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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."
With an iPhone is battery would have been long dead over 2 days...
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. But of course we wouldn't want to use Stingrays for saving lives when they're much more useful for spying on everyone.
But of course we wouldn't want to use Stingrays for saving lives when they're much more useful for spying on everyone.
Those two uses are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the former facilitates the latter. Law enforcement can justify the procurement and deployment of a Stingray for search and rescue, and then use it for spying on the boyfriend of their ex-wife when there is no SAR in progress. They could use the same argument to justify the drone it is mounted on.
At least according to the posts on Mom's Facebook page that are linked from the AJC article.
Very little mention of the other students that actually did the work.
Really lady?
If your God was so fucking awesome, why did he let this guy get beat within an inch of his life and left to die?
Better to use the technology for good, than for evil.
The actual article, once you freaking find it, has a one liner about "Cellphone records showed he was possibly in the area of DeKalb Avenue a couple of hours later." After that, it was just people walking around searching.
How the hell is this 'cell phone pings'? I was expecting some uber geeky geolocation doodad written in an overnight Cheeto induced haze. (no, not THAT "uber")
What, his phone did the auto check-in thing via some standard 'app'?
Pinging a cellphone means setting up a portable cellphone tower.
No, pinging a cellphone doesn't mean setting up a portable cellphone tower. "Pinging" is the what the cellphone companies call the process a cellphone goes through trying to register with any available cellphone tower (almost always fixed). It's an analogy for the "ping" command in unix.
There are established procedures for public safety agencies to request and obtain the cellphone data. All it takes is a signed affidavit attesting that the data is necessary for safety of life -- which this clearly was. One of the first questions in the lost person interview is "does he own a cellphone and what's the number?"
With one cell tower hearing the ping, you can get a direction (from the phased array antennas they use on a tower) and an approximate distance (from the signal strength.) Both are recorded for every ping.
From two or more towers you can use either triangulation (multiple bearings to the same ping) or time-of-arrival differences to measure the relative distances. (The latter is the basis for GPS.)
I've been involved with searches where the ping has resulted in locating the subject within a few hundred yards. One such search didn't result in a find right away because the subjects were trying to hide and heard the aircraft that was looking for them. They came out a few days later when they got hungry.