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Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

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Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#171

Post by 542458 »

kube-system wrote: post #68
542458 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hunh. Does this definitely use the e911 system for tracking? If so, there’s sort of a well-poisoning thing going on here. Most people would like 911 be able to figure out where they’re calling from in an emergency, but if this is going to be abused for surveillance purposes people are going to want to disable the phone-side portion of it - which prevents it from helping in an emergency. On that note, can this even be…

As I understand it is mostly handled by the chipset firmware these days, and no options are available to disable it because it is a legal requirement. But even if you were able to disable the functionality, the carriers towers can triangulate you.

Hmm. Re: chipset firmware, the GPS chip and the cellular modem are typically separate and not directly connected, right? So doesn’t that mean there is necessarily something in the main phone software that’s handling passing GPS data from the gps to the modem chip on-demand from the modem firmware?

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#172

Post by Dylan16807 »

jfk13 wrote: post #160
Dylan16807 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objectively, the group settles into a particular speed. It's based on both safety and perceived safety, and it's not perfect, but it works out pretty well. If the road is designed properly it's the top few percentile that you need to restrain, not the masses. If you make a super wide straight shot of asphalt down a residential neighborhood, and people go too fast, that's the road designer's fault.

> it's the top few percentile that you need to restrain, not the masses And how do you propose to "restrain" them, if not by enforcing a speed limit?

I'm not suggesting getting rid of speed limits.

I was objecting to the idea that there is no natural speed, and that the group will "just escalate". Nothing else.

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#173

Post by alistairSH »

jfk13 wrote: post #160
Dylan16807 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objectively, the group settles into a particular speed. It's based on both safety and perceived safety, and it's not perfect, but it works out pretty well. If the road is designed properly it's the top few percentile that you need to restrain, not the masses. If you make a super wide straight shot of asphalt down a residential neighborhood, and people go too fast, that's the road designer's fault.

> it's the top few percentile that you need to restrain, not the masses And how do you propose to "restrain" them, if not by enforcing a speed limit?

I don’t think anybody is arguing speed limits should be abolished. At least not in any general sense. But, it’s plain enough to see that speed limits on some roads are wrong.

I-495 in VA is a prime example. It’s posted at 55mph and traffic regularly flows faster (or slower, during rush hour). It really needs variable limits based on traffic volume instead of a dumb 55.

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#174

Post by vkou »

alistairSH wrote: post #75
logifail wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Virginia as a whole has some pretty absurdly pro police laws, at least re: driving (Full disclosure: have never driven in the USA), but without wishing to sound like a know-all, how about sticking to the speed limit? I've been dinged exactly twice for speeding since getting my licence almost exactly 30 years ago this month. No points in either case. It's not hard, honest. My wife might disagree, but her licence, he…

how about sticking to the speed limit? Because the speed limit in much of the US is below the “natural” speed of that roadway. We have highways where 80+mph is the norm, but the posted limited can be anywhere from 55-70mph (I-95 along the east coast). Driving the speed limit actually becomes dangerous. At this point, speed enforcement becomes a hit-or-miss affair, where you’re at the mercy of the police officer. Bett…

The problem with this line of reasoning is that the 'natural' speed limit of a freeway is a death sentence in the event of a crash.

I have zero sympathy for this. If you're doing 20 mph over the limit, you shouldn't be driving, whether it comes from taking away you car, or from putting you in a cage for a few weeks.

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#175

Post by chrismcb »

warning26 wrote: post #137
woodruffw wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am someone who's extraordinarily sympathetic to journalists. But I don't think there's really any excuse for going 93 miles an hour on a country road marked for 55, as this author did. Should he have been sent to jail for it? I don't think so. But it's remarkable how acceptable that behavior seems to be.

Eh, I don't think speed limits really should exist in any context. If you want people to go slow, design the roads for slower driving, don't just impose arbitrary limits.

So we should make roads more dangerous instead of using speed limits? That seems backwards.

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#176

Post by alistairSH »

cycomanic wrote: post #131
Dylan16807 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your common sense is wrong here. If you replace speed limits with "go a safe speed" then people don't go faster indefinitely, they'll find a speed that depends on road design. It doesn't escalate, and it's only notably faster than the speed limit when something has gone wrong with the road planning.

You obviously have not seen any of the many posted videos of some guys racing on public streets. Or are you saying the natural speed is a personal thing and everyone should be allowed to drive as fast as they personally feel comfortable with?

There are outliers in any group. Nobody is debating that. All we’re saying is roads tend to have a speed where the vast majority of drivers are comfortable and they’ll tend to go that fast.

Most times you’re on a road and traffic is flowing significantly faster than the posted limit, either the limit is wrong or the road is poorly designed and not fit for purpose. And that happens a lot in the US.

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#177

Post by neither_color »

worik wrote: post #140
warning26 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don't think speed limits really should exist in any context. If you want people to go slow, design the roads for slower driving, don't just impose arbitrary limits.

> Eh, I don't think speed limits really should exist in any context. If you want people to go slow, design the roads for slower driving, don't just impose arbitrary limits. In the realm of ego orientated commenting, this one really stands out. I do not want to put my life in your unregulated hands. I want you regulated to hell and back when you operate a tonne of steel at thirty metres per second heading in my genera…

Are you familiar with the autobahn?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn

Parts of highway with unrestricted speed are not only possible, they're not particularly dangerous either.

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#178

Post by chrismcb »

logifail wrote: post #24
eganist wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virginia as a whole has some pretty absurdly pro police laws, at least re: driving. The lesser of either 20 over the speed limit or any speed over ~80~ 85 miles an hour (thanks jmisavage) in Virginia is a misdemeanor, and at least one auto journalist has been jailed in Virginia. https://jalopnik.com/never-speed-in-virginia-lessons-from-my... It's also the only state to prohibit radar detectors.

> Virginia as a whole has some pretty absurdly pro police laws, at least re: driving (Full disclosure: have never driven in the USA), but without wishing to sound like a know-all, how about sticking to the speed limit? I've been dinged exactly twice for speeding since getting my licence almost exactly 30 years ago this month. No points in either case. It's not hard, honest. My wife might disagree, but her licence, he…

Because im and places it is designed to catch you. But I got a ticket in Zurich for doing 16 kph in a 15 kph zone.

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#179

Post by krapht »

function_seven wrote: post #87
VistaBrokeMyPC wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically just a more sensitive radar detector. Instead of picking up the main frequencies radar guns use, it picks up the harmonics emitted by the oscillating crystal inside the radar detectors. All radar detectors leak on harmonic frequencies of the frequency they pick up on, it's just a matter of how much. Those cheap Walmart radar detectors leak so badly they detect each other. Pricier ones are more sophisti…

Could one build an SDR version of a radar detector that doesn't have a detectable oscillator? (Or, if it does, it's oscillating at a much higher frequency?) I'm no RF guy, so I'm clueless on this stuff. But my understanding is that SDRs aren't radio receivers in the traditional sense. That's the whole "SD" part of it, the device scoops up everything and FFTs it or something.

It would be way cheaper to design the radar detector to have better RF isolation than to go towards an SDR solution.

A modern radar gun operates in the Ka-band, Google says between 33.4 and 36 GHz. Assuming 12 bit samples, your proposed solution needs to process a minimum 3.9 gigabits per second, or ~500 megabytes per second. To do this work in software would require a workstation.

Not to mention I'm not even sure if you can operate most ADCs above the 1st Nyquist zone like would be needed here.

Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

#180

Post by RF_Savage »

function_seven wrote: post #87
VistaBrokeMyPC wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically just a more sensitive radar detector. Instead of picking up the main frequencies radar guns use, it picks up the harmonics emitted by the oscillating crystal inside the radar detectors. All radar detectors leak on harmonic frequencies of the frequency they pick up on, it's just a matter of how much. Those cheap Walmart radar detectors leak so badly they detect each other. Pricier ones are more sophisti…

Could one build an SDR version of a radar detector that doesn't have a detectable oscillator? (Or, if it does, it's oscillating at a much higher frequency?) I'm no RF guy, so I'm clueless on this stuff. But my understanding is that SDRs aren't radio receivers in the traditional sense. That's the whole "SD" part of it, the device scoops up everything and FFTs it or something.

Radenso Theia does that.

But they are suffering from the chip shortage. I was interested in using it as an X-band and K-band capable SDR receiver, which is a supported use case according to their media. But we'll see when it ships.

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