Distribution of googuns_staging tweets is attached, created by New York artist Neil Freeman.
"GooGuns posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000 in intervals of about five minutes on average. The string of characters always ends with zeroes, occasionally with the location service turned on, so you can see that 554705fa00000000 was allegedly tweeted from the "Region of Khabarovsk." This has been going on all day and all night, for years, with more than 318,000 tweets posted since 2009. But why?"
>>2489 The tweets' geolocations which change every few hours seem to suggest they are being beamed from satellite, whereas the old numbers stations were trackable to distinct military bases which give not so subtle clues as to who is responsible (viz the classic British ones from Cyprus bases).
I've found crazies online claiming they are unwilling test subjects who had implants inserted in mental hospitals which are now controlled by radio frequencies beamed from satellites.
One has to assume that googuns is for agents in remote places with OTPs and a mobile.
If I had the technical knowledge I'd spend a great deal of time making bots that do that sort of thing, simply to give people a feeling of the mysterious. I think it's kind of cool.
Sadly every technically-able person I've tried to explain it to just looks at me like I'm an idiot.
OOOOH! Can we have a page here like /poacher/ or /Armstrong/ or similar that spits out random hex? Then we'd delete this post and never speak of it again until are Emily found it.
>>2490 >The tweets' geolocations which change every few hours seem to suggest they are being beamed from satellite, whereas the old numbers stations were trackable to distinct military bases which give not so subtle clues as to who is responsible (viz the classic British ones from Cyprus bases).
>>2490 >The tweets' geolocations which change every few hours seem to suggest they are being beamed from satellite
Or, alternatively, *shock* they're not actually putting their real location in there.
There are some things hidden on the less active boards for are ems but they've been there a while. If she hasn't found them by now she probably never will.
They're using TOR if they're coming from random locations around the globe, with a higher incidence of locations that have more TOR nodes.
If they're coming from a predictable orbital pattern then they're not. Or >>2494
I'm not sure where you're getting the "directly under its orbit" from, but if it's moving in a pattern then presumably where it beams to forms a similar pattern. More of a pattern than establishing a new connection of TOR each time is likely to produce, at any rate.
Is that wrong?
For a start an orbiting satellite has no known geolocation, as it's non on the earth's surface. Geolocation is done by calculating your position relative to orbiting GPS satellites.
Beyond this, tweets can't occur directly from a satellite - they have to come in via TCP/IP over the internet. This means geolocation is done from a database which links IP addresses to physical locations (based largely on ISP registered netblocks). Therefore, your geolocation on sites like this is not your actual location, rather it's the estimated location of the TCP/IP endpoint from which the connection to the twitter servers is made.
Satellites generally (AFAIK) don't act as TCP/IP endpoints. Having to reconfigure an IP address, routes and gateways would be almost impossible - not to mention probably highly insecure for the base stations. Communication satellites are almost always used for trunking, meaning that they carry and transmit data of which they have no understanding. They simply beam it from one base station to another.
Which leads me to my final point, due to the nature of point to point trunking most (all?) communications satellites are in geostationary orbit. They occupy a single point, not an orbital trajectory of the earth.
I found out about googuns a month or so ago via the awl.com website. There's a theory out there somewhere that it's sth to do with an early, now deleted iphone app. Which, as it's much more dull than other theories, probably won't catch on, despite being much more likely to be true
>>2498 >Therefore, your geolocation on sites like this is not your actual location
It often is when on wireless. Google know where most access points are. Though this method generally requires a user's express permission to function.
>>2496>>2498 >You're suggesting that a satellite will somehow obtain a geolocatable IP address relative to the part of the earth directly under its orbit?
All of the IP geolocation systems I have used have a specific "country code" for satellites. Maxmind is the most popular and accurate database, it marks satellite internet as coming from country-code A2, for instance.
>>2503 Exactly which part was unclear? Twitter do not do and never have done IP geolocation. They trust the client to send its own location through the API, since for mobile there's no reliable way to get a fix through IP geolocation alone.
This is true, due to google mass scanning wifi SSIDs while they trawled around the country in their google maps cars.
>>2505 >Exactly which part was unclear? Twitter do not do and never have done IP geolocation. They trust the client to send its own location through the API, since for mobile there's no reliable way to get a fix through IP geolocation alone.
If that's true, then there's no discussion to be had as there's nothing to be spoofed.
>>2504 > All of the IP geolocation systems I have used have a specific "country code" for satellites. Maxmind is the most popular and accurate database, it marks satellite internet as coming from country-code A2, for instance.
Right, that's a satellite provider - such as using IP over satphone. That's not a direct connection from an orbiting satellite (the poster was implying that a satellite's geoip'd location would change during the satellite's orbit).
>>2505 That's the case for third party Twitter clients, but surely not for twitter.com. It doesn't use HTML Geolocation, so AFAICT there's no way for long/lat to be passed. They're using a geolocation IP database.
It's just a bot someone has setup to excite conspiracy nuts.
Numbers stations operate in the open for very good technological and operational reasons - you can't effectively hide the location of a shortwave transmitter, but that's unimportant so long as your field operatives can receive the signal with something as innocuous as a worldband radio.
For a similar one-way service online, there's no reason not to use something steganographic, hiding the message inside something innocuous-looking. It'd be easy to design a protocol that was still easy to decode by hand with a OTP and a pencil, but that looked like perfectly normal communications. The easiest option would be to leave comments on blogs that look like spam.
If you read the Twitter API docs, you'll see that the API user declares their own geolocation. It's not IP based, you just append your longitude and latitude to the HTTP POST request. Whoever set up this bot deliberately chose to append weird geo data.