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Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

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Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#181

Post by dshanahan »

unreal37 wrote: post #158
dshanahan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They went to the same event, took some photos. And in checking their photos, see that the same girl was in their photos too. Then they saw who she was with, and were able to locate a friend of hers. From locating a friend of hers from this second photo, they located her.

"didn't have anyone else in it" - seems no one else was in the photo with her.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#182

Post by [deleted] »

philfreo wrote: post #173
abalone wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - None of her information has been posted online. 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…

The ad was honest and even described the bet. "stalk [verb]: to follow, watch, and bother (someone) constantly in a way that is frightening, dangerous, etc." -- merriam-webster This very much was not the case. If it makes you feel better, the ad was also taken down very quickly.

[deleted]

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#183

Post by philfreo »

abalone wrote: post #180
philfreo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ad was honest and even described the bet. "stalk [verb]: to follow, watch, and bother (someone) constantly in a way that is frightening, dangerous, etc." -- merriam-webster This very much was not the case. If it makes you feel better, the ad was also taken down very quickly.

It's interesting you claim the word "honest". You lied about posting her picture online. Not only did you post it online, you targeted her classmates and let them know she was flirting with some douche in your company! Yeah, no one would ever possibly be creeped out by that. You think it's ok because you have good intentions. Guess what? So does every other creep. It's not up to you to decide whether your actions are…

I haven't lied. We were talking about different things. I was referring to the fact that throughout these discussions none of her actual info has come out and that we've been careful not to post any of the information we discovered about her from our search. I edited my comment to try to make that more clear.

Also the ad didn't say that she was flirting with anybody and it was designed with an attempt to not make her look bad in any way.

Finally, she is aware of the whole deal and has been a good sport, and is not upset.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#184

Post by philfreo »

abalone wrote: post #153
philfreo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> - This was just a fun bet between friends… she even knew about this bet. 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 dox…

She knew what was going on, not just after the fact.

I've just re-read the definitions for "stalking", "cyberstalking", and "harassment" and I can assure you none of what we did qualifies given the actual scenario of how things really occurred.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#185

Post by joetann »

philfreo wrote: post #17

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…

Wherever you were that night had a Facebook page with an event created for the evening you were there. You uploaded your second picture to the Facebook event, or tagged the Facebook page of the bar you were at. Then someone tagged the girl in the photo, revealing her identity.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#186

Post by gocard »

grecy wrote: post #118
philfreo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second photo that we later realized we had was one a teammate had taken himself and didn't have anyone else in it. I think it was doable with just 1 photo, and I'm not ready to share with Justin how the 2nd photo helped. :)

So you had a second photo of the girl, taken by a team mate, but it has only her in it? OK then, there is something identifying about this girl, which the second photo gave you * Tattoo * Glasses * Hair * Amputee * Scar/burn, etc. * particular purse/hat/watch/accessory * etc.

Or maybe she was wearing a t-shirt brandishing the company she works for.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#187

Post by woodchuck64 »

Well everyone's on his/her phone these days, so let's assume a second picture caught her busy with her phone. Highly doubtful a photo would be high-res enough to get text-level detail but certainly the general layout and colors of whatever she was looking at would show up. So if this led to a successful ID, she must have been looking at an app or page that is user-customizable to some extent like facebook with a unique profile and cover. If you have even a blurry image of a website, the RGB colors are still going to be pretty close so if you have some sort of way of automatically iterating through user pages on the website in question (GraphAPI), doing direct page capture to image, scaling down that image, doing the appropriate rotation, shear, etc., and then running some simple image match criteria, that "might" work. Facebook has billions of users though which surely would take more than 24 hours to iterate through, so maybe you could prune the search space by only searching friends of people claiming the high school graduation year in question.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#189

Post by LogicX »

cbhl wrote: post #58

One of the things that looks like a clue to me is that this the lead engineer of close.io. Browsing through their site, it looks like they do "telecom in an API"; it reminds me of Twilio and OneBox. So, here's a thought. Let's say the Engineer has access to the SMS logs (NSA-style) for Justin's phone. (Maybe his phone goes through their system. But even if not, maybe it's company-provided, so there's an admin interfa…

No need to call in the middle of the night to see what voicemail says. Use slydial.com and it connects directly to voicemail without ringing. If you hang up promptly, they get no record of a voicemail being left. I do this for most unknown numbers which call me. In additional to using TrueCaller.

Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer

#190

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

Someone wrote: post #143
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how can there ever be 'nothing interesting' in EXIF data :-)?) If one strips all of the metadata a photo, or replaces it with metadata from another photo, or makes up some bogus metadata.

"If one strips all of the metadata a photo" A photo without EXIF data? Someone must be trying to hide something from me. Let's see how good he is, and check whether there still are parts of the file with metadata in the disk's free blocks. "or replaces it with metadata from another photo" A Nikon F5 at f/5.6 and 1/100s? No way! If so, that car must have done a thousand kilometers an hour or so. Also, the aberration l…

>Someone must be trying to hide something from me.

Umm, No, many popular photo-sharing sites at least give you the option to strip metadata from photos when posting. IIRC, fb does this as well, by default.

> and check whether there still are parts of the file with metadata in the disk's free blocks.

Good luck.

>A Nikon F5 at f/5.6 and 1/100s? No way!

It doesn't have to be believable metadata to be practically useless.

>Also, the aberration looks more like that of an Canon lens, but I'm not 100% sure of the model.

> I wonder whether it is possible to train a model on the 'JPG to camera model' problem.

Sure, but not for beer money. You could probably even have some success identifying individual cameras by characterizing their CCD/image sensor, and comparing to known photos.

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