this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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115
Are those top tier Geoguessers that do crazy stuff like figure out a location from 4 pixels and a mcslurry contracted by the CIA? (lemmy.world)
submitted 17 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Seriously I've seen a guy see a bunch of pixels and go "Idk but that reminds me of Mexico" and he was right. There's no way the three letter companies wouldn't want that kind of skillset, right?

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 hours ago

You can get jobs like that, sure. Normally called GIS analyst (geospatial informations systems)

For a while, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service GIS job applications were less about ticking boxes and more looking at a satellite image of a structure and being asked, "what is this, where is it, and why is it interesting"

And the answer might be "Its ostensibly a wastewater treatment plant, its in southern Iran, and its interesting because the truck parked next to the liquid chemical tank farm has an ISO gas storage trailer, not an ISO liquid storage container as might be expected.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Wait till you find out how good ai is at pinpointing a picture.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Israel intelligence has a division dedicated to neurodivergent people who scour satellite photos. So wouldn't be surprised if they have people like this on payroll. A lot of ONSIT already have people like this participating doing geolocation on war footage.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

I could monetize my favourite hobby?

(Assuming someone NON-genocidal valued it)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 hours ago

You can't assume it won't be weaponized, in fact you should expect it.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 17 hours ago

Who says they don't already? I knew a guy who worked for a major government agency who's job was to look over horrible pictures to try to figure out where they were taken.

I bet the most skilled people do work for them, not just youtube. But talking to that guy, it's a tough job, not for everyone. Instead of a random streetview image it's a scene of abuse, so...

[–] [email protected] 21 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I'm sure that those agencies have been contacting top players for that game over the last few years. But if those simply dont want to work for them, thats moot.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 14 hours ago

I wouldn’t be surprised to find they created the game. And if not, sponsored the competitions.

Great way to scout that kind of talent.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

The problem is getting the pictures to work from. People who don't want to be found aren't giving the CIA pictures of their locations, and I'd imagine the CIA already knows what road signs look like in different countries, or where certain mountains and other features are.

The problem is getting the pictures. It's intel collection, not processing.

[–] bdonvr 31 points 13 hours ago

the CIA already knows what road signs look like in different countries, or where certain mountains and other features are.

I mean "the CIA" isn't a person. Someone there does this work. Which is what we're talking about.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago

I never received any offers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

I just assume they're super lucky. Or that they play so much, they recognize when it shows them the same picture because it doesn't have an infinite set of images.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Like the other guy said, it's street view. So the number of images isn't quite infinite, but it's high enough that just memorizing the images isn't realistic.

Because of that, though, road patterns are a solid chunk of what the really good players are looking for/at. There's definitely more to it than that, but because of the nature of the game there's almost literally always a road in view.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

My guess is that some memorization exists, check the geoguesser grand finals, there was one play where both players marked the exact same spot with absolutely no clues another that "maybe Mongolia".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

There's definitely memorization, but there's just a ton of tricks that aren't explicitly memorizing the images themselves.

They can sometimes narrow down the area based on the car that's taking the images, or how wide the lens is. As a made up example, if they see a red toyota corolla is the car taking the photos- which they can tell based on the mirrors appearing- they know it's specifically mainland Malaysia.

Very small context based clues a lot of the time.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 16 hours ago

They use Google street view, so it's a ton.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

It has a practically infinite set of images. Seriously, I've seen people do geoguesser and get nothing but back roads in the middle of basically Anywhere, Earth; I've seen people get stuck inside malls, go into caves, walk down random-ass rabbit trails in the middle of a forest surrounded by miles of fucking nothing (I wish I could remember what video I saw that in, it was fucking insane). Geoguesser pulls from the full catalog of Google Street view images, and there are a lot of street view images.