QR codes appearing in Google street view? | Hacker News Reader

QR codes appearing in Google street view?

nso.group

223 pointsnotbeuller76 comments

I spotted a series of signs posted near me (irl) that only contained hex characters. I was curious and thought it might be some sort of Cicada 3301-type nonsense, so I transcribed all of the signs and tested multiple combinations to discover a secret URL, and...

It turned out to be a crypto scam!

I love it. Ovaltine must be remaking themselves for the 21st century.

What's the Ovaltine reference to?

https://www.achristmasstoryhouse.com/a-christmas-story-movie...

For some reason the quote "oh my god I shot my eye out" was stuck in my head yesterday. Topical.

https://youtu.be/zdA__2tKoIU

Damn I remember Cicada 3301. Good times.

I think the source is always online though as it was to cast a wide net. IRL would be too narrow.

Hope the Cicada crew pulls another one soon, although now that reddit is what it is...

It had a IRL component. Technically the last puzzle is still not solved. There is a good chance that one won't start until it is, but who knows.

One can only hope…

I was one of the “winners” of the first one (yeah I know, believe it or not, it makes no difference) and I can tell you: there is absolutely nothing interesting on the other side. Don’t hold your breath. :(

I would love to hear some more details about what was on the other side!

We were I think 8 or 9. We got access to an onion forum on Tor with randomized nicknames, and one person who said they were a representative of a bigger network, but no extra info was given. Then they told us to find some common project to work on; something that would change the world or whatever. We were supposed to discuss ideas and decide by ourselves. Eventually we settled on an idea and started working on it, but we had a shitty forum, a shitty chat, and an even shittier slow git repo. The whole thing was pointless so I just drifted away (it was a very busy time for me).

It made no sense, there was no reason why we should work in secrecy, no infrastructure, no motivation, nothing. I bet the guy who said he was a representative was just a kid somewhere who made up the challenges. I don’t know, I just abandoned it and lost the drive to pursue any further ARG after that.

Is knowledge of hex/ASCII an indication of increased gullibility? If anything, I'd think it would be the exact opposite.

You’re assuming scam works. Maybe the cryptoscammer received zero subscription, and is in debt from putting up the signs. Could be an artifact of gullibility of the scammer, not the victim.

The trick is that the actual scam was likely someone sold a "class" to whoever put up the signs for how to get rich quick

Knowledge of hex/ASCII is probably associated with an increase in the likelihood to get involved in crypto, as a filter there.

Maybe they are seeking fellow scammers to join forces.

I think it's more about making the victim feel like they're on to something special and secret. They're in the know.

Plenty of skid type people who are into tech for the aesthetics mostly.

what you're telling me Mr. Musk won't double my money

A bit tangential, but I found and contacted the author of Cicada3301 some years ago. They sloppily used a single Google Analytics ID on 2 sites, one of them being on an old version of the Cicada3301 site which had been snapshotted by archive.org before they realized their mistake and removed it. I was able to reverse search this ID and found it was also in use on the personal website of a cryptography/security expert who was the Chief Information Security Officer of a contractor who primarily does work for big three-letter agencies in the US. I contacted him on LinkedIn and he denied it, though I very much doubt this was some big coincidence.

So you won Cicada3301? But they just didn't like how you won?

Yeah that's kind of what I was thinking!

Or the creator of Cicada took the Google analytics ID of that security expert

A bold claim to make, but interesting nevertheless. Did you ever do a writeup on that? I'm not into it myself (I'm not smart enough for puzzles like that), but I can imagine there's obsessive communities around it that would love to know more about this lead.

I never did a writeup because it seemed to me that the theories may have been true that Cicada3301 was a government program to recruit talent. I didn't want to dox the guy publicly and I also didn't want to piss anyone off at a three-letter agency. This is actually the first time I've ever mentioned this in public, but so much time has passed since the program was active that I think it's probably OK at this point.

I looked it up, here's the Google Analytics ID if anyone's curious: https://builtwith.com/relationships/tag/UA-526724

Looks like Dave V. removed all the websites. I wonder if the guy ever though it'd follow him around like this.

You're famous Dave!

He’s Wikipedia famous, but I’m not sure how relevant he is in the community to warrant it. Maybe he doesn’t actually exist, and this is all a just a ruse?

I’d be interested to see if there’s any linkages between contributors to those two pages.

That was an interesting rabbit hole. Pretty hard to deny that connection, given their background.

It does somewhat ruin the puzzle though, and still doesn't actually solve it.

Yep, that's the one.

I remember being fascinated by this Cicada story when it came up. if this is true it really deserves a blog post .

I’m fairly certain the owner of the domain is unrelated to the Cicada 3301 challenges beyond hosting a fan site. Their PGP signature is completely missing from the website, and in the words of 3301 itself: all messages will be signed with only their key. Besides, 3301 hosted everything on the dark web, not a clear web site. This is an interesting anecdote, and personally I’ve always thought the challenge was alphabet agency related, but I truly don’t think you found anything beyond a fan boy.

I think I saw one of these in New York. Someone stuck a "bitcoin is a scam" sticker on it. Now it all makes sense.

My favorite street view easter egg:

https://www.google.com/maps/@48.6547428,-120.5744037,3a,75y,...

Technically, not actually street view I don't think, but the blue circle does show up on Google Maps if you drag the little yellow guy in search of imagery.

Could be a sneaky recruiting trick. Stuff like this has happened before:

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/26/11618060/puzzles-are-fun-searc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588080

Caught me by surprise when I first saw that black box emerge while doing a search.

I saw it last year while I was doing a project for school - and clicked off the page as it was appearing. Never seen it again.

Yes, and the Mastadon post came up because it was too obscure.

I got a Google Foobar challenge back in 2022. Never ended up completing more than the first level, but would be interesting to know if they're still using it for hiring.

Last I heard they'd stopped it. The site still seems to exist though, maybe it came back.

The last problem on mine was really interesting, took me days. I wonder if there's a list of the problems somewhere, I thought I remember hearing that they weren't all the same.

I never did continue with the recruiting part of it, just had some fun.

The team behind it still exists.

I loved that puzzle site. I don't think I have ever been as hooked by programming as when I worked on those puzzles. Managed to get thrown out after completing level 5 by requesting another puzzle and forgetting about it. I even sent a support ticket begging to be let in again. If someone at the team sees this, I'd appreciate it :)

The last level for me was to write a function that evaluated

  sum([floor(i*sqrt(2)) for i in range(1,n+1)])

for 0 < n < 10**100. It was the first time I ever had use for my Knuth books.

It was quite detrimental to work performance though. Never heard from a recruiter, but I guess they don't employ developers in Norway.

I got the website three months ago, I just did the first puzzle and then stopped because I had to make way too many exercises for the classes I was taking and never entered the second challenge in.

That’s a curious domain, seems like it’s a meme/joke? (NSO group is the ones that helps shady governments put 0days in the phones of journalists etc). I guess it’s kinda fun to see this quirky and in-jokey vibe to the fediverse. Reminiscent of the pre-corporate internet era.

Yeah, the domain administrator runs it as a joke.

Left sidebar:

> This Mastodon instance is not affiliated with NSO Group. Made for hackers by hackers, nso.group is the best domain name you’ve encountered yet for a Mastodon instance

It's literally the location of Google Datacenters, maybe where-is-google-maps as in where is Google Maps hosted ?

Ageee. Was that the take away from this post? Is everyone else having a totally disconnected discussion here? I'm a bit confused

Worth noting its implemented mostly in JS, view-source on the page to get the whole list of photos and destinations.

I need to know what does it mean all of them:

https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/107193335994695458225/ph...

It seems like if I go to http://where-is-google-maps.com/?p={number} such as http://where-is-google-maps.com/?p=1, http://where-is-google-maps.com/?p=2, and so on, I get the locations of different google data centers around the world with qr codes on them. also worth noting the page title seems to be 'hide and seek' for all these pages. also the fence in p=2 seems to have a number on it? "4-20-11911191" or something.

User submitted photos with QR codes?

How would it get into Street View?

Easter egg?

Its not in Street View.

Ah, indeed. Kind of a nothing-burger then if you ask me.

It isn't? But the linked thread shows precisely that, and that is the title...?

Had to look closely at this. This looks like user submitted photospheres which google shows in the street view interface. They show one screenshot of the same spot but from the google streetview car which has no QR codes.

Ah gotcha that is very misleading.

GSV also shows user-submitted photos.. e.g. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wHQ3645j3EkaazC8A

You can submit your own 360⁰ photos to Google Maps and they will appear in Street View. You used to be able to submit whole tours with navigation through the Street View app, but that functionality is now mainly reserved for paid 3rd party services (which have much better software). You could possibly still do this via the API, but I haven't looked that far recently as it would involve building tools that I don't have the time to write.

I'm contributing bicycle trails to Google Street View (and CC-BY-SA to Mapillary). It's no longer done through the app, but through uploading a equirectangular videofile with either gps metadata or attaching a gpx file here: https://streetviewstudio.maps.google.com/

So no 3rd party services needed for plain old Street View. It's a bit opaque what's going on when you upload a video, though, they do all kinds of weird stuff with it. Try to align the track to a nearby road, when I'm not biking that road. Selecting intervals of pictures that doesn't make sense compared to how I would do manually etc. This one could perhaps control better through the API and uploading photo by photo and connect them.

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of camera/setup do you use? How do you find the results? I have been experimenting with this but the equipment I've been using (a mediocre 4k360 camera) gives pretty bad results, and I'm wary of spending a bunch of money and still getting images I'm not satisfied with. I have a bunch of my own street view contributions that were fun to make, but they look nice because they were taken with my phone and I had good control of the process.

A Gopro MAX on a pole on top of my bike helmet. The results raw are pretty OK when I view it locally. It's 5.6k. The problem is often whatever Google decides to do on their end with the video can be a bit funky. So you wont see the same quality as when uploading a photo sphere, but I can cover 40+ km in a ride, which I would never be able to do if I were to manually capture each spot with manual control.

Cool. I've been looking to record a bunch of gravel around where I live (and a bunch of minimum maintenance roads) in addition to the relatively minimal bike-specific infrastructure.

Didn't Google shut down this feature? Last I heard, someone "contributed" a image of the Android robot pissing on the Apple logo, which lead to the feature shutdown.

Didn't know Street View allows this still.

That was Map Maker, which allowed you to actually draw map features (park areas, roads, building outlines, you name it). This is just submitting photos that will be shown in Street View if they are in 360 degrees. Photos are clearly user-submitted unlike map features.

I wonder if these are the actual data centers that power Google Maps?

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Kinda off-topic, but this just reminded me of that story Paul Graham made about him being on Google Maps.

The title is very misleading

The codes translate to series of billboards for "South of the Border" and "Burma Shave"

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!

What's the Ovaltine reference to?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Story

It’s the hip dough

My friends love to hodl

You’ll earn so much crypto

It’ll make you yodel

BurmaCoin

Years ago, Games magazine had a contest for the cleverest Burma Shave style slogan, and the winner was:

To be a king Is not so fine. You cannot make A throne recline. (La-z-boy)

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