#hacktoria
7 writeups ·all writeups
132 kV and a Puddle: Geolocating a 360° Image in Iceland
One power line voltage put me within 10 m of the answer in minutes. The rest of the day went on the assumption that "the 360 image" meant Google's.
Angle of Ascent — Dating a Takeoff Photo to the Second
An aerial shot of a KLM Cityhopper lifting off an unnamed runway. Runway markings give the scale, the scale gives the airport, and Denmark's open aerial imagery archive gives a timestamp accurate to the second — enough to name the exact flight and its arrival gate.
Not here any more — A Payload No Scanner Can See
zsteg, Aletheia and five statistical detectors all called this file clean. The ZIP was sitting at offset 0 the whole time — hidden by splitting one bitstream across three different bitplanes.
Finding a Norwegian Farmhouse Brewery From One Photo
Hacktoria GEOINT. No EXIF, no signs, no text. Here's how I got from an unmarked Scandinavian valley down to a single building — and the shortcut I ignored for six hours.
Corrupted — Finding a Town Behind Black Squares
A GEOINT writeup: geolocating a censored Street View panorama in the Italian Alps using nothing but a poem's four constraints. Why the redactions were the biggest hint in the challenge.
Hacktoria — Wild Fire
A GEOINT writeup: locating a Colorado wildfire from an evacuation-zone map, and why the InciWeb URL will hand you the wrong incident number. With the WFIGS query that settles it.
Snow, Catenary, and a Confident Wrong Turn: Geolocating a Train Window
A single blurry photo shot from a moving train. The deduction chain landed on the right country in the first thirty seconds — and then I talked myself out of it for three hours. A GEOINT writeup about tool-induced hallucination in data-sparse regions.