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GA Tech Students Use Cell Phone Pings To Find Missing Person (ajc.com)
McGruber writes: Georgia Authorities are giving kudos to technology – and the perseverance of Georgia Tech students – for the safe return of a fellow student who disappeared after a Friday night party. The missing student was found Monday morning along railroad tracks, in northeast Atlanta. He had been beaten, was unconscious and was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital. Georgia Tech Police Chief Robert Connolly said "The students rallied together and then they started searching. The students stayed out until midnight last night, putting out pamphlets and combing the area, anywhere they could possibly find [cell phone] pings along the route." The students "were not going to stop. They checked every hospital, every hotel, they checked everywhere. They didn't give up on their friend."
http://www.fox5atlanta.com/vir...
Karma: Bad
Search And Rescue teams should carry "Stingray" mobile cell towers with them to locate missing persons in the wilderness. Any phone in range would try to connect with them.
That's not what Stingrays are for.
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/l... It looks like they've started putting the article reference next to the story title.
GPS is passive. It only receives, doesn't send information.
The only way to get a GPS location from a phone is if the phone has the GPS function switched on, and then starts to send a GPS reading out through another channel - e.g. a WiFi or mobile data connection. In general this requires you to have an app running sending out your GPS coordinates to some server that records this info. Most phones don't have this function due to privacy concerns, and if they do, such records are (or at least, should) not be available to the general public to query.
I'm curious how a bunch of students were able to get past the two restrictions - I can imagine a uni having some portable towers lying around for research purposes, but how would they have found out his IMEI number?
From the article (hiding in the header), I don't think that they did. It sounds like the police gave the students the last known cell phone towers and they canvased the area on foot around those towers.
I had that idea years ago. They could mount one in a chopper and once they get a ping, crank down the range to quickly narrow the search.
That's almost entirely unnecessary (and this article is almost total crap).
If your cellphone is turned on (and not out of battery), and within range of a cell tower, your provider will know about it. Your phone "checks in" every so often to make sure calls to it are being routed to the correct tower. Police can lawfully, with a warrant, subpoena this information from your provider, no Stingray required. If for some reason your phone was on but outside the range of any cell towers, your idea might make some sense. But in that case it wouldn't need to be a Stingray per se; a portable cell tower (like providers deploy for disasters/emergencies) would do the trick just the same.
Oh, and while I'm at it, college students have no way to access the information of cell phones pinging providers' cell towers. The closest you could reasonably get is if they have each others' iPhone "Find My Friends" or Android equivalent, which would actually pull a full GPS location off the phone. But that is available to every jackass in the world you choose to share your location with, no engineering prowess or ingenuity involved. And it has nothing to do with "tower pings."
TL/DR; Stingrays not necessary. College students have no legal access to the cellphone tower "ping" information and shouldn't. Slashdot editors should consider actually, you know, editing story submissions into being cogent rather than clickbait.
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