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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..."
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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
from the marco!-...-polo! department?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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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
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.
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
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!
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?"
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
"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 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
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)
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?
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?
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.
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."
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
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)
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
The project homepage, with papers and downloads, is here.
You can read a piece about the 15-year-old kid behind it here.
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
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
I remember a while back that people wanted to pass a law requiring that all cellphones broadcast their locations to 911 systems. It also requires that the phone companies be able to open up their systems to FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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
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