101–110 of 151 posts
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That can't possibly be legal.
It may depend on which state, and sometimes it's a grey area if the car is jointly owned (since you could argue the "owner is consenting" to the tracking). http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/11/...
looks like Private Investigator catalog equipment in the states. Big, clunky, and built to suit a million different uses. Dev board + sensors + 3g = a million different reconfigurable spy toys. Although I hope it's a three-letter agency, because that'd make me a bit less frightened of them. Also, I don't know why everyone is up-in-arms about the solder job quality. Rip apart a Chinese Futaba-knockoff RC transmitter,…
Very few companies produce GPS chips. Most devices that include GPS capability do not bother to reinvent the wheel, but instead elect to integrate an existing GPS processing chip. It's unlikely the GPS module is integrated with the processor core of this thing. Since it is likely separate, it would be fun to probe the PCB with a logic analyzer to see if there are any exposed serial (or possibly I2C, SPI) traces relay…
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It may depend on which state, and sometimes it's a grey area if the car is jointly owned (since you could argue the "owner is consenting" to the tracking). http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/11/...
Not everybody lives in the USA.
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Aw man I loved your comment right up to the point where you gave people a suggestion on how to make better surveillance tech :(
Seriously. It's extremely important that we as engineers be ethical about what we build. If you are enabling a surveillance state, I think many people would consider that to be harmful to public welfare.
I honestly do not know how those working for the NSA, GCHQ, etc. can live with themselves for the damage they're doing. Snowden said he was getting something like $120k p/a as a consultant for the NSA, so it's not like it's massively financially lucrative.
Very few companies produce GPS chips. Most devices that include GPS capability do not bother to reinvent the wheel, but instead elect to integrate an existing GPS processing chip. It's unlikely the GPS module is integrated with the processor core of this thing. Since it is likely separate, it would be fun to probe the PCB with a logic analyzer to see if there are any exposed serial (or possibly I2C, SPI) traces relay…
You can buy second hand GPS transmitters for ~50USD. Remove antenna, plug in transmitter done. Reverse engineering the board would be fun though.
What are the transmitters you're talking about? Multiple analog front ends each transmitting on a different L1 channel frequency? SDRs transmitting on multiple L1 channels? L1 is 1575.42 MHz (10.23 MHz × 154) so you'd need multiple channels to simulate multiple satellites. How can I do that for $50?
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Things cannot be evil in and of themselves. It takes sentient intention that you judge to be so for it to be (to you).
I guess it's hard to prove, but I think certain objects are inherently correlated with good/evil. E.g. a torture device is inherently evil IMHO, and a vaccine is inherently good.
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There is a lot of ethical uses of such trackers (e.g. a company tracking its own vehicles, shipping container tracking, etc.). We can't assume the developer of the original board knowingly designed it for evil purposes. Full disclosure: I design smart-grid and telemetry applications, including a GSM + GPS device (GPS was initially used for getting accurate timestamps, but we also added positioning registers, which ma…
Interesting, I always thought that google using it for TrueTime was a strange use-case, but I guess it was the original use-case!
Iep, is there a lot of systems depending on GPS and a major system failure will bring us some chaos.
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You can buy second hand GPS transmitters for ~50USD. Remove antenna, plug in transmitter done. Reverse engineering the board would be fun though.
Transmitting RF on GPS frequencies would almost certainly run afoul of local laws on transmission interference, and in the US FCC enforcement penalties are both severe and expensive (as they should be for interference). A direct coax connection would probably be fine though. What are the transmitters you're talking about? Multiple analog front ends each transmitting on a different L1 channel frequency? SDRs transmitt…
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It would be fun injecting fake paths to some NSA datacenter, a military supplier IC foundry, Area 51, and CIA HQ. The people monitoring him may draw some strange conclusions.
Fun and pretty solidly stupid. The last thing you want to do when you're being followed is antagnoize the people following you. Especially so if you think the tracking violates your civil rights. The best outcome for you is contacting a lawyer, a media outlet, and the people you think are surveilling you; the local police and FBI field office are a good start. Making already suspicious people think you're doing somet…