This week’s huge protests in Israel drew huge crowds to the streets – but how many people took part? Crowd sizes are often used as evidence to show how widely supported a particular cause is, so being able to determine how many people took part in a demonstration is an important skill for those working …
In last week’s Wednesday Quiz Tilman Wagner posted this photo and asked us several questions about it: 1) Who posted it and where? 2) What was the occasion? 3) Did Tilman participate, and if so, how? So where to start? We need to know the location before we can answer any of Tilman’s questions. There …
Quiztime: How To Clean Pictures For Better Search Results Read More »
Ever since I started blogging about image geolocation I’ve tried to write about methods and techniques that make solving these kind of puzzles more structured and systematic. In my professional career I was (until recently) a criminal investigator so it was helpful for me to transfer habits and methodologies from traditional investigation to the subject …
Extract, Research, Verify: Quiztime 6th October 2020. Read More »
During lockdown I’ve spent a lot of my evenings trying to improve my coding and data science skills with Datacamp. As I’ve tried to apply my new found knowledge to real world projects I’ve come to learn that about 80% of working with data is cleaning it up and making it tidy before you can …
I started writing up this Quiztime post almost two months ago but then life got very busy and I never managed to finish it. This was a really fun quiz by Lars Wienand and the solution was not as obvious as I first thought it was so a little extra digging was required. Here’s the …
Lost In The Woods & Translation Troubles – Quiztime 10th March 2020 Read More »
Not all image-based OSINT work is about geolocation. It is always helpful to know where a photo was taken, but knowing when an image was taken can be just as important when trying to verify it. Is this a COVID-hit Italian hospital, or the aftermath of an earthquake in Croatia? Are these food packages left …
Using photographs for OSINT purposes is not new but almost all work of this kind mostly focuses on the visual content of images. Much less well known is the usefulness of image meta- and file data for research purposes. Beyond the visual appearance of an image there is often additional information hidden within an image …
In OSINT we make use of the wealth of information that is now available to us, but so often it becomes the case that there is too much information for us to process effectively. It’s easy to drown in a sea of data and you can quickly find yourself with twenty browser tabs open having …
Using Gap Analysis For Smarter OSINT – Quiztime 4th March 2020 Read More »
The challenge of dealing with fake accounts that spread disinformation is probably one of the greatest challenges facing the large social media companies. Most methods used to detect fake Twitter accounts (like the excellent Botometer) assume that they are working at scale and are automated, and for large bot operations this is almost always the …
How can you become more accurate with photo geolocation? Finding a country is good, finding a town is better, finding a street in a town is better still – but is it possible to get even more accurate than that? It depends on the needs of your case, but if you want to geolocate and …