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India Makes It Compulsory For Phones To Have a 'Panic Button' (cio.com)
Reader itwbennett writes: Starting in January 2017, all feature phones sold in India will need to have a panic button that will alert "police, designated friends and relatives, for immediate response in case of distress or security related issues," said Minister of Communications, Ravi Shankar Prasad, on Twitter late Tuesday. The measure is one of many responses by the Indian government to the growing women safety issues in the country. Furthermore, starting in January 2018, mobile phones will also be required to have GPS systems to help pinpoint the location of the affected person in the event of harassment or distress, said Prasad.Mashable has more details.
How many butt-dialed panics will that generate per day per square mile?
If they are allowed to use software it's no different from the US requirements which require access to 911 without an unlock code and the E911 requirement (which is such incredible BS, even last year when calling 911 from my phone the operator still asked me my location and city, I was calling in to report black ice on a state route in a city I'm not familiar with, I wasn't sure exactly which jurisdiction I was in, the freaking phone is REQUIRED to give them lat and longitude, it should have come up on their screen before they even picked up my call ffs)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Only men are allowed to have phones:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/india-banning-women-owning-mobile-phones-160226120014162.html
There is no growing women safety issues.
There is growing international (and national) awareness to the general un safety/danger for women.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And it must say "Don't Panic"
India has been trying to support it's nascent cell phone manufacturing industry. They just told Apple no on selling Used phones there.
A cynic would see this as a ploy to help the local industry, making a hardware button specific for a single market. For a local producers who only sell to India, the single market requirement isn't much of a handicap. To international companies this is more of an issue for supply chains and all.
Of course this is not the reason, it's really to protect the women. Which is why they fully support cell phones for women because they cause rapes... wait...
Presumably some phones or alternative devices offer such functionality (otherwise, that sounds like a good opportunity). So, if people choose devices that don't have such a button, then it is there choice, just as they choose to carry or not carry various other defense devices.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Buy every woman a gun. A panic button isn't going to do them any good because many police there empathize with social conservatives who are doing most of the harassment. Cops either show up late or not at all. Prosecutors reflect the same attitudes and value the life of a male aggressor more than a female victim. So turn the tables on them. Either drag the scumbag men off the street and put them in 'protective custody' or bring the coroners wagon to the scene after a failed attack.
Have gnu, will travel.
He's informative and he's correct.
Emergency calls in the NANPA areas are handled by PSAPs (public service answering points). Most are consolidated centers, like the one servicing all 12 of CenturyLink states.
The operator is trained to take the call as soon as possible, and say "911; what is the emergency". *
At that point the only thing they have for sure is your CLID and if there's a LIDB CNAM entry for it, that entry (Colloquially "Caller ID number and a name").
It takes time for the system to also display any other information. Your cellular telephone's GPS is actually not used -- instead tower information is used. However, if you're out on a rural highway with sequential towers, you're likely only hitting one tower so all the operator can know is you're within an X-mile radius of some location. Note that "X miles" is approximated by using the round-trip-delay in the cellphone-to-tower communication and dividing by the speed of light.
So that's E911. This new suggestion that Indian phones send out their coordinates supposes that the GPS/GLONASS is on all the time. If it isn't, it may need to acquire ephemeris data and that can take 30s-5m if the GPS has been recently used, and up to an hour if not. (These times vary depending on various factors too complex to get into here and not entirely relevant). The point being is that if you push the "PANIC" button and someone is attacking you, it is extremely likely they can take your phone and render it inoperative prior to it getting a GPS fix. (GLONASS ephemeris time to live is a one-byte field that counts how many 900-second intervals the data is valid. This allows their users more flexibility in not needing always-on devices.)
That leaves the simple issue that if someone wants to perpetrate a crime in India then the FIRST THING they are going to do is take the phone away from the victim. So much for a panic button.
Ehud
* There was talk at some point of having the automated system say it and then put the operator on the line (thus saving on personnel costs) but they decided that oftentimes what the operator hears in the background while saying that is actually useful intel. Also in the event of a delay in putting an operator on the call, the caller hasn't already started talking.
When I call 911 from the freeway it goes straight to the California Highway Patrol. They say "CHP, what are you reporting?"
Drill baby drill - on Mars
If it isn't, it may need to acquire ephemeris data and that can take 30s-5m if the GPS has been recently used, and up to an hour if not.
Cell phones use assisted-GPS to improve the position acquisition speed. From the Wikipedia article:
Standalone GPS provides first position in approximately 30–40 seconds. A standalone GPS needs orbital information of the satellites to calculate the current position. The data rate of the satellite signal is only 50 bit/s, so downloading orbital information like ephemerides and the almanac directly from satellites typically takes a long time, and if the satellite signals are lost during the acquisition of this information, it is discarded and the standalone system has to start from scratch. In A-GPS, the network operator deploys an A-GPS server. These A-GPS servers download the orbital information from the satellite and store it in the database. An A-GPS capable device can connect to these servers and download this information using mobile network radio bearers such as GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, LTE or even using other wireless radio bearers such as Wi-Fi. Usually the data rate of these bearers is high, hence downloading orbital information takes less time.
They should make it a panic switch instead. Women can toggle it on when they're in India and off if they visit civilization.
Except for people in other countries where their emergency code is 999 or something else.
phones will also be required to have GPS systems
What does that mean? Are they requiring that the GPS always be on (and draining the battery)? Or will the required GPS be turned off to save power and thus no more useful than a phone without one? Perhaps what would be really nice is require the panic button to power on the GPS, but it takes time to get a GPS lock and even then is wasn't stated that this would be put in place.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
when calling 911 from my phone the operator still asked me my location and city, I was calling in to report black ice on a state route in a city I'm not familiar with, I wasn't sure exactly which jurisdiction I was in, the freaking phone is REQUIRED to give them lat and longitude, it should have come up on their screen before they even picked up my call
In the real world, the dispatcher doesn't always get the information instantaneously and it isn't always that accurate. That is why she has to ask.
Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP
Enhanced 9-1-1 [The law since 2012 in the US]
And this is just one symptom of their problems. Their federal gov't recognizes the problems and takes measures (well thought out or not) to solve them. But the backward locals just block progress.
It's time for the feds to take the local officials who thought up this ban, demote them to Dalits, hand them buckets and shovels and put them in charge of cleaning out the outhouses.
Have gnu, will travel.
...the US requirements which require access to 911 without an unlock code and the E911 requirement (which is such incredible BS, even last year when calling 911 from my phone the operator still asked me my location and city, I was calling in to report black ice on a state route in a city I'm not familiar with, I wasn't sure exactly which jurisdiction I was in, the freaking phone is REQUIRED to give them lat and longitude, it should have come up on their screen before they even picked up my call ffs)
The phone I have has an especially wonky GPS, since they combined the GPS and NFC antennas and put them on the removable back. If the pins on the phone don't make absolutely perfect contact with the antenna, it will get a poor signal or no signal at all, and the location guesses tend to be downright laughable. Sometimes, its location data even gets "stuck" and my weather widget keeps reporting a faraway location I had been earlier. Indeed, after avoiding flagship phones for a long time, I'm ready to go ahead and pop for a G5, because I'm so pissed off at this phone's GPS performance.
I'm not surprised the 911 operator asked for your location.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!