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Comment by networkchad | Hacker News Reader

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

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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/

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...

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

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