Comment by hemancuso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hemancuso | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who is impressed by this should seriously check out Andrew Sullivan's view from your window contest. Most weeks a reader submits a photo from their window, literally anywhere in the world. And people track it down with very similar techniques, to the exact window. And a lot of the contest photos offer much less to go off of than this [namely, only 1 photo, low res, country/context unspecified].

Here is the winners archive.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/

Some of photos aren't too crazy or offer a landmark that is recognizable if you'd seen it before. But most of them offer very little in terms of knowing where to start unless you've got a huge body of contextual knowledge you can draw on.

A couple ones that I had absolutely no idea where to start with:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-your... http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/19/the-view-from-your...

I imagine the CIA/NSA has a crack team of a couple dozen people doing this exact job.

I imagine the CIA/NSA has a crack team of a couple dozen people doing this exact job.

There is actually an entire Agency devoted to doing this exact job and other similar activities:

https://www.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx

A few recent ones that I had absolutely no idea where to start with:

Those actually provide TONS of identifiable features that make them relatively easy to track down with relatively simple tools.

Perhaps I didn't select the hardest from the recent archive. My basic point was more to show that people have the tools to a lot more digging with a lot less context.

Hadn't heard of the NGA. Well there you go.

Perhaps I didn't select the hardest from the recent archive. My basic point was more to show that people have the tools to a lot more digging with a lot less context.

Sure. Not intended to be a slight, more a nod to our Defense brethren doing this with a lot harder targets!

Indeed. I swapped in a couple tougher ones :)

Nice. They are on github! https://github.com/ngageoint

> https://www.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx

They have an HTTPS warning, due to a Facebook image being loaded over HTTP.

My wife does this sort of analysis when she is trying to track down where a VRBO rental actually is :-) The Andrew's stuff is quite impressive. Before modern CGI it used to be great fun to try to figure out where a movie or TV show was really shot in the outdoor scenes. Apparently there is a whole group of Stargate fans that do that around Vancouver.

Regarding the VRBO research, how does this help you vs. plain ole' Google streetmap? Or is she using streetmap in a non-traditional way? We've been renting a property sourced from VRBO for the past 6 years, so I'm curious how you're researching properties.

Some VRBO properties only have vague generalities about their location and not street address - "3 minute walk from the beach", "Close to wineries" etc etc...

I've done this before as well - most of the time you find out the description is entirely accurate, but I'd hate to find out they exaggerated upon arrival for a week long vacation.

Reminds me of this:

http://www.dominic-deegan.com/view.php?date=2007-01-04

Summary: In a fantasy setting with seers who get random visions, they must have encylopedic knowledge of the history of everything to be able to tell, from contextual clues, from where (and when – past, present, or future) the visions originate.

I keep telling users of my website that want to keep their identity safe to NOT point their camera out of their window and yet quite a few of them ignore that advice and have their home address and other private details published by jerks and find stalkers at their door at 6 am. Very silly, and possibly even dangerous.

What's the nature of your website? The reason I ask is, I'm curious as to what sort of website would attract actual 'yes he really physically showed up at someone's door at six a.m.' stalkers as opposed to just the theoretical possibility of such.

I pioneered the 'live webcam' concept. This has brought all kinds of creeps out of the woodworks.

It's fascinating how this is literally out of science fiction.

The short story "WHILE-U-WAIT" by Edward Wellen (from 1978) describes a world where offering this kind of detective work service is made possible by technological data collection and filtering advances.

When I first read the story sometime in mid 90's it still felt too far off, but over the past 5 years it has become not only reality, but apparently also a competitive sport for would-be forensics hobbyists.

Well, consider that Sullivan has a reader base of tens or hundreds of thousands. So while it is hard to impossible for any one reader to be able to know or determine the location of a particular VFYW shot, among all of his readers there is very likely at least one and probably a handful who do recognize it right away.

Check out the Pop Spot archive. Some of them are very detailed:

http://www.popspotsnyc.com/

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