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Chatroulette + GeoIP + screengrabs = Chatroulette Map
- bbuffone 17y agoChatroulette is by far the most useless thing that has been created on the Internet. I wish I could have the memories of using it erased from my brain, and the electricity it takes to run the site and the computers connected to it back as well.
- die_sekte 17y agoIt seems that you have never been to zombo.com.
- bbuffone 17y agothat is pretty useless, but my vote is still for Chatroulette
- peterwwillis 17y agoIf I was still going to school, i'd get on Chatroulette and ask people for answers to my homework.
- peregrine 17y agoDoesn't this defeat the purpose of anonymous chat?
- paulgerhardt 17y agoI think the point is that it's not that anonymous to begin with.
- blantonl 17y agounless you are wearing a Nixon mask or your dog/cock/cartoon is on on the screen.
- noonespecial 17y agoJust when I thought Chatroulette couldn't possibly get any creepier. Well done indeed! How about laying a few of the details of this mashup's creation on us. Did you automate the "next" somehow to get lots of screengrabs with minimal work?
- ten7 17y agoFinally, a constructive use of Geo Location!
- angusgr 17y agoSmall bug report (assuming this is your mashup): clicking on the "zone" nodes in Chrome centres them but doesn't pop up the screengrabs. Works in Firefox though. 10 clicks in, first penis sighting. Sigh.
- dailo10 17y agoDoes anyone else find this disturbing in a Big Brother sort of way?
- badave 17y agoVery disturbing. I'm not going on Big Br-... chatroulette again. It's just geoip though, so it's accuracy is low.
- rudyfink 17y agoThat was the first question I had, "whoa, is GeoIP that accurate?" Sadly the best I could quickly find was this ( http://www.maxmind.com/app/city_accuracy http://www.maxmind.com/app/city_accuracy ) which says that, as of 11.19.2008, GeoIP correctly resolves to 25 miles of the actual location 83% of the time.
- DougWebb 17y agoThere are at least 100 towns within 25 miles of my house. One of them is New York City. I guess I'm not concerned about GeoIP's accuracy... this is one of the advantages of living in a very dense area.
- TrevorJ 17y agoThat, coupled with my complete lack of desire to ever use this website should keep me safe.
- tlrobinson 17y agoStill, Chatroulette provides a mapping from IPs to faces, which I'm sure could be used for evil. There are any number of things you could cross reference IPs against (email headers, web server logs, etc)
- dirtbox 17y ago>It's just geoip though, so it's accuracy is low. I do hope so, there's a man 2 streets away from me, masturbating into the camera. For the record, it seems that the UK is a world leader in this regard.
- dzlobin 17y ago...apparently there are 7 people chatting from Rosedale Cemetery in LA, on Normandie and W Washington.
- eli 17y agoDoes that cemetery happen to be dead center in the middle of LA?
- scottjackson 17y agoI heard that people are just dying to get into that place.
- elblanco 17y agoInteresting the very large number in the D.C., NYC and LA area, and the very low number in the Bay Area.
- brandnewlow 17y agoChicago's pretty dead, too.
- kmcgivney 17y agoRelatively popular on the border of Nunavut and Manitoba though.
- maukdaddy 17y agoMight be the time of day data was collected?
- tel 17y agoWhat a gross invasion of people's privacy as enabled by collecting information they already willingly submitted. If chatroulette proper is an unwavering stare into the faces and bodies of the internet, chatroulette map is stripping one further layer of anonymity away. It's also terrifying to think what'll happen when this collides with registered sex offender counts.
- tbgvi 17y agoAdding a whole new level to the creepiness of Chatroulette. Exactly what it needed! If only those dudes knew their location could be pinpointed, maybe it would make it a bit more bearable.
- die_sekte 17y agoA dick-map! Great! This needs statistics: dicks per square kilometre, dicks per million inhabitants … Edit: There is a surprisingly low number of dicks in this map. Lots of bored teenagers/mid-twenties.
- chrischen 17y agoGo to the center of paris. That blob is pretty much all dicks.
- froo 17y agoWell for the 1 pic that is on the entire continent of Africa... it's dickless, but that guy was well on his way to getting his tackle out.
- z8000 17y agoIt would quite funny to replace the pins on the map with d*cks for those users showing off their wares.
- z8000 17y agoIt would quite funny to replace the pins on the map with d*cks for those users showing off their wares.
- eli 17y agoSomeone should code up a Firefox plugin that pops up a map with a dot on the person you're chatting with.
- chrischen 17y agoAnd then if someone's doing something nasty just freak them out by telling them their address!
- koepked 17y agoOkay, I don't know about chatroullete anymore. I just came across (on the OP) a girl doing naughty naughty things... maybe this has already been considered, but what if she's not of age? Am I now guilty of possessing kiddie porn? The way current laws are written and enforced, who knows...
- ewjordan 17y agoI highly doubt it. Chatroulette has been mentioned on all sorts of Real News sources, and it's well known (and easy to explain) that you don't personally choose what you're viewing over it. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury that would really agree to throw the book at you for accidentally coming across something illegal there. Then again, I'm no lawyer, and crazier things have happened...
- ErrantX 17y agoNo, your fine.
- chrischen 17y agoSo I zoom in my geographic area and there's these two points on the map. One is this like 60 year old guy looking at his computer. His neighbor however is masturbating. Imagine if it were my neighbor. Guess it's not so anonymous anymore.
- henrikschroder 17y agoImagine if you were 60 years old!
- micrypt 17y ago...where are all the Russian users?
- deutronium 17y agoI presume this site is created by the Chatroulette people themselves, as surely they'd be the only ones with access to the IPs of users? [Edit: Just tried Wireshark with chatroulette and you can see the UDP packets going to/from the other user, I guess this isn't always the case if you're both behind NAT gateways]
- bugs 17y agoI think it was found that people were directly connected or the ip address was forwarded.
- python123 17y agoWhy would you think that? The domains chatroulette and chatroulettemap don't seem to be related. The real site has is own nameservers and is registered out of the UK. The map is served by Dreamhost and is registered out of Colorado. The real site was created by a talented young person. The map site was probably created by a talentless old person (sorta like the HN demographic).
- travisp 17y agoApparently Chatroulette involves a direct connection between individuals, so it's possible to determine the IP address of the person you are connected to. For it not to be a direct connection, Chatroulette would require some pretty heavy resources to stream everyone's video.
- MichaelGG 17y agoAs per http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/chatroulettes-founder-17-introduces-himself/?src=twt&twt=nytimesbits http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/chatroulettes-found... : "Network throughput is 7 gigabits a second." which would sort of line up with ~20K users at ~50K video streams.
- swolchok 17y agoI posted a comment to this effect here about 3 weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128322 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128322 I can confirm that the UDP stream is not always available and that I was behind a NAT during my testing.
- angumagu 17y agoThere's a bit more info here: http://laughingsquid.com/chatroulette-map-not-so-anonymous-anymore/ http://laughingsquid.com/chatroulette-map-not-so-anonymous-a...
- roder 17y agothis is why I'm scared of the South http://grab.by/2YNw http://grab.by/2YNw
- blasdel 17y agoI spend too much time on the internet — I immediately recognized the both the paraphilia (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Plushie http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Plushie) and the object with the dick in it (Pocahontas's pet raccoon).
- subbu 17y agoBe careful, both the links above are NSFW. I accidentally clicked on them to jump from my chair :) Luckily nobody were around.
- johnyzee 17y agoI actually saw that during my one ChatRoulette session a couple of weeks ago. Whew, thank God it's just a clip someone is running.
- jamesbritt 17y agoThis calls for a Zillow mashup.
- tlrobinson 17y agoWhoa, are Chatroulette users connected directly to each other rather than proxying the streams through Chatroulette's servers? Certainly the former would be more efficient, but if so then it's not as anonymous as it first seems.
- aw3c2 17y agoYes, it uses some sort of newish P2P stuff in Flash.
- stevejalim 17y agoYeah, it's called Stratus and provides P2P for flash player 10+
- stellar678 17y agoWell, clicking around for two minutes I ended up seeing a group of map points that all resolved to...a domain specifying the res hall of a major university. I'd say that destroys any hope of quasi-anonymity.
- dhuck 17y agoI'm in Maine right now. Here's a warning message from chatroulettemap.com that I see when I visit: "We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using student's names in their hostnames. We've decided, at least for the time being, to hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable information was found in some entries."
- andylei 17y agohow does this work?
- slig 17y agoChatroulette uses p2p for video. So, I guess this new app simulates a client by connecting to chatroulette server, getting a new peer, geolocating his IP and taking a screenshot.
- ShabbyDoo 17y agoWhat are the mechanics of this peer-to-peer interaction with both peer nodes being Flash browser plug-ins?
- slig 17y agoCheck this: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/
- maqr 17y agoSince when does flash support this? And does it depend on upnp or something? Just when I thought I understood Flash... now I'm confused again.
- slig 17y agoCheck this: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/
- tarkin2 17y agoThis is going to give HR departments an extra method of determining who to employ, at least. And given the number of people exhibiting their penises, I'm foretelling another drop in employment.
- tarkin2 17y agoAlso, whoever runs this site, if he plays his cards right, is surely going to be a millionaire by next Monday.
- dmn001 17y agoThe IP address is in the filename of the image!?!
- rbanffy 17y agoAnd the first part looks suspiciously like a timestamp... Edit: In [4]: datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(1267675073) Out[4]: datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 4, 0, 57, 53)
- terhechte 17y agoAlso, in Milano (Italy) there seems to be one house that houses all Chatroulette users. That's either a really, really freaky place to live, or Geo-IP has a pretty bad coverage of Italy.
- jacquesm 17y agoI've been in the webcam business since day one, this is one of the reasons why we make it purposefully hard to get to the real IP of our users. Only after you jump through a fair number of hoops can you expose your IP, if by then you aren't warned yet you probably can't read. We've had some stalking issues due to this in the past as well, especially the 'early days'.
- travisp 17y agoWow: "We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using student's names in their hostnames. We've decided, at least for the time being, to hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable information was found in some entries" They put student names in their hostname? That's... bad.
- maukdaddy 17y agoVirginia Tech used to do that, back in the late 90s. 99% of people didn't know that, so when you initiated a direct connection via IM (or ICQ back then) you could find out all sorts of fun information.
- joeschmo 17y agohow do you know if you have been grabbed and why hasn't someone who knows about computers built an application so you can easily hide your ip? london would be a huge market for that...and for the record i find lol cats more useful than chatroulette