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In Brazil, Trees To Call For Help If Illegally Felled
Damien1972 writes "The Brazilian government has begun fixing trees in the Amazon rainforest with a wireless device, known as Invisible Tracck, which will allow trees to contact authorities once they are felled and moved. Here's how it works: Brazilian authorities fix the Invisible Tracck onto a tree. An illegal logger cuts down the tree and puts it onto a truck for removal, unaware that they are carrying a tracking device. Once Invisible Tracck comes within 20 miles (32 kilometers) of a cellular network it will 'wake up' and alert authorities."
Fell Alert! (0:30)
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Life Alert Bracelets have unlimited uses !!
so when a tree falls in the forest we will know if it makes a sound.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/how-to-for-emp-weapon-stunningly-accessible/
I don't believe that it's so invisible that you can't take pictures of it.
Show me something that makes me trust you that it is actually "invisible" when installed, even though it obviously can't be when not installed.
Why do they need to be recharged in a year? Simply checking orientation with a microcontroller in deep sleep the rest of the time shouldn't take that much power.
I wonder how much such a device would cost.
Cheap GSM (GPRS) modems in Brazil cost around $30 USD for high volume. About 65% of that price are taxes.
The fact is the government will probably have to resort to shooting dead each and every person in the truck and in convoy and throw the family of the driver out on to the street and bulldoze the house.
Why is that depressing?
Well, apart from ruining the lives of those unable to choose otherwise (the family), the real arseholes, the companies buying *suspiciously cheap* hardwood in the first world will get away scot free. THOSE are the ones who need to be shot, families homeless and all property taken.
So many bad jokes in my head. They are clogging my brain so much I can't get them out...
Why is Snark Required?
Elegant solution to a complex and difficult situation, made possible by technological advance. This is progress (and what slashdot is all about)
elliot....
...and gets his hundred bucks to ignore it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The tree has already been cut down. All they can do is arrest the guy who is transporting the tree (low down in the business probably). All the bosses of the illegal tree fellers need to to is restructure their business a little, or probably buy a metal detector.
well, it's better than "First Post!"
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If no one is in the forest, do trees actually fall? Because until you've answered this question with an affirmative "yes", your question doesn't even make sense.
Note that the fact that when you go into a forest and find trees which look as if they had fallen is no proof that they actually did fall. That's true even if on your previous visit they have still been standing.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Ripe for plenty of gags...
Humour aside, this is a good use of technology, and much needed. I've seen what happens when deforestation is left un-policed (it doesn't take long for a developing nation to clear one, given the amount of money that it can generate). Seeing what's left of the 'Amazon of the southern hemisphere' as they call it in Borneo, was very sad. Less than 2% is left, and you can imagine the natural habit that's also gone. Not to mention the global impact on climate. The next 30 years will be a challenging time imho - unfortunately, the required action will no doubt after things have really gone downhill, as is usual when government and regulation is involved (e.g. someone has to die before safety regulations are improved).
Logging trucks in the rain forest will now be equipped with cell phone jammers.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
They won't use an EMP or anything, they will just buy and install a GPS jammer on their trucks. The Tracck will call home but it will have no idea where it is. Truckers already use them in various parts of the world to bypass rules about how many miles they can drive in a day. This came to /. attention some time back when driving by airports was causing airliners to make hands on landings rather than automated ones on a regular basis.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Based on the weakness of the signal strength and the low cost of GPS jamming equipment (>$69 for something that actually works) how secure is this solution? Beyond that would there be significant electronic signature to detect such devices considering the lack of background interference? Is there such thing as a long distance metal detector? Not knocking progress, just interested.
Imagine what would happen if a precocious ten year old with enough skills to hack together a protocol droid out of junkyard parts or capable of building a pod racer decides to build a scanner to locate the invisible scanner hidden inside a living organism... It could happen? Right?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... trees illegally fell you?
Apparently the people proposing this sort of thing lack the imagination to understand how many trees are in the forest.
Even if they only tagged a few trees like this figuring to seed the forest with trackers there is still the problem that this is easily hacked against. Anyone who's spending the money to cut illegal trees and haul them away (very expensive) will simply hire a good hacker to hack the trackers before the loggers hack the trees out.
then the middleman has to get the chainsaw out.
and how likely is that?
the problem is that they have to ramp up the punishment for the little guy.
fines and arrest haven't worked.
shoot them dead, summary justice.
if that doesn't work, throw the families (profiting from the crime) out of their homes.
if that doesn't work, then don't let logs get sold.
Well, apart from ruining the lives of those unable to choose otherwise (the family), the real arseholes, the companies buying *suspiciously cheap* hardwood in the first world will get away scot free.
What makes you think this old-growth hardwood is being sold at knockoff prices when buyers are willing to pay a premium?
So to save these trees will they have a battalion of sky commandos who will desend from on high to aprehend the villians? All a simple theif needs is a hand held radio a quick scan, off with the GPS and away down the road they go!
There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas.
-- Rush
Have gnu, will travel.
If no one is in the forest, do trees actually fall? Because until you've answered this question with an affirmative "yes", your question doesn't even make sense.
Note that the fact that when you go into a forest and find trees which look as if they had fallen is no proof that they actually did fall. That's true even if on your previous visit they have still been standing.
Quite right. Perhaps the trees were tired and needed to lie down.
If no one is in the forest, do trees actually fall? Because until you've answered this question with an affirmative "yes", your question doesn't even make sense.
Note that the fact that when you go into a forest and find trees which look as if they had fallen is no proof that they actually did fall. That's true even if on your previous visit they have still been standing.
Quite right. Perhaps the trees were tired and needed to lie down.
Are the trees there if nobody looks?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If a tree is felled in the forrest, and no one is at the office to hear it, does it still call for help?
Assuming the Brazilian authorities only put these devices on the most valuable trees, just take a portable cell transmitter into the rain forest to set off all the devices, then track them down.
Bingo.
You just found the most valuable trees, and you know they have a transmitter on them.
Aren't government subsidies WONDERFUL?
Wonder if the Brazilian government personnel who thought this up are getting a kickback from the illegal loggers?
How does this fit in with their enforcement? If I were in charge of this, I'd look at the mills first. Raw logs aren't worth much. They have to be milled. You make sure that raw logs arriving at the mill are from operators with licenses, under approved harvesting plans. If a huge region is exporting raw logs, that's a bit more complicated. Still, you have scales for trucks just like in the US. If they're not already weighing trucks down there, they can build weigh stations and kill two birds with one stone. Once again, any log truck gets a "your papers, please" moment with enforcement.
Don't go after the poor truckers of course. They just work for the man. Go after the business. Make sure every company knows that if you have a hot log on your truck, you're getting shut down.
Now you might end up with guerilla mills, which is more tricky. You'd probably end up with what you have in the US. Timber poaching occurs in the Pacific Northwest, but they aren't big operators. Instead you have the disgrace of some drug addict cutting down a huge old tree and turning into... fence posts. Yeah, fence posts; because you can mill them on site and carry them out. Pathetic; but it takes a long time to do that just so you can get a few more hits of whatever it is you're addicted on. It's slow enough and rare enough that the US's protected forests aren't threatened by it that much. Fires are a much bigger threat here. Cleared land being used to grow pot is also a big threat, due to water theft and fire.
The USA has, in some places, reached the limit of what public conservation can do. In some cases the land would be better protected if it were made private and zoned for low-impact development. A wealthy estate holder has a strong incentive to keep illegal grows and timber poachers off his land. He has the means to do it. The government? Less and less these days.
That's not to say that privatizing should be done will-nilly and absolutely. Also in some areas the private owners are no better off than the government. We have vast areas of land that are there for the taking by criminals. Gunslinging in the woods isn't for everybody, so even if you made the land tax-free and re-opened homesteading you probably wouldn't totally solve the problem.
Until you realize all the illegal loggers have to do is carry a micro-cell with them that can fake authorized cell tower access, and then when the device activates, they can triangulate it back to the source, remove the tracking device and continue on with impunity.
Seems like a good idea, but it'll only catch the stupid criminals and only until they learn better.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to give the Trees guns?
I developed a device to disable offensive technology disabler. Its basicly an E coupled marx pulse generator that cooks the rf section. Its quite effective. If it has an antenna, it dies.
I built it in response to the electric util putting in 900mhz smartmeters effectively wiping the WISP I worked for off the map from interference.
I just wonder what will happen when they want to get better cell phone coverage...
Someone puts up a 3G mast in the vincinity of these devices and you get false alerts.
eTree: Phone Home!
This has been a big problem for decades. I often thought those governments didn't give a damn. Maybe there is hope for us as a race after all.
In the global struggling economy, my first question would be who's paying for this? There's a cost for the devices, someone to install them, fix them, maintain them, plus the cell service. I don't know that this would be very high on my priority list in terms of new projects to get funded. I'm sure it's a great project with good intentions, but is monitoring trees really something we need to be spending money on right now?
The whole thing is going to be moot soon anyway. Someone will come up with an invisible track detector which identified the trees that are tagged so they can be avoided. Trees and forests have the very handy tendency to be devoid of metal, so a very sensitive metal detector is all you're going to need to detect these things. I wonder how they managed to get this fact by the review board...