#streetview
12 writeups · all writeups
Name that Street! Two Shop Signs to One Street in Frankfurt
Bellingcat Urban Exploration. An ordinary German street with parked cars and no street sign. Number plates narrow it to the Rhine-Main area, a fabric shop and a mattress store each have one branch that fits, and both are on Stiftstraße in Frankfurt.
Deep in the Forest: Geolocating a Video by Its Bird Song
Hacktoria GEOINT. Eighteen seconds of bog and spruce with nothing to read in the frame. The picture leads nowhere; the soundtrack is a 2008 xeno-canto recording, and its recordist logged the exact spot on observation.org.
Fire: Finding the Building Behind a Smoke Plume on Street View
Hacktoria GEOINT. A 2021 Street View frame with a black smoke plume over Flemish fields. Two wrong countries on the way, one search operator that mattered, and a press photo that pinned the house number.
Pulling Focus: What Is This Blurry Building by a Kyrgyz Highway?
Bellingcat Globetrotters. A blurred photo from a moving car, one Cyrillic sign and no building name. The letter Ү pointed to Kyrgyzstan, Google fixed a half-read village name, and a 2015 Street View pass pinned the junction on the A365.
The Rider's View: Which Monument Is Just Out of Frame in Bogotá?
Bellingcat Globetrotters. A street photo with a motorbike on a crosswalk and no EXIF. Yellow plates said Colombia, a pink dog in a shop window led to one vet clinic on Carrera 7, and Street View turned around to the bust the photo leaves out.
The Blurred Fuel Station: Timing a Chicago bp Photo to the Minute
Hacktoria GEOINT. One photo of a bp forecourt with the shop signs blurred out, and a question about when it was uploaded. A logo read through the blur, 211 candidate stations, and a delivery van that ruled out Google.
Private WiFi II: One Street Photo to a London Pub's Wi-Fi Password
Hacktoria GEOINT. A blurred street photo, a courier van, a hot-sauce advert and a dark arch. The advert was a trap, Scotland was an hour wasted, and the answer was laminated on a wall the whole time.
Raptor Reserve
A Hacktoria CTF that hands you one word and nothing else. The island was the easy part — the hard part was three empty frames in an email.
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.
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.
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 four black squares point at the poem, not at the picture.
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.