Whistle Orga

ask anything you like there

Like, "scr33n being a Niantic investor"

added 'metanotes' and 'metametanotes'

y'all have fun

And there's Niantic devs listed, but only with description of having created a Navarro portal. Well, didn't many agents do that?

Damn it. This is going to take a lot of time. Lol. I'm still making original notes, much less to comment on others.

😱

There's a question of how much you want to question every little thing.


The comments on sc33n are from @strandit


The comments on slackfarmer are from @vain_vurxof

they both know what they're talking about. This is a trust community. /shrug

I didn't question if they know what they're talking about. I'm asking if we can *prove* it.

what do you need, a W-2?

It's not what we know, it's what we can prove.

I'm not talking about ME.

sworn testimony?

Jesus

Ok, well on behalf of whatever entity you're advocating

I'm not being flip

I'm advocating on behalf of US

what constitutes proof?

Everyone in here

If we go throwing that around, we damn well better be prepared to prove it

If not, we're going to look like morons

That's what I'm saying

VAIN got slackfarmer drunk in Navarro and picked his brain about the easter eggs implemented on the redacted portal. Is that proof? probably not.

does that mean slackfarmer isn't a Niantic dev? uh...no.

I have no idea if he is or isn't.

But I also know that rumors and myths abound about who is/isn't "Niantic xyz".

If only we had someone on the Niantic payroll to dig up that kind of evidence :)

So I'm just wanting to be sure we can prove anything we claim so it doesn't blow up in our faces

I don't have that kind of access. :(

[[Webpage]]https://twitter.com/slackfarmer

that took like...45 seconds

I just asked if it can be proven

My question is both simple and legitimate

sure. Might be useful to provide some documentation.

not sure how far down that path we want to go.

"I mean, can we PROVE that these people actually used the tools to break TOS?"

etc.

The tool's existence is is own violation. Why be in there if you're not using it?

So I don't think that will be an issue

But if we're going to mention that someone is an actual staff person, we need to be prepared to defend that. Niantic will close ranks....quickly.

it will certainly be interesting to see what happens

Seeing that list of names....


You're not wrong.

There's many that don't surprise me. But others....

Back to adding notes....

Ok, I'm sure I missed some, but that was a first pass

thanks for the good notes on the euros

There's more in there that I recognize, but I need to dig through chats to find out from where

Just found another RES Vanguard :( Katvinci

argentina

Is there an easier way for me to cross reference that list and my chats?

A LOT of those names look familiar, but I'm having to search each one

I...don't think so. You pretty much have to flip back and forth, I think.

[[☹ Sticker, size 21'244 bytes]]

I have a list of Vanguards thanks to @deafone , so I just crossed that against the name list

didn't expect to get another hit

Ok, then it'll take me some time, but I'll try to pound through it alphabetically

poor Andrew

Unfortunately there is more than one name on the Enl side of Vanguard that hunts....

oh I'm sure

they just don't have the bad luck to be on a massively well-documented list

or at least not one that's been released yet.

Not that we've seen anyway.

This

[[Webpage]]https://spairo.org/comms/
surely someone can have some fun with this

I was wondering what that stood for

[[Photo]]

g+ post

Fine fine

not yet :)

But but..

Daaad

the picture is starting to come together

it's going to be lovely

I've started doing the googling on the undocumented agents.


Krakow, Bombay, the Netherlands, Japan

Like I said, there's many I recognize

Just have to sort through

these guys put together a hell of a tool and network

gotta hand it to them

Again, no wonder they don't win more things in the actual game...

Had to take time to build

Lot of coder hours, for sure. And some careful consideration on the social engineering / infosec side of things

found a Hawaiian

It would be graceless not to acknowledge the depth and complexity of the technical achievement here, even if it is built on sand.

and the internationalization of it is breathtaking.

Somewhere there is a list of all the Navarro portals with who made them right? Although maybe it doesn't list the niantic one

I agree with this. I also think we probably need to explain why it violates tos and what tos means. I've had way too many players try to tell me agents are violating tos by deploying more than one 8 on a portal or doing things that are actually impossible. People don't know the tos.

Agreed. The ToS is ambiguous in many ways, but it's fairly clear on scraping data.

We're not actually releasing the notes and aos right? It might reduce some of the moral high ground we have about not autogenerating heatmaps with home locations

Furthermore, the argument can be made that what we're looking at isn't "exactly" scraped data. What we are seeing is a slack channel that has access to a bot, that has access to a database. No one in that chat can be proven to have scraped. Just that they queried a db. Now, logic would dictate that the db is compiled using scraped data, but the members of that chat can technically say they had no idea how the info arrived, just that they had access. Plausible deniability. Is the reveal still embarrassing? Yes. But unfortunately, being an idiot isn't against ToS.

I don't think we are, but I wasn't sure.

Yes. Some of these people have access to a scraper and have said nothing. Some of them queried the scraper and gotten information. Others are more silently complicit, aware this is going on but not using it.

The only reason why I phrase the defense that way is because that's how it was phrased to me when one of the res on that list pulled a series of my portals.

Why is this worse than using @PortalAssistBot?

It seems to be doing the same thing? Or am I mistaken?

I've never used that bot

I'm not in Slack. Lol

@PortalMapBot and @PortalAssistBot are both telegram bots you can query to look up a portal globally by name

Oh...didn't know that either