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Physical location of live stream found using flights patterns and astronomy
- tscs37 10y agoSay what you will but this shows how much dedication random people on the internet can bring up if they want to do something... even if it's as destructive as this... Amazing and terrifying.
- tunap 10y ago"Mob Rule" is terrifying. It seems many people are willing to embrace a good witch hunt... for a good cause, of course. I'm sure Sunil[falsely accused Boston Bomber] would agree, you know, if he wasn't dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi
- quannah 10y agoIt's kind of relevant, for anyone not familiar with with the details, that his death (likely suicide) had nothing to do with the witch hunt.
- tunap 10y agoI do not know what his state of mind was before his name & picture were splashed across every media outlet in the world, but I would presume that stress had an affect.
- rhcom2 10y agoHe went missing before the bombing. > Tripathi had been missing for a month prior to the April 15, 2013 bombings.
- tunap 10y agoI noted the downvotes and went investigating. "[His] body was found... April 23, 2013." He was identified by dental records, so body was decomposed &/or carrion, is there any information that suggests he was dead prior to 4/15? So the two middle eastern fellas in running attire w/ backpacks didn`t turn out to be Tripathi, as I assumed. I am assuming again, but I bet they felt some consternation at being accused. Wasn`t another person falsely identified, as well? My point stands.
- aaron695 10y agoHis suicide was before the bombings/witchhunt even happened.
- tunap 10y agoFor my edification, could you point me to pertinent forensics that determined he was dead prior to the bombing? I have not located any postmortem details.
- booleandilemma 10y agoIf only it could be harnessed for the power of good. 4chan as a service.
- tscs37 10y ago"4Chan As a Service" and "8Chan As a Service" 2$ for simple shitstorm 10$ for advanced shitstorm
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoDo “for the power of good” and “as a service”, uh, align? It would be the favourite tool of terrible people.
- lighttower 10y agoHumans working in teams to solve a problem. imagine the amazing things children could do if our education system motivated them like 4chan motivated random people on the internet
- RoboPlumber 10y agoThis one was 8chan, not 4chan. While I'm nothing more than an occasional passive observer of the chan communities, it seems that most of the "talent", so to speak, has left 4chan amidst increasingly strict rules against various forms of tomfoolery.
- hex12648430 10y agoAs far as I understand most of the work was done on 8chan because the 4chan moderators banned discussions of the live stream from /pol/, but most users of the /hwndu/ board on 8chan originally came from 4chan's /pol/. >it seems that most of the "talent", so to speak, has left 4chan amidst increasingly strict rules against various forms of tomfoolery. I don't have any number to prove this but to me it seems that the overlap between 8 and 4chan is huge. There's very few 8chan users that absolutely never visit 4chan anymore. 8chan is tiny in comparison to 4chan so the signal-to-noise ratio may seem better there. (according to their front page they get roughly 2k posts/hour, if it was a 4chan board it would be medium-sized and 3 times slower than big boards like /b/, /v/ or /pol/)
- empath75 10y agoI'm not sure we should be celebrating what's basically an intimidation campaign to shutdown free speech. What they did was trespassing and theft in the service of shutting down political speech they disagreed with. It's pretty disgusting.
- RoboPlumber 10y agoWhile this was certainly illegal, I think it's hard to say that it was malicious. This has essentially become a (somewhat one-sided) prank war. If they intended to deplatform or suppress Shia, they could have done something much more mean-spirited than photobomb his video streams and snatch his flag.
- threeseed 10y agoIt's the very definition of malicious. You can't just doxx, trespass and then steal from someone.
- empath75 10y agoIt's funny how anti-doxxing the chan people are when it's directed at them, but they cheerfully do it against their enemies. And let's not forget that along with relatively minor stuff like this, they'll be getting death threats and swatting attempts for the foreseeable future.
- ctrl-j 10y ago> This has essentially become a (somewhat one-sided) prank war. Isn't there another term for a one-sided prank war? I think it's called harassment or something? Combined with theft and vandalism... I can see why they prefer to be anonymous. It's hard to meme from jail.
- RoboPlumber 10y agoI bet you were fun in college. Good-spirited pranks don't warrant jail time.
- clubm8 10y agoSo for anyone else intending to do an anonymous live stream, doing the shoot indoors (insulated from outside noises such as a 4channer driving around in a truck honking their horn) would probably allow for an uninterrupted stream.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JoshCole 10y agoI don't think it would. I think what this actually shows is the opposite may be true even when it seems absurd to think that way. Crazy things might be used to locate you: - Picture surfaces of person planning to do the live stream hopping off a plane. People track where they came from back to Malaysia. - Person sees the dimensions of the rooms via the live stream. Runs over Google maps and finds all buildings with those dimensions. - Half the area gets ruled out, because of the limitations of running a live stream means there is no connectivity in some of the areas. - Rent a car service records hacked for only car dealer in that area. GPS logs of cars acquired. One of the cars went to one of the possible locations. Burglar heads out breaks in and captures the flag. It's completely absurd. Utterly absurd. Not much more absurd than what happened here though.
- Houshalter 10y agoAll of those things are way more effort than what they did here. It's like computer security, where you can never have a system that is 100% guaranteed to be perfectly secure. But you can do some simple things to vastly increase the work required by an attacker.
- JoshCole 10y agoYeah. I get that. I just don't think the take-away of this was as long as you sound-proof a room, you are probably golden. It would be reasonable to have thought that an undisclosed location with no visible landmarks was fine. It wasn't. As far as the using the geometry visible and google maps: this was done before in a video of a terrorist training camp. It resulted in Russia bombing the area, after they were alerted.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- johnwatson11218 10y agoI remember reading of another example like this on reddit where they referred to this kind of thing as "weaponized autism". In that example they had looked at training videos of a terrorist training camp and managed to get the physical coordinates which were passed to the military for an airstrike.
- Houshalter 10y agoReddit used to do stuff like this until the Boston Bombing. A bunch of volunteers created a big effort to try to identify the bombers from photos and videos of the event. The media reported on some suspects they came up with before it had any confirmation from authorities or anything. And ended up falsely accusing innocent people of being terrorists. Then there was a big backlash against reddit for even trying to do what they did. Now the community really frowns on stuff like that. The admins created much stricter site wide rules on posting personal information.
- chroma 10y agoYou're probably thinking of /sg/ (the Syria general broad) on 4chan last year: http://i.imgur.com/5P1N1GI.jpg http://i.imgur.com/5P1N1GI.jpg Turnaround time (from initial post to bombs dropping) was about 36 hours. Most of the delay was in relaying the info to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
- backpropaganda 10y agoDoes this operation have a wikipedia page?
- ars 10y agoSounds like "Focus" from A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
- thenayr 10y agoA far-right conservative political blog on the front page of HN, you've got to be shitting me.
- chis 10y agoI don't know if this is really all that impressive... Shia posted a photo from a diner in Tennessee, and then some dude drove around honking until the noise appeared on stream.
- RoboPlumber 10y agoNope, they used flight radar data to triangulate the flag to within 2km, then had cars drive around.
- NuDinNou 10y agoThat was used as confirmation, they found the general area before.
- matt-attack 10y agoCould someone please explain how you can triangulate a location by the presence of three contrails in the image. I simply don't understand how that's possible.
- Xunxi 10y agoThis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6uGP8hHwrQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6uGP8hHwrQ sums it up.
- hoorayimhelping 10y agoShia posted something on twitter which made it clear he was in Tennessee, which they used to narrow their search down significantly. this gif was at the top of r/4chan the other day (even though it seems like it's 8chan's work) http://i.imgur.com/BkkgY1g.gifv http://i.imgur.com/BkkgY1g.gifv and it does a pretty good job of getting you up to speed.
- teej 10y agoThey didn't. They ended up finding it because of Shia's tweet and having some local 4 channers drive around and honk.
- RoboPlumber 10y agoNope, they did use contrails. I happened to see the /hwndu/ board while it was happening. They only sent people out in cars after triangulating the flag using the sun (for camera direction) and flight data (for location).
- ndh2 10y agoThey had projections of flight paths and a point in time. It wasn't just one image, it was a live feed. From gravity and/or the pole they may have had an estimate on the pitch angle of the camera. Then you need live flight data. flightradar24 looks like a good bet, they even provide altitude information. The accuracy of that data can probably be massively improved with a Kalman filter. It probably doesn't happen too often that there are three airplanes flying close to each other at a specific point in time. Even if there are, you might rule out all but one triplets of planes from the angles. You could also look at flights at different times (e.g. over the course of the last hour, how many flight paths have seen flights at 7, 20, 33 and 51 minutes apart?). That way they were able to identify which ray in the image corresponds to which plane and 3D flight path. If you look at two intersecting lines, the angle will change depending on the view direction. They knew the angles of the 3D flight paths to each other, and the angles of the projections. To find the angle of the paths to the view direction you can use non-linear optimization. Or just do it manually in Blender (you only need two angles). You actually only need two rays.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago> trolling Labeouf so hard that he lashed out and got arrested Uh, a better word might be harassing?
- mabbo 10y agoSetting aside the pretty debatable morality of this whole thing (lots of other good comments here to debate that), I think the real story, the interesting one, is that this is even possible. The tools used all exist and are basically free and easily accessible (gmaps+streetview, flight data maps, the live stream itself, etc). The people behind this are just random strangers on the internet who agreed on a cause (as strange as the cause may be). This used to be something only the CIA could do and they took longer to do it. 15 years ago, 'The Bourne Identity' was nearly science fiction! What's this look like in 10 more years, when facial/vocal recog software is just as easy, when drones are somehow even cheaper and smarter, when 5 new technologies we hadn't considered exist, when there's even more people reaching out to each other to find common causes? I'm excited/terrified to see what that looks like.
- R_haterade 10y agoThe best free tool here by far is the weaponized autism, as they call it. Hundreds or thousands of bored, reasonably intelligent people united toward a common cause. And they're the sort of people who wind up on /pol/, so generally they're of a sort that develops an obsessive interest in some (or many) esoteric topic(s). To your speculation here: > What's this look like in 10 more years, when facial/vocal recog software is just as easy, when drones are somehow even cheaper and smarter, when 5 new technologies we hadn't considered exist, when there's even more people reaching out to each other to find common causes? I would state that the singularity has already reached us. The next steps will simply be better organization and better interconnects between computing nodes. (people)
- R_haterade 10y agoShould also state that the relatively democratic, even anarchic nature of 4chan posting is the single best mirror of my own thought processes I've encountered in my time on the internet. (Maybe a little less porn gets posted in my brain, but you get the picture.) While it has its flaws, I think it's really a great way to mimic some sort of collective consciousness.
- rbanffy 10y ago
- phyller 10y agoThis is why we can't have nice things
- rdtsc 10y agoWhat was the nice thing here though?
- phyller 10y agoThe internet, freedom of speech. I know, we do actually have those things, its a facetious comment, but with a kernel of truth. Our freedoms rests more on personal respect and responsibility than the government and military. Once we pass a certain percentage of people who celebrate antisocial behavior, things just break down. Cities only exist because less than 1% of people think its ok to randomly throw bricks through windows or punch strangers. If that number creeps up to some other larger, but still very small percentage of people, cities just wouldn't be livable anymore. These guys just decided to troll this project, and went to extraordinary lengths to break the law and ruin someone else's dream. If more people did this type of thing, no one would feel safe expressing themselves or sharing information of any kind.
- rdtsc 10y agoI think there is more to this story than just random vandalism, or say a personal feud. What is different here is this was a political issue. I don't think they would go and throw bricks at storefronts, or rob people on the street and so on. This was done as a political taunt. But I may be wrong, I don't go to 4 chan, this is the impression I got from reading about it. > These guys just decided to troll this project, and went to extraordinary lengths to break the law and ruin someone else's dream It seems they didn't go to extraordinary lengths just to break the law. They would have done this even if it was on public property and there was no reason to break the law. The goal was to prove a point. There is another disturbing and interesting process happening and that is of disarming of slogans and political speech by appropriation. This random group of participants basically showed that indeed "He Will Not Divide Us" by coming together and solving a technical problem to prove a political point. So in a way they appropriated the slogan and applied to themselves. That makes the slogan less effective. The exact same thing happened with "Fake News" it was used for a while but it was appropriated by Trump's supporters and it ended up backfiring. Now major mass media channels are openly taunted and are defending themselves against the charge of being "Fake News" and so on.
- lkrubner 10y agoIt's extremely worrisome that this part of human psychology exists. In this particular case, the white supremacists exerted maximum effort, and showed tremendous cleverness, simply to advance their agenda. This same energy could be exerted for thousands of good causes: crowdsourcing research efforts to track climate change, or track bird migrations, or to track populations of endangered species, or this energy could be channeled into astronomy, or any other research effort where amateurs play an important role in helping advance knowledge. Or this energy could be channeled into local volunteer efforts, such as teaching low income children skills they might not learn in the schools. Or reading to the blind at retirement centers. But instead this all of this cleverness and effort was exerted on behalf of a white supremacist agenda. I find it incredibly sad that people are moved to exert so much effort for what is on the surface a trivial and useless act, and worse, which one that is ultimately in the service of a dark and evil impulse.
- ntelson1s 10y agoLooks like you climbed out of your hole of ignorance today, albeit just to spew it.
- dang 10y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13855559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13855559 and marked it off-topic.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]