151–160 of 220 posts
Is it just me or is this spectacularly creepy? "I bet you can't cyber stalk my friend! I bet you we can!" I could understand if this was at defcon or a security/privacy related conference and all parties involved were in the field, but just cyber stalking some random woman? What's the point?
Did she sign up for a free trial of close.io?
Wow. It is stunning how oblivious nearly everyone on this thread is to how douchey it is to BET YOUR BROGRAMMER PALS THEY CAN CYBERSTALK A GIRL. Advice to woman: Run. Advice to startups: Don't let your sales and engineering teams be giant douche canoes and if they are certainly don't publicly brag about it.
Or, have some faith in humanity, considering: - This was just a fun bet between friends. Justin really didn't think it could be done and I wanted to show him how a little information goes a long way online. - Justin treated this girl well and she even knew about this bet. - "Look up online" != Stalking - None of the discovered information has been posted publicly online. This isn't even her photo.
No, from what you guys have said you didn't tell her about it until after the fact. That's super douchey and retroactive permission doesn't change anything. If you grabbed a girl's butt and she laughed it off as "fun between friends," it doesn't make it ok. You need to ask permission first.
If you think cyberstalking is only bad if you add doxing to it, then you don't understand cyberstalking.
Wow. It is stunning how oblivious nearly everyone on this thread is to how douchey it is to BET YOUR BROGRAMMER PALS THEY CAN CYBERSTALK A GIRL. Advice to woman: Run. Advice to startups: Don't let your sales and engineering teams be giant douche canoes and if they are certainly don't publicly brag about it.
Or, have some faith in humanity, considering: - This was just a fun bet between friends. Justin really didn't think it could be done and I wanted to show him how a little information goes a long way online. - Justin treated this girl well and she even knew about this bet. - "Look up online" != Stalking - None of the discovered information has been posted publicly online. This isn't even her photo.
You are totally lying. I just saw your other comment on this where you admitted you posted her pic in a Facebook ad. I will quote:
>This is the closest I've heard to one of the ideas that we expected to work, so I'll share.
>- Create an ad on Facebook with her picture.
>- Target people that went to her high school within 4 years of the range of years we thought she graduated within. Was only a few hundred people so the cost of running the ad would likely only be a few bucks.
>- The ad copy / landing page just needed to be convincing that we weren't stalking her. We went with the "help us win a bet" approach but the "lost camera" approach would have been good also.
>Ultimately we got the answer sooner from another approach after we found out that we had another picture of the girl that Justin didn't know we had. So we canceled the ad, but I think this would have worked if given enough time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369859
I especially like the part about making the ad copy "convincing that we weren't stalking her."
I'm the engineer he's referring to. I still get a laugh seeing Justin's amazement when we told him her name. To answer a few questions... - This isn't the actual photo but looks similar, except that she was alone. Justin was afraid of reposting the same photo after the results of handing over a photo last time :) - There was no useful exif data in the image. - We knew her high school and approximate age in Austin, bu…
This is dumb. You can get a private investigator to do this for $100 - $200, with almost surely a better method that Phil used. Given what Phil does, the most cost effective (rational) method he could have used was to spend those hours working, and then pay a private investigator. If he wanted to do it himself, the easiest way is to facebook search for people who went to her high school in the right date range, then…
except that this is an intellectual challenge, more like a puzzle. You could pay a puzzle solver to solve a puzzle, but that defeats the purpose.
A good riddle is about the best way to do something, not about the way someone else happened to do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This method likely would have worked by itself. The method that worked sooner wasn't just "another photo" found online of her friends as grecy mentioned. It was a photo we had taken ourselves, and it didn't have anyone else in it. But I'm not ready to tell Justin more details about it.
This strikes me as odd, albeit a clue. You had a photo of a girl you'd presumably never met. A photo you'd taken, that you didn't know was her at first.
>My Ask Nails on a freaking chalkboard. What is so bad about the word "question"?
FWIW, as others have pointed out, I do find this a bit creepy too, on two levels. First, the initial bet is a bit creepy. Guy involved said girl laughed it off, but that doesn't necessarily mean she didn't find it creepy that some guy she recently met was betting other people they couldn't track her down Enemy of the State style. And then on top of that, inviting the entire Internet into the game via the second obscured photo adds a much bigger layer of creep on to it, especially since in the process a lot of secondary information on her was leaked. Probably enough along with the photo of her face missing for others to find her, and you've kind of made that a public challenge indirectly. (Not one I have any interest in pursuing because like I said, the whole thing seems a bit creepy to me).