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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..."
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.
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..."
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
"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?"
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 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?
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