
Osint Amateur Hour - duck
https://www.secjuice.com/geolocation-osint-amateur-hour/
======
phreeza
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you may like the Geoguessr game
([https://www.geoguessr.com/](https://www.geoguessr.com/)), and this guy on
youtube who is really good at it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xApbqwtnSzs&list=PL_japiE6QK...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xApbqwtnSzs&list=PL_japiE6QKWprCnen-1gL31VA9owRLhcx&index=4)

~~~
polytely
That guy (GeoWizard) has an amazing video series where he attempts to cross
the whole country of Wales while walking in a straight line [0], it is
honestly one of the best things I've ever seen on the internet.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w986ni7_g&list=PL_japiE6QK...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w986ni7_g&list=PL_japiE6QKWphPxjqn0KJjfoRnuVSELaI)

~~~
mywacaday
Thanks for that, enjoyable watch over a coffee. I'm currently looking into
planning a kayak trip with some friends. Nice to see with a bit of imagination
there is still some adventure to be had.

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pintxo
Doing this quite often as we are currently looking for a new house. Real
estate offerings here in Germany often omit the actual address. So some
research on the actual location is needed. It’s fun and reduces the list of
possible objects easily without communicating with the realtor.

~~~
thepangolino
Any idea on why the address is not provided?

I just find this practice really annoying and I don't see how it helps sell a
property.

~~~
UweSchmidt
It prevents people from showing up randomly and ringing doorbells. The realtor
can control the process, inexperienced and stressed sellers are not confronted
with strangers 'negotiating'. Mostly it's in the interest of the realtor that
their position as a middleman is accepted.

~~~
kortilla
So why isn’t that an issue in the US where addresses are openly listed and
homeowners aren’t harassed?

~~~
justacog
Realtors in the US typically have an exclusive contract with the seller and
the seller must pay the commission however the house is sold. Without a
contract like that (seems common in Europe), a buyer can bypass the realtor
and work directly with the seller. The listing agents hide the address to try
to prevent that from happening.

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fortran77
Of course the sleuths on twitter think they can identify people from clues in
photos and often get it wrong with dangerous or disastrous results.

See:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52978880](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52978880)

And: [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/spike-lee-
sued-...](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/spike-lee-sued-tweet-
george-zimmerman)

And, of course, reddit and the boston bomber.

Do this for fun, but don't get your pitchforks out

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jiofih
How do you go about completing the challenge?

Identifying its SA is extremely easy with the Dutch text and newspaper names.
There is no real hint this is Pretoria and not somewhere else. The satellite
photos don’t have enough resolution to help find the stop lights (which appear
not too common looking at street view).

You can kind of see a double roof in the building in the background, and the
road arrangement, but it would take days to manually look at every city
intersection.

I guess the easiest approach is to post the image on a forum / twitter and get
locals to chime in :)

~~~
executesorder66
There is no Dutch text. It is Afrikaans.

And as a South African, I would immediately know it was SA just by the look of
the traffic lights and street signs.

I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.

In the article there is the line: "Some quick Googling revealed several
universities in Pretoria, and I decided to wing it and take a closer look at
the Pretoria skyline."

That's glossing over a very important part of figuring it out. Because once
you know which city it makes it much easier.

~~~
Hackbraten
> I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.

If you look closely, you can see stenciled markings on the yellow poles. These
felt like official markings to me so I tried to figure out how to use the
markings to narrow down the list of candidate cities.

According to Wikipedia, the _Burger_ newspaper is distributed only in three
regions: Western, Eastern, and Northern Cape. There are not too many large-ish
towns in these district.

So I made a list of all towns with >50k inhabitants. Looking at those cities
on Street View one by one, I found there are only two towns where the yellow
poles have the exact same typeface of stencil numbers on them: East London and
Uitenhage.

So I took a closer look at either town. (After a few misses, you quickly get a
feeling where to find the parts of towns where the roads actually have traffic
lights). With a bit of luck, I actually managed to locate the first picture
just by randomly clicking on corners. Its coordinates are 33.7648S/25.4012E.

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ricardo81
First clue I noticed from the 1st photo was they seem to drive on the left
hand side, which is fairly rare. The language on the signs obviously is a
great clue.

~~~
cgriswald
Not just language, but brands can help a lot as well. Newspapers, obviously,
but even a brand of soda can narrow things down.

I think a better approach on his second step would have been to search "<major
city> skyline", preferably in order from largest population to smallest. South
Africa isn't that big. I think it pays to be more methodical and work with the
information you know, before speculating. Speculating is great if you're
stuck, but I think he mostly just got lucky there.

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TheHeretic12
4Chan is notorious for doing this successfully, with even less detail to start
with. The large anonymous crowd of viewers and poster is highly likely to
contain people who can identify even the smallest detail. Within the past few
years, a few remarkable ones stand out to me:

1\. Locating terrorist training camps by high voltage power lines visible in
the background.

2\. Shia LeBeouf's IRL Super Capture the Flag, "He Will Not Divide Us,"
located and vandalized no less than 5 times. The last one used astronavigation
principles, and visible contrails from airplane traffic.

3\. Identifying muggers in crowds based on nothing more than biking gear and
facial hair.

The one thing these had in common, was a sustained call for effort. By keeping
the limited original details available and obvious, people in every timezone
and demographic could view them. This greatly increases the odds of specialist
knowledge or community insiders being able to add information to the detail,
which goes back to the general audience, forming an action feedback loop.

Amatuer hour indeed, but when you have 10000 random people you get results
pretty quick.

~~~
wizeman
Yes, but then again, Reddit also did the same thing right after the Boston
marathon bombing and as I recall it went pretty badly, as they ended up
identifying the wrong person as the culprit and his mom ended up receiving
threats from random people (he was missing at the time). He was later found
dead in a river and it turned out he had killed himself.

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GEBBL
Cool write up! It reminds me of the amateur osint that was carried out after
Donald Trump showed the aerial photo of the Iranian power facility (iirc) and
people were able to work out the exact coordinates and flight path of the
satellite that took the photo from using the shadows on the ground. Amazing.

~~~
kl4m
This one? "Trump Tweets Sensitive Surveillance Image Of Iran"
[https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-
twe...](https://www.npr.org/2019/08/30/755994591/president-trump-tweets-
sensitive-surveillance-image-of-iran)

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bradknowles
But they never took that information and went back to the first photo to
figure out where it was taken.

Or am I missing something?

