She checked in with Foursquare? Some people still use it.
He said she only bought the dress recently. They did a image search and found a local store that stocks that particular dress - and she had checked in with foursquare?
Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
81–90 of 220 posts
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#82Some ideas...
- using tools like http://www.pictriev.com/ or similar offline solutions to get a pretty good estimate of her age.
- using image analysis to "fingerprint" the camera used to take the picture. Then crawling sites where she would be likely to post pictures (twitter, etc.) based on the suspected area and comparing to find matches (i.e. pictures taken with the same camera). I'm not sure what the current state-of-the-art is for those algorithms, but if for instance the camera displayed an obvious visible flaw (darker spot), it would have made it easier. On a perfectly clean camera without visible defects I assume that more than one picture is necessary for effective camera fingerprinting.
- using tools like http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/im2gps/ to try and determine the location just based on visual features.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#83>My Ask Nails on a freaking chalkboard. What is so bad about the word "question"?
It sounds terrible and is awkward to say.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I resent the fact that you think I'm an idiot. I have had two engineers check for EXIF data and there is 'nothing interesting in there'
The fact that you required two engineers to do something that you could have confirmed yourself with 2 seconds of Googling shows that your ego is a bit inflated.
I like the grey color of your comments. Where did you get that? :)
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#85Here is how I think it was done:
I assume the author is not a Facebook friend with the girl. Otherwise it would have been too easy. But friends of friends is not the only privacy leak on Facebook. There is a very old feature (which is about to get deprecated) called Networks.
Networks are created for schools, universities and other big organizations. They had the name of the high school so they have to list it as their own high school in their Facebook profiles.
This will automatically put them in the same network as the girl. I am assuming here that she has listed that on her Facebook profile.
Then performing a graph search for women who has gone to that high school and live in Austin with an age between X and Y will narrow the search a lot. Even if some of that information is not public on Facebook it would be public to them if they are not same network if she has the default settings. This is a neat trick which is still usable.
I don't think looking through the pictures would take more than half an hour.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
post pic on craiglist/similar in Austin area. Say you found wallet/purse/camera/etc with her picture. Anyone that knows her please call/email w/ Name/Address for you to send back. Use highschool for validation when contacted. Might have some error.
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…
yah I was actually thinking of facebook ad just after I replied, with that criteria..only thing that turned me off from it what that you made it sound as highschool was a post-processor (validation) vs pre-processor (targeting)
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#87I'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…
C'mon Phil, spill the beans now!
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#88jbg331 - while we wait for people to ferret out the right answer, can you tell us how the woman in question has responded to the "game"? Genuinely curious.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#89Hate to sound cynical, but this seems like an attempt to solicit responses to identify good engineers to hire or promote some upcoming feature of the web app.
Re: Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
#90Really people? You are going to give ideas to track people to the general crowd. It's not even an exceptionally technical problem.