I don't think it's all that amazing they just used some pretty standard tools/techniqies and available info..some learned about parallax in high school. I ask: how many of them id'd the Tsarnaev brothers??
2. studyied the flight patterns and contrails of the airplanes passing overhead
3. mapped out what they saw and took their findings to flight radars to try and pinpoint a general area.
4. Using the knowledge gleaned from the flight patterns they found that the location was near Greeneville, Tennessee
5. users studied the star patterns and their movements and with that, plus a tweet that Labeouf sent out in a Tennessee diner, the trolls were able to narrow the area even further—to a small patch of land between a house and a river.
6. Drove around and honked their car horn until picked up by the live stream
This is not hard to do and hardly novel. Also done using all public information and the target used poor opsec.
Personally, I think it's pretty cool, for pretty much all of the reasons you list. Clearly it's not to you, and that's okay. I suspect you were down voted perhaps because your comment comes off the same way as when someone comes up with a new app or service and someone else says "oh, I could whip that up in a weekend", particularly as you didn't provide any support for it initially. The fact that someone put all of these things together to solve the problem in and of itself makes it interesting to me. A pretty successful hack, in my opinion.
Fair enough. The lengths they went to in order to accomplish the task despite its mundanity is, admittedly, cool. Maybe I should've said their methods weren't interesting or novel. Thanks for clarifying.
