Does the "Stop broadcasting SSID" option in most Wifi access points / routers prevent wardriving or is the BSSID still leaked?
In this case the AP still beacons (which includes the BSSID), just with the SSID field set to "".
Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
81–90 of 124 posts
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#82One time I worked at a zoom competitor, and our team got to prototype a "detect if these people are in the same room as each other" feature for dealing with echo cancellation etc, where everyone's laptop would emit a unique high frequency, and everyone's laptop would listen for other frequencies. Of course it worked in pristine conditions and fell down in the real world. But it was a fun experiment...
That's what Google Meet does too: https://support.google.com/meet/answer/14263133?hl=en-NZ
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question - what's your use case for needing GPS indoors? I generally know where I am when I'm indoors :)
Maybe indoors is the wrong term: as soon as you don't have direct sky visibility it's relatively hard to get a position. Some examples: on a train, on the underground, in a train station, in a mall, in an office building, ...
Probably depends on the construction of the roof and windows. At least on European trains I've never had an issue getting GPS (unless you are in a tunnel or subway system). It takes a bit longer to get the first fix if you don't have AGPS, but no worse than in a car. Same with planes. On the other hand in a building it it pretty much only works next to a window, and malls don't have windows
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#84I've had companies send us laptops for VPN access that had LTE modems and GPS specifically for location verification before granting access to the VPN.
Imagine having your services so poorly secured or authenticated that you need to protect Layer 3 access this tightly.
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#85The root problem is that a lot of higher education is nurturing a culture of cheaters right now. Your future doctors, scientists, government officials, etc... will have had to compete and gain coveted academic and career opportunities, in an environment that both has been heavily gamified, and is being overrun by cheaters. Insulting measures like this TopHat practically endorses the culture of cheating, by telling st…
I have an inside perspective on this via an academic integrity company. A couple weeks ago there was an exam in an R1 institution that double booked the facility so one section did the exam in person on campus and the other did it "from home". The score distribution of the in person exam was a typical bell curve, and the distribution of the online exam looking like a power-law curve with over half the students scorin…
Catching cheaters is easy. The problem is that incentives are not aligned. Students are also customers, and you can’t simply fire a quarter of your customers and stay in business.
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#86Is it common for North American universities to take attendance? Seems like a whole lot of effort to gain little and infantilize your students. They're paying tuition, and if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments. And if they don't fail their exams/assessments then clearly mandating lecture attendance for them wasn't necessary anyway.
It's a protection for the faculty and students.
If you fail someone who rarely attended class, and they claim that they did, asked you for support, and never received it, how might you defend yourself?
If you have an excellent student who encounters a hardship, how might you petition for leniency to allow them to drop without penalty beyond a cutoff, or delay submitting final grades until they can complete makeup work?
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#87[dead]
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is verification of attendance , specifically, that "endorses the culture of cheating... telling students they can't be trusted, and turning into yet another cheating challenge/task"? If not, what is fair game for verification, in the pursuit of finding students of integrity?
Finding students with integrity is hard now, because the culture is already full of poo. But one starting point is to communicate that you expect and require integrity, explain what that means, and then expect it. Trying to make metrics or tests or whatever to detect, rate, rank, etc. it just turns it into a game, like the same load of poo. Though here is one thing you can do. Explain that you expect integrity, and t…
> Explain that you expect integrity, and then watch the students raise their hands and ask how they will be tested on this. You say it's expected. Back and forth a few times, until eventually some of them start crying, and then their heads explode, because they can't figure out how to game that.
This assumes that the students are untrustworthy and the faculty/institution are ultimately trusted. In a world in which that is not true (such as the world that produces the article we're commenting on), and students sometimes encounter problems due to unclear expectations or vague criteria that are not the student's fault, it is not unreasonable for people to ask questions whose goal is to find out the actual non-vague criteria to avoid unpleasant surprises.
By way of one of many examples: many excellent classes encourage students to talk about assignments with each other, as long as the work they turn in is their own. Now consider what happens if a student accustomed to such a policy encounters a class taught with a different policy, where that policy has not been made clear in advance.
Honor codes and integrity are excellent things to enforce. Transparency and crystal-clear criteria are also excellent things to enforce. Not to allow gaming the system, but to ensure the system doesn't game anyone.
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#89Now the question: can you spoof your location? Say you are an admin on your system (for instance you run a Linux distro), can you make your OS return the same list of SSID/BSSIDs as your friend who is in the classroom (or as you recorded the day before) to pretend you are there?
Would be a fun experiment, and a nice follow-up post :-).
Re: Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
#90One time I worked at a zoom competitor, and our team got to prototype a "detect if these people are in the same room as each other" feature for dealing with echo cancellation etc, where everyone's laptop would emit a unique high frequency, and everyone's laptop would listen for other frequencies. Of course it worked in pristine conditions and fell down in the real world. But it was a fun experiment...
People need to learn manners, nobody should be using video calling without headphones. It's insane whenever someone joins and we hear all their background, feedback of whoever is speaking, etc as if nobody has ever told them to mute or stop using speaker in their life.
> People need to learn manners, nobody should be using video calling without headphones.
OK? it still sucks even with headphones. Imagine the following scenario: You are in a meeting using your headphones as you suggest. A coworker a few seats away from you are in the same meeting using their own headsphones. When they talk you hear their real voice reach your ears first (this happens with even the best noise canceling headphones to some extent) and then you hear their voice with some delay from the meeting.
This is not about manners or headphones.
Better meeting software identifies when this is happening and they suppress the streamed voice of your coworker just for you.