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Comment by gusgordon | Hacker News Reader

The only practical way of making something like this work would be to collect all the photos taken ~2 hours before the bombs went off near the finish line. You could do this by searching Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for geotags and keywords/hashtags then sorting by date and time. Dump all the photos into a database and do your best to sort by time (duplicates shouldn't be much of a problem). I don't think there would be too many photos, probably less than 5,000. Then see if you can find what the bombs looked like before they went off, then go back and find when they first placed.

If anyone is interested in doing something like this, I can help, so let me know.

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Perhaps this could be combined this with the information below and we could search pictures taken prior to the blast for black duffel bags that might contain 6 quart pressure cookers.

I don't really like the idea of putting a lot of photos of traumatized people on internet, photoshit happens, the last thing that those sons, women, family could merit is to be lynched on internet.

...but

If you know or suspect that the bags were black, a reasonable solution that maybe could have success without to blow up all the remains of privacy could be:

1-to create a filter that makes a copy of the originals AND change all colors of the bunch of photos in a named directory to i.e. soft blue... EXCEPT a small range of black tones.

2- Thus, you could check or search then in the bunch with another script what photos have those suspicious black tones. And you could choose to move those photos to a different dir for a preliminary analysis, maybe saving a lot of time.

2- or you could search for photos taken from same place in different times (very frequent in a competition) that have black tones NOT changing of place in a specific time. People moves, claps, node, etc, bags with bombs don't.

3-You could refine the script to permit to enter any desired tone also and mask all the other colors. The goal is to find quickly a bag, but keep the privacy of innocent people and victims that do not deserve this.

I thing that should not be much challenging technically.

They shouldn't be too traumatized in the hours before the blasts ... and that's when we'd be looking for the black duffel bags.

They are traumatized now, that's for sure :-(

To be exposed on internet again and again, or to put pictures of happy friends and members of the family that now are in an hospital will add a lot of unnecessary suffering and probably will enlarge the "satisfaction" of the authors, the "success" of the operation, and I'm writing this with a very angry face.

We have to avoid this.

If you have a photo of the marathon, any photo, not only of the finish line, send this photo to the police.

To care and show respect and love for the victims, dead and alive, should be a priority, in the same level as to put the authors in jail. (only my opinion).

Thanks gusgordan! Can you e-mail me at jon@jonb.org?

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