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UCSD Students Tracking Their Friends' Locations
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The location-tracking software, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas. No GPS Required. Article from Salon here..."
Starting this fall, American University is going to have a completely wireless computer and phone network for all of it's students. Throw in a bit of gps, and hey, easy to track everyone everywhere! (Plus they get to add that fun new "set your phones to vibrate while in public rule!)
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How'd this post make it on there?
Nothing is better than sneaking up behind your friends and shooting them w/ non lethal devices!
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
This is a great hack. Keep track of your friends on campus, sneak up on them for a little mischief, etc.
;)
I wonder how many are going to bust each other for fibbing about their location
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
when I was 15 all I did was play video games and get drunk in parks. I guesse some people are just more productive at a young age :(
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
This has been done before. I even saw it on McGuyver.
It is cool though, cheap gbs and all. I wonder how accurate it is?
from the marco!-...-polo! department?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
A hack here and some ducktape there and you've got yourself a game!
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I'd be more impressed if he were measuring the trajectory of the packets. :)
I remember seeing a show many years ago about XPARC and how they developed a system that would track an employee anywhere in their office by using transmitters on their ID badges. Problem was nobody would were the badges after they got through the front door because they didn't want to be tracked. Duh.
Gee, instead of leaving this tracking device in my desk, I'll take it with me when I decide to do something wrong.
If you wind up getting caught because you have one of these on you, then its you're own fault. Unless it's actually wired to you, then just leave it at home. This isn't big brother stuff, more like his little cousin's.
Xaotik Designs
I'm expecting Katz to respond to this anytime now... The digital generation of cyber-enabled college students in the post-Orwellian, nay, pre-Ashcroftian period find themselves the vicitms of marginalization by haXoring non-GPS compliant systems in the Stephensonian future of Southern California. or something like that.
It's a fun little toy, but it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. The first time someone gets malevolently stalked over the system, there'll be some crap ont he fan.
There is a company Cell-loc that has been working on this same sort of thing, wireless location technology, without GPS.
I can certainly see that this sort of thing is going to get big, and a large number of companies are going to want it bad.
It's kinda neat stuff, and it nicely fits where GPS doesn't: Downtown. GPS requires line-of-site to the satelites, and without that you get no position. When you are downtown, amongst big buidlings, you can't find anything.
Asset tracking is going to be big too. Help! I lost my car/pet/wife/computer!
BUUUUUT!
I just can't see how that information is going to be private, I mean when the cops can simply get a warrent for the information, bam! instant confirmation of location. Privacy Agreement or not.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
There is nothing technically innovative about triangulating a radio signal, and as compared to cell-phones, it is a terrible way to try to meet up with friends.
Basically, the most valuable thing about this is as a publicity tool for HP and UCSD.
so much for beating off in the library bathroom with my pda porn collection, you know they will be watching for that!
No need to mess around with all that. With the new legislation you can just ask one of your mates that works at one of hundreds of pseude-randomly chosen places to hand over the phone location records that he suddenly has access to.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Back in my misspent university days, 99% (made up statistic!) of the phone calls I overheard on campus consisted of: "Hey, it's me, where are you? Cool, be right there!"
This would save making those phone calls.
Such starry-eyed naivete and optimism baffles me. Surely no one actually expects college-aged persons to think for themselves?
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
I remember seeing a show many, many, many, many, MANY FUCKING years ago about SPARC and how they developed a system that would track an employee anywhere in their office by using transmitters lodged up their ass. Problem was nobody would were the badges after they got through the front door because they didn't want the crack of their ass to show. Duh.
AFAIK, this kind of solution only works (well) when the area in which it is used is profiled, because of multi-path fading, and other mysteries of radio technogolies :)
Similar technology, based on for example WLAN, is good for inside tracking, in clearly designed buildings. Because of it's relatively cheap cost of implementation (cheap devices available of the shelf), we might see this in near future in many applications.
Another interesting application would be building of "open" wlan tracking project, in which thousands of "nodes" in a city for example would be utilized to provide tracking within entire city. A system like this, with some sense in design, could be created in a manner which provides "zoom-like" tracking, focus could be tightened based on reports by a mass of nodes.
"What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow."
Don't you mean, "what 35-year-olds will be doing with them in 15 to 17 years?"
This has been done before at CMU and by Victor Bahl at Microsoft.
I hate to be that guy with the government conspiracy ideas, but I wonder if the US government has these kind of techniques in their arsenals for tracking people on WiFi networks. Although I guess it depends on whether the network uses encryption (I don't even know if there is 128 bit encryption for WiFi). This "new" terrorist fighting government scares me sometimes...
"The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas."
GPS does not do triangulation via signal strength. It does it via time measurement. Someone needs to buy a clue.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
UCSB campus is always sunny and is made of entirely of wood and recycled aircraft tires.
Great, now Little Brother is watching too.
meanwhile, check out this report , re-leased buy your friends over at the Tux de Linuxville institute for GNU reporting.
That method is taken from the same system my Grandfather designed in WWII to track the German U-Boats.
At least now they're using it for something useful.
If this project is developed further on the sofware side, it would be interesting to be able to have a "friends" list of people who are able to track you. You could also be able to 'go offline' if you wanted to use your PDA without your stalker knowing where you are. Or a hardware on/off from turning on or off the wi-fi. Integrate this with existing IM's and this could be a really great campus tool.... Especially for finding elusive professors.
I'd like to see something like this on our campus, it'd make a great addition to our file sharing project.
NMG
Idea for a campus business (imagine this being an ad printed on a blue/yellow paper with bold white/black letters): .50cents an hour we will move your PDA from place to place within the campus premises until midnight."
"Tired of being constantly tracked by your girlfriend? Need a getaway? You can buy our unique services for as low as 19.99 a month. For this amount of money one of our operatives will carry your PDA with him/her from 9AM till 6PM. For an additional
I should write a full business plan, name it something like "Nano/Security" present it to some investors and spend the rest of my days in Bahamas!
You can't handle the truth.
Griswold says. "What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow."
...
Drop them, lose them, spill beer on them,
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Too bad they are at UCSD though.
"Nick Van Borst, a 25-year-old senior majoring in world literature who criticized the tracker system in a university magazine"
Fuck you, you Shakespeare quoting fag! Props to the 15 year old!
Live web cams
They say that you can omit yourself from view using a buddy-list like hide. That is bullshit, and will only protect you from the application layer. Any time the thing transmits a packet it has the MAC address of the wireless card attached. A knowledgable person could "war walk" with custom software and snoop other peoples wireless packets. Finding the hot blonde from math class got a whole lot easier.
I'd like to go ahead and buy stock in this adolescent kid.
My god I wish I would have been cranking out stuff like that when I was still in high school.
best of luck kiddo!!!
Get paid to code OSS
Just wrap the bloody thing in aluminum foil, problem solved!
i wish they had this when i was in school...would have made it so much easier to stalk that cute freshman girl in the next dorm over...
seriously though, this has the potential to get pretty creepy...people always knowing where you are...
"oh look, jane is in the bathroom"..."hey, why are frank and amy's locations so close together?"...etc...etc...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
A much more friendly and less 'technical for the sake of being technical' solution is just to have a text messenger built in, possibly with a vibrate/alert feature on the PDA so one PDA holder can alert the other if he/she is being sought. That gives the person being sought the ability to filter based on whether or not they in fact want to be found. And even that is a bit of a stretch since most college students seem to have cellphones which could be used for the same purpose. So all-in-all this is a non-story except to highlight again that companies (and universities) are all too often persuaded to do things based on some perceived coolness factor rather than being based on practical applications.
The greater accomplishment here is getting on slashdot.
I mean how hard is it take two exsisting technologies and combine them with a little bit of code?
Just takes a litle bit of creativity to come up with.
Sure I couldn't do that when I was 15, but his age shouldn't be the issue.
(Probably to salon it is, if a MIT grad had done it it wouldn't have been featured there.
After all CS grad students do alot of cool stuff but don't get featured on slashdot or salon)
Hey i compiled my own linux kernel and now it does some cool stuff that others don't.
Guess i should get on slashdot, eh?
Using 2.4Ghz cordless phones and microwaves near the antennas!
Or are there enough antennas to provide redundent signal info?
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
I am one of those CS students who receieved a free PDA and I've never seen anyone do anything other than goof around on the internet in lecture with them.
We did however make use of another app called activeclass that was semi-interesting, allowing students to post quetions to the professor during lecture (moderated by a TA). Unfortunately it tended to take so long to input the question on the PocketPC PDAs (which I find to be clunky and sluggish, I ended up giving my PDA to a family member to use) that the question was no longer relevant by the time I entered it.
you can read about it here:
http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/
--Avoid metagame thinking, browse with scores hidden (This sig is in violation of itself)
The title is ... gulp ... correctly punctuated !!!
Sometimes Slashdot just blows me away.
They are letting the USER decide how to use their technology! That certainly can't be allowed.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
Click click...
Let's see here... I wonder if Joe wants to get together to study for the physics exam.
Click click... log in... search... triangulate... click click click...
HEY! What's he doing in my girlfriend's dorm room?!?!?!
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Why is it that when you put a tracking system in your car its a great idea, but when you put it on your PDA, its "too Orwellian" for most people? Asset tracking doesn't have to be an evil thing. I reallize the project is aimed at tracking usage/position of the people, but come on... Not everything has to be a conspiracy. If you don't want to be tracked leave the PDA at home/take the batteries out/turn off the software. Remember this is an experiment... Plus you're not forced to participate. (The article states that many students are not going to participate for fear of breaking the PDA and having to pay for it.)
For finding the way back to the dorm after a long night of partying.
Here's another way for businesses to keep their workers on call 24/7 and even monitor them 24/7. It could even become big brother watching. This hella sux!
How ya like dat?
I'm guessing it would safe to say "how 35-year-olds will be stalking 15 to 17 year-olds tommorow" as well.
Geeks can use this technology to know the location of every girl on campus!
girls can use this technology to avoid geeks!
but since (i am figuring) that most geeks will have 2 generation of technology ahead most of the time -- this means that the gene pool will finally be filling up (a bit) with our genes
j/k of course -- sigh, unfortunately they (girls) can still pick up the smell of skin came in contact with PCB material too many times / irradiated from CRT / solder fumes / etc and avoid avidly
My life in the land of the rising sun.
The computer science department at CMU as well as the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have been putting out papers on actual implementations of campus location systems. Most deal with its use for contextual/location aware computing (one of the more recent papers). Although some have dealt with the privacy implications (I should know, I was an author of one published at IEEE Wireless 2001). Project Aura deals with quite a bit of reasearch around what can be done positivly with this technology as well.
As one last thing, I wrote software to poll wavepoints and figure out a location over 1.5 years ago... It was less than 50 lines of C, so I have trouble being impressed by this.
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
"He's right behind you!!! RUN!!!!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The university is using a program called "Active Campus" that you can download for your Journada. You have to have an account, though, to track someone from the web. Here is their webpage.
:)
NOTE: They are using PHP
Does anyone know about a more detailed write up of this?
Specifically, I'm wondering whether each portable device is computing its own location based on the relative intesities of the access points as measured at the device, or the other way around.
If the devices are determining their own position, then, at least in theory, it should be possible to be selective about who gets access to that information. Done properly, there wouldn't need to be any central point of failure, so an attacker would need to compromise the software on their intended victim's PC. Or, more likely, they would have to discover an unintentional fault in that software and exploit it. On the other hand, if an external system is determining the location of the devices, then a would-be snooper need not compromise the software on the victim's computer, but only the central system.
In the first scenario, your own Pocket PC is trusted, while in the second, a device outside your control is. This isn't really that big a distinction in practice, because most of us extend trust to third parties by using software and hardware the properties of which we cannot or do not verify, but it's still important: It's possible to some extent to verify and monitor the behavior of systems in our physical possession, but nearly impossible to do so with someone else's.
Girl meets boy.
Girl lets boy put her on buddy list.
Girl dates boy for a while, then realizes he is a bad boyfriend.
Girl tries to gain a little freedom by not letting bad boyfriend spy on her whereabouts.
Bad boyfriend flips out and accuses her of (fill in the blank).
Girl not only can't dump bad boyfriend, he now knows her every move.
Girl joins convent to get away from bad boyfriend.
Next time youse guys are wondering where all the geek girls went, you'll know they're all hiding in convents because they played a little fast and loose with their PDA permissions and will be paying for it forever...
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
I would not take a bribe to be tracked in that manor. Of course, even if you paid full price they could still track you. But I would not willingly give my permission to do so.
.ORG for a .COM, since its clearly a for profit company, and not a .ORG.
Its kind of like the people who drive those cars wrapped in advertisements. I can't stand them. All they are doing is perpetuating greedy capitalist marketing scum.
(Kinda like that big f'ing banner ad in the middle of the page when reading the slashdot article.)
Speaking of which, when does Slashdot plan on giving up its
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Check activeweb.ucsd.edu which is a more interesting application.
A Software System for Locating Mobile Users:
Design, Evaluation, and Lessons
I'm a bitter 17 year old.
Bah! No source to be found anywhere. :-(
So, is there a Linux project underway to do something like this?
Swap devices with your friends occasionally. This isn't scary until the technology is the size of a piece of confetti that can be attached to someone who doesn't realize it. Did anyone else see that Buffy?
Can I bum a sig?
Signal Degradation due to weather and metal isn't so much an issue with triangulation technology because in the case of weather it will just degrade the signal to all antennaes equally from which you can still obtain a differential signal and in the case of a metal wall blocking one antenna, you are still going to be able to track the individual on a line which is all you really need most of the time (still there are so many algorithms that take signal degradation due to obstacles into account. ie every cell phone, you just need to pick the method of choice and bam) One thing I'd like to know is how they effectively sector the antennas on the campus. (Everyone is on the bad site of this tech but say campus security can use it to know the exact position of a victim who is fleeing an attacker, instead of having those polls they have to wait at. i think attackers would be more wary if the student has to only push one button to get campus security tracking her(his) every location)
They've got this fifteen year old student who has a neat idea, so they implement it to feed off the publicity generated by the issue of privacy.
"Look at us, we've got fifteen year old students building contrversial technology. Give us money."
The justification they give of helping students find each other is a crock.
A 15-year-old student at the University? Man, it kills me to hear stuff like that. That poor kid probably thinks he's tough stuff now, but I'm betting he'll regret his lack of a social life later on. There are more important things in life than advancing quickly.
There are probably tons of people here that could've skipped grades at a time, but wouldn't you at least want to be in your sexual prime when you went to college?
Somebody needs to watch American Beauty again - you gotta stop and smell the roses.
The Red Pill
The "ActiveCampus Locator" software for Jornadas and other platforms can be found at http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/locator.html.
There is even Linux source code there for "ActiveCampus-locator.cc", which has the description "Gets the access point list seen by the wireless card and sends it to the ActiveCampus server so it can geolocate for the user."
is here: http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/
Saving random seed...
Gee, instead of leaving this tracking device in my desk, I'll take it with me when I decide to do something wrong.
..ah.. I yearn for the yesteryears when fags roamed free on /.
Of course, nothing would stop me from taking my free tracking device, planting it in my bitch's backpack, and seeing if she really is going out to that gay-club...or to my sister's dormroom, or whatever.
You don't need to let anyone track your device if you don't want them to, but now everyone has immediate access to a moblie, and plantable, tracking device.
It doesn't. Someone walking through a sufficiently thick-walled corridor, or stairwell, will cause the signal levels to become innaccurate, and as a result you just might "warp" to the other side of the campus. This would work fine on an open field, with no obstacles to the radio waves, but not in a building.
Nice hack, but it's no substitute for GPS, sorry.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Students can log in to a Web site from anywhere and check where their friends are.
I don't see it on the public site.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Speaking of which, when does Slashdot plan on giving up its .ORG for a .COM, since its clearly a for profit company, and not a .ORG.
Jesus, I'll bet you're still pissed that AOL was ever allowed to interface to the Internet, too. Oh, and don't forget, the government gave us their poorest-performing version of the Internet to play with so they could keep tabs on all of us in just one place!
Intelligent Life on Earth
Student 2: Ummm.... I.... I'M NOT GAY!!!
Student 1: Sure thing.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Check out this article on Microsoft's site:
. as p?PubID=768
http://research.microsoft.com/scripts/pubs/view
And everybody says "Microsoft doesn't innovate." (Note the date: March 2000.)
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
I imagine it's looking for relative signal strengths, and who cares if it's accurate to within 5 ft, it's some kid's software hack. If it works at all it's cool.
Wouldn't you just take the 802.11 card out when you wanted some privacy?
Just leave your tracking device on and hit every strip club in the world...or make sure you get caught at one of her friend's houses.
This is the sack-less man's dream! My friends that avoid their girls for weeks before the she gives up would get to kill the covert ops and get right down to some good old fashioned bachelor fun!
Of course, I am mostly hooked...so I could only live vicariously through them.
There was a group of competitors at MacHack 2001 (i think it was 2k1) that did this with the wifi stations in the convention center + hotel. They didn't win the competition, but it was my favorite hack from the event. I'll see if i can find a link to the info page.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
1) It will make it easier for students to find each other on such a large campus.
Problem: UCSD, although a large campus, is by no means one of the largest schools out there (I believe Penn State, Michigan, Ohio State, etc. are much larger). I've had friends at these large campuses, and even went to visit them several times. Locating people is not that big an issue. Most friends (this service is for tracking one's friends only, right?) know what each others' schedules are and typically make plans about where they'll meet or what they're doing after classes.
Secondly, as another poster already pointed out, these days, almost everyone has cell phones so you could easily give your friend a call and say "hey, where are you? You want to meet at the cafeteria?" Much more informative and useful than following a dot on a screen.
2) HP wants to figure out what people in the future will use this technology for. Quoted from the article: "What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow." :-) The fact is what's important and cool and worthwhile when you're 18 is not the same as when you're 35. It would be far more useful to find a subset of 35 year old people who can be identified as "trendsetters" and follow them. This is not to say that the 18-24 year old demographic should be ignored (indeed, that age group is the focus of nearly every marketer out there) but HP's justification of their involvement doesn't seem quite accurate.
Problem: Any 35 year old out there living their life like they did when they were 18, please raise your hand... (and doing it in your dreams doesn't count
So far the reasons seem pretty weak. At best, this is a "gee-whiz, look what I can do" type of demonstration with no real benefit but which is otherwise benign (which is not necessarily a bad thing; perhaps these college students will actually figure out a completely new and useful purpose for this technology, and besides, they're getting a free PDA. What's not to like? :-). At worst, this is a harbinger of colleges monitoring their students' movements to address "security" issues. Already, we have high school students submitted to daily metal detectors and pat-downs, plus random urine testing and spot locker checks in the name of the "War on Drugs". Who knows what school officials will be able to justify in the name of the "War on Terrorism". Just think, all those intelligent, impressionable young students just ripe to be picked by evil Al-Quaida operatives to become HENCHMEN OF THE AXIS OF EVIL(tm)!!! And this is not even addressing the very real concern that no matter how many security features they build into this, someone will figure out a way to hack it.
Perhaps I'm just being paranoid or cynical, but like the saying goes "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're *not* after you" :-).
Until your other half starts making complaints like "If you loved me, you'd let me track you." et al.
is not the nicest prof in the world, he has an ego that is annoying and he think he's the god of software engineering. I had him for my compiler class and I hated his remarks.
The project was done part of his graduate software engineering course.
...if my car keys and TV remote were connected to the wireless network.
Now do you really think that college students geeky enough to have one of these would have an other half?
Lord knows I never do...
GEEKS FOR LIFE
You'll always know where's the ball catcher.
Now, seriously, it has good uses, but even if you disable it for a few hours it's still not secure. Imagine if you turn it off because you are going to meet with your girl, and something bad happens at the campus. Like a robbery. Who will be the first suspect?
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
This tech is being developed and has a mandatory deployment for the new E911 system. I know of a number of companies who can already do this sort of thing with cell phones using triangulation and signal strength and delay measurements.
:)
Some manufactures are going to start putting gps into cell phones. No you wont have a free gps because the data prolly wont be displayable without the phone being in a test mode or if it does it will just give you a lat/lon.
When you think of all this stuff along with the article earlier today UK Government Expands spying powers. I guess we will all be watched and "tagged" without having implants
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
The article says that anyone can opt out so they can't be tracked. Well, thats not very assuring. You can bet there is going to be some Admin software or tools that will ignore this so called "buddy list", and identify the location of ANYONE regardless if they opt out or not.
So what kind of controls are they going to have over these Admin tools, who gets to use them? Univ staff? Admin Staff? FBI? CIA?
This is scary stuff...
This is not just the work of one individual; see http://activecampus.ucsd.edu
To toot my own horn, I helped them get started with a personal project of mine, which was mapping out the wireless access points at UCSD. See here: http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~ghamerly/wireless.html
I'm not directly involved with the active campus project, but they started by using some of my data. I got data by collecting it with my gps and laptop as I rode my bike around campus.
I'm kinda curious as to who the 15 year old is, how smart he is etc...
I also wonder if he retained the intellectual property rights to the software he developed for the university, being that he's a minor and all.
How long until someone is lured somewhere by a stolen or hacked PDA? I can see the fox news special now "Coed lured to her doom by hackers: Is your daughter safe?".
I thought I'd write something funny, but it just isn't.
Launching VERY soon, a new mMode service will allow you to locate your friends using the GSM e911 service (Enhanced Observed Time Difference). You can be "invisible", but thats I'll I know about it. TDMA customers are out of luck.
I suspect a radio transponder wouldn't work too well when it's tucked away inside a metal business card or cigarette case. $15 bucks is a small price to pay for a little privacy.
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
"Maybe you're cheating on your girlfriend and you don't want her to know you're in somebody else's dorm room."
Yeah, but alternatively you could set it up to alert you to stop fooling around and start pretending to study when your SO gets within a certain radius of that dorm room.
warning
We did this back in the day with Ricochets.
It's a little known bit of trivia that the original Ricochet system used Geographic Routing. Every poletop knew its Lat/Long, and portables associated with their "Best Node," or strongest RSSI (signal strength)/lowest latency poletop. There was a nameserver that did modem name/number -> lat/long translation, and the system routed by sending the packet in its visible node list that was closest to the destination.
If you type ATS311? into a Ricochet modem, you'll get the best few nodes on that node list, including RSSI and latency. There was a Newton app that parsed ATS311, did a weighted average based on RSSI, and gave you a position.
Worked pretty well, actually, though the sample rate was low, since it could be several seconds between updates of the node list.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
OK. Think about it. You're measuring the time it takes for a radio wave to travel between your PDA and another receiver/transmitter. If you do not have perfect radio line of sight between your PDA and the other station, then you're actually measuring a longer period of time than you would be if you had line of sight because the signal you're measuring is actually bouncing off of something first. This will cause your triangulation calculation to be inacurrate because your measurement of the time it takes for the radio wave to travel between the PDA and the other site will take longer and make your calculation reflect a greater distance between you and the other station than there really is. Check out this web site for a similar idea on position detection that uses "radio finger prints" to identify your location www.uswcorp.com.
From the article, it sounds like the technology *does* use GPS:
Furthermore, the article states:
which means people can be tracked anywhere in the world, which you can't do with a triangulation of signals but you can with GPS (more or less.) It sounds like all they're doing is getting the PDAs to receive the GPS signal, decode it, then send the GPS coordinates to some computer on the UCSD campus via the Internet using SSL.And not to mention any lack of information in the article about any custom (or at least rare) hardware that are required for triangulation were they not using GPS.
I did a similar project at Carnegie Mellon. It worked great around the campus. However my team did not have time to evangalize it.
m us.do c
You can access the report and performance results at:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~rahulm/Pres/Proxi
If you can't read MS Word format, let me know.
Rahul
rahul@cmu.edu
You don't need college to get the knowledge but you do need that piece of paper to be taken seriously in a job interview. One of the hoops we have to jump through unless our daddy or uncle is the boss.
How ya like dat?
The wording on the "around the world" thing wasn't completely clear, but I think they were saying that if you're in a remote location on a WiFi network that has Internet access, you can check where your buddies back home are, by accessing their PDAs across the net.
As a recently graduated grad student at UCSD, I'm fairly familiar with Bill Griswold's project. It's huge -- they have about 10 or 11 students working for them, and more volunteering. I've considered writing source code for them, but other projects, such as work (www-cse.ucsd.edu/~baden) and girlfriend (no innate web address) have taken priority.
:)
Basically, IMO, this article is full of it. These aren't homing devices planted in the shoulders of all the students on campus, used by campus police to track potential hooligans. These are PDAs which can be turned off, whose location tracker service is only enabled by people who *want* to be found. Professors, for example, can turn on the service when they have office hours, but want students to be able to find them while visiting another professor a few doors down. Study partners can use it to find the location of the person they thought they were going to meet at the library. The argument that people can be tracked without their knowledge basically devolves down to an access-control issue... which can be entirely bypassed by turning off the PDA itself.
Anyhow. I think the Salon article misses the point of ActiveCampus entirely. Salon is focusing on privacy, and students' (presumed) inherent desire to stay apart from one another. Active Campus' goals are the opposite: it allows people to get a form communities on a gigantic, alienating campus. You can walk to a coffee shop on campus and invite your friends to meet you there. You can sit in a classroom and discuss the lecture with all the other ActiveCampus participants, allowing you to meet people you'd never talk with before. You can quiz a TA in real-time about the professor's lecture, without becoming that "irritating guy who always disrupts the lectures".
Active Campus, by the way, won the top award at the campus Research Review. As well it should... it's one of those rare pieces of technology that is actually good for society.
Cheers,
Bill Kerney
If you think for a second that the 25-year-old world literature student has a bigger ego than the 15-year old computer science student, then you haven't met too many 15-year old computer science students.
well, the same AT&T labs (or was it Bell) where VNC was started had a thing where people wore nametags. these nametags would then talk to tranceivers around the office, usually part of the ceiling tile grid. then the receivers would talk to the server.
you could then finger some user and see where they are in the building, or you could finger a room in the building and see who was in the room.
I thought that was pretty damn nifty when I first saw it - some people say it is too Big Brother, I just think it was cool.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I love them. It will make hunting a lot easier.
I can't even get my GPS to work inside my house, no matter where I am. Even standing by the window. At least this would probably work somewhat, rather than not at all with GPS. I think people have to much of a lofty idea on how GPS works.
Sure there is. Go to http://activecampus.ucsd.edu and there are links on the front page.
I am part of the ActiveCampus project.
We started about a year ago with ActiveClass and ActiveCampusExplorer. You guys can find info at activecampus.ucsd.edu but if you have interesting ideas to share with me, feel free to send me an email
mailto:truong_tan_minh@hotmail.com
Way to reinvent LORAN.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Uh no, why would I?
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
When are they going to make this protocol secure? Allowing someone to pinpoint your physical location is a security leak in many ways worse than breaking encryption on the data stream.
How long will it be before someone writes a program to track and store the location of every student on campus once every few minutes or so. Stored over time, lots of people would find that useful. The database size is meaningless these days. A standard PC with 80GB drive and MySQL could deal with storing the location of 10,000 students every 5 minutes for a couple months.
Want to know if your girlfriend has been near some other guy at any time in the last month? Just query the database for when the two were located within a certain distance of each other, look for the days with the most hits, even plot the paths of both for those days on a map...
Does anyone think this kind of knowledge about each other is good?
The project homepage, with papers and downloads, is here.
You can read a piece about the 15-year-old kid behind it here.
I'd love to play with it, just imagine for example walking around with your laptop in a museum and have full descriptions of the Magritte painting you're looking at, the painter's biography, directions to similar paintings, or reaching the top of mount Evrest and have "Cowboy neal was here" pop up...
I'm getting carried away, but I'd really love to see your code. I suppose you're using the data contained in the beacon frames for this, right?
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Don't the cell-phone companies have databases of the locations of every logged-on hand-set? Why not just hack into that system, or do some social engineering and pretend to be some kind of official.
I'm interested, how accurate could a cell-phone system be, (obviously they know what cell your in, and the relative signal strengths from the surrounding transmitters, which you can see on most phones' test modes) can they compensate for obsticals? it seems possible, since most obsticles (and transmitters) don't move, they could build up some kind of map to compensate for the signal loss...
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Throw in a bit of CPS and you don't even need an extra box. This is the direction location aware mobile apps are really going.
br
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Note that triangulation does depend on the data payload, folks. RSSI is determined by the 802.11 card's firmware when it receives a signal (ala the prism2/2.5/3 chipset).
In other words, a signal containing encrypted data is still a signal and has an associated RSSI.
All your 802.11 are belong to us.
You must have a Garmin. I recently went GPS shopping and compared Garmin to Magellan units. The Garmin (ETrex line) is much smaller, has cooler features, etc...but their antenna sucks. Doesn't even work under tree cover, much less in a house...so what's the point. The Magellan Meridian/SporTrak line work MUCH better is less than ideal conditions, even though they are clunkier and have a much worse display and UI.
The GPS system calculates your position using GPS too! Here's a little bit about triangulation. I'm using GPS satellites because you get them for cheap in theory land and they come with these cool weightless levers. However you can replace them with 802.11 access points, cell phones, whatever suits you.
Imagine having three satellites on a chess board, the first one on a1, the second one on a8 and the third one on 1h. You're somewhere on the checkboard, and you know where the other satellites are. You know the speed of light is one square per second.
To find out where you are, you take out your brand new iBook and send five pings to the satellite in a8, using radio waves, which are light after all:
--- satellite-a8 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 14.00/14.00/14.00 s
Light takes fourteen seconds to go to the satellite and back. You now know you're anywhere in a seven squares radius from a8 and decide to ping the satellite in h1:
--- satellite-h1 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 14.00/14.00/14.00 s
You now know you're also seven squares away from the satellite in h1. You look at your map and understand that you can only be in a1 or h8. How do you find out? You ping the satellite in a1:
--- satellite-a1 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 22.00/22.00/22.00 s
Looking at this, it becomes clear that you are in h8. You can even use pythagoras to make sure I didn't get the distances wrong :). We use this method to locate any radio device, from the GPS in your car to your iBook.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
It's 92%.
I simplify here, but GPS effectively gets the ranges from various known points (the satellites) by measuring relative propagation delays and computes the intersection of the resulting spheres.
The weather at UCSD is even better than at UCSB, haha.
No one is forcing students to use the $549 Hewlett-Packard Jordana PDAs, which are provided for free,
Does MJ get a royalty for each one of those sold? I think they probably meant the HP Jornada. Not that a Jordan themed PDA wouldn't be a good idea, but somehow I think he would probably go with a SONY rather than an HP.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I haven't noticed anyone taking note of the fact that this sort of technology is probably around 50 years old or more.
Pilots have been using signal strength and direction of radio beacons (including radio stations, actually) to figure their position for at least that amount of time. The instrument is called ADF, for Automatic Direction Finder, for those who want to know about it.
Implementing it in a PDA is kind of neat, but not exactly ground-breaking.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I'm sure the "government" can do this, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. Probably a few things you can't imagine, also.
No, it's not the most useful thing anyone has ever done, but it's really neat. That Shawn Fanning guy didn't do anything "new" when he made the napster app, but it changed the world. When someone takes existing technologies and ties them together with a few lines of code, it is very, very cool.
According to the article the system uses SSL encryption.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Yup. I just used pings as an easy way to measure the distance. I thought that would be the best way to "make it understandable to a layman", but I should definitely have inserted something similar to your text. Thanks for pointing this out! May I quote you on that?
I couldn't open the shockwave thing on Mac OS X though :(
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
I think the easiest and best "opt-out" would be to turn the PDA off, or remove the wi-fi card...
It's not my fault - greatness was thrust upon me.
We're using the word "triangulation" very loosely here because it's a word most people can understand, but purists would not call what GPS does "triangulation" because no angles are involved. It's really "trilateration" or "resection."
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
This sounds similar to the triangulation the cell phone companies tried to use to locate phones when ordered to do so by law enforcement (to comply with CALEA and ostensibly E-911.) That didn't work well enough in rural cell areas, however, thus the move to on-board GPS receivers in cell phones.
The thing that amused me the most was the error in the Salon article's description of the technology involved:
The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas.
GPS does not use signal strength. GPS uses differential timing. This system and software work like a GPS in the same way that a kitchen stove works like a microwave oven. Love them Salon facts.
John
At a company I worked at - we had a system like this... One day one of the sys programmers comes in with a remote controlled car... Attaches his badge to it and starts driving it all over the office...
Took Security about 5 minutes to come running out - to see why this "guy was running around the office like a maniac"... hillarious...
This kid's so smart he must be a Revelle student.
-- It is my strong belief that it is a mistake to hold strong beliefs.
about 8 years ago now at RPI, there used to be a program that someone wrote and made available called XStalker. it had maps of every computer lab on campus (then all IBMs and Suns), correllated with the known hostnames of all those machines, and therefore could tell you where a certain user id was logged in, therefore, where they were (after all, so many of us rarely strayed from a computer). Pretty low-tech by comparison, but cool nonetheless. Couple this with the ease of constructing the standard user id from a last name and first initial, and you could find just about anyone. of course, i believe that capability along with the name is what caused it to be frowned upon.
Forgive me if i messed up any of the details; it was a while ago.
i hope it has tetris...
Seriously
Mail me