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Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

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Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#161

Post by anikamariam »

manarth wrote: post #126
anikamariam wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes it will hold up in court. Police don't let suspects out of detention just because they complain they have to pee. High-tech state-of-the-art tracking technology from Google and Apple indicates that these people are somehow involved in the disappearance of a missing person. How dumb would the officer look if he let a suspect destroy evidence, escape, or otherwise pull something on the claim that they have to pee?

There's nothing in the article to say that the residents were arrested. An arrest is the threshold for controlling someone's legitimate actions: if the police don't have enough evidence to arrest the person, then they shouldn't be limiting their movements. That is the whole point of arrest (and the related burden of proof required to make an arrest). To restrict someone's actions without legal authority - such as arr…

Holy shit civics education is pretty bleak in high school these days huh?

everyone commenting on this is so ignorant you all must be teenagers

the cops dont have to arrest you to control you. They can detain you whenever they want and barely need any reason at all. A hunch is sufficient to detain you for pretty much as long as they want if their hunch continues.

fuckin privileged teenagers

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#162

Post by anikamariam »

mentat wrote: post #48
anikamariam wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes it will hold up in court. Police don't let suspects out of detention just because they complain they have to pee. High-tech state-of-the-art tracking technology from Google and Apple indicates that these people are somehow involved in the disappearance of a missing person. How dumb would the officer look if he let a suspect destroy evidence, escape, or otherwise pull something on the claim that they have to pee?

There's no way it would hold up in court. Perhaps the court of public opinion but nowhere else.

i can cite 100s of cases where way weaker evidence held up in court with NO PROBLEM

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#163

Post by egypturnash »

kuschku wrote: post #71
lucb1e wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think these days they have the mobile devices themselves do the mapping, by phoning home with the WiFi hotspots it sees while out and about. 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 versi…

And it’s horrible when no one activates it, and you’re the first to do so – every minute your phone will activate WiFi, scan, activate GPS, get a lock, and upload the data. Battery is empty in a few hours. But, after doing so for a few days in a row, your battery consumption goes down again, probably because it has mapped enough for now.

Or maybe because it's not seeing many new SSIDs because you mostly go to the same four or five places in the same routes.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#164

Post by qume »

If this community can't pin point the problem together, then there is something up here. Clearly this warrants Google, Apple, the telcos and someone from an electronic forensic team each putting a part time expert into a team to figure this out for everyones benefit - themselves and this couple.

Of course the reality is that key Google and Apple staff know exactly what has caused this and don't have a ready solution so are keeping quiet.

In any case, if there are Google or Apple employees reading, perhaps you can suggest this idea to someone internally in the chance there may be some progress before someone innocent gets killed for 'stealing' a phone.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#165

Post by ghshephard »

asciimo wrote: post #154
ghshephard wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rights are you referring to? The police seem to have done everything correctly. These were individuals who were being detained pursuant to an investigation of an ongoing crime. The police did not search the inside of the house without a warrant - though, it's unclear why not - if they had strong belief that there was a crime in progress, they had every legal right to do so. I guess the only thing in question is…

Software that puts a blinking dot on a map should not be considered probable cause.

The findmyfriends feature on my iPhone has been 100% accurate in identifying where my friends are. If I had a child who went missing, and findmyfriends showed that they were in a house, I would absolutely hope that the police would go to the house and rescue my child.

I would also hope that the police would have enough sense to prevent any occupants from the house from going into the house and potentially destroying/hiding any evidence, and/or, powering down the iPhone.

As it was, I think the police showed restraint by not going into the house until they had a warrant.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#166

Post by egypturnash »

mdip wrote: post #140

Based on my experience with a few phones I own, there's a few things that could be happening here: It was mentioned the "SSID"/MAC address problem. It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID and are encountering a MAC address collision (assuming MAC address is always taken into account, which I'm not sure that it is). Their router is likely part of some database that the GPS uses when the phones…

> It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID

The guy is an engineer. I'm pretty sure their SSID has a silly in-jokey name.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#167

Post by etingel »

The problem is likely that the location where these phones are really at is near the WiFi router that used to be at this address. No amount of messing with their router will help with fixing this, since those phones aren't there to begin with. The couple might have better luck hitting up the previous tenants/owners.

Based on this line from the article, I'm almost certain that this is the real answer:

> It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together.

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#168

Post by FireBeyond »

schoen wrote: post #150
gnu8 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the industry should assign a bit in the BSSID to indicate a mobile AP that shouldn't be used for mapping purposes.

You can opt out of some of them with _nomap (maybe not all). https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ssid+nomap

Yeah, that's a horrific abomination.

Why not "SSID_mappable"?

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#169

Post by mdip »

egypturnash wrote: post #166
mdip wrote: post #140

Based on my experience with a few phones I own, there's a few things that could be happening here: It was mentioned the "SSID"/MAC address problem. It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID and are encountering a MAC address collision (assuming MAC address is always taken into account, which I'm not sure that it is). Their router is likely part of some database that the GPS uses when the phones…

> It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID The guy is an engineer. I'm pretty sure their SSID has a silly in-jokey name.

I hear ya, but "Mechanic's Car"[1] sometimes comes into play. I recently installed a new AC router in my home. I took the time to install OSS firmware, customized all parts of the security, applied a few tweaks to the WiFi configuration via a shell script and ... my SSID? "OpenWrt"

I keep meaning to change it to something snarky ("Free Public Wi-Fi?") but then I know I'll have to enter my ridiculously complicated/long password into a bunch of devices without keyboards.

[1] ... usually doesn't run right

Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

#170

Post by kelnos »

Houshalter wrote: post #107
mschuster91 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm disturbed by how anti-police HN is. Like even searching for a missing person is now some great abuse of power. Because police, be it in the US or anywhere else, has time and again proven that they are not to be trusted and any power the legislation grants them can and will be exploited or illegaly expanded. Add to this that police (and most legislators, as well as most judges) don't have a fucking clue how comp…

That's fine, and has absolutely nothing to do with this case. The police were just doing their job searching for a missing girl and had strong evidence that her phone was in the house. And people here are outraged. It's absurd. The point of the fourth amendment is to stop excessive or abusive searches, not all searches ever. Second I think some of the police hate is just availability bias. If you read nothing but art…

Second I think some of the police hate is just availability bias. If you read nothing but articles on the Internet about police somewhere doing something bad, of course you will think they are all terrible.

No, we think they're all terrible when we hear about one officer doing something bad, and an entire precinct closing ranks around him/her to cover it up. (Which accompanies the vast majority of instances of police misconduct.)

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