141–150 of 156 posts
Great. So you just made an app that helps bike thieves find the airtag hidden in my bicycle.
Won't the AirTag start beeping if your bike is stolen (that is, if the tag is away from your iPhone for too long)? I think that will alert them much better than this app will.
> With the app you can play a sound on AirTags and find it easily. I wonder how it does that. Unauthenticated BLE characteristic? This would imply anyone could force an arbitrary AirTag to make a sound. Obvious application: force all AirTags nearby to keep making sounds.
Why annoy people like this? My e-bike has Find My tracking built in to the firmware. As long as you don’t steal my bike you have no privacy concerns from me securing my bike. Even better I can track my bike down without involving the police, so the potential thief doesn’t even have to worry about being shot by some trigger happy cop.
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> And yet, you are about as likely to get hit and killed by lightning as you are to die from being shot by police. And? You’re also more likely to die of a lightning strike than you are in a school shooting [0]. Does that mean we should judge the horror of school shootings any differently? - [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/971473/number-k-12-schoo...
You're asking if we should judge the horror more differently? Certainly. One (school shootings) is obviously far more horrible, for obvious reasons. But, if you're commenting on how common something is (as the original poster did), then having an actual understanding of the frequency is important. For instance, I don't think we need armed police and metal detectors on every single campus. That would be an over reacti…
Even on HN, people have an allergic reaction to even a suggestion that a report arguing for the conclusion they already believe in could be based on flawed data or flawed methodology.
(A sure-fire way to have this conversation on an arbitrary topic is to point out base rate fallacy - so many reports and arguments omit the base rate, either accidentally or on purpose, which often leads to making a sensation out of a non-story.)
Still, bad reasoning has to be pointed out, or else we fall into darkness. The big problems ahead of us are of the kind where intuition alone won't help us. We've had thousands of years honing our intuitions and refining them into saws, cultural norms, religious beliefs, etc. The problems we find hard today are precisely the ones where you need rational, correct reasoning.
Pretty cool but why does it have to be limited to AirTag or any specific devices? It would be easy to expand it to keep track of any nearby Bluetooth device and a corresponding whitelist. (Or do AirTag devices rotate Bluetooth MACs?) Airtags are just one implementation of a Bluetooth transmitter and a long life battery but anyone could probably build a similar device dedicated to tracking with off the shelf parts.
> Airtags are just one implementation of a Bluetooth transmitter and a long life battery but anyone could probably build a similar device dedicated to tracking with off the shelf parts. There is nothing Dropbox does that can’t be done with rsync.
Running even a NAS storage with remote backups and decent security is not trivial job.
While UX/client features is a factor for buying into Dropbox, the storage and backup costs are the primary cost driver.
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> "fairly common"? You are about as likely to get hit and killed by lightning as you are to die from being shot by police. Chance of getting hit by lightning: 1 in 500,00 = 2.0 * 10^-6 [1] Chance of getting shot and killed by police (2020): 993 in 331,449,281 = 2.99 x 10^-6 [2] Hardly seems "fairly common" now does it? And, your second post about the relative frequency to other countries is a different statement, one…
Wait a second, why is the chance of getting shot and killed by the police a per capita statistic. The denominator should be the number of police-initiated encounters. I could only find 2018 data, but it's likely in the same ballpark. [1] Thus, the chance of getting shot and killed by police (2020): 993 in 28,880,900 = 3.44 x 10^-5 For African Americans (2020): 241 in 3,393,800 = 7.10 x 10^-5 So it's an order of magni…
To normalize data collected from jurisdictions with different populations.
"The denominator should be the number of police-initiated encounters."
It depends what you care about. If you're a black man in America, perhaps you care about the overall chance of dying this way.
Perhaps, conditional on having been stopped by police, the chance of being shot and killed is the same for white men and black men. But this would be irrelevant if black men are 10X more likely to be stopped in the first place.
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Is “cop shoots bike thief” something you actually think is common enough to note? This implies a concerning reality departure.
The police department is recommending people store their documents in an always-visible pouch to avoid getting shot. https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/ooc/news-releases/Pages/dps-par...
Oy vey.
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What other options allow them to embed a tiny almost invisible device in a piece of clothing or a toy and learn its location from anywhere in the world? GPS trackers are larger, require a fair amount of power (big battery), don't work well indoors, and require cellular service.
I was thinking about this - if I were a stalker, I wouldn’t bother with any physical device. I’d just add myself (or an innocuous looking account) to “share my location” on their phone. The non-HN public would probably never notice, and it wouldn’t be too hard to get someone’s unlocked phone (especially in an abusive-relationship scenario)
But these trackers mean that you can give a stuffed animal to your favorite streaming star at a conference (or sent one in the post to their mailbox service) and then learn where they live... and you can do so with a few minutes effort and a few dollars in cost above the toy.
If you know you're at risk you can protect your phone. I think the threat from these apple-powered trackers is much more severe, but it's true that these sorts of risks still exist without them.
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In what area of the US do the police actually recover bikes?
If you show the police officer a live location of your stolen property moving on a map, that's usually enough to motivate them into action. I've seen two stolen phones recovered this way. If you tell them your bike is stolen and that's all the information you have, they rightly deduce that there's almost no chance of you getting it back.
This is what happens most of the time -- cops just don't care in the majority of cases.
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Future movie spoilers alert! And it’s actually true isn’t it! :-) Apple won’t let bad guys use their hardware; https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/26/apple-wont-let-bad-guys-use-...
That is nonsense. Legally, Apple can do nothing if a movie maker wants to go out and buy an Apple product and show a bad guy using their products. That director is probably referring agreements the movie maker made with Apple in exchange for free Apple devices to use in the movies. Or he is trying to misdirect for the next movie he is making.
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In many areas of the US, that trigger happy cop will be the difference between you recovering your property and you being severely beaten when you show up in a rough neighborhood trying to get your bike back.
In my experience, the most an American cop is going to do to help you resolve a property crime is take a report. If they happen to find the item, you _may_ get it back.