Just when I thought Chatroulette couldn't possibly get any creepier. Well done indeed!
How about laying a few of the details of this mashup's creation on us. Did you automate the "next" somehow to get lots of screengrabs with minimal work?
That was the first question I had, "whoa, is GeoIP that accurate?" Sadly the best I could quickly find was this ( http://www.maxmind.com/app/city_accuracy ) which says that, as of 11.19.2008, GeoIP correctly resolves to 25 miles of the actual location 83% of the time.
There are at least 100 towns within 25 miles of my house. One of them is New York City. I guess I'm not concerned about GeoIP's accuracy... this is one of the advantages of living in a very dense area.
Still, Chatroulette provides a mapping from IPs to faces, which I'm sure could be used for evil. There are any number of things you could cross reference IPs against (email headers, web server logs, etc)
What a gross invasion of people's privacy as enabled by collecting information they already willingly submitted.
If chatroulette proper is an unwavering stare into the faces and bodies of the internet, chatroulette map is stripping one further layer of anonymity away. It's also terrifying to think what'll happen when this collides with registered sex offender counts.
Okay, I don't know about chatroullete anymore. I just came across (on the OP) a girl doing naughty naughty things... maybe this has already been considered, but what if she's not of age? Am I now guilty of possessing kiddie porn? The way current laws are written and enforced, who knows...
I highly doubt it. Chatroulette has been mentioned on all sorts of Real News sources, and it's well known (and easy to explain) that you don't personally choose what you're viewing over it. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury that would really agree to throw the book at you for accidentally coming across something illegal there.
Then again, I'm no lawyer, and crazier things have happened...
So I zoom in my geographic area and there's these two points on the map. One is this like 60 year old guy looking at his computer. His neighbor however is masturbating. Imagine if it were my neighbor. Guess it's not so anonymous anymore.
I presume this site is created by the Chatroulette people themselves, as surely they'd be the only ones with access to the IPs of users?
[Edit: Just tried Wireshark with chatroulette and you can see the UDP packets going to/from the other user, I guess this isn't always the case if you're both behind NAT gateways]
Why would you think that?
The domains chatroulette and chatroulettemap don't seem to be related.
The real site has is own nameservers and is registered out of the UK.
The map is served by Dreamhost and is registered out of Colorado.
The real site was created by a talented young person.
The map site was probably created by a talentless old person (sorta like the HN demographic).
Apparently Chatroulette involves a direct connection between individuals, so it's possible to determine the IP address of the person you are connected to.
For it not to be a direct connection, Chatroulette would require some pretty heavy resources to stream everyone's video.
I have an open Chatroulette session and Wireshark running at the same time. A lot of traffic is running by me in Wireshark as users connect and disconnect. What am looking for that tells me the other person's general location? Which, out of all those scrolling IPs, is the one of interest?
I spend too much time on the internet — I immediately recognized the both the paraphilia (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Plushie) and the object with the dick in it (Pocahontas's pet raccoon).
Whoa, are Chatroulette users connected directly to each other rather than proxying the streams through Chatroulette's servers? Certainly the former would be more efficient, but if so then it's not as anonymous as it first seems.
Well, clicking around for two minutes I ended up seeing a group of map points that all resolved to...a domain specifying the res hall of a major university. I'd say that destroys any hope of quasi-anonymity.
I'm in Maine right now. Here's a warning message from chatroulettemap.com that I see when I visit:
"We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using
student's names in their hostnames.
We've decided, at least for the time being, to
hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable
information was found in some entries."
Chatroulette is by far the most useless thing that has been created on the Internet. I wish I could have the memories of using it erased from my brain, and the electricity it takes to run the site and the computers connected to it back as well.
Chatroulette uses p2p for video. So, I guess this new app simulates a client by connecting to chatroulette server, getting a new peer, geolocating his IP and taking a screenshot.
This is going to give HR departments an extra method of determining who to employ, at least. And given the number of people exhibiting their penises, I'm foretelling another drop in employment.
Also, in Milano (Italy) there seems to be one house that houses all Chatroulette users. That's either a really, really freaky place to live, or Geo-IP has a pretty bad coverage of Italy.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadHow about laying a few of the details of this mashup's creation on us. Did you automate the "next" somehow to get lots of screengrabs with minimal work?
Works in Firefox though. 10 clicks in, first penis sighting. Sigh.
It's just geoip though, so it's accuracy is low.
I do hope so, there's a man 2 streets away from me, masturbating into the camera.
For the record, it seems that the UK is a world leader in this regard.
If chatroulette proper is an unwavering stare into the faces and bodies of the internet, chatroulette map is stripping one further layer of anonymity away. It's also terrifying to think what'll happen when this collides with registered sex offender counts.
If only those dudes knew their location could be pinpointed, maybe it would make it a bit more bearable.
This needs statistics: dicks per square kilometre, dicks per million inhabitants …
Edit: There is a surprisingly low number of dicks in this map. Lots of bored teenagers/mid-twenties.
Then again, I'm no lawyer, and crazier things have happened...
[Edit: Just tried Wireshark with chatroulette and you can see the UDP packets going to/from the other user, I guess this isn't always the case if you're both behind NAT gateways]
For it not to be a direct connection, Chatroulette would require some pretty heavy resources to stream everyone's video.
"Network throughput is 7 gigabits a second." which would sort of line up with ~20K users at ~50K video streams.
I can confirm that the UDP stream is not always available and that I was behind a NAT during my testing.
"We'd like to advise maine.edu to stop using student's names in their hostnames. We've decided, at least for the time being, to hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable information was found in some entries."
Just when I thought I understood Flash... now I'm confused again.
Edit:
In [4]: datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(1267675073)
Out[4]: datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 4, 0, 57, 53)