's not the point of the article. The point of the article was to reveal the location of the hanger using the stars and other metadata, and to explain how that was done. The journey was the story, not the destination.

"as if that was previously a secret"

And that's where the disagreement is. It implied a secret by the nature of the object, enough so that the fact it wasn't needed to be clarified - but at the end. You only publicly reveal something once, and this already had been.

But then, those aren't his words and it's implicit so this is a grey area and not a huge deal. But I still think leaving the clarification to the end was deliberate.

Right. It should be my responsibility to guard everything I say or write from lazy morons.

This trick happened for real with the HWNDU stunt back in 2017. 4channers found the flag based on the stars in the livestream, along with matching aircraft contrails to flight radar maps.

https://youtu.be/vw9zyxm860Q

remember when 4chan figured out the location of a terrorist training camp from one of their PR photos and called in a literal airstrike? I like how 4chan is sometimes described as weaponized autism.

https://imgur.com/N7DwWP1?r

Remember when imgur was marketed as an imagehost that doesn't suck? Now i can't read 2/3 of the text because it's just a blurry mess if I'm not manually changing url parameters. I'm using Firefox on Android and I can't find another method to get the full image. Am I missing some button to show the full res image?

For imgur on Android, I use ImgurViewer[1], which can display images using apis from a bunch of different sites (imgur, Reddit, gfycat, etc) as well as anything that ends with a common image extension. It's a far superior interface, and ability to swipe it away makes it more seamless, like it's just part of the app you opened it from.

For the browsing in Firefox, there's multiple extensions you can use to add the referrer and get the image directly instead of a redirect (see [2], though I'm not sure if it works on mobile)

Alternatively, use Rimgo[3], an alternative frontend to imgur. This page also lists several ways to automate redirects from imgur domains.

[1] https://github.com/SpartanJ/ImgurViewer [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/referercontro... [3] https://codeberg.org/video-prize-ranch/rimgo

Same exact boat as you. FF Focus on Android and I can't read anything on that post. If you long click the image you see some url parameters, but when I tried to play with them they only made the image smaller and lower quality lol. What ever happened to imgur linking directly to the full size image?

Add a 0 to maxwidth (6400) and you can read it.

- Open imgur page

- Desktop mode

- Change the TLD back to ".com"

- tap image with finger

Sounds simple, but I figured it out only after running into 3 or 4 other dead ends. For example, desktop mode needs to be in place for forcing the TLD to stick on my phone.

Fantastic.

I feel like when you diss journalists, it should generally be for something they actually did wrong, not preemptively based on your imagination.

If they are so terrible, there should be no need to invent stuff.

When people read something like this post, and they are predisposed to the idea, it’ll reinforce their skepticism of „the mainstream media“. If you want to test yourself, make a bet of how many media outlets will run with the story in the manner outlined above, then check in a few days. My prediction: you won’t see it in the NYT, WSJ, BBC, or on CNN.

I put 'news' in quotes for this reason. I wasn't as much implying that this would be actual news, but instead would be used in clickbait articles on lesser publications. I admit I am being hypothetical, but this does reflect observation on how these kinds of discussions has been get picked up and spread and thus has made me want to avoid such writing style.

I'm not so sure.

It is very interesting--and newsworthy--how difficult it is to be anonymous on the internet. Any person, place, or thing can be "doxxed" by seemingly innocuous background details.

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