Slashdot Mirror
Using Cellular Traffic to Monitor Traffic Jams
An Anonymous Coward writes "The BBC has this story about Scots company Applied Generics and their plan to use cellphone location data to determine where there are traffic jams and (presumably) generate (and sell?) evasive routing tactics for drivers. They are using both passive cellular traffic (what you get when the phone is switched on) and active (drivers phoning up to say they'll be late - in standing traffic, I hope) to look for clusters of immobile cellphones along major routes. The whole idea has a sort of "why didn't I think of that?" neatness. Personally I wouldn't mind my own traffic being used wholesale (aggregated with thousands of other users), but how do other /.ers feel about a company profiting from data emitted by the cellphone that they paid for?"
Hah!
But when I asked an information officer there for information about the spread of radioactivity in the atmosphere from a nuclear war in Asia, the answer was, "That information is classified in the interests of national security."
.. or something like that. LOL
Congratulations on your excellent first post! The CLIT has been utterly humiliated, and the whole world bows to the might of the ACs.
Keep up the good work.
Annoymous Cowards:
Our name is legion
For we are many.
drivers phoning up to say they'll be late - in standing traffic, I hope
Blow it out yer ear. Just because you can't chew bubble gum and walk at the same time doesn't mean the rest of us should be hampered. If you can't drive without being distracted you shouldn't be driving, period.
You need to track down and read Larry Niven's article Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation, which is in the collection All the Myriad Ways (now out of print). Among other things, he invented the idea of the flash crowd, which is typified these days by a site being slashdotted.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."