Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

manas.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 349 posts

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#281

Post by mgarciaisaia »

nehal3m wrote: post #156

>Largely beautiful as this country is, as you get into more rural areas, there's a high chance you won't have cell phone coverage there - I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to choose if that's a feature or a bug. >We'd already called and sent some WhatsApp messages, so we knew the phone wasn't reachable. How did they do that without coverage?

The place had Wi-Fi, but the phone was just enough apart from the router to not reach it. The calls were WhatsApp Calls because we knew there was no cell service to make a standard call (don't know if the phone has VoLTE).

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#282

Post by mgarciaisaia »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #27

Walk around shouting Hey Siri

WOW. I love this approach. Didn't think of it since I don't usually use Siri (nor Google Assistant, since I'm on Android - as my cousin).

SO steampunk to see a group of adults shouting around "HEY GOOGLE" in the woods to find a lost phone.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#283

Post by mgarciaisaia »

dicknuckle wrote: post #62
theendisney2 wrote: post #59

In my job I regularly wonder how to get a found phone laptop or notebook back to their owner. The notebook is the easiest. The apple laptop the most stupid. I have the locked laptop i have my iphone you would think, with the closed eco-system, there to be some magic ritual i can perform for the laptop to register on the owners "find my device"???? Or at least let me type a number for them to call? Sometimes, (if i ch…

On my Android phone, the homescreen can have a short message, I changed it to "If found, call {wife's phone number}"

Whenever I go to big concerts or gatherings, I set my lock screen to a screenshot of a WhatsApp story (that I never publish) saying something like that.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#284

Post by mgarciaisaia »

aaron695 wrote: post #76

>I’ve learnt to save battery by switching my phone’s wifi off whenever I go into the woods or mountain I feel like this is not true. Walking in a city it'd be even worse since there would be 100's networks to check to see if it can connect too. Which I don't think matters much. Bad cellular reception which you'll hit if you are coming and going out of coverage would matter. Similarly a wifi you can connect to will dr…

Rationale is "I will be offline, so don't even try to connect". When I'm hikking in the mountains, maybe spending a couple of days up there, I only use my phone for GPS and/or photos - so everything else goes off.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#285

Post by xkekjrktllss »

semireg wrote: post #107

I had AirPods Max stolen from our car a few months ago. A week later they popped up on Find My a block away. I hopped on my bike and tracked to a small apartment building. Using Find My will show you a “warmer … warmer … colder” kind of UI and whenever I lifted my phone to a particular window (shades drawn) Find My would say “Nearby.” I called the police and they were genuinely excited to knock on the door. A guy ans…

Where are you located? Here in a busy midwest city, the police are too short staffed to even respond to a 3 car pile up in the middle of a busy intersection sooner than 2 hours after the fact.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#286

Post by mgarciaisaia »

grav wrote: post #210

TL;DR: created a wifi-network on another phone with same SSID and password as the one that the lost phone usually connects to, walked around waiting for the phone to connect, receive the "Find my phone" notification and send out a sound. Cool :)

This, but without the "Find my". Not sure if my cousin would have been able to log into his account from another phone (maybe MFA would be a blocker if he tried), and my hotspot didn't actually provide Internet anyways.

I thought about "relaying" the place's Wi-Fi connection through a chain of phones sharing via bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but luckily we could find the phone without having to try that. The setup would have been something like:

Router Phone Phone Phone <-....

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#287

Post by [deleted] »

lxgr wrote: post #56
solardev wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, back in the day before HTTPS was common, this used to be a viable attack where people would set up rogue hotspots at cafes and whatnot and intercept all your traffic.

That's only possible for unencrypted networks/SSIDs, though.

[deleted]

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#288

Post by mgarciaisaia »

Agent766 wrote: post #88

Here's a fun question, after the device connected to the wifi hotspot, would the "find my" feature work?

The hotspot didn't provide real Internet connectivity, since there was no service - only the places' WiFi, but out of reach, and the phone can't connect to the WiFi and provide the hotspot at the same time.

So probably not. But if the lost phone was an iPhone, walking around with another iPhone would have reported it (once the walking one was connected to the WiFi back again).

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#289

Post by 93po »

rem1313 wrote: post #249
brookst wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read up on how Find My works? I don’t see how it’s a spy network when only the device owner can see where a device is. Lots of people imagine that every Apple user, or at least Apple themselves, can track devices. But it doesn’t work that way.

If Apple can access your account, they can see any device location the same as you. Which means that three letter agencies also have access

This is true of literally everything with a modem in it. Tracking via tower triangulation has been around for 20 years or longer. Also the entirety of your browsing history is tracked and logged by your ISP and also given to three letters agencies. And companies like Google give basically unrestricted access to all your data. Nothing is private anymore.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#290

Post by mgarciaisaia »

mgarciaisaia wrote: post #282
dzhiurgis wrote: post #27

Walk around shouting Hey Siri

WOW. I love this approach. Didn't think of it since I don't usually use Siri (nor Google Assistant, since I'm on Android - as my cousin). SO steampunk to see a group of adults shouting around "HEY GOOGLE" in the woods to find a lost phone.

(I've just asked my cousin, and he says Google Assistant is not enabled)
Post reply on HN