MH370: China releases satellite images of possible crash site | Hacker News Reader

MH370: China releases satellite images of possible crash site

theguardian.com

46 pointsaburan2846 comments

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Oil rig worker says he saw Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 burst into flames

Source: http://www.news.com.au/world/oil-rig-worker-says-he-saw-mala...

The images are from SASTIND, available here: http://www.sastind.gov.cn/n112/n117/c303244/content.html

These images interpolated 400%:

http://www.eliteraspberries.com/files/303251-416.png

http://www.eliteraspberries.com/files/303252-55.png

http://www.eliteraspberries.com/files/303253-144.png

Can this information be used in the crowd-sourced search that is happening on http://tomnod.com so people can focus on that area for a while?

Most likely but I couldn't find an easy way to go to a specific lat/lon coordinate and they make interacting with their system in an unintended fashion fairly annoying. If you click the 'random location' you'll see a POST which contains a JSON body that has lat/lng coords and such, might be able to manipulate that in order to figure out the correct grid # that tomnod assigns to that area.

Please let us know. I think they are using their own internal lat/lon mapping to encode images. I was able to get some images using their API:

https://ddnhehdam2vn0.cloudfront.net/malaysiaair2014_02/18/2...

https://ddnhehdam2vn0.cloudfront.net/malaysiaair2014_02/12/3...

but most of the numbers return 403. Above links roughly match upper left and lower right corner.

http://www.tomnod.com/nod/challenge/malaysiaairsar2014

If they were taken Sunday wonder why it took 4 days for them to become public? Anyone familiar with satellite imaging? Are the images not sent instantly to earth where they can then review?

well someone has to notice something too. In this day and age I expect them to be available real time but my ex brother in law used to do similar for the air force and what he could see in a photo is beyond me even after going "its right there". Video about finding V1 in WW2 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23270332 explaining how to find something in photos

That is an awesome story thanks for sharing the link. More people died making the V1/2 than killed in Britain I didn't know that.

There are a massive number of images to review. The South China Sea search area alone is 14,440 square miles.

That is true but if this turns out to be not far off the flight's original path then I am a little surprised still.

Possibly because the Chinese initially didn't want to release the images to give away the full capabilities of their satellites to potential adversaries.

It's safe to say these images have been blurred/degraded from the original sources.

The image was taken on March 9 11:00 AM and relaesed on Marh 12. That's about 48 hours.

Also note that their work is to "found the airplane" not to "release the image".

Because after the pictures were taken they had to search thousands of square miles of ocean to find any tiny speck of anything that looked interesting. It's a very slow and tedious process.

I'm getting more and more fond of the "live feed" style of reporting that theguardian.com does so well.

Other than your tech release liveblog, does anyone else do this kind of news format? It's pretty awesome, as the timeliness of the reporting and sequence convey a story that goes beyond the individual facts.

BBC does it as well. I've seen on a handful of other news sites (NY Times, CNN, NBC) for some events.

Forums are a great source, too, when you get parties that are interested in aggregating news sources [1] for the community.

Sports and elections use the format very frequently — these have the advantage that significant infrastructure can be set up in advance, whereas breaking news live blogging is more adhoc, and often constitutes just updating the text of a posted article on a website.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/20288q/comprehensive_t...

Reddit is my go-to for live-feed style news of major events. there's always somebody in the comments of a front-page thread doing a good running summary of what's happened so far.

Yeah, I found Reddit's investigative journalism superb during the Boston Marathon Bombing /s

This attitude still annoys me. Yes, there were a couple of users that may have jumped to conclusions - but so what. Overall, the Boston Bombing coverage through Reddit was an amazing, breakthrough experience in the realm of how we can experience a media event. It represented the first time people could experience the combination of a) freely available police radio signal b) satellite imagery c) a mass man-hunt - which resulted in an incredible, absolutely breakthtaking and adreniline inducing media experience. The mainstream media? Hours upon hours behind what we were experiencing. Now - that is now being repeated - to a lesser degree - with flight 370. It's a shame that a few trolls have obscured this event for what it was. So please don't tarnish all Reddit users with the title of "Reddit". Isn't that just the same as talking about "all those Muslims", or, conversely, the jihadist talking about "America"?

While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that part of the difference ni the experience is that anyone can post whatever they like in a forum thread, leading to trolling and worse.

Not everyone has the ability to broadcast news from a news outlet, and certainly the more reputable ones, which are hours behind, are behind because they also have habits from more traditional journalism, things like fact checking and avoiding pure speculation.

> Yes, there were a couple of users that may have jumped to conclusions - but so what

You cannot seriously be blind to the implications or consequences can you?

>You cannot seriously be blind to the implications or consequences can you?

There seems to be a serious lack of empathy on the parts of many of the users on HN who are commenting.

They're forgetting that Sunil was a person, and that he had family and friends. They're forgetting that baseless accusations actually hurt others.

Sure - while the sense of responsibility within the fourth estate has diluted with 24/7 news cycle - I agree that the buffer to reporting news (after fact-checking) remains important. I'm simply highlighting that the last 5 years has birthed exciting new means of experiencing mass events.

Re: "so what" - well ... do I get upset a few about racist/homophobic Youtube commentors? No, because I know that by engaging in this platform (and the whole interent FTM) I am going to be exposed to a raft of idiots/trolls who carelessly ruin lives. That is simply the rules of engagement on the internet, so I thicken my hide and continue on. So I'm not blind to the consequences, as you put it - I just accept that I cannot control the actions of a speculative, idiot minority that trolled that missing kid.

I think you vastly overestimate Reddit's influence there, it might be the largest ever, but certainly not the first.

I still remember the /. threads during 9/11, now that felt like the first time that an internet forum really reacted in mass to an event. (queue someone "get off my lawn" comment about BBS's and Kennedy or something)

They're not really comparable events. I'm old enough to have been around for both - and Boston was a far more immersive online expercience. 2001 we didn't have Streetview and u-stream. Also, 9/11 was not a man-hunt. My online memories of 9/11 only recall speculation about the sky falling in - after the fact. What made Boston special (sic) was that it was in real-time - and you were effectively on the ground with the five-0 in that locked down suburb.

I agree with most of your points, but saying it was only a couple of users that may have jumped to conclusions is a gross understatement.

One mistake ruins the entire foundation of crowdsourced information! Never trust forums for info! /S

You're right, that was the only instance in which Reddit was wrong. Ever. /s

All journalistic entities have been wrong multiple times before, so we should only trust the official authorities.

Oh wait, they're confused too.

I do not have enough fingers to count the number of times CNN has been wrong.

I'm not saying read all of reddit. In any current events thread, there's usually one heavily-upvoted comment containing a comprehensive timeline of events where somebody with some background knowledge has done the hard work of filtering through all the noise in the reddit comments / twitter / etc and picked out only the actual news. Just read that comment.

In fairness wasn't that a subreddit? It probably got posted and on the front page a few times, but it's very different to the live news in big front page news threads referenced. An example is the showdown there, the top live news comment was the best I saw for the events anywhere.

It moved to a subreddit when the thread in /news or /worldnews got too big (I don't remember specifics).

In any case, the effects of the witchhunt weren't limited to that subreddit anyway... the users started harassing Sunil's parents on Facebook and began calling LEO with their harebrained theory.

There's a reason that vigilante justice isn't legal in most of the civilized world.

Wold you prefer the moronic bland sound-bytes of official propaganda arms such as fox and cnn, or a bunch of people actively working to come to a far faster, more informed position, even if the immediate info and positions are wholly wrong.

I would prefer that innocent people's names are not dragged through the mud and that the parents of innocent college students not be harassed over social media.

I don't see how accusing Sunil was "informed." It was a baseless accusation that was made because he was brown and lived in the area.

Yeah but with threaded comments, it's very difficult to follow a discussion as it develops. I have the same complaint about HN. I much prefer the chronological layout with the ability to quote other people.

> with threaded comments, it's very difficult to follow a discussion as it develops

I actually completely disagree with this. Threads allow for a single point of interest to spawn multiple straight-line conversations, where each thread pertains to a different facet of the original topic. Whereas a single thread conversation (like a forum) only allows for a single thread of conversation, and divergent conversations are all mixed up in the same thread.

With Reddit (but not HN), the ability to collapse threads makes it even easier to only follow the particular conversations you are interested in. Collapse the ones you don't care about (like pun threads, etc.), and read the important stuff. With a single thread, you have to scan every single comment, including the junk and the stuff you don't care about. Not to mention the whole "Page 1 [2] 3 ... 389" deal that single threaded conversations get into.

You mention chronological order being important, and most threaded sites (but not HN) have the ability to sort threads by chronological order, which gives the same single threaded "top level" of comments.

I agree with you that HN can be a chore to read, though. I think it would be massively improved were it to have a built in thread collapsing mechanism. It definitely has the least feature of threaded conversations that I've seen.

Yeah but with proper moderation, you don't have to collapse the ones you don't care about. The main forum I use doesn't allow dumb shit like puns, so it's not a problem. It's just impossible on a site like HN to read a bunch of comments, come back an hour later, and read all the new comments.

Reddit actually have a live updating page for subreddits now. It seems to exclude comments (although I think the sub can add a comment to its feed) so it's very different but might work better in some cases.

My local Swedish newspaper does it (http://www.sydsvenskan.se) when there are events like storms or public transport delays that have ongoing news. They also allow reader comments into the feed to gather new info from the field and respond to questions. I think they use coveritlive.

Vox Media (behind The Verge, Polygon, SB Nation etc.) announced in January they're working on something similar [1]. Their jobs page [2] is listing a few positions under 'Project X'.

Worth keeping an eye on.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/26/5348212/ezra-klein-vox-is-... [2] http://jobs.voxmedia.com/apply

The've been doing it for years on SB Nation.

http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2013/12/19/5228994/kobe-bryant-i...

Circa.io does it nicely in an app form, and storify is a crowd sourced platform for doing such stories.

FYI Heroku is reporting that the site is down.

Serious question: How can they tell it's not a cloud?

I think there are a few different satellites that their imaging systems respond to different lightwaves.

It's my understanding the South China Sea is, compared to open ocean, really more of a shallow lake that happens to be teaming with Chinese subs. American ones, too, for that matter.

If the plane did hit this body of water, would these subs have noticed it? If so, are they keeping silent as a matter of tradecraft, to avoid showing their capabilities to the other side?

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