231–240 of 266 posts
I know it is an inconvenience, but couldn't they just maybe get a new router and see if that fixes the problem? Surely a cheap router is better than getting your house ransacked by police?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
Either a location is enough for the police to search your place or it is not. Don't pull the kidnapped big eyed little girl card, please.
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…
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.
I took my router with me when i moved back home from university (and i changed the SSID first thing). For about a year my iPad would think it was still at university, and sometimes when i used it to chat with friends on Facebook they would reply "Oh, you're back in town?? Come visit!".
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…
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 MITMin…
That's me. I "stalk" my children. Here's the long story of why.
I live in a relatively safe area, the suburbs of Portland Oregon. There's a fair amount of petty property crime, which tends to be tolerated if not quite condoned.
Fortunately the region has generally investigated violent crimes quite aggressively, and the violent crime rate is relatively low compared to many parts of the country.
But that doesn't mean there aren't bad guys, violent sociopaths who live in the area. People like that live everywhere. E.g. here's something horrible that happened just a few miles away to two girls, one age 12 the other age 13: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Weaver_III#Murders_of_Ash...
My girls were just about that age when they got iPhones. So, I try to keep an eye on them. There's a slight chance they'll run into some serious danger and I might be able to help.
But, more realistically, it helps kids stay out of trouble, because they know there's an increased probability that they will get caught. It's not perfect. E.g. my older daughter was only supposed to drive my car from home to high school and back. But she chose to drive off campus at lunch. And, since she was a very inexperienced driver, she got into a car accident. So, even when she knew that dad might be stalking her, she chose to be a free spirit. That's just how some kids are.
Certainly some kids will be resourceful enough to hack their phones. More power to them! But there are simpler ways. My older one simply turns off location services and then blames it on "Low Power Mode".
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.
As I discussed in my other post, I'd say that:
10% of the time, no location at all
60% of the time, highly accurate location
30% of the time, accurate to a general area, a few hundred feet up to a few miles
2% of the time, totally haywire. Location jumps around randomly, or stays wrong for an extended period of time.
(Statistics are my SWAG, and don't total to 100%).
This is a problem caused by incorrect data representation. Everything the companies know about the location of the phones is an imprecise area, yet they are representing it with this: [1]
This absurdly precise representation doesn't convey the error margins of the information available, and it's what's convincing people that this couple's home is the point that they're looking for. The mapping companies are misleading their users by hiding the level of confidence about the information provided.
Please all front-end developers, don't use a map pin to represent a place in the map if you don't know their coordinates or exact address. A circle with a radius proportional to the uncertainty area is the best representation in that case.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=icon+map+pin&biw=790&bih=750...
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.
That it not how statistics work. Assume it is correct 90% of the time. There are 700 million iPhones worldwide. Assume 1% of them use the app, that is 7 million friends found, and 700k incorrect locations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
Think of the children? Either a location is enough for the police to search your place or it is not. Don't pull the kidnapped big eyed little girl card, please.
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…