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Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

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Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#291

Post by myko »

themaninthedark wrote: post #285
SilverElfin wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For consequences, we need to do away with the notion of qualified immunity. Why should police officers, politicians, agents of the government have any immunity for their actions? They should carry personal liability for breaking the law and violating others’ rights. Otherwise, there is no reason they’ll change. Right now, at best you’ll sue the government and get some money, but all you’re doing is punishing other ta…

In the United States, qualified immunity is a legal principle of federal law that grants government officials performing discretionary (optional) functions immunity from lawsuits for damages unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known". Under 42 USC § 1983, a plaintiff can sue for damages when state officia…

Nearly impossibly hard to receive justice against government officials due to this standard

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#292

Post by wolvoleo »

nateberkopec wrote: post #182
michaelt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that only happens when the phone user dials 911 ?

You're thinking of Phase II E911 in the US. That's true, but you can always be triangulated down a couple hundred meters by figuring out which towers you're connected to.

Triangulation is far more accurate than that in cities. And in rural area that accuracy is already enough to identify the house you're in.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#293

Post by Borealid »

strcat wrote: post #187
tigrezno wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about Graphene?

GrapheneOS only supports devices with isolated radios including but not limited to cellular. It's one of the hardware requirements: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices The radios on the supported devices can't access the microphone, GNSS, etc. GrapheneOS has never supported a device without an isolated cellular radio since that isolation was in place even with the initial Nexus 5 and Galaxy S4. However, some of…

I cannot imagine a way to connect a cellular modem that provides a smaller surface area than USB ACM. There is no direct memory access and no way for the modem to directly access other devices.

Could you perhaps elaborate on what the more-secure alternative to USB ACM would be?

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#294

Post by cpncrunch »

p-e-w wrote: post #290
cpncrunch wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should it not be available with a valid court order as well?

Why? What is the rationale? Unless of course you subscribe to the idea that anything goes as long as a court decrees it, in which case there’s nothing to debate really.

Im a little confused. Do you not believe there should be courts at all?

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#295

Post by bigyabai »

bilbo0s wrote: post #106
bigyabai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I empathize with the sentiment, but in reality Apple is as lazy as anyone else: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/29/134008/apple-con...

Apple is not as lazy as anyone else, don't believe the hype. That assertion is a bit overblown. And people can easily find out it's overblown with a bit of research. But at the same time, my whole philosophy is never let it touch any network connected device at all if it is critical. I don't care if it's an Apple device. Here's reality, mobile carriers have been able to get your location from nearly the inception of…

> And people can easily find out it's overblown with a bit of research.

Where? Apple's whitepapers aren't audited by anyone other than themselves.

> Assume everyone is tracked, and some are even watched.

Fatalist non-sequitur.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#296

Post by joecool1029 »

I'll ask people, because I'm in the right circles. I want to know where it works. I've been VERY clear in my messaging to HN (on the RCS issue and having ear blown out by iPhone last week) that I am not going to glaze Apple even if the new modems they built interest me. They are usually sort of a neutral to me that has me more pissed off in the recent months than usual. Maybe send me one of your new devices if you don't want me pissed off anymore.

As for this location stuff, I'm curious though into how this works and how Apple (and BOOST/DISH) somehow prevent it happening when the big 3 in the US don't. We all know Apple would have complete control over the modem they designed, that's not a surprise. T-Mobile at least it's possible to stay NR-SA connected, it's apparently not a feature limited to SA like resistance to IMSI catchers are. Is this an OpenRAN feature, which Boost uses?

At least in the past, towers had a piece of equipment called a LMU that is sometimes installed separately from the radio equipment and it's used for measuring the timing advance to triangulate where a device may be for 911. Here's a reddit thread I started years ago for a KML of all the T-Mobile LMU installs in the NYC market: https://www.reddit.com/r/cellmapper/comments/hq2h7u/kml_of_a... (I just found it leaked, it's not online anymore probably). An FCC doc on LMU's: https://transition.fcc.gov/pshs/services/911-services/enhanc... (this is all old tech now, we're doing LTE/NR now in 99.9% of circumstances in the US)

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#297

Post by esseph »

golem14 wrote: post #278
comboy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20? These networks do not try to hide your location and triangulating known frequencies is trivial.

How trivial is it, really? These are spread spectrum devices that could have very sparse duty cycles. If you sending only millisecond bursts a couple of times an hour, for telemetry and whatnot, it would seem pretty hard to get a good fix, especially when moving. I haven't analyzed lora traffic, so just talking out of my ass.

Sdrs are super cheap these days. It wouldn't be hard.

Note: did things in .mil

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#298

Post by flemhans »

josephrrusso wrote: post #279

911 Product guy here... TL;DR, this is nothing new. Carriers have offered location of your device for 911 calls for years now, through a set of metadata called Automatic Location Identification (ALI). This is only provided to 911 (police & fire) by carriers alongside your 911 call. Mobile Device Manufacturers can also provide "precise location" to 911 for the same calls, but that's a separate form of data and closely…

But it seems this article is arguing is that there is another (non SMS based) way of accessing the precise location data which is not so difficult to access.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#299

Post by wolvoleo »

wisplike wrote: post #108
iJohnDoe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be so confident. The article even references this. Apple has used third-party baseband devices in the iPhone since the beginning, which was from other manufacturers. All bets are off regarding security when this is the case. This does included microphone access. The article touches on this by saying Apple is making the baseband/modem hardware now. Something they should have done since day one, and I’m not…

Patents is why it took them so long.

Yeah but also RF in the real world is hard.

Apple found out the hard way with the iPhone 4. Their secrecy didn't help. People doing real world testing had a case that made it look like an iPhone 3s and that also happened to mitigate the death grip problem. We know this because one was stolen and given to gizmodo.

And that was even only antenna design, they still used a standard RF stack then.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#300

Post by joecool1029 »

noja wrote: post #132
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #40

This community should be talking about meshcore more imho. It's a peer to peer network based on Lora. It really only allows text messaging but with up to 20km hops between peers coverage is surprisingly huge. Incredibly useful if you go hiking with friends (if you get split up you can still stay in touch). See https://eastmesh.au/ and scroll down to the map for the Victoria and now more widely Australia network that'…

Is it open source?

Meshcore isn't, the firmwares are proprietary. Meshtastic is, but they whine about trademark stuff all the time and cry when anyone mentions Meshcore in their channels. LoRa radios themselves are all proprietary Semtech turf. I guess it's possible to run over 2.4ghz but the range predictably sucks compared to 900mhz.
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