// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Geolocating a random island using geometry and CUDA programming
NOTE: this is a genuine human work, didnt use LLM generation.
I'm writing this page as a writeup for this challenge gralhix 004 made by Sofia Santos | Gralhix.
You can view, clone and locally try all code files and the final report with all instructions here at github.
a) What is the name of the resort?
b) What are the coordinates of the island?
c) In which cardinal direction was the camera facing when the photo was taken?
In my opinion, solving this challenge with google lens is wasting a fun opportunity, so decided to solve it with math and programming.
Of course, first thing u look for is the metadata. Ran that on my linux void:
As expected, nothing useful here. No EXIF, no GPS, no camera make or model.
I couldnt make a correct perspective model of birdview of this image, as clearly the image is taken by a drone and cant estimate the elevation at all (and not found in the metadata).
So I had to estimate that by intuition, I just want the relative distances between the 3 islands and angles of that triangle.
I built a small click GUI 01_triangle_gui.py that records pixel coordinates for each point in order and computes the triangle's geometry.