51–60 of 266 posts
I found this particularly disturbing: > In June, the police came looking for a teenage girl whose parents reported her missing. The police made Lee and Saba sit outside for more than an hour while the police decided whether they should get a warrant to search the house for the girl’s phone, and presumably, the girl. When Saba asked if he could go back inside to use the bathroom, the police wouldn’t let him. > > “Your…
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They had probable cause: the last reported location of a missing teenage girl was their house.
Reported by something that has <90% accuracy? Less than 99%? It matters...
In this particular case, why can't the local PD/Sherrif/agency see the damn pattern, record the note, and proceed with meaningful caution? That's what would annoy me the most.
Now this is interesting. Presumably the coordinates of their house are significant in some way. The result of some kind of truncation perhaps? I can't see how a floating-point error could converge on a specific value like this, but I'm no expert in such things. If they could only post their address the answer would surely be found very quickly, but that would defeat the object somewhat. I suppose it's fortuitous that…
0,0 is Null Island! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010
Must be a hell of a crossing party associated with maintaining that.
My money is on a wifi SSID that matches the one used by thieves or a heavily-trafficked location the victims all pass through. My company moved ~5 blocks and it really screwed up the map on my phone (which I use to get around the city) for several months. My company had left the network SSID the same in the old location, so that no one had to re-configure their wifi. Even with GPS on, my phone was always convinced it…
An amusing example of this sort of problem shows up sometimes on airplanes with onboard WiFi. If the phone doesn't get a GPS lock right away (common when you're in a metal tube) then it may show the position based on the mapped location for the hotspot MAC address, which is often at a completely different airport. Obviously, Skyhook isn't driving around mapping airliners, but I think these days they have the mobile d…
That thought is correct. Google has been doing this for years, popping up an agree-to-continue like screen on Android phones on which everyone clicks "sure, I just want to use GPS now" and then uploads every place they ever go to Google. Mozilla is working on their own version of this to create a variant of a more open nature: https://location.services.mozilla.com
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They had probable cause: the last reported location of a missing teenage girl was their house.
Reported by something that has <90% accuracy? Less than 99%? It matters...
'Probable cause' is slightly higher that 'reasonable suspicion' but much lower than 'beyond all reasonable doubt'.
Essentially, it boils down to: Would a 'reasonable man' (another technical term) suspect that something is the case? If yes, one has reasonable suspicion.
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Good point. My understanding is that both SSID and MAC address are typically used as inputs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system
I guess it's not exactly difficult for the likes of google to remove the millions of 'Netgear' SSIDs from their dataset.
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Well, BSSID, not the easily-changed ESSID (as commented below.) Presumably some manufacturer of ultra-cheap wifi gear isn't properly setting a unique BSSID range into the units they make, and some stolen-phone operation has the same BSSID as these folks do.
They are modifiable in software too...
I wonder if the couple could make a profit on this mishap by suing anyone who accuses them of stealing phones (i.e. on social media) after visiting their house.
The geolocation would probably be enough evidence for claims of libel to be ineffective.
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Wouldn't hurt to change the MAC of the router (and the SSID while they're at it).
The problem is not that the router is currently broadcasting a BSSID that exists elsewhere. The problem is that a geo-wifi database contains an association between their address and a BSSID. They can change the router, and eventually the problem should sort itself out (if it is indeed their router and not a neighbor's that is the issue), but it's going to take until the old record ages out of the database for it to h…