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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

My former manager at work posted a photo out of the window of his condo. I correctly identified his building, floor, apartment number, and which room he was in when he took it.

He was impressed and slightly horrified.

I'm no rainbolt, but the are a few neat tricks you can do. In my case, I was able to identify two landmarks that overlapped, and used Google Earth to extrapolate a line from them to his window.

Still, nothing compares to that time 4chan identied the location of a terrorist training camp from a photo and gave it to the Russian military who promptly bombed it (https://imgur.io/N7DwWP1).

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Some stalker managed to doxx a Japanese singer based off of reflections in her eyes on a selfie and identify which house and floor she lived in by minute details in the background of photos and videos [1].

Absolutely wild.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50000234

From the reflection in her eyes he "just" identified a train station, from there he followed her to the building she lives in. From posted indoor videos - and probably his own outside photos - he tried to identify the windows of her apartment based on things like window curtains and the direction of the sunlight. The linked article does not say whether he succeeded, just that he admitted to trying this.

this is why women generally don’t post pictures to the Internet without a lot of thought behind it

I know someone who was doxxed because the pattern on bedsheets that were visible in the picture uniquely identified her hotel. The picture only had a tightly-cropped cat sitting on generic white linen.

I know a person who made a comment on Twitter about “I need a new pair of boots” three years ago. From that, her stalkers correctly inferred what city she lived in based on historical snowfall data, and were then able to use other context to get her fired from her job.

Presumably this person got themselves fired for stuff they said online.

Or by owning an Onlyfans account.

> Still, nothing compares to that time 4chan identied the location of a terrorist training camp from a photo and gave it to the Russian military who promptly bombed it (https://imgur.io/N7DwWP1).

Image is too blurry to tell thanks to imgur compression, but does this mean the US-backed Syrian opposition?

The Shia LaBeouf “He Will Not Divide Us” 4chan geo-location is my favorite. Never underestimate bored autistic shitposters lol.

The initial couple HWNDU challenges were solved through rather boring means. They tried geolocating based on stars, but what ended up giving away the solution was a tweet from a local diner waitress posting a pic with Shia. Once they narrowed it down to a small town, then it got a bit fun, with one anon driving around and honking, so they could determine the location of the flag based on the volume of the honking sound on the livestream. And the whole drone usage to "alter" the flag was pretty unexpected.

But one of the latter ones was kinda crazy. I am thinking about the one where Shia placed a flag inside some wooden cabin (in Finland iirc), and they managed to find it based on a pattern of the woodgrain[0].

0. https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/4chan-shia-labeouf-cabin/

I think about the indoor HWNDU flag every time I post pictures online that were taken in my house.

The one I recall was when Shia finally pointed it at the sky with no landmarks visible.

So they tracked jets flying overhead, and combined that with what birds and bugs they could hear. And that got them the location.

We are talking about the same one, and there imo was some wishful exaggeration in a lot of coverage regarding how it all actually went, probably for the sake of making it into a more interesting story. I was in those HWNDU threads at the time, so I clearly remember it, and sources that looked at it in more detail corroborate it.

Tracking jets flying jets along with the rest of the things you mention only helped with narrowing it down to somewhere in the viscinity of Tennessee[0]. After that, there was no progress whatsoever until that geotagged tweet containing a photo of Shia with a diner waitress (she was the one who tweeted it, as it was a typical "i took a photo with a celebrity i just met" tweet), which narrowed it down to a speicific small town in Tennessee. And only then all the fun stuff with driving around and honking occurred.

While tracking flying jets was a cool idea, it ended up being a dead-end approach, as it didn't help with narrowing it down beyond "Tennessee and adjacent areas". And the geotagged photo that eventually led to the flag location didn't rely on overhead jet paths or any of that, as the geotag was fairly sufficient.

0. http://wikimapia.org/36787915/He-Will-Not-Divide-Us-Flag-Sit...

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