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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."
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.
With an iPhone is battery would have been long dead over 2 days...
http://www.fox5atlanta.com/vir...
Karma: Bad
Click the sublte (ajc.com) next to the article title
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/l... It looks like they've started putting the article reference next to the story title.
And how does it reveal your location?
Does this mean some kind of peer-to-peer WiFi or Bluetooth? I don't understand.
If it's cellular, then the phone is either reachable or it isn't, that doesn't change based upon how near you are to the other phone.
Are they saying they just used a built-in location service to find it?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
How do you ping a phone? Was it through some app, or at the network layer?
Yes, because it's much too difficult to actually put the link to the story in the fine summary. They've tried it for 15+ years and it's been obvious that the technique didn't work so we need to come up with something new. Something edgy, like making the link obscure.
Oh, for those that are reading challenged, the above was sarcasm.
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?
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'?
If you click the (ajc.com) link right next to the title, you'll find yourself looking at the article, as if by magic!
Magic indeed. I suppose this is the fault of the style sheet designer rather than the submitter or editor, but (ajc.com) is not underlined, is not a button, and is not part of a menu, so it never occurred to me that it was a link.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
(ajc.com) is not underlined, is not a button, and is not part of a menu, so it never occurred to me that it was a link.
UX Designer: "Nailed it!"
Not that I disagree with you, but ...
> They've tried it for 15+ years and it's been obvious that the technique didn't work so we need to come up with something new.
If the measure of it working is that people click the link to RTFA ...
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.
There's some significant holes in this story. According to the ajc.com article, he had last been seen 11pm Friday. Friends started looking for him "last night," presumably Sunday based on the article's date of Monday, Oct 19. That means he would have been lying unconscious for up to two days, yet later in the article we read, 'Atlanta police Lt. Charles Hampton described Hubert’s injuries as minor, adding that he was “not sure where those injuries came from.”' Also, what are these pings they're talking about? Pings like when the cops have the phone company tell them which towers his phone is hitting? Were the cops relaying that info to student searchers instead of searching themselves? It sounds like something else: "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.” How do civilian student searchers "find pings"? I wish journalism wasn't such a realm of technical illiterates.
When you hover your mouse over it, an underline appears, revealing it's a link. I was also at first wondering what those domain names are doing next to the headline. The UI designer really seems to go out of their way to hide the fact this is a link, and they seem to even try to hide the existence of the link by making it green on green.
...no foul play was suspected.
In general this requires you to have an app running sending out your GPS coordinates to some server that records this info.
Or dial 911. The E911 (enhanced) system includes GPS position data for incoming calls, including wired and cell. This system was put in place specifically to deal with people who call 911 and then don't know where they are so they can't tell the 911 op where to send help.
This is why you are supposed to register an address with your VoIP cell service, so when you call 911 not only will the call be routed to the correct Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) but so help can be sent if you are unable to tell them where it is needed.
Some lost people make the mistake of using the last gasp of battery power calling a friend for help, when they should call 911 and their location will be recorded.
The only way to get a GPS location from a phone is if the phone has the GPS function switched on,
The consumer-available GPS function does not need to be "on" for E911 to get that data.
And initiating a full-scale search for a person who is of-age and not known to be in danger would create a lot of full-scale searches for people who just didn't want to be where they were. We had the owner of a local hot-dog shop just not show up for work one day around here. He was found a few hundred miles away just trying to not be involved with the hot-dog shop anymore. The owner of a car audio store did the same thing about a month prior.
That's why missing person reports don't automatically trigger an all-out search. Not for a college student who just didn't come home. Now, one that is kidnapped from the street, or a dementia patient, or someone who is reported missing in a wilderness area, yes. But a college student who could have easily decided to shack up with someone for the weekend? If you burn out your search volunteers looking for people who just didn't want to be where they were anymore, you'll not have them available when there is someone who really does need to be found.
Ahhh, they probably wrote a VB app to "ping" his phone...I wish we had some video footage showing the size 400 font and single-button UI in action though.