Ok, ok, I get it. Next time I'll go commit a crime, I'll leave a cellphone at home. Or will give it to my accomplice to taxi it around at a significant distance from a location where I'll engage in some heinous activity.
Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
221–230 of 271 posts
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Driving the speed limit actually becomes dangerous. I've lived in VA for decades and have driven all over the state. There is no highway where driving the speed limit is actually dangerous and there certainly isn't a highway where the norm is 20 over.
in Atlanta there's a stretch of interstate at 50mph, and the traffic flows at 70+mph. driving the posted limit is dangerous, and possibly even illegal (delaying traffic.)
Are the loaded semi trucks also driving 70+?
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In the realm of ego orientated commenting, this one really stands out. >I do not want to put my life in your unregulated hands. It takes an impressive amount of cognitive dissonance to insult him and then drivel about "putting your life in unregulated hands" when the regulation in question is speed limits, a type of regulation to which compliance is low to the point of it almost being comical. If the regulation were…
The whole subject of this thread is someone going 93 in a 55. I guarantee 93 is not some kind of everyman median speed on that road. This is actually a pretty good example where someone was doing something unsafe and big bad spooky regulation stopped them.
Context matters. A while back, a 4 lane (in one direction) piece of I-80 in Oakland had an inexplicable speed limit of 45. People routinely went 80-85mph in the left lane, and the cops didn't seem to care.
Edit: To be clear, the 45mph sign was not obvious at all. Most cars assumed it it was a 55 or 65 zone, and went at about 70. I drove the road two dozen times before noticing the speed limit dropped so far down. Going 45 on that stretch would have been dangerous.
Anyway, I can imagine a road that should be 75 in some other state being posted at 55, and also for going 15 mph over to be common in that state.
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
No. We would use the baseband PMIC and DMA to move the info out of the AP if they were not integrated.
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a gentleman's agreement between many manufacturers of street legal cars to produce vehicles that will not accelerate to faster than 120-130mph unless some special conditions or limits are met. Been that way for at least a decade.
Speeds within many highway speed limits (like 75mph) are not 120-130mph however.
Not all laws are best enforced by manufacturer collusion. I assure, if you want an corporate oligopoly, that's the way to go about it.
Make things. Let people figure out how to use them. Keep semiconductors neutral.
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#226Earlier 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.
Speed limits exist because stupid people exist. When I was young, I was stupid. I thought it’d be cool to count how many streets I’d on which I’d driven at least 100kph. Soon after that I got into an accident because I was going too fast and couldn’t slow down in time.
Speed limits exist entirely because of World War era gas and rubber rationing, and were never repealsed due to their LE revenue producing nature.
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#227Earlier 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.
You play pick your speed limit in the wrong place in Chesterfield county, you'll discover that those speed limits are where they are because the roads haven't been updated since they originally had asphalt laid down. It was a very specific road near where I grew up. Nice and flat. Looked like you could do any speed you wanted. People routinely did 55. Posted was 30. Near one end of the road was a tree slowly pushing…
If DOT has no budget, that sure sounds like those people are good decapitating somebody every 6 months.
Funny thing about governments by, for, and of the people.
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#228Could the wireless carriers track phones even if they were carrier unlocked or factory unlocked?
How would those two things be related at all?
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 101 through Sonoma/Humboldt/Mendocino counties is, at some places, a 2-lane highway weaving its way through a twisty curvy Redwood forest at 55-65mph, and up to 75mph when it's a six-lane highway. And here in Southern California I regularly get away with 80-85mph in front of CA highway patrol. Most places I've been to in the US seem to consider 5-10 over the limit to be acceptable. I have even heard of freeways i…
For someone so ready to leap to conclusions, you don’t sound particularly informed about British attitudes to road speed (notably, Britain still uses mph, not km/h). You might be surprised to discover that outside built up areas in the UK the national speed limit on an undivided road is 60mph. Not an undivided highway - an undivided road . Here’s an example of a random British B road with a 60mph speed limit: https:/…
Most of my experience is on continental Europe, where it seemed like multilane highways topped out at 55-65 km/h. So you're probably right.
No need to go on the offensive though. "Gaol" is a pretty dead giveaway of Britishness.
Re: Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones
#230Earlier 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. 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.
I am familiar, and have been on the Autobahn many times.
From the speeding journalist's article:
>These roads weren’t anywhere near schools or towns, and have lots of curves and very little traffic.
This is hardly like the Autobahn (except for the schools and towns bit). The parts of the Autobahn with speed restrictions are exactly the parts that are most dangerous, meaning parts with curves, or hilly parts (as you cannot see what's going on on the other site of a hill). The unrestricted parts are basically straight lines. And the Autobahn very much only goes in one direction only (with the other direction physically barricaded off), so oncoming traffic is practically not an issue - except for the rather rare cases of "ghost drivers". You have no pedestrians or cyclists and no wildlife crossings (thanks to barricades); only vehicles which can do at least 60 km/h (~37 mph) are allowed. Trucks and other large vehicles, as well as vehicles with trailers do have speed limits. The Autobahn has a lot fewer crashes and fatalities than rural motorways in Germany, because of that.
As the poster you're responding remarked: "I want you regulated to hell and back when you operate a tonne of steel at thirty metres per second heading in my general direction." That's just not a thing on Autobahn.
The person who was responded to initially also advocated to design "slow roads" instead of having regulations. That's basically the opposite of the Autobahn, which was designed for fast travel. My guess would be that if you designed roads to be slow, a lot of people just wouldn't go slow, but cause crashes. We see that already on roads which just happen to be relatively "slow" without being specifically designed to be that.
Aside from that, German drivers got to have a lot more certified training by law (compared to the US), pass a lot more strict and comprehensive theoretical and practical exam (compare to the US) before getting a license, and cars have to be inspected every two years for road-suitability (including working safety features).
I wouldn't want some reckless driver coming at me on a curvey, rural road at 93 miles per hour, some 35 mph over the limit. Because that's literally what is is: reckless and dangerous, with disregard for anybody else who might be on the road. Jail time, however, seems too harsh, as there was no victim (this time). If I did the same on a German road as the journalist did on that Virginia road, I'd have to pay 600 EUR, have my license suspended for 2 months, and get 2 points in the register. Which I find rather fair and justified.