Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
On Mon, 8 May 2000, Kris Kirby wrote: BTW, you do realize that in many cases "off" for your cell phone doesn't really mean off, right? :) I have strong objections to small transcievers (what cell phones actually are) that operate close to my body and don't let me know when they are transmitting. When you're talking on it, you know it's transmitting, but I'm talking about just about every other time when you've got it on your belt or clipped to your side. I know they aren't high power, but we don't know long term effects (actually, we do; we just don't know the thresholds for triggering cancer, etc.). Well, maybe we do. Just read the other day that the british are planning to make warning signs compulsory on mobile phones... I'm not thrilled at the aspect of a radio close to my head either. You can feel a radio after it's been transmitting for a while and think: "Something close to the amount of heat generated by this radio has been sent out over the ether and I was standing right in front of it." Yes, to cook your noodle you'd need a couple hundred watts but still, it's energy. - Kris Kirby, KE4AHR | TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said. [EMAIL PROTECTED]| --- "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony." To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
Because the a large percentage (majority?) of cell phones are used in locations where GPS can't be used effectively (think any big city inside of a car), Qualcomm is not adding GPS chipsets into their phones. According to my friend, the solutions they have designed work for both the existing analog and digital phones being used today, and are much better than the 100m accuracy marks required by law (as stated before, the number 25m jumps to mind). As long as you have multiple towers in reach. Sure. This limitation certainly applies to analog coverage, which will probably be pretty much deprecated by 2003, and with digital phones at the extreme edge of coverage. So, they get higher accuracy solutions that don't require changes to their phones, thus driving up costs. (Although it does require changes to the cell towers, but that's a much cheaper alternative since there are fewer of them *PLUS* it works with old phones, making it *very* attractive to the government.) I don't think the government ever stops to consider the cost of the idiotic requirements they levy on people. The phrase we're groping for here is "unfunded mandate." Ahh, but like my friends at Qualcomm postulated, we can't completely comply with the order using GPS (phones outside of cell coverage, phones just turned on, etc...), so we're not putting GPS chipsets on the phone, since the amount of failures will be far less with the existing solution than they would be with a GPS solution. We're damned in we do, and we're damned if we don't, but at least the former way we'll lose less money. :) Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Olaf Hoyer) writes: Well, thats reality. Sometimes the mobile telco hotlines are so overloaded, you cannot even tell them that your phone was stolen. (Talk about service-but you get what you pay for) In germany, there is some list, where every cell phone can be entered with its IMEI-number (thats like the MAC on an ethernet card). So theoretically you simply enter them and make them useless for the thief. In Finland, somebody is apparently doing something to track down stolen phones, rather than block their use. One Saturday morning I got a call from someone at some agency (I couldn't quite make out what it was, it sounded like customs but that would seem odd) accusing me of stealing the GSM phone I was using. It turned out that he had one digit wrong (presumably of the either the IMEI-number or just the MSISDN). I wonder what he was trying to accomplish by calling the supposedly stolen phone. This was last month, but not on April 1... ;--) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
RE: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
BTW, you do realize that in many cases "off" for your cell phone doesn't really mean off, right? :) Well, those with the same old Nokia 9000 communicator that I have will know that after 20 hours of standby it's off off. And I mean really, battery gone, off, off. That ought'a tell Big Brother. :-) Could we perhaps not go into Big Brother on this list? Kees Jan == You are only young once, but you can stay immature all your life To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
BTW, you do realize that in many cases "off" for your cell phone doesn't really mean off, right? :) I have strong objections to small transcievers (what cell phones actually are) that operate close to my body and don't let me know when they are transmitting. When you're talking on it, you know it's transmitting, but I'm talking about just about every other time when you've got it on your belt or clipped to your side. I know they aren't high power, but we don't know long term effects (actually, we do; we just don't know the thresholds for triggering cancer, etc.). I'm not thrilled at the aspect of a radio close to my head either. You can feel a radio after it's been transmitting for a while and think: "Something close to the amount of heat generated by this radio has been sent out over the ether and I was standing right in front of it." Yes, to cook your noodle you'd need a couple hundred watts but still, it's energy. - Kris Kirby, KE4AHR | TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said. [EMAIL PROTECTED]| --- "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony." To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chuck Robey writes: : Curious about that, I haven't been following it too closely, but I know : cdma works on codes, not timing ... how do they get timing (other than bit : clock recovery)? cdma does work on timing. It effectively transmits all the data all the time. Phones need to know when the start of frame is, which means they need to know what time it is. They can get that from the last start of frame, and the rate of start of frames they are seeing. cdma and tdma are different in some ways, but they both have to know what time it is to work. Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
Olaf Hoyer wrote: At 12:40 06.05.00 -0600, you wrote: Plus, they can get a fix on the phone in 300ms (good to about 25m), which is far faster than a GPS unit can do it. Basically, the phone is 'locked on' as soon as you turn it on and it finds a cell tower. And, apparently they've figured out a way to get a coarse fix on it even where there is only one tower, although when I pressured him, he just smiled and claimed it was a trade secret. Or so I've been told, but I trust the source since he's one of the smartest guys I ever met. :) GSM (which is what all of these systems are based on) depends heavily on knowing the flight time from the phone to the cell hardware (and back), in order for TDMA to work correctly. 25m is special for a reason I don't recall (possibly flight time for one clock, or something similar). Triangulation is typically trivial with only two towers (your phone will generally log into at least the strongest three or four cells) because the towers use directional antennae, so the tower knows where the antenna you're on is pointing and you can eliminate the shadow position (most of the time). Right, with triangulation it's trivial. With one tower, you're down to describing an arc along which the phone is probably located; still pretty good when it comes to finding someone. He seemed to imply that they could get it within 25m, even with one phone. Like I said, I don't understand how, but I didn't question his ability. Plus, he knows alot more about the stuff than I do. Hi! Well, I've heard reports that they are working on precision calculations where you are... Those numbers only work (at least this is my latest understanding) if you are actually doing some calls, so that all towers (in the GSM-900 net, IIRC the phone locks to three towers, one for primary data transfer, the other two for backup or movement issues to hand over) have some active connection. If the phone is only turned on, it sends some data to the tower, so that you know that in the area this tower overlooks, (360 degree) it is somewhere. There were some famous cases where some criminals were located by tracking down their cell phone. The police needed some decision from court to do that, but after that, it was a short way to go. The GSM nets have some of this ability built in, to track phones. The operators only don't want the "normal" citizen or user to know about that. All this discussion of the wonders of GSM is wonderful, but doesn't apply to the USA where this mandate is happening. This was the stated reason for Rockwell getting into the GPS chipset market, because the volume is going through the roof by late 2002. (TDMA and CDMA cover much more of the USA than GSM, and will probably continue to lead coverage for quite some time.) -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Wes Peters writes: There were some famous cases where some criminals were located by tracking down their cell phone. Several cases have been nailed shut here in Denmark on that basis by now, people saying "I were not at home that evening, I was with some friend on the other side of town" and the police then playing a GSM call and showing the area where the phone could have been at the time of the call. They need a court order of for both wire-tapping and getting hold of the location information. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD coreteam member | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
Mike Smith wrote: There were some famous cases where some criminals were located by tracking down their cell phone. The police needed some decision from court to do that, but after that, it was a short way to go. The GSM nets have some of this ability built in, to track phones. The operators only don't want the "normal" citizen or user to know about that. This capability of GSM was well known when it was introduced in .au, but when my phone was stolen, the telco bastards wouldn't admit to being able to tell me anything about where it was (even though I could still call it...). What's being proposed here sounds just slightly scary. No, think very, very scary. What's already possible is frightening enough. Yes, there are some public safety benefits, and if I were really doing anything criminal the last thing I'd want to have with me is a cell phone. But, it's universally true that the only criminals caught are the stupid ones. BTW, you do realize that in many cases "off" for your cell phone doesn't really mean off, right? :) Doug -- "Live free or die" - State motto of my ancestral homeland, New Hampshire Do YOU Yahoo!? To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
There were some famous cases where some criminals were located by tracking down their cell phone. The police needed some decision from court to do that, but after that, it was a short way to go. The GSM nets have some of this ability built in, to track phones. The operators only don't want the "normal" citizen or user to know about that. This capability of GSM was well known when it was introduced in .au, but when my phone was stolen, the telco bastards wouldn't admit to being able to tell me anything about where it was (even though I could still call it...). What's being proposed here sounds just slightly scary. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
Mike Smith wrote: There were some famous cases where some criminals were located by tracking down their cell phone. The police needed some decision from court to do that, but after that, it was a short way to go. The GSM nets have some of this ability built in, to track phones. The operators only don't want the "normal" citizen or user to know about that. This capability of GSM was well known when it was introduced in .au, but when my phone was stolen, the telco bastards wouldn't admit to being able to tell me anything about where it was (even though I could still call it...). What's being proposed here sounds just slightly scary. Depends on your big brother complex. When I first went to work at Hanford, I was told that 1 in 10 calls were recorded. You didn't worry about it. You didn't say anything stupid either :). Some of the western parts of the US have a lot of milleage between towns. Australia is much worse in a lot of areas. How many people know if they are closer to one emergency service or another. One could be 100 miles (160km) away and the next one could be 10. It could be even worse and would depend on a helicopter being dispatched with paramedics. You are in the middle of no where but you can still have an active cell phone. It doesn't do the emergency services people any good unless they have an idea where you are. Kent -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html FreeBSD News http://daily.daemonnews.org/ SETI(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @ HOME http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
At 12:09 06.05.00 -0700, you wrote: There were some famous cases where some criminals were located by tracking down their cell phone. The police needed some decision from court to do that, but after that, it was a short way to go. The GSM nets have some of this ability built in, to track phones. The operators only don't want the "normal" citizen or user to know about that. This capability of GSM was well known when it was introduced in .au, but when my phone was stolen, the telco bastards wouldn't admit to being able to tell me anything about where it was (even though I could still call it...). What's being proposed here sounds just slightly scary. hi! Well, thats reality. Sometimes the mobile telco hotlines are so overloaded, you cannot even tell them that your phone was stolen. (Talk about service-but you get what you pay for) In germany, there is some list, where every cell phone can be entered with its IMEI-number (thats like the MAC on an ethernet card). So theoretically you simply enter them and make them useless for the thief. But its too much work for the telcos, so they tell you they cannot, their computer systems are down, or the list is overcrowded and no more entries can be made (there was a discussion on .de usenet some year ago, IIRC, and they stated that the list indeed was very big and no-one really cared for that), etc etc. It is simply some work, that they don't get paid for, have some personnel that is not trained for other tasks then saying: Ok, I'll send you some prospects... So there are some insurance companies offering policies, but we all know the attitude of insurance... Bottom line: The telco does not want it, because it is work, and they don't make money with it. It would be technically able to enter the _individual number_ of a cell phone into a database (which already exists), rendering stolen cell phones useless immediately. They will be simply denied upon log-in to the tower. Regards Olaf Hoyer Olaf Hoyer www.nightfire.demailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] FreeBSD- Turning PC's into workstations ICQ:22838075 Liebe und Hass sind nicht blind, aber geblendet vom Feuer, dass sie selber mit sich tragen. (Nietzsche) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
On 06-May-00 Mike Smith wrote: With one tower, you're down to describing an arc along which the phone is probably located; still pretty good when it comes to finding someone. He seemed to imply that they could get it within 25m, even with one phone. Like I said, I don't understand how, but I didn't question his ability. Plus, he knows alot more about the stuff than I do. http://www.cursor-system.com/ Cambridge positioning Systems have developed some technology to do this for GSM. Positioning isn't built into the GSM system - yes they can tell what sector of a base station a mobile is in but much more than that is difficult. The other cells a mobile is aware of aren't aware of the mobile. Duncan --- Duncan Barclay | God smiles upon the little children, [EMAIL PROTECTED] | the alcoholics, and the permanently stoned. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
Ask him if they can still do it at 35km out (the outer limit for a normal GSM cell). That'd really spook me. 8) He wasn't interested in talking about it when I started asking about single cell towers, so I never pressed him on the issue. Maybe he was afraid that the 100m accuracy claim would be found out to be un-doable, but the Feds claim 'it must be that accurate', and they aren't interested in spending the $$ for GPS receivers in the handhelds. What's the actual background behind this? Being able to track 911 calls in the case of emergency. Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
What's the actual background behind this? Being able to track 911 calls in the case of emergency. While some people may find this a convenient excuse for more Big Brother tactics, I once spoke to a paramedic friend about 911 cell phone tracking after it was first announced. She said that she couldn't overestimate the problems caused by people giving bad directions or locations over cell phones. Apparently, its not uncommon for a person, still dazed from an accident, to report their location as "Somewhere on Interstate 80". -For those non-Americans, I-80 is a 3,000 mile freeway that starts in San Francisco and ends in Boston.- On another topic, I recently read an article on Ace's Hardware comparing the performance of standard benchmarks, on a Alpha 21264 under Linux, compiled with the GCC and Compaq's proprietary compiler. Compaq's C compiler kicked GCC's ass in almost every metric. My questions: Is such a compiler available for *BSD? Why is GCC so bad at Alpha optimization when it does so well on x86? Is somebody asleep at the wheel here? Thanks, Alex Stamos [EMAIL PROTECTED] ISTORE project, UC Berkeley CS Department To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
GCC and Compaq's proprietary compiler. Compaq's C compiler kicked GCC's ass in almost every metric. My questions: Is such a compiler available for *BSD? Not yet. Talk to your friendly Compaq sales rep and request it. :) Why is GCC so bad at Alpha optimization when it does so well on x86? Is somebody asleep at the wheel here? I don't know which "somebody" you're even referring to here, so it's hard to answer that question. gcc's alpha optimization will get better when somebody makes it better. The fact that it's weak has been a very well-known fact for over 4 years now, but everyone keeps waiting for "somebody" to ride up on his white horse, I guess. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
On Saturday, 6 May 2000 at 13:00:04 -0700, Alex Stamos wrote: What's the actual background behind this? Being able to track 911 calls in the case of emergency. While some people may find this a convenient excuse for more Big Brother tactics, I once spoke to a paramedic friend about 911 cell phone tracking after it was first announced. She said that she couldn't overestimate the problems caused by people giving bad directions or locations over cell phones. Apparently, its not uncommon for a person, still dazed from an accident, to report their location as "Somewhere on Interstate 80". -For those non-Americans, I-80 is a 3,000 mile freeway that starts in San Francisco and ends in Boston.- That's not the only issue. Recently somebody called 112 (the international GSM emergency number) from the local golf course in Mt. Barker SA, saying he had had a heart attack. He specified exactly where he was in the golf course, but help didn't come. It *did* go looking for a golf course in Mt. Barker WA, about 2000 miles away. The emergency centre didn't know about Mt. Barker SA, and the caller didn't realise they weren't local. One of the disadvantages of having a separate prefix for mobile phones (in Australia, they all use area code 4). Greg -- Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up )
With CDMA, you can get a distance very easily. The phones know what time it is, or CDMA doesn't work at all. That helps a lot. Much of GPS's work is knowing what time it is. Since the phone knows what time it is, they can do all kinds of calculations and round trip things to get the distance. From there, you have a 120degreep arch to worry about. Since CDMA towers have 3 antennas, you likely get use slight phase differences between them to narrow it down further. The CDMA folks at qualcomm tend to be smart (although as they have gotten larger, this tendacy is weaker than it was), so I wouldn't be surprised if they thought real hard and were able to do something simple in the end because it happened to fall out of the equasions. Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
