2ND UPDATE AT BOTTOM
UPDATE - THIS STORY MAY BE FALSE.
THE CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE IS A PRETTY WELL-KNOWN BLOG AND I DO NOT RECALL THEM PUTTING OUT FALSE INFORMATION BEFORE.
HOWEVER, NONE OF THE IMAGES SHOW UP AND THE TRAIL LEADS BACK TO BEFORE IT'S NEWS, WHICH IS A SITE I DON'T GENERALLY TRUST.
HMM.
Hat tip: Conservative Treehouse
via GatewayPundit comment to: MISSING #MH370: Australia Detects Distress Signal in Southern Indian Ocean
The image was indeed taken from an iPhone 5 on March 18th 2014 at 8:48:41 pm (20:49:41) and the embedded location shows the image was taken in the South Indian Ocean at/around a U.S. military base on Diego Garcia.
2ND UPDATE - Nico writes to say:
Just saw the post on IBA about the IBM guy getting kidnapped and heroically sent some image with a voice recorded message.
I followed the links and saw that the folks had based all their arguments on EXIF data being "extremely hard to change" and if it is changed "it ALWAYS leaves traces unless you're some sort of a hacker". Well, uh, that is BS.
I already knew this was BS because of a couple of things:
1) I have personally obtained and changed metadata from JPEG files as part of a class in computer science that I took a year ago. I did that programmatically but there's no reason programs can't be created to read and edit that data. The guy on one of the websites says that it is so hard to change EXIF data, and to prove how hard it is he asks people to open the JPEG file in Notepad...Well of course its going to look like gibberish.
Let me give you an example: In programming, sentences like "Hello Pasto" are known as "Strings". In Java, for example, Strings are known as Objects. If you try and print out an Object in raw form, even if it is a String saying "Hello Pasto", it is going to come out as gibberish. The reason for that is that everything is turned into assembly and then machine code for the computer to read. Assembly code is mostly in Hex values, aka, gibberish. For things to be human readable, they have to be put through different methods/functions.
Anyway, a long winded way to just say that the guy was basically BSing or has no idea what he's talking about.
2) ANY data, literally, any data on computers can be changed. It can be extremely easy to extremely hard depending on what one is trying to change but computers and data stored on them, at the end of the day, is just 0s and 1s. EXIF's are no different. There's no unwritten law that says that software changing EXIF has to leave traces. EXIF is just a standard agreed to by folks to be able to easily read and share location, camera, lens etc information, nothing else. Just like JPEG is a standard, or PNG is a standard, or even PDF is a standard.
Anywho, based on these assumptions I thought I'd do some investigative work. So I took my Xbox 360 controller (its covered in dust because I haven't had the time to play it in a while lol) and took a picture of it using my iPhone 4. Then I downloaded some easily and freely available software and changed some, not all because I just couldn't be bothered. Uploaded the image to 4chan (because most legit websites strip the EXIF data from images to protect people's personal data from being exposed) and then used the same website used by Conservative Treehouse to extract EXIF information. Here's the link to what I uploaded. You should find it extremely interesting:
http://www.findexif.com/?l=UScWkLdPSHw#results
Notice some things here. First the location. If you zoom out of the map, you will see me sitting right there in the middle of the ocean off the coast of California. Then the Date/Time says March 31, 1914. The brand of the device is Banana. And the model is iPhone 28. I could have also changed the OS which is 7.02 but I didn't really bother with it because iPhone 28's 7.02 is awesome!
Anyway, so according to this image and its EXIF metadata, I went back in time, took my iPhone 28 made by Banana with me, took a picture of an Xbox Controller from back then (sitting on a wooden table, mind you), while floating in the middle of the ocean off the coast of California.
