A teen in Canada tracked his lost cellphone to a home and was killed trying to get it back.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jeremy-cook-18-killed-...
Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
181–190 of 266 posts
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the easy part. If previous contact hasn't taken place, persistence is irrelevant. Simply envision the current system with a periodically changing BSSID as your proof of existence. If the AP and client possess a shared secret (as in WPA2), then there's no reason for a third party to be able to deduce any identifying information.
> That's the easy part. If previous contact hasn't taken place, persistence is irrelevant. A periodically-changing ID would do. Okay. How would you design a system to permit associated or unassociated stations to passively determine whether or not they were in range of a given AP? Remember that human-friendly names for a given AP are almost certain to collide.
First, for purposes of this comment I only need to address the situation where WPA2 is currently used (the majority of private APs). Second, I'm one person taking a few minutes to write a HN comment, not a design committee.
Simple protocol: The AP and client have shared secret K (similar to the present WPA2 key). We define the identity of a network as this secret key. The AP can change "BSSID" every hour, while broadcasting [BSSID, Hash(BSSID, K)]. An interested client runs through their database of known private networks, checking if the broadcaster is any they know.
This obviously has a number of shortcomings (eg our attacker is also known to groom people into uploading K to their silos), but it should illustrate the concept.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#183I had something similar happen when I was in college visiting a friend and the police show up asking who dialed 911, if she was alone, etc. This was before ssid based geolocation become popular. I had to spend some time explaining how inaccurate cell tower positioning is, most people just assume that if the cops say it came from inside the house it must have.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoever said that the phone location tracking was anywhere near this level of reliable? IMHO, it's really only good as a sort of hint on where your phone _might_ be.
"might be" absolutely constitutes probable cause.
I don't know.
Out of curiosity I just tried Find my iPhone on my own device which has been sitting in the same location in my house for about an hour completely untouched.
Apple's interface shows my iPhone about a half mile away in a house I've never visited or been in before. There is a big circle around my device (which doesn't even include the actual location) but the actual dot is somewhere I've never been before. I've refreshed it about 5 times now 2-3 minutes apart and it is absolutely convinced that I am at that location.
I avoided touching my iPhone during this experiment to mimic a real life scenario where the phone is out of reach.
If I were in a scenario where I believed a family member was taken against their will to a location I would absolutely want a search, but this experiment makes it pretty clear why Find my iPhone is not probable cause to me..
Still trying to figure out why multiple 'pinpoint location' requests are showing somewhere about a half mile away from my real location. I would think that that type of request would push something to the phone which would power up GPS for accuracy, but it doesn't appear to be so.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the most unexpected and off-the-wall Godwin I've ever seen.
Does being able to draw a parallel affect the validity of the point? Or is your memetic immune system misleading you? FWIW despite what our modern religion emphasizes, the Nazis were hardly the only ones to track prisoners with tattooed numbers
The comparison between willingly assigned and transmitted MAC addresses and death camp tattoos is utterly absurd, both because it unnecessarily pulls Nazis into the conversation, and because they have no useful parallels purely from a technical point of view.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#186This is just a hunch, but does anyone know whether there is any connection / shared services between the phone finding system and the iMessage airline flight tracking system?
It may just all be coincidence, but that flight tracking feature is so wonky and jacked, giving false locations, legs, flights, and information on the regular. I am surprised it hasn't caused a massive outcry for just how horrible it is. It kind of makes me wonder whether there is some shared service or database or something because the flight lookup feature just smells of the same kind of failure.
I realize, most people don't know/recall that iMessage will auto-link flight numbers. Just message the full flight number.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does being able to draw a parallel affect the validity of the point? Or is your memetic immune system misleading you? FWIW despite what our modern religion emphasizes, the Nazis were hardly the only ones to track prisoners with tattooed numbers
The comparison between willingly assigned and transmitted MAC addresses and death camp tattoos is utterly absurd, both because it unnecessarily pulls Nazis into the conversation, and because they have no useful parallels purely from a technical point of view.
Calling them "willingly" transmitted is a bit of a stretch, given that people don't have much choice to turn just them off and defaults are a powerful thing.
The useful parallel is the general inventorying and tracking of people. Luckily we don't have the rest of totalitarianism (yet), but this cornerstone is well laid due to naive designers.
BTW you were the one who brought up the subject of Nazis.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/…
There are a lot of things that are justifiable to rescue a possibly kidnapped child that are not justifiable to rescue a possibly stolen iPhone.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Ah. Fair point.
Re: Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's the easy part. If previous contact hasn't taken place, persistence is irrelevant. A periodically-changing ID would do. Okay. How would you design a system to permit associated or unassociated stations to passively determine whether or not they were in range of a given AP? Remember that human-friendly names for a given AP are almost certain to collide.
First, for purposes of this comment I only need to address the situation where WPA2 is currently used (the majority of private APs). Second, I'm one person taking a few minutes to write a HN comment, not a design committee. Simple protocol: The AP and client have shared secret K (similar to the present WPA2 key). We define the identity of a network as this secret key. The AP can change "BSSID" every hour, while broad…
> An interested client runs through their database of known private networks, checking if the broadcaster is any they know.
That solves the problem for clients that have connected to that AP before. [0]
How do you propose to solve the problem for clients that have never interacted with that AP before?
[0] It probably actually doesn't, but I won't distract you with why at the moment. :)