It was the so-called E911 law, it was 2002, and I was paying attention. It required location tracking for emergency purposes, and it was well understood that that meant GPS wired-in to every phone. 2005 was the deadline for all phones to be so-equipped if they were to be sold. I held on to my pre-2005 phone until 2007, when my provider informed me my phone would no longer work at a certain date, would I like a free, GPS-enabled phone?
You imply I'm lying, yet this is well known. Why is ignorance on your part evidence of lying on mine?
Here: http://bit.ly/yymPGS...In 2000, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued an order requiring wireless carriers to determine and transmit the location of callers who dial 9-1-1. The FCC set up a phased program: Phase I transmitted the location of the receiving antenna for 9-1-1 calls, while Phase II transmitted the location of the calling telephone. The order set up certain accuracy requirements and other technical details, and milestones for completing the implementation of wireless location services. Subsequent to the FCC's order, many wireless carriers requested waivers of the milestones, and the FCC granted many of them. By mid-2005, the process of Phase II implementation was generally underway, but limited by the complexity of the coordination required from wireless carriers, PSAPs, local telephone companies and other affected government agencies, and the limited funding available to local agencies which need to convert PSAP equipment to display location data (usually on computerized maps). Such rules do not apply in Canada.[27] FCC rules require that all new mobile phones will provide their latitude and longitude to emergency operators in the event of a 9-1-1 call. Carriers may choose whether to implement this via Global Positioning System (GPS) chips in each phone, or by means of triangulation between cell towers. Due to limitations in technology (of the mobile phone, cellular phone towers, and PSAP equipment), a mobile caller's geographical information may not always be available to the local PSAP. Technologies are currently under development to remedy this situation and improve performance.[28] Although there are now technological ways to obtain the geographical location of the caller, a 9-1-1 caller commonly still needs to be aware of the location of the incident about which he or she is calling."
Went into effect 2002 or so, wrapped up in 2005. They had a choice, triangulation or GPS, and while it was mixed at first, it's GPS all the way now, as it had to be.
It was intended for emergencies, and of course the use was immediately expanded by Homeland Security, the DEA, and other police-like entities who wanted this wonderful new trick. Cops can log onto a website and find any phone they choose. Some carry phone readers that can stripmine any phone of data while you wait, altho that of course is hogwash until I tediously have to look it up for someone who doesn't read news feeds every day.
The primary use of the GPS on phones by cops has been drug busts. It has many solid, good uses, but it also inevitably is used by domestic spying agencies. And India is just being above board about it.
VOIP providers are required to log IP addys of incoming and outgoing, or they were about to be required to do so, last I heard. VOIP if anything gives them even better location data.
I'd go with a TOR-like mesh adhoc WiFi system, encrypted end to end. Which would be made illegal in less than a week.
If only we had some sort of computing device that could analyze and winnow down the movements of hundreds of people at a time, esp. since we know where each started and each ends in a time period... but that's just crazy talk. Tin foil underwear nonsense, no one could pull that off.
I find your tin foil hat insult puzzling, because 1) the story is utterly true, and 2) wrecking your insult, tin foil actually works.
So the intended mockery only shows that you just don't care... it has no other meaning. You imply that to think otherwise is crazy, or the facts are wrong, yet we are sane and you only pointing out we were right all along and somehow this makes us crazy... my head hurts
New law requires credit card and valid photo ID to get a prepaid phone. It'd take a fool to give a criminal a tracking device, registered to the fool, so that they can take the hit when the manure hits the windmill. Poor and ghetto doesn't mean stupid. Stupid people don't stay in one piece very long. You want stupid, get a teenager. A suburban one. That thinks gangs are cool. It's a large crop.
They can listen to the microphone pickup whenever they want, and that isn't exactly well known. My belief would only be beggared if they didn't have a wakeupandtelluswhereyouare command. It can be done, so it has been done, or could be with the next update. It would have to be implemented that way, or people would notice the considerable power drain GPS engenders on a phone.
A cuter trick would be an inertial tracker chip for the times the phone is shut off, or the phone can't get a signal, or GPS is blocked by a ceiling or trees. It could extrapolate location based on last GPS lock, accelerometer readings, and gyroscope. It could reconcile on next GPS lock. And your phone wouldn't need to be on at the time - the inertial tracker would use minimal juice. And the iPhone does have two batteries... one you can't shut off or remove, the other you can, last I heard.
Let's put it simply. The GPS tracking is part of an API of a new type of police state. Who the "police" are doesn't matter, the API does. The tech of the API varies. Location services are one, the ability to listen in on the phone is another. The elimination of anonymity is wanted and granted. The removal of laws or the mere refusal to follow them are another. Cameras are another. Car tracking is another. ID requirements to travel are another. Put it all together, and it is what we fastidiously condemned Soviet Russia for doing, what we threatened to destroy the world for, to save it from Soviet-style repression. Do recall msot Russians were okay with the police state; it was a safer place to live than Russia today. All you had to do was not piss off someone in power, that almighty "they". And they didn't have this API we are deploying over the world.
GPS gives granularity. A tower can give a location, but GPS gives them locations down to a couple of meters. Analyzed, it gives associations, meeting times, patterns of behavior. A "they" can not just know what block you are on, but who you are standing next to or walking with. Hence India.
Our country has customs against such surveillance, but those are breaking down faster than the laws that cover it. Other countries do not. India.
This is a problem that is evolving. Do remember that the tech is not static, and the signs are that it continues to grow more powerful. Hence the article about India. India is simply going first (that we know of).
It's hardly crazy to point out the bloody obvious.
I am hyperbolic because I don't have time to post too much nuance, but here goes; yes, they can use towers. But if so, they didn't need GPS, did they? Of course it's for tracking, for pete's sake that's what the article is about! They are mandating GPS tracking, full time, for everyone, forever, soon, in India. I can't absorb why you are calling the description of the very point of the subject crazy. It is what they are doing. *stonkered*facepalm*
GPS gives tracking precision, and probably speeds it up a tad, granting them the future ability to track everyone in real time as storage costs drop and processor speeds increase. What was not possible in 2002 (or extremely expensive) will be trivial in 2015. They laid the tracks, now here comes the train.
The E911 excuse was issued immediately after 911 and during the Patriot Act era, when they just ordered up their wish lists of must-want toys for surveillance.
We've got bureaucratic assassination laws that we can't see, we now can be dragged away in secret on American soil by military operatives, never to be heard from again, we're being set up to be tracked to the blinking atoms we breathe on, and somehow saying the truth is nuts? I'm not being dramatic enough, in my opinion. This is unprecedented, this is evil, this is insane, this is the takeover of the world by the anal and the deluded who think everything will be safer if we all sit at the table with our hands where they can see them, if I can borrow some Pratchett here. Cops, of all stripes, don't like anonymity, as it makes things complicated and unmanageable. My way of thinking is that they crimes they are looking for which actually matter are few, and the crimes that don't matter take up all their time and are used as a justification to make the world into a ever-constricting place where you have to sit in the desert to not be watched, (if an RC airship camera doesn't notice your campfire and zoom in to see what you are doing). If we are lucky, very lucky indeed, they'll go broke before they get all their toys deployed in the next half century.
We don't need this junk. They are charging our descendants a fortune for it (we won't raise taxes, so it's all borrowed money). I've a feeling a lot of it won't even work right. But that won't comfort me much when I or someone I love gets arrested because they trust their toys so completely that they can't use common sense.
No, you can press a button that tells you it is turned off. It indeed turns off. But they can turn it back on, and you wouldn't know it. They can't-not have the capability - the hidden power is the real reason why the phone won't work if *you disable the GPS circuit itself*. I'm not talking about the feature, I'm talking about the the circuit board itself. Years ago, I read about people trying to disable the GPS hardware itself - the phone, if they succeeded, stops functioning. chop the wires, the phone won't work. They integrated the phone with the GPS. They don't want you to shut it off. They may say it is for safety's sake, and that may be, but the auxiliary purpose is to make sure that phone is tracked. The cops and the DEA use it for drug enforcement almost exclusively. People are convicted for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. And always, the future is not like the past! Because they don't have a capability today doesn't mean they won't five years from now; the GPS tracking of cars will be like that. Using the phone's firmware as an example, I will not even take bets that cars won't even start if you disable the GPS tracker integrated into the car's systems. It's a no brainer. Power=power, if they can, they will. And we're watching them do it. And YES, of course they could use the towers to almost kinda track you. And phones had physical locations before cells. That's why they tore all the pay phones out, or placed cameras to watch those that exist. There are a few that are still anonymous, but you must admit they are a precious and dwindling few. The object is to remove anonymity for us, but not for "them".
2002: laws passes making GPS mandatory in all phones made and sold after 2005. It is done, we are told, to Make Us All Safe, so that you can dial 911. I post that it is for tracking. People tell me that I'm paranoid, that you can shut it off, that no one cares where we are. Turns out you can't shut off tracking, that phones will not work if you manage to disable GPS tracking. This is ignored when commented on. Turns out that they can turn GPS on when they want to, without you knowing, of course. People tell me, oh, so what, no one cares where you are. Now it it turns out, they want it on all the time, you can't turn it off, and of course they care very much where we all are. It's a tautology: they track us because they can, no other reason necessary. Power wants more power. And people tell me privacy doesn't matter anymore, that no one cares. Of course, the people who shoved this down our throats are not tracked; Wikileaks and Assange show us what happens when the powerful are tracked & outed. We don't even know who "they" are. But they sure get what they want.
Now they want to "save us money" by tracking our cars with GPS and providing that data to insurance companies, who of course have nothing but our welfare in mind. But, privacy is dead, it'll save us money, I'm a luddite...
The end result, so painfully, infuriatingly obvious ten years ago, is that you will not be able to move around with a phone, take a train, or a plane, or an automobile without you every move precisely recorded. Such tracking does not apply to the actual shadowy trackers, whom we can't even name without going to jail.
Freedom without anonymity is impossible. That's why those who ordered this and who use this have no names and no locations. The power is all one-way. If you can't anonymously speak or move around, you are a prisoner, no matter how pretty your cage is.
My new insurance has a million dollar lifetime cap. "Obamacare" (some sanity) isn't due to go into effect until 2014. At which point the Republican President and Congress will kill it - which was the whole point of making Obama cave on making it go into effect after he's gone. There isn't, and will never be, an "Obamacare".
We used to federally fund a lot of such research. Now it's done primarily for profit by corporations. So now it costs a quarter million a year per patient for a CF cure for quite a few people.
At some point even the libertarians have to notice that the actual free market means death for most people when so much research is necessary to discover treatments. The profit necessary to support the private research is too high for most to partake of the benefits.
This is what taxes are for. Go back to the public model, and fund the universities again with copious research grants - and freely distribute the results. Use companies to manufacture and distribute the drugs, no more.
The Age of Reason came about because knowledge was shared freely, and patrons granted money to scientists to discover. This in-house profit-only model is stifling us.
That is not a robot. It is a tele-operated tool, related to a waldo (A waldo mimics one's movements precisely - See Heinlein's story Waldo). Call it a waldo, just to keep it simple. For example, a powered suit worn by a person is a very complex waldo.
A robot is not completely operated by a human. It can be partially so; the Mars rovers are robots that do what they are told, but interpret the commands with their own programming, as they are 45 light minutes away and cannot be controlled directly.
A robot has it's own "brain". It independently operates in its environment by its own perception and judgement.
A claw on a stick is not a robot. Words are important. These things have names, and confusing the terminology muddles communication.
Relax, it's hyperbole. But truer for the under-30's than for the over-30's. We oldsters didn't grow up in the police state system that schools have become. And, I'm in the same give-us-your-fingerprints employment that you are. Young people will tend to not notice that the world has changed - they can't, they weren't here thirty years ago. For oldsters, it's horrifying.
Damn straight you aren't all fools. God, I'm depending on it! We greying-beards ain't gonna last forever. Keep that flag up and think about alternative internet tech - it will be needed.
Darkneting won't save us. They can deep packet inspect, or block service to TOR nodes, or simply disconnect anyone who tries. They can - will- turn the internet very quickly into an old fashioned telephone system, with your real name required and full tracking on at all times. Bandwidth throttling, for instance, while ostensibly to stop "hogs" and kill Netflix, is very useful to discourage people from running TOR nodes. Hard to run encrypted virtual pipes when they constrict at will.
They can pass any law they like and criminalize any trick we can come up with. The spooks behind this are not uninformed, and read the same boards we do.
Young people, 30 and below in age, are not concerned. They have never, if you think about it, lived in a free world. They laid face-down on the hallway floors in high school while giant thugs let dogs sniff their crotches, looking for drugs like aspirin and Dayquil. They have been fingerprinted, watched, recorded, and monitored to the point where their school-issued laptops were taking pictures of them in their underwear for years. They have never lived in a world where such things are insane; this is everyday life to them. As they grew up, they have to give pee tests, saliva tests, stop for random searches by cops, swear to moral turpitude, sign up to homeowner and condo associations that pretty much are prison systems with nicer plumbing, and submit every movement on the internet and in person to GPS/IP-registerd locations. They don't understand why privacy is important; they are indoctrinated by the sheer banality of the evil. People who live by sewage filtration plants don't smell the shit, and young people don't smell the loss of their liberties.
Solutions have to be hardware based combined with newer communication tech. Simple WiFi with encryption won't work; they'll make it illegal.
Ideas: go to LEDs in a tube to transmit optical signals over short distances, home to home, building to building. Infrared lasers to act as backbones to a TOR-like network that does-not-interface with the old internet. The old internet is dead, people; they commercialized it, gave to the corporations and the police states of the world.
Wild ideas: finally solve the problem of radio interference- it is a hardware/software limitation, not a real one. Thousands can transmit and receive over a single frequency if we solve this riddle, and then bandwidth is effectively infinite enough that TOR-like radio mesh networks could actually work with low latency and high throughput, with encryption.
3-D printing of custom network nodes that do not conform to the government's ideas of MAC addresses and complete surveillance. We'll need our own custom 3-D printers as well; they will easily require mass-produced printers to ID themselves in the products.
Well out there ideas: Quantum entanglement as a communications method. Don't laugh too hard; think about it. A transmission system that doesn't actually transmit through the air, but instead transmits at a distance without any detectable means. It can be done; I'm not the genius to do it. Believe it that the military will do it if it can be done. We all can do it too.
US businesses supported the National Socialist government for many years before the war started. Henry Ford, for instance, was an admirer of Adolph Hitler and his pro-business policies. We were not anti-German, and became so long after France and England commenced their conflict with Germany. The US was not particularly interested in Germany's civil rights issues - we sent back a liner full of Jewish refugees to Germany, presumably to die, rather than annoy the Germans.
Americans re-wrote their own past after the war started. We were always at war with Oceania.
If Germany had not started a war with everyone else on the planet, they probably would have gotten away with the execution of gays, Jews, Gypsies and the handicapped. We'd be arguing now about whether or not it actually happened. For illumination here, let me remind us that Indonesia, after electing a democratic government we didn't like, was overthrown by our CIA-trained anti-commie fanatics, who blacked out the country and used a sports stadium to execute all the union leaders and socialists, and a hell of a lot of workers as well - and the US remember not a bit of it, and would insist it didn't happen. We have a very convenient memory. Reference Iraq: lies to attack, destroyed the place, now consider it a "victory". We have no self-critical history here - such is considered "leftist" and therefore disreputable.
And fascism is a mode of government which requires a fusion of corporate business and government, to the point which it becomes impossible to separate the motivations of the two.
The "gimp" GIMP was named for was the leather-masked slave kept in the basement of the shop in "Pulp Fiction". The alternate meaning means "crippled" as in a "gimp" leg" or "the kid is a gimp". The intended connotation is horrifyingly stupid - a good parallel would be your word processor - the "TWINK". Equally intended to be sexually childish. And named to fail.
The connotation is obviously intended to provoke at least and offend at most.It costs nothing to rename it something less adolescent.
And don't get me started about OGG - dear gods, why???? Name it something related to sound, at least. Obscurity for obscurity's sake is a nerd's joy, but death for the format. Stop gigglesnorting and name it.TUN or.GSND or.FREE, a good name for a good product, named to evoke what it is, rather than crack up your fellow Pterry followers. And it isn't even funny to us. It makes no sense on any level than being intentionally irrelevant for the sheer joy of making people walk away.
Programmers also think they know how to name things as well. The... GIMP? Really? Try to explain to your employer that you want everyone in the department to use the GIMP to edit images. Then you can try to bring in the GNONORREA, RTARD, and MYBYTCH office suite components, all really well built - with names designed to send you to sensitivity training and a fine permanent billet in the data entry department (if they don't fire you outright).
The police could send a "kill camera" signal to every phone and appliance in the zone that has wifi or cell access, so that nothing will take a picture. Apple already applied for the patent (has the patent) for killing cameras in a specified area with a kill code. Think it through. There is nothing to stop them from developing a kill code, and they probably already have asked for one from manufacturers. It'll be here, sooner rather than later. If the tech generation has a failing, it is that it believes that their tech is intrinsically on their side - it's why I have such a hard time getting people to care about computerized vote counting. The machine ain't your friend, not when you don't control it.
The 9th Amendment was implemented precisely because they could not anticipate the future.
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Rights exist even if not anticipated or enumerated by the original document. You can state that you have the right not to be scanned by a telepath, even if we don't have telepathy. Rights are not privileges, and you should not have to beg for them.
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It was the so-called E911 law, it was 2002, and I was paying attention. It required location tracking for emergency purposes, and it was well understood that that meant GPS wired-in to every phone. 2005 was the deadline for all phones to be so-equipped if they were to be sold. I held on to my pre-2005 phone until 2007, when my provider informed me my phone would no longer work at a certain date, would I like a free, GPS-enabled phone?
You imply I'm lying, yet this is well known. Why is ignorance on your part evidence of lying on mine?
Here: ...In 2000, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued an order requiring wireless carriers to determine and transmit the location of callers who dial 9-1-1. The FCC set up a phased program: Phase I transmitted the location of the receiving antenna for 9-1-1 calls, while Phase II transmitted the location of the calling telephone. The order set up certain accuracy requirements and other technical details, and milestones for completing the implementation of wireless location services. Subsequent to the FCC's order, many wireless carriers requested waivers of the milestones, and the FCC granted many of them. By mid-2005, the process of Phase II implementation was generally underway, but limited by the complexity of the coordination required from wireless carriers, PSAPs, local telephone companies and other affected government agencies, and the limited funding available to local agencies which need to convert PSAP equipment to display location data (usually on computerized maps). Such rules do not apply in Canada.[27]
http://bit.ly/yymPGS
FCC rules require that all new mobile phones will provide their latitude and longitude to emergency operators in the event of a 9-1-1 call. Carriers may choose whether to implement this via Global Positioning System (GPS) chips in each phone, or by means of triangulation between cell towers. Due to limitations in technology (of the mobile phone, cellular phone towers, and PSAP equipment), a mobile caller's geographical information may not always be available to the local PSAP. Technologies are currently under development to remedy this situation and improve performance.[28] Although there are now technological ways to obtain the geographical location of the caller, a 9-1-1 caller commonly still needs to be aware of the location of the incident about which he or she is calling."
Went into effect 2002 or so, wrapped up in 2005. They had a choice, triangulation or GPS, and while it was mixed at first, it's GPS all the way now, as it had to be.
It was intended for emergencies, and of course the use was immediately expanded by Homeland Security, the DEA, and other police-like entities who wanted this wonderful new trick. Cops can log onto a website and find any phone they choose. Some carry phone readers that can stripmine any phone of data while you wait, altho that of course is hogwash until I tediously have to look it up for someone who doesn't read news feeds every day.
The primary use of the GPS on phones by cops has been drug busts. It has many solid, good uses, but it also inevitably is used by domestic spying agencies. And India is just being above board about it.
VOIP providers are required to log IP addys of incoming and outgoing, or they were about to be required to do so, last I heard. VOIP if anything gives them even better location data.
I'd go with a TOR-like mesh adhoc WiFi system, encrypted end to end. Which would be made illegal in less than a week.
If only we had some sort of computing device that could analyze and winnow down the movements of hundreds of people at a time, esp. since we know where each started and each ends in a time period... but that's just crazy talk. Tin foil underwear nonsense, no one could pull that off.
I find your tin foil hat insult puzzling, because 1) the story is utterly true, and 2) wrecking your insult, tin foil actually works.
So the intended mockery only shows that you just don't care... it has no other meaning. You imply that to think otherwise is crazy, or the facts are wrong, yet we are sane and you only pointing out we were right all along and somehow this makes us crazy... my head hurts
Prepay requires photo ID and debit/credit card. That hole was filled a while back. No anonymous prepaid phones, that's over.
New law requires credit card and valid photo ID to get a prepaid phone. It'd take a fool to give a criminal a tracking device, registered to the fool, so that they can take the hit when the manure hits the windmill. Poor and ghetto doesn't mean stupid. Stupid people don't stay in one piece very long. You want stupid, get a teenager. A suburban one. That thinks gangs are cool. It's a large crop.
They can listen to the microphone pickup whenever they want, and that isn't exactly well known. My belief would only be beggared if they didn't have a wakeupandtelluswhereyouare command. It can be done, so it has been done, or could be with the next update. It would have to be implemented that way, or people would notice the considerable power drain GPS engenders on a phone.
A cuter trick would be an inertial tracker chip for the times the phone is shut off, or the phone can't get a signal, or GPS is blocked by a ceiling or trees. It could extrapolate location based on last GPS lock, accelerometer readings, and gyroscope. It could reconcile on next GPS lock. And your phone wouldn't need to be on at the time - the inertial tracker would use minimal juice. And the iPhone does have two batteries... one you can't shut off or remove, the other you can, last I heard.
I'd be careful - they label you crazy out here if you state the obvious truth.
Let's put it simply. The GPS tracking is part of an API of a new type of police state. Who the "police" are doesn't matter, the API does. The tech of the API varies. Location services are one, the ability to listen in on the phone is another. The elimination of anonymity is wanted and granted. The removal of laws or the mere refusal to follow them are another. Cameras are another. Car tracking is another. ID requirements to travel are another. Put it all together, and it is what we fastidiously condemned Soviet Russia for doing, what we threatened to destroy the world for, to save it from Soviet-style repression. Do recall msot Russians were okay with the police state; it was a safer place to live than Russia today. All you had to do was not piss off someone in power, that almighty "they". And they didn't have this API we are deploying over the world.
GPS gives granularity. A tower can give a location, but GPS gives them locations down to a couple of meters. Analyzed, it gives associations, meeting times, patterns of behavior. A "they" can not just know what block you are on, but who you are standing next to or walking with. Hence India.
Our country has customs against such surveillance, but those are breaking down faster than the laws that cover it. Other countries do not. India.
This is a problem that is evolving. Do remember that the tech is not static, and the signs are that it continues to grow more powerful. Hence the article about India. India is simply going first (that we know of).
It's hardly crazy to point out the bloody obvious.
I am hyperbolic because I don't have time to post too much nuance, but here goes; yes, they can use towers. But if so, they didn't need GPS, did they? Of course it's for tracking, for pete's sake that's what the article is about! They are mandating GPS tracking, full time, for everyone, forever, soon, in India. I can't absorb why you are calling the description of the very point of the subject crazy. It is what they are doing. *stonkered*facepalm*
GPS gives tracking precision, and probably speeds it up a tad, granting them the future ability to track everyone in real time as storage costs drop and processor speeds increase. What was not possible in 2002 (or extremely expensive) will be trivial in 2015. They laid the tracks, now here comes the train.
The E911 excuse was issued immediately after 911 and during the Patriot Act era, when they just ordered up their wish lists of must-want toys for surveillance.
We've got bureaucratic assassination laws that we can't see, we now can be dragged away in secret on American soil by military operatives, never to be heard from again, we're being set up to be tracked to the blinking atoms we breathe on, and somehow saying the truth is nuts? I'm not being dramatic enough, in my opinion. This is unprecedented, this is evil, this is insane, this is the takeover of the world by the anal and the deluded who think everything will be safer if we all sit at the table with our hands where they can see them, if I can borrow some Pratchett here. Cops, of all stripes, don't like anonymity, as it makes things complicated and unmanageable. My way of thinking is that they crimes they are looking for which actually matter are few, and the crimes that don't matter take up all their time and are used as a justification to make the world into a ever-constricting place where you have to sit in the desert to not be watched, (if an RC airship camera doesn't notice your campfire and zoom in to see what you are doing). If we are lucky, very lucky indeed, they'll go broke before they get all their toys deployed in the next half century.
We don't need this junk. They are charging our descendants a fortune for it (we won't raise taxes, so it's all borrowed money). I've a feeling a lot of it won't even work right. But that won't comfort me much when I or someone I love gets arrested because they trust their toys so completely that they can't use common sense.
No, you can press a button that tells you it is turned off. It indeed turns off. But they can turn it back on, and you wouldn't know it. They can't-not have the capability - the hidden power is the real reason why the phone won't work if *you disable the GPS circuit itself*. I'm not talking about the feature, I'm talking about the the circuit board itself. Years ago, I read about people trying to disable the GPS hardware itself - the phone, if they succeeded, stops functioning. chop the wires, the phone won't work. They integrated the phone with the GPS. They don't want you to shut it off. They may say it is for safety's sake, and that may be, but the auxiliary purpose is to make sure that phone is tracked. The cops and the DEA use it for drug enforcement almost exclusively. People are convicted for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And always, the future is not like the past! Because they don't have a capability today doesn't mean they won't five years from now; the GPS tracking of cars will be like that. Using the phone's firmware as an example, I will not even take bets that cars won't even start if you disable the GPS tracker integrated into the car's systems. It's a no brainer. Power=power, if they can, they will. And we're watching them do it.
And YES, of course they could use the towers to almost kinda track you. And phones had physical locations before cells.
That's why they tore all the pay phones out, or placed cameras to watch those that exist. There are a few that are still anonymous, but you must admit they are a precious and dwindling few. The object is to remove anonymity for us, but not for "them".
2002: laws passes making GPS mandatory in all phones made and sold after 2005. It is done, we are told, to Make Us All Safe, so that you can dial 911.
I post that it is for tracking. People tell me that I'm paranoid, that you can shut it off, that no one cares where we are.
Turns out you can't shut off tracking, that phones will not work if you manage to disable GPS tracking.
This is ignored when commented on.
Turns out that they can turn GPS on when they want to, without you knowing, of course.
People tell me, oh, so what, no one cares where you are.
Now it it turns out, they want it on all the time, you can't turn it off, and of course they care very much where we all are. It's a tautology: they track us because they can, no other reason necessary. Power wants more power.
And people tell me privacy doesn't matter anymore, that no one cares. Of course, the people who shoved this down our throats are not tracked; Wikileaks and Assange show us what happens when the powerful are tracked & outed. We don't even know who "they" are. But they sure get what they want.
Now they want to "save us money" by tracking our cars with GPS and providing that data to insurance companies, who of course have nothing but our welfare in mind. But, privacy is dead, it'll save us money, I'm a luddite...
The end result, so painfully, infuriatingly obvious ten years ago, is that you will not be able to move around with a phone, take a train, or a plane, or an automobile without you every move precisely recorded. Such tracking does not apply to the actual shadowy trackers, whom we can't even name without going to jail.
Freedom without anonymity is impossible. That's why those who ordered this and who use this have no names and no locations. The power is all one-way. If you can't anonymously speak or move around, you are a prisoner, no matter how pretty your cage is.
My new insurance has a million dollar lifetime cap. "Obamacare" (some sanity) isn't due to go into effect until 2014. At which point the Republican President and Congress will kill it - which was the whole point of making Obama cave on making it go into effect after he's gone. There isn't, and will never be, an "Obamacare".
A quarter million plus a year for the drug.
We used to federally fund a lot of such research. Now it's done primarily for profit by corporations. So now it costs a quarter million a year per patient for a CF cure for quite a few people.
At some point even the libertarians have to notice that the actual free market means death for most people when so much research is necessary to discover treatments. The profit necessary to support the private research is too high for most to partake of the benefits.
This is what taxes are for. Go back to the public model, and fund the universities again with copious research grants - and freely distribute the results. Use companies to manufacture and distribute the drugs, no more.
The Age of Reason came about because knowledge was shared freely, and patrons granted money to scientists to discover. This in-house profit-only model is stifling us.
That is not a robot. It is a tele-operated tool, related to a waldo (A waldo mimics one's movements precisely - See Heinlein's story Waldo). Call it a waldo, just to keep it simple. For example, a powered suit worn by a person is a very complex waldo.
A robot is not completely operated by a human. It can be partially so; the Mars rovers are robots that do what they are told, but interpret the commands with their own programming, as they are 45 light minutes away and cannot be controlled directly.
A robot has it's own "brain". It independently operates in its environment by its own perception and judgement.
A claw on a stick is not a robot. Words are important. These things have names, and confusing the terminology muddles communication.
Relax, it's hyperbole. But truer for the under-30's than for the over-30's. We oldsters didn't grow up in the police state system that schools have become. And, I'm in the same give-us-your-fingerprints employment that you are. Young people will tend to not notice that the world has changed - they can't, they weren't here thirty years ago. For oldsters, it's horrifying.
Damn straight you aren't all fools. God, I'm depending on it! We greying-beards ain't gonna last forever. Keep that flag up and think about alternative internet tech - it will be needed.
"So is everyone who buys a white, nondescript minivan automatically flagged as some sort of pedophile or terrorist? "
Yes. Try sitting in that van, parked. Just the act of looking out the window at a kid going by will get you cops with guns drawn. The USA is insane.
This was forecast almost twenty years back, in the Culture of Fear. We fear the wrong things. http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Afraid-Things/dp/0465014909
Darkneting won't save us. They can deep packet inspect, or block service to TOR nodes, or simply disconnect anyone who tries. They can - will- turn the internet very quickly into an old fashioned telephone system, with your real name required and full tracking on at all times. Bandwidth throttling, for instance, while ostensibly to stop "hogs" and kill Netflix, is very useful to discourage people from running TOR nodes. Hard to run encrypted virtual pipes when they constrict at will.
They can pass any law they like and criminalize any trick we can come up with. The spooks behind this are not uninformed, and read the same boards we do.
Young people, 30 and below in age, are not concerned. They have never, if you think about it, lived in a free world. They laid face-down on the hallway floors in high school while giant thugs let dogs sniff their crotches, looking for drugs like aspirin and Dayquil. They have been fingerprinted, watched, recorded, and monitored to the point where their school-issued laptops were taking pictures of them in their underwear for years. They have never lived in a world where such things are insane; this is everyday life to them. As they grew up, they have to give pee tests, saliva tests, stop for random searches by cops, swear to moral turpitude, sign up to homeowner and condo associations that pretty much are prison systems with nicer plumbing, and submit every movement on the internet and in person to GPS/IP-registerd locations. They don't understand why privacy is important; they are indoctrinated by the sheer banality of the evil. People who live by sewage filtration plants don't smell the shit, and young people don't smell the loss of their liberties.
Solutions have to be hardware based combined with newer communication tech. Simple WiFi with encryption won't work; they'll make it illegal.
Ideas: go to LEDs in a tube to transmit optical signals over short distances, home to home, building to building. Infrared lasers to act as backbones to a TOR-like network that does-not-interface with the old internet. The old internet is dead, people; they commercialized it, gave to the corporations and the police states of the world.
Wild ideas: finally solve the problem of radio interference- it is a hardware/software limitation, not a real one. Thousands can transmit and receive over a single frequency if we solve this riddle, and then bandwidth is effectively infinite enough that TOR-like radio mesh networks could actually work with low latency and high throughput, with encryption.
3-D printing of custom network nodes that do not conform to the government's ideas of MAC addresses and complete surveillance. We'll need our own custom 3-D printers as well; they will easily require mass-produced printers to ID themselves in the products.
Well out there ideas: Quantum entanglement as a communications method. Don't laugh too hard; think about it. A transmission system that doesn't actually transmit through the air, but instead transmits at a distance without any detectable means. It can be done; I'm not the genius to do it. Believe it that the military will do it if it can be done. We all can do it too.
US businesses supported the National Socialist government for many years before the war started. Henry Ford, for instance, was an admirer of Adolph Hitler and his pro-business policies. We were not anti-German, and became so long after France and England commenced their conflict with Germany. The US was not particularly interested in Germany's civil rights issues - we sent back a liner full of Jewish refugees to Germany, presumably to die, rather than annoy the Germans.
Americans re-wrote their own past after the war started. We were always at war with Oceania.
If Germany had not started a war with everyone else on the planet, they probably would have gotten away with the execution of gays, Jews, Gypsies and the handicapped. We'd be arguing now about whether or not it actually happened. For illumination here, let me remind us that Indonesia, after electing a democratic government we didn't like, was overthrown by our CIA-trained anti-commie fanatics, who blacked out the country and used a sports stadium to execute all the union leaders and socialists, and a hell of a lot of workers as well - and the US remember not a bit of it, and would insist it didn't happen. We have a very convenient memory. Reference Iraq: lies to attack, destroyed the place, now consider it a "victory". We have no self-critical history here - such is considered "leftist" and therefore disreputable.
Godwin's Law becomes null when fascism is reborn.
And fascism is a mode of government which requires a fusion of corporate business and government, to the point which it becomes impossible to separate the motivations of the two.
The "gimp" GIMP was named for was the leather-masked slave kept in the basement of the shop in "Pulp Fiction". The alternate meaning means "crippled" as in a "gimp" leg" or "the kid is a gimp". The intended connotation is horrifyingly stupid - a good parallel would be your word processor - the "TWINK". Equally intended to be sexually childish. And named to fail.
The connotation is obviously intended to provoke at least and offend at most.It costs nothing to rename it something less adolescent.
And don't get me started about OGG - dear gods, why???? Name it something related to sound, at least. Obscurity for obscurity's sake is a nerd's joy, but death for the format. Stop gigglesnorting and name it .TUN or .GSND or .FREE, a good name for a good product, named to evoke what it is, rather than crack up your fellow Pterry followers. And it isn't even funny to us. It makes no sense on any level than being intentionally irrelevant for the sheer joy of making people walk away.
Programmers also think they know how to name things as well. The... GIMP? Really? Try to explain to your employer that you want everyone in the department to use the GIMP to edit images. Then you can try to bring in the GNONORREA, RTARD, and MYBYTCH office suite components, all really well built - with names designed to send you to sensitivity training and a fine permanent billet in the data entry department (if they don't fire you outright).
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market.
The police could send a "kill camera" signal to every phone and appliance in the zone that has wifi or cell access, so that nothing will take a picture.
Apple already applied for the patent (has the patent) for killing cameras in a specified area with a kill code.
Think it through. There is nothing to stop them from developing a kill code, and they probably already have asked for one from manufacturers. It'll be here, sooner rather than later.
If the tech generation has a failing, it is that it believes that their tech is intrinsically on their side - it's why I have such a hard time getting people to care about computerized vote counting. The machine ain't your friend, not when you don't control it.
The 9th Amendment was implemented precisely because they could not anticipate the future.
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Rights exist even if not anticipated or enumerated by the original document. You can state that you have the right not to be scanned by a telepath, even if we don't have telepathy. Rights are not privileges, and you should not have to beg for them.