I know I shouldn't rip into tv shows seeing as their goal is entertainment, not scientific accuracy. Still in this day and age you'd think they'd at least try to make an effort. I was watching a recent CSI NY episode where the killer has kidnaped a blogger and is making him post on his blog while he carves up his latest victim in front of him. While this is happening the CSIs are monitoring the blog trying to find where he is when one of them comes up with the following and I quote:

"I'll make a GUI using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP."

Count how many WTFs they managed to fit into this. Go on. I dare ya.

Later when she presumable makes the GUI they still have trouble. Aparently the blogger is not posting in real-time. Rather he completes a post and then uploads it. This only takes a few seconds each time and as such there isn't enough time to pinpoint the IP address. *groan*

 In any case our VB-writting CSI is not a complete novice. She manages to narrow down the killer's location. How does she manage that you ask? Well, the GUI must have got part of the IP and since IP addresses (like telephone numbers) are assigned geographically she finally discovers that "he is blogging somewhere  in midtown."

DOA:

"I'll make a GUI using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP."

Count how many WTFs they managed to fit into this. Go on. I dare ya.

Video link

DOA:

 In any case our VB-writting CSI is not a complete novice. She manages to narrow down the killer's location. How does she manage that you ask? Well, the GUI must have got part of the IP and since IP addresses (like telephone numbers) are assigned geographically she finally discovers that "he is blogging somewhere  in midtown."

TRWTF is that you think IPs aren't assigned geographically.  How do you think those adultfriendfinder.com ads always show you girls in "your area".  (sure, they're wrong every now and then and think I live in seattle.... but the same could be said of phone numbers.  I have an 804 area code in TX).  If she feasibly got enough of an IP address, she could narrow it down to a range owned by a single ISP, for example.

DOA:

"I'll make a GUI using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP."

Oh yes. I saw the same show and that line was painful to watch. I don't expect much from TV/Movie IT, but that's sure set a new low for the show.

/Could be worse.  CSI: Miami.

vt_mruhlin:

TRWTF is that you think IPs aren't assigned geographically.  How do you think those adultfriendfinder.com ads always show you girls in "your area". 

Heck, even if you didn't you could geo-locate IPs that way, pretty much all dsl/cable ISPs seem to love encoding a general (or even pretty specific) location in the IP's hostname. A simple reverse lookup and you can go "oh, hey, that IPs in Los Angeles" or whatever. 

My fave CSI WTF is when they take some crappy surveillance camera footage - you know, bad quality camera, very poor/bad/non-existence lighting, and zoom in 5,000,000x to read a license plate 2 miles down the street with perfect clarity. Amazing what you can do with enhancement algorithms, even if the item you're looking at was much smaller than a single pixel in the original image.

Or even in one case, somehow manage to "look around a corner" to spot a perp who was behind a wall, complete out of sight of the camera. 

chrisb:

Video link (YT: CSI New York "VB GUI Interface")

vt_mruhlin:

TRWTF is that you think IPs aren't assigned geographically.

vt_mruhlin:

TRWTF is that you think IPs aren't assigned geographically.  How do you think those adultfriendfinder.com ads always show you girls in "your area".  (sure, they're wrong every now and then and think I live in seattle.... but the same could be said of phone numbers.  I have an 804 area code in TX).  If she feasibly got enough of an IP address, she could narrow it down to a range owned by a single ISP, for example.

In my case I'm using the larges ISP in the country and getting only the ISP would mean that you know in which country I live not the region nor the city. The way they could improve the show and make it a bit less WTFish would be to log to the ISP through super secret back door access and get my account number based on IP, again in my situation I have static IP and inet account is linked directly to my phone number so even if I want to use my account on some other place I can't.

vt_mruhlin:

TRWTF is that you think IPs aren't assigned geographically.  How do you think those adultfriendfinder.com ads always show you girls in "your area".  (sure, they're wrong every now and then and think I live in seattle.... but the same could be said of phone numbers.  I have an 804 area code in TX). 

Well, technically, to split hairs, IPs aren't "assigned geographically" - they're assigned by and to entities that, incidentally, seem to have geographical presence, according to some registry somewhere. (Why would anyone care about that stuff anyway? Physical locations are so last century!)

Last I checked, geolocation was mostly based on educated guesses, such as "IP block such-and-such is assigned to a company located in X" - all based on bits and pieces of information that get refined as time goes by ("ARIN said this IP address range belongs to the Miskatonic University, Arkham, MA, but this particular sub-range is actually used for their base in Antarctica.") And sometimes, someone uses IP that's supposed to be elsewhere. Which is exactly why you get so wildly inaccurate results for major ISPs every now and then. =) And then there's VPNs and whatnot... good grief.

vt_mruhlin:

If she feasibly got enough of an IP address, she could narrow it down to a range owned by a single ISP, for example.

Yeah, though one would assume it'd be simpler for the law enforcement to just look up the IP address, go ask the ISP who used that IP at the given time, and look the guy up from the big old file. Much more tried-and-true than "hey, ip2location.com says the guy is in the North Pole. Send the SWAT there!"

WWWWolf:

Last I checked, geolocation was mostly based on educated guesses, such as "IP block such-and-such is assigned to a company located in X"

Only for ISPs who won't give^H^H^H^Hsell their own internal geo-IP data to the geolocation aggregators. It's a business like any other. The aggregators throw some bucks at owners of IP blocks in exchange for geo data, and resell the info for a profit. If it was completely done by guesswork, then the information would be next to useless for any kind of real work requiring location data.

WWWWolf:

"ARIN said this IP address range belongs to the Miskatonic University, Arkham, MA, but this particular sub-range is actually used for their base in Antarctica.")

That kind of fragmentation would nedlessly complicate the routing tables, unless Miskatonic was going to shell out the $ to run a wire down there. IPs are concentrated geographically for just that reason. Bigger routing tables makes life hell on the backbone providers, though Cisco/Juniper will be more than happy to sell you the ever-bigger iron required to handle such large tables. 

Cap'n Steve:

Prince of Persia

PJH:

Cap'n Steve:

Prince of Persia

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/7505/140631.aspx#140631 that one?

The video linked from the article you're referencing does no longer exist ("removed due to copyright violation"). Care to give us some explanation?

PS: That is one of the reasons why I hate people just posting links to media content without at least briefly paraphrasing the essence of what's to be seen there...

PJH:

Cap'n Steve:

Prince of Persia

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/7505/140631.aspx#140631 that one?

MarcB:

My fave CSI WTF is when they take some crappy surveillance camera footage - you know, bad quality camera, very poor/bad/non-existence lighting, and zoom in 5,000,000x to read a license plate 2 miles down the street with perfect clarity. Amazing what you can do with enhancement algorithms, even if the item you're looking at was much smaller than a single pixel in the original image.

Or even in one case, somehow manage to "look around a corner" to spot a perp who was behind a wall, complete out of sight of the camera. 

In one of the few episodes I've seen they waved a Star Trekky device near a christmas tree and it displayed "100% carbon" or some such - indicating that the dangling bauble was in fact the missing diamond.

Soon afterwards, I read a comment from a lawyer (a UK crown prosecutor I think) complaining how shows like that are making it hard to get juries to accept _real_ forensic evidence.  Interstingly he said it cuts both ways:  they don't believe anything that doesn't claim to be 100% scientifically conclusive (whetever that means), and at the same time they're prepared to believe the wildest speculation if it's dressed up as the result of a scientific process.

MarcB:

My fave CSI WTF is when they take some crappy surveillance camera footage - you know, bad quality camera, very poor/bad/non-existence lighting, and zoom in 5,000,000x to read a license plate 2 miles down the street with perfect clarity. Amazing what you can do with enhancement algorithms, even if the item you're looking at was much smaller than a single pixel in the original image

 That has annoyed me to no end ever since Blade Runner. Check out the research in this field though. The details that real people are able to recover from crappy camera footage is almost as unbelievable as the TV antics. Rather than just turning the sharpen filter up to 11, they use all the available low res frames of a subject to build a high res composite.

The last time I saw CSI New York the entire episode was a Second Life WTF. Wait - I've never "played" Second Life, so I'm not sure if the WTF was CSI or Second LIfe.

obediah:

The last time I saw CSI New York the entire episode was a Second Life WTF. Wait - I've never "played" Second Life, so I'm not sure if the WTF was CSI or Second LIfe.

Ugh. Any time Hollywood shows anything on a computer I just want to cry. My favorite was probably in Minority Report, where they have these fancy computers you can control with your hands and stuff, but to transfer data from one computer to the one on the other side of the room, Tom Cruise had to transfer the data to a snazzy glass disk and walk it over to the other computer.

bstorer:

My favorite was probably in Minority Report, where they have these fancy computers you can control with your hands and stuff, but to transfer data from one computer to the one on the other side of the room, Tom Cruise had to transfer the data to a snazzy glass disk and walk it over to the other computer.

I don't know the movie, but for a high security environment, it can make sense to disallow networks.

DarkAngl:

vt_mruhlin:

TRWTF is that you think IPs aren't assigned geographically.  How do you think those adultfriendfinder.com ads always show you girls in "your area".  (sure, they're wrong every now and then and think I live in seattle.... but the same could be said of phone numbers.  I have an 804 area code in TX).  If she feasibly got enough of an IP address, she could narrow it down to a range owned by a single ISP, for example.

In my case I'm using the larges ISP in the country and getting only the ISP would mean that you know in which country I live not the region nor the city.

Remains to be seen.

Post your IP.  Let's see how close I can track you down.  I reckon I'll be able to get at least the region and quite likely the city.

(If you want to keep your IP private, send it to me using the forum's private mail feature rather than posting it publicly.) 

 I know for a fact that my IP allows you to determine that I live in 1 of the few hundred rooms on 3 sites owned by my college. It could be worse. I always pick my own hostnames; they default to the first part of your email address, meaning someone knowledgable can get your email based on your IP. One may even then be able to search on Facebook for that and thus get a real name.

Of course this only applies to those knowledgable enough. Most locating things only get my city.

obediah:

The details that real people are able to recover from crappy camera footage is almost as unbelievable as the TV antics

This tech was used heavily in restoring the original Star Wars movies for the enhanced versions. Yep, amazing what you can recover by superimposing and melding multiple shots of the same thing from slightly different angles, but still, they don't do that in CSI. It's always a single still frame, it's always a totally crappy shot, and yet they always manage to recover shots of the boogers in the perp's nose, and do a DNA analysis of the snot by zooming in to the molecular level, even though the nostrils couldn't be seen in the original shot. 

MarcB:

It's always a single still frame, it's always a totally crappy shot, and yet they always manage to recover shots of the boogers in the perp's nose, and do a DNA analysis of the snot by zooming in to the molecular level, even though the nostrils couldn't be seen in the original shot. 

I seem to recall an episode of the original CSI wherein they got an image of a guy out of the reflection in someone's pupil in a photograph.

brazzy:

I don't know the movie, but for a high security environment, it can make sense to disallow networks.

 Yes, because instead of allowing people to transfer files over a network, where I can do all sorts of snazzy encryption and monitoring, I would much rather they put it on a physical medium they can walk out of the building with.