Slashdot Mirror
Cell Phones Could Sniff Out Deadly Chemicals
Hugh Pickens writes "Science Daily reports that Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate's Cell-All is an initiative to equip cell phones with a sensor capable of detecting deadly chemicals. A chip costing less than a dollar would be embedded in cell phones and programmed to alert either the cell phone carrier to the presence of toxic chemicals in the air, and/or a central station that can monitor how many alerts in an area are being received. While one alert might be a false positive, hundreds would indicate the need for evacuation. 'Our goal is to create a lightweight, cost-effective, power-efficient solution,' says Stephen Dennis, Cell-All's program manager. Does this always-on surveillance mean that the govenment can track your precise whereabouts whenever it wants? On the contrary, DHS says; Cell-All will operate only on an opt-in basis and will transmit data anonymously."
Now I have to turn off my cellphone when I cook meth.
You can't take the sky from me.
One might be a false positive. Hundreds might indicate the need for evacuation.
So how is that person holding the false positive going to react? Maybe they're the first phone to realize it? Maybe they don't understand what 'false positive' means?
For personal safety issues such as a chlorine gas leak, a warning is sounded; the user can choose a vibration, noise, text message or phone call.
I'd be concerned those false positives might not be warmly received. Especially if someone in a crowded Starbucks has a phone that starts to alarm and says "Oh my god, there's chlorine gas in here!" You might be hit with some lawsuits after a few people are injured in a stampede. Contrived scenario? Maybe. But people are less than rational beings when their lives are perceived to be at stake. While academia is right on board some of the larger cities have been a little resistant toward citizen operated detectors.
My work here is dung.
On the contrary, DHS says Cell-All will operate only on an opt-in basis and will transmit data anonymously.
And I'll fund this entire venture after I complete my sale of the Brooklyn Bridge.
This might also be a method for monitoring hygeine?
Hackers will be able to summon black helicopters full of men in white Hazmat suits and have entire city blocks cordoned off.
There'll be an app to detect Colombian dope dealers wandering around with bags full of currency, so we can mug them.
And don't forget the app that sniffs the air around you and occasionally plays the ringtone, "Phew! Somebody farted!"
A chip costing less than a dollar is embedded in a cell phone and programmed to either alert the cell phone carrier to the presence of toxic chemicals in the air ...
Well look on the bright side, the Chinese worker who makes the chip only has to step outside of the factory and turn it on to see if it works on a wide spectrum. Of course who would be foolish enough to risk their job, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness with a complaint about a local government official being bribed into letting your employer pollute to its heart's content?
My work here is dung.
Seriously, I do hope that the notices are sent to the carrier/emergency services without informing the (panicky) phone owner. The average person will scream "Poison gas?!?" and start a panic.
Not so seriously, does this mean an upswing in poison gas detection if someone keeps the phone in their back pocket?
Awesome now another chip in my phone to help trim away my already bad phone battery life!
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
You mean this?
Ah the The Vaughans, I have waited patiently for years to link to thee.
Cheers, Chris
Anything working only and mainly thanks to and through people's fears and worries is, to my experience, a bad idea.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
A user.
Hello? Hello? Hmm, it seems to work...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Those sensors will be going off left and right in the stairwells of middle and high schools, what with girls wearing perfume (and maybe some boys with cologne), many being (as I shudder to recall) inexperienced at estimating proper dosage.
Of course you would be dangerously close to it so what is the use?
DHS says Cell-All will operate only on an opt-in basis and will transmit data anonymously.
Right, because the DHS has such a fine track record of opt-in, anonymous data, and not using it for other purposes. While they might have opt-in it will be buried under pages of the cellphone contract or settings and will be on by default requiring the user to spend a few hours figuring out where it is hidden to turn it off. Anonymous transmission, maybe anonymous by the fact it relays cell tower coordinates with an identifier number through which they can gain the personal information "only" by asking the cell provider.
My question is, how often are dangerous chemicals released in the air for this to be needed? Places which handle dangerous chemicals already have detection systems in place, it's not often you hear of a city being evacuated because of some sort of toxic accident. Or is it to help combat terrorism? It sounds to me like it's a location based detection system which will be [ab]used to detect drugs and other activities instead of to "protect the public".
Orwell was an optimist.
Also known as cocaine. Or tetrahydrocannabinol, diacetylmorphine, methamphetamine or similar killers of children. What, don't you want your cellphone to be used to sniff out the murderers of children? What kind of monster are you?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
As long as it is possible to buy a cell phone without the chip if I so choose.
does this mean i can make an app to successfully detect trace elements widliwi for iphone (like in star trek). i'll be rich!
I can imagine the many ways to abuse this feature:
Your buddies and you are drinking, someone farts... phone says it's deadly
There's a million ways this can be used with house hold chemicals brought to school to get out of a test
You notice a good looking girl (or guy) on the street about to go into a store. You go over to her, and say: "WAIT!, my phone says this place is deadly... How bout you come to lunch with me, it's much safer."
All joking aside, how many people are going to take these threats from a 1$ sensor seriously?
Obviously I'm not the only one utterly convinced that the optional part is a complete sham. What a thin cover story for an attempt to embed bomb sniffing devices in something everyone carries, in the name of greater security. Folks at a rocketry convention would see men in black in no time flat if they 'forgot' to register their event with the monitors. 1986.
This seems oddly familiar to Batman: Dark Knight. Using cell phones to collect data points throughout a city to find the culprit (the Joker / toxic chemicals). Ultimately, in the movie, there were great concerns about privacy and use of the technology. The safety net here "Cell-All will operate only on an opt-in basis and will transmit data anonymously" seems nice on paper, but I'm sure those in a position to use it will feel the pressure to exploit the technology for more.
http://viaspace.com/ms_about.php
So does it sound an alarm after I've eaten a curry?
I know some people who's BO would qualify as toxic :)
It's called the "person you are talking to coughs & suddenly dies" mechanism on the phone. Yes, the canary has been made obsolete.
"Cell-All will operate only on an opt-in basis and will transmit data anonymously"
Buwahahhahaahahaaa, Yeah, I'm sure that's how it will start. But as with any "Security" program IT WILL result in mission creep. Airport searches, criminal activity databases, fingerprint databases, DNA databases, if there is one thing that our government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt it is that systems initially used to track/monitor for "bad" people/things will eventually be used to track/monitor everyone/everything. Airport searches initially only searched for things capable of commandeering/damaging the plane, now ANY form of contraband is searched for, drugs, kiddy porn, "Suspicious" money, even "objectionable" reading material has been screened. Wasn't there even a incident a while back where a cargo tracking system was used to track law abiding people instead? I see this particular system eventually used to search for meth labs, then used to get search warrants for houses where any illicit chemicals are detected. It'll eventually get so bad that setting off too many firecrackers or messing around with a home chemistry set/bioreactor (homemade fuel) will result in a SWAT team coming through your door, after all you could be a terrorist building a bomb.
A chip costing less than a dollar would be embedded in cell phones and programmed to either alert the cell phone carrier to the presence of toxic chemicals in the air, and/or a central station that can monitor how many alerts in an area are being received
And how about alerting the user that paid for the phone in the first place? I want flashing red-on-yellow big letters that say, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! With a loud siren sound too.
If this were to come into being, cell users would be horrified at how often chemicals would be detected. This is really the last thing that corporations would want, so it is not going to happen.
I used to work in a genetics lab, and this is a terrifying thought. Imagine 20 lab techs working with chemicals in the same room, easily enough to set off the "low levels indicating danger and not a drill" alarm. Assuming that this is set to detect chemicals that are not yet at dangerous levels, merely anomalous levels, how do they propose to avoid raiding GlaxoSmithKline on a daily basis?
Sounds like "Vapour ware" to me ;)
bæ8Ã0sÃOE?5r©oÂÃ?âz:ÃÃAÃ?ÃOEÂ6fXÃ?]Â
There are potential, non-political-control-through-fear uses for this. Just about every environmental scientist would be thrilled to see the kind of fine grained data such a huge network could produce. Of course, the potential for political abuse is huge. I think a project like this could really benefit from open development.
I have a solution to our energy crisis - connect a generator to George Orwell.
HE only imagined the telescreen being able to hear and see you - not smell you and determine you had committed foodcrime by examining your flatulence.
And of course, if you
a) stand near somebody smoking (ANYTHING)
b) stand near a barbecue
c) stand downwind of somebody fertilizing their yard (OMFG NITROGEN COMPOUNDS! TERRRRRRORRRRRRISTS!)
d) be in a room where somebody is using a non-approved substance
You will be a suspect.
If these chips are so wonderful, why not make them into self-contained modules and locate them throughout our cities, right along with the cameras, microphones, gun-shot detectors, radar units, tire-pressure monitor transponders, and so on.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Hope these don't come to Australia, I'm regularly surrounded by dangerous levels of Sulphar Dioxide and Methane gas!
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
The idea is not a million miles removed from the folding@home and seti programs. Why build a supercomputer you can't afford when you can utalize existing hardware?
Why install a dense and costly sensor grid when you can disribute the sensor in a much cheaper package? You could of course install countless sensors with their own battery pack, processing power and communication gear, OR you could hitch them to existing gear that is by its nature widely distrubuted.
And with it, you could create a grid that reaches almost anywhere to measure air quality. I am pretty sure there are scientists who have a wet dream thinking of a very dense air measurment grid in urban areas.
Sure, privacy could be an issue...
Oh wait, no it isn't. If you got a phone, "they" can track you already. No special sniffer needed. How many of the privacy nutters got a phone? Your secret overlords thank you for carrying your tracker.
So, no privacy issue is added except perhaps "they" being able to tell you farted.
The idea is very close to using cellphones to track traffic jams. Lots of phone signals not moving? Traffic jam. Why not? The alternative is installing lots and lots of camera's.
Yeah, the tech would need good laws to regulate it, but if done right, it could create a very powerful tool for having a dense sensor grid at marginal costs.
We in the west enjoy excellent weather forcasts thanks to a dense grid of weather station, many of which are operated by amateurs. This could do the same for monitoring air quality with a hundred times refinement. An intresting idea, once you get beyond the knee jerk privacy reaction which anybody with a cellphone has already accepted. Allthough I wouldn't put it behind the average privacy nutter to wrap his cellphone in tinfoil, just in case.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The false alarms will be tremendous. How about landscapers and farmers, or even joe homeowner spraying some weeds around his driveway? Modern technological life has a ton of chemicals associated with it. Use some bleach on your kitchen counter, or in the laundry, stuff like that.
because what's not cool about having a sensor in my phone capable of detecting many different chemicals that I can opt out on not sending data to the government? Given that there was a recent fluorine leak on my campus(no one was hurt or injured, though someone did gain the nickname of fluorine boy), these might be useful. Also, given that the chips will cost next to nothing and will be produced in high quantities, they could become as ubiquitous as accelerometers are today. Just imagine all the cool things hardware hackers could do with them. But the most interesting effect these could have is stricter environmental restrictions. Something like "Opt-in cellphone data shows that pesticide levels are higher than we initial thought in homes" or "people who were around this brand of housepaint were more likely to develop cancer." Then again, these sensors are pretty much vaporware at this point.
Does this always-on surveillance mean that the govenment can track your precise whereabouts whenever it wants?
Sure ... but not because there's a chemical sensor in your phone. That's just stupid. If they can track us, it's because there's a GPS chip in there, and that's nothing new.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That's actually surprisingly good for a song about farting.
which is totally what she said
It appears they failed to account for the fact that these sensors will be embedded in a device with a case of plastic made in China. Any time the phone gets warm it's going to outgas right into the sensor and alarm.
...The detectors turn better, eventually into artifical bloodhound noses, so while the data from the mobile may be anonymous, your scent will definitely be recognized, cataloged and tracked. You may not know what or where you ate ten weeks ago, but the goverment will.
Bergholt Stuttley Johnson, is that you ?
Cell phones with pheromone detector chips, so Homeland Security can determine the level of fear gripping America.
-kgj
The goal of a terrorist is to terrorize their enemies. Were this to be implemented as described - a small sensor in millions of cell phones scattered across the country, alerting a central monitoring station - they've made the job of the terrorists much easier. Rather than trigger a device to release posion, explosions, etc., now all a terrorist need do is disperse sufficient amounts of "poisons" to trigger detection and cause panic...
And once the terrorists cause the Gov't to "cry Wolf" too many times, the public will ignore the warnings.
Ken
I'd never by a phone with this in, if there were alternatives available.
I value my privacy and the battery life of my phone too much.
Sure, at first.
Just like how your census form won't be used inappropriately, except maybe to round up japanese-americans and put them in internment camps.
Last i heard cell phone were not routed through FreeNet or I2P before reaching the carrier!
There is NO anonymity in cell phone networks, even less than on the internet...
They should start by making every cell phone mesh-network-aware to route around problems in case of a destroyed tower.
Can't wait for them to program the phone to figure out where pot is being smoked and coke snorted.
Really, stop buying closed phones!
I'd love an app that called me a taxi when I blew too high to drive.
Better yet I'd want a wristband that sensed alcohol in my sweat and changed color to alert to wait before ordering another, and alert the bartender not to serve me.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I envision a new class of Web Sites.
Informative pages on various consumer products that explain where to do 'surgical drilling' on products to disable unwanted features. "A #45 drill penetrating .023mm at the point indicated will disable the sensor without otherwise disturbing the function of your phone."
I already want something like this to wipe out the Accelerometer in my iPod Touch. It's like trying to read the news off the back of a playful otter sometimes when I use it in bed. The screen flips this way and that and Apple gives me NO WAY to disable it.
.. suppose these will detect window cleaner?
How about car exhaust. Real useful on your morning commute.
Diesel exhaust? Your rail commute will also be more entertaining.
Let's hope they don't go off in the gym locker room when the deodorant and hair spray comes out.
Honestly, this is pretty weak to me. But I didn't RTFA, so perhaps this is just a case of drumming up demand by a manufacturer. Like that never happens...
These will, however, sell well in Europe, I bet. Especially the U.K. Sad lot there. Watney's will set 'em off, you'll see.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"Your leechcraft ere long would have had me walking on all fours like a beast." Before long Americans ( and sooner or later the rest of us ) are going to be afraid to shit because a terrorist may have planted something in/on/under the toilet. You can't protect against everything. Bugging your citizens with cell phones that track your location with GPS and call Big Brother if they think you're playing with something THEY think you should'nt be is going way to far.
The alternative is installing lots and lots of camera's.
The alternative is installing lot's and lot's of camera's.
FTFY(?)
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
the only thing that's going to overwhelm the detector is the "deadly chemicals" from the phone owner's breath xD
Wouldn't it be convenient for the DHS to have every new cellphone giving them a call whenever it smells that its owner is handling nitrates or peroxides.
The reason for the Third Amendment is that the British forced the Colonists to to house troops and the troops acted as spies on their activities. Looks like the Fed has finally found a virtual way to get around yet another of the Bill of Rights provisions. B-b
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Who does it auto-dial when I break wind?
DHS says its gonna be anonymous? Yeah right! I do not believe a word of any govt agency.
Between the painting, gluing, fuel-mixing and fuel-pouring, I'm going to look like a one-man explosives factory.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Geiger counter? Yeah, there's an app for that.
lets see, a chip that cost less then $1 will probably add at least $20 onto the phone cost.
Be seeing you...