The Bellingcat Open Source Challenge

Wordle and Minute Cryptic and Scrambled Maps will have to a back-seat this month - there's a new daily challenge in town: the Bellingcat Open Source Challenge.

Launched by Bellingcat, a renowned platform for open-source research and investigative journalism, the Open Source Challenge is running throughout December. Five days a week, Bellingcat is posting a new challenge, inviting participants to use open-source tools to solve intriguing puzzles.

So far, five challenges have been set - each involving the analysis of a different photograph, primarily to uncover geolocation clues. After about 90 minutes of sleuthing, I’ve managed to solve only two of this week’s daily challenges (the photos outlined in green in the screenshot above).

I don’t want to spoil the challenge for you by giving away any answers, but I can share the tools I’ve been using this morning (none of which, ironically, are truly open-source):

ChatGPT

Gemini

Geospy

Google Image Search

Bellingcat maintains its own Online Open Source Investigation Toolkit, a comprehensive, categorized database of tools for verifying photos and videos, archiving web pages, and much more. To add to the collaborative spirit, Bellingcat has set up a Bellingcat Challenge channel on its Discord Server, where participants can work together to crack each daily challenge.

Via: Webcurios