Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by jameshart » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 1:58 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #229

jameshart wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry to burst your preconceptions, but... no, it isn't. 'Gaol' is barely used in British english outside of affecting an olde-worlde charm for tourists. British usage tends to words like 'prison', 'custody', 'cells', 'remand', 'detention'... barely even use the word 'jail', let alone an archaic spelling of it (and the pretrial/postconviction jail vs. prison distinction common the US system doesn't apply to the terms in the UK). HM Prison Reading might have a sign outside noting that it is the eponymous "Reading Gaol" that Oscar Wilde wrote about, but nobody's calling it that outside of a guidebook.

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

#232

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:02 AM UTC

xwdv wrote: post #106

jmisavage wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're out of date as of 2020. Reckless driving is 20 mph over the speed limit or over 85 mph now. It's a class 1 misdemeanor. Most of Virginia has 65 mph as the stated speed limit which usually drops to 55 mph around cities. There are stretches of I-95 and I-81 were the speed limit is 70 mph. But anyone who drives here knows that the speed limit is generally considered the slowest you should go on the road. Speeding…

I regularly drive at speeds in excess of 100mph when highways are empty and waze shows no police. What would be the fate of a person caught at those speeds in Virginia?

[deleted]

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

#233

Post by jameshart » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:05 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #229

jameshart wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(Oh, and to put you out of your misery, a more recent comment by OP contains the clue: "Where I live (Aotearoa)", which suggests they're a New Zealander. So, you missed your guess by around 11,000 miles, and apparently 80 years or so in terms of English language usage.)

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

#234

Post by Bedon292 » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:06 AM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #168

somehnguy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how? Waze doesn't show your speed to others on the map.

It's been like eight years. I don't recall exactly, but what I recall is that Waze showed me other Waze users on the road, including their positions, and these were updated in something close to real-time, which means one could estimate their speed. I imagine a police officer waiting to "ambush" a speeder they know is coming.

I have never seen anything close to real time updates on Waze, even 10 years ago. Its always very delayed jumps and never seeming to be actual accurate positions.

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

#235

Post by BalinKing » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:07 AM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #231

tomc1985 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry to burst your preconceptions, but... no, it isn't. 'Gaol' is barely used in British english outside of affecting an olde-worlde charm for tourists. British usage tends to words like 'prison', 'custody', 'cells', 'remand', 'detention'... barely even use the word 'jail', let alone an archaic spelling of it (and the pretrial/postconviction jail vs. prison distinction common the US system doesn't apply to the terms…

I think you’re conflating P(Is British|Uses “gaol”) with P(Uses “gaol”|Is British), the latter of which I would expect to be much higher than the former.

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

#236

Post by shadowgovt » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:08 AM UTC

salawat wrote: post #227

shadowgovt wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly... Yes. That's how it appeared to work.

The group that petitioned most consistently not to reshape the road were the people who lived in that neighborhood. They didn't want their main thoroughfare shut down and they didn't want people driving that road faster.

Eventually, two volunteer firefighters died when a fire truck flipped doing lights-and-sirens down that road. Then the county stepped in, declared eminent domain on the tree, and cut it down to remove the root and reshape the road.

Democracies don't always vote in everyone's best interest. Or plenty of Americans are comfortable with one vehicular death every six months. Many possible explanations.

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

#237

Post by Bedon292 » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:13 AM UTC

jmisavage wrote: post #54

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.

You're out of date as of 2020. Reckless driving is 20 mph over the speed limit or over 85 mph now. It's a class 1 misdemeanor. Most of Virginia has 65 mph as the stated speed limit which usually drops to 55 mph around cities. There are stretches of I-95 and I-81 were the speed limit is 70 mph. But anyone who drives here knows that the speed limit is generally considered the slowest you should go on the road. Speeding…

Huh, didn't know that upped that. Guess I missed that with everything else happening in the world.

Speeding is the normal, definitely. And funny that I have seen traffic flowing faster during rush hour, when everyone is going well over. And then mid day you have someone from out of state passing through slowing everyone else down.

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

#238

Post by salawat » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:14 AM UTC

mdoms wrote: post #46

tyrfing wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is it stated that he was tracked for 2 years?

It doesn't, it says 30 days and renewable by the court.

which if allowed in perpetuality sounds an awful lot like a general warrant.

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

#239

Post by d110af5ccf » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

krapht wrote: post #179

function_seven wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> To do this work in software would require a workstation.

These days hardware capable of that throughput can be had for less than $500 and draws less than 50W. 3.9 gigabits really isn't all that much by modern standards.

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

#240

Post by throwaway48375 » Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 2:55 AM UTC

Rufhfhs3747rhe7 wrote: post #138

Why are drug dealers still using an easily trackable phone number for communication? Why not a 3rd party messaging and voice app like Matrix/Element? Am I incorrect in assuming that local police would not be able to easily track it?

You are going to miss out on potential sales asking people to download and figure out some weird app and honestly the likelihood of getting caught is pretty low. I know people who have been selling drugs without even so much as changing numbers for many years.

Also even using these apps you are still on the cell network and there are methods for determining your phone number / IMSI. You wouldn't be immune to this type of tracking.