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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?

#201

Post by mindslight »

simoncion wrote: post #199
mindslight wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I was thinking of prisoners of the Japanese in WWII. As I said, the Nazis were hardly the only ones to number prisoners, and I suspect the phenomenon has more to do with technology than with the supreme evil tidily ascribed to losers of wars. I'm making a general point about identifiers and protocols. The same thing applies to client MACs, which are obviously being used to track phone users with wifi on. Obv…

> Actually I was thinking of prisoners of the Japanese in WWII. I've never heard of this, and have family that served in the Pacific during WWII. I'm also having difficulty discovering any sources that mention the practice, let alone reliable ones.

Maybe I have my family history wrong? I certainly see plenty of references to "POW number" for various conflicts.

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

#202

Post by knughit »

FireBeyond wrote: post #168
schoen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Because _nomap gets 99.999% coverage, and _mappable would get 0.001% coverage.

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

#203

Post by nommm-nommm »

beeboop wrote: post #39
patrickmay wrote: post #20

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…

Stories like this further my conviction to simply never answer the door if it's a police officer unless they specify having a warrant. They can't detain you if you don't answer, and chances are the officer will escalate the situation on his own if he wants a reason to detain you. There is nothing to gain and everything to lose.

I've answered the door to police, they were there to return property of mine that I had no idea was missing. It took some work on their end to find me too.

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

#204

Post by mangeletti »

I didn't finish the entire article, but my immediate thought was that this has something to do with these new phone drop spots that I've seen at grocery stores.

You apparently can just put a phone in one of these ATM-like machines and get money out, which immediately struck me as a clever way to buy stolen phones on the cheap from criminals, with indemnity... which would definitely lead to situations like this when those stolen phones are resold to unsuspecting consumers.

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

#205

Post by simoncion »

mindslight wrote: post #197
simoncion wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, this is back to the case of non-WPA2... Okay, I'm a little confused, please bear with me. Are you designing two half systems, one of which periodically changes BSSID but provides no other anonymity protection, and the other which hashes the BSSID with the WPA2 PSK? Or are you designing one system with a rotating BSSID that transmits -in cleartext- the BSSID and the hashed BSSID?

I'm pointing out existence certificates of each independent property. View them as two systems, or assume they can be merged into one system. It's obviously impossible to have a publicly-available network that hides its existence to the public (while a private network can obviously hide its existence to the public completely), so each problem will obviously have different ideal solutions.

> View them as two systems, or assume they can be merged into one system.

It's the merging and the details of the same that's the complicated bit, and the only thing worth talking about in this sub-thread.

You made the assertion that the "the committees designing [wireless communications] protocols don't think [that things screamed on the street corner are public data]". [0] This is simply not true. The folks who designed 802.11 had to make several key-management-complexity/computational-power/ease-of-use tradeoffs.

> ...while a private network can obviously hide its existence to the public completely...

Not if it's a relatively-high-performance radio network operating in a relatively tiny slice of spectrum, [1] it can't.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950276

[1] As 802.11b/g/n does

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

#206

Post by simoncion »

mindslight wrote: post #201
simoncion wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually I was thinking of prisoners of the Japanese in WWII. I've never heard of this, and have family that served in the Pacific during WWII. I'm also having difficulty discovering any sources that mention the practice, let alone reliable ones.

Maybe I have my family history wrong? I certainly see plenty of references to "POW number" for various conflicts.

> I certainly see plenty of references to "POW number" for various conflicts.

AFAIK, it was never policy of the Allied forces to tattoo anything on captured POWs. I would be very surprised if captured Axis soldiers were not given some sort of uniform, unique tracking number.

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

#207

Post by cortesoft »

Houshalter wrote: post #193
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The findmyfriends feature on my iPhone has been 100% accurate in identifying where my friends are My wife and I use Find My Friends quite often to keep track of our children. I've used it for years, so I'm quite familiar with it. Our experience is quite the opposite of "100% accurate". I provided more detail in this other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950107 Edit: just looked up the USA version of "pro…

What percent of the time is the location totally wrong? Greater than 50% of the time? If not then it's totally justified.

Wait... you are saying you are willing to have a 49% chance that the police hold you in custody and search your house when you are totally innocent?!? Think about that.... there are LOTS of stolen phones and tablets, and if the police end up searching the wrong house nearly HALF the time that would be hundreds of innocent people. Fuck that I am SO not willing to live in a society where that happens.

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

#209

Post by Houshalter »

cortesoft wrote: post #207
Houshalter wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percent of the time is the location totally wrong? Greater than 50% of the time? If not then it's totally justified.

Wait... you are saying you are willing to have a 49% chance that the police hold you in custody and search your house when you are totally innocent?!? Think about that.... there are LOTS of stolen phones and tablets, and if the police end up searching the wrong house nearly HALF the time that would be hundreds of innocent people. Fuck that I am SO not willing to live in a society where that happens.

It was a missing girl, not a random stolen phone. Yes I'd absolutely be willing to risk inconveniencing one person to save a kidnapped girl.

The 50% number was made up anyway, it's likely higher than that. GPS especially is pretty accurate, and these tracking systems probably use it when available.

For a single stolen phone, probably not. Though you can still go to their house and then call the phone right as they answer the door. If you hear ringing then that's probable cause.

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

#210

Post by sillysaurus3 »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #172
ghshephard wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

The findmyfriends feature on my iPhone has been 100% accurate in identifying where my friends are My wife and I use Find My Friends quite often to keep track of our children. I've used it for years, so I'm quite familiar with it. Our experience is quite the opposite of "100% accurate". I provided more detail in this other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950107 Edit: just looked up the USA version of "pro…

Why do parents track their children? Kids are tougher than parents credit them for. It's unfortunate that new technology will let parents hover forever.

Luckily, they're resourceful. I wonder if it's possible to hack the app to send false location data? There are ways to jailbreak a phone that make it appear unjailbroken (e.g. to put a keylogger on it). Maybe this technique could be used to acquire freedom, by MITMing whatever findmyfriends is sending to their servers and modifying it in transit. The phone's location is probably a JSON field in the request. TLS provides no protection against an attacker with sudo privileges on the same box, so it seems possible.

Wanting to sneak out to see someone at 1 AM is a pretty powerful force, so this would be an amusingly effective way to get teens interested in hacking.

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