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UCSD Students Tracking Their Friends' Locations 246

Posted by timothy from the after-my-own-heart dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The location-tracking software, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas. No GPS Required. Article from Salon here..."
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UCSD Students Tracking Their Friends' Locations More

UCSD Students Tracking Their Friends' Locations

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  • American University is going completely wireless (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Starting this fall, American University is going to have a completely wireless computer and phone network for all of it's students. Throw in a bit of gps, and hey, easy to track everyone everywhere! (Plus they get to add that fun new "set your phones to vibrate while in public rule!)

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • UCSB campus is always sunny and is made of entirely of wood and recycled aircraft tires.

    • Re:cool (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Signal Degradation due to weather and metal isn't so much an issue with triangulation technology because in the case of weather it will just degrade the signal to all antennaes equally from which you can still obtain a differential signal and in the case of a metal wall blocking one antenna, you are still going to be able to track the individual on a line which is all you really need most of the time (still there are so many algorithms that take signal degradation due to obstacles into account. ie every cell phone, you just need to pick the method of choice and bam) One thing I'd like to know is how they effectively sector the antennas on the campus. (Everyone is on the bad site of this tech but say campus security can use it to know the exact position of a victim who is fleeing an attacker, instead of having those polls they have to wait at. i think attackers would be more wary if the student has to only push one button to get campus security tracking her(his) every location)

      • Salon goof (Score:5, Interesting)

        by plover ( 150551 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2002 @12:05AM (#3683940) Homepage Journal
        When you consider that they probably have WiFi access points on just about every floor, it's pretty easy to say "within a margin of error of one floor."

        This sounds similar to the triangulation the cell phone companies tried to use to locate phones when ordered to do so by law enforcement (to comply with CALEA and ostensibly E-911.) That didn't work well enough in rural cell areas, however, thus the move to on-board GPS receivers in cell phones.

        The thing that amused me the most was the error in the Salon article's description of the technology involved:

        The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas.

        GPS does not use signal strength. GPS uses differential timing. [trimble.com] This system and software work like a GPS in the same way that a kitchen stove works like a microwave oven. Love them Salon facts.

  • cool! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mike77 ( 519751 ) <mraley77NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @03:59PM (#3681457)
    It'll make playing that "assasin" game all the much more fun!

    Nothing is better than sneaking up behind your friends and shooting them w/ non lethal devices!

    • Don't even get me started. First year of college I was so gung-ho about playing that game. My friends and I went nuts with planning it. We were going to have cars waiting, back door exits unclocked thanks to stolen janitor keys, the works.

      We're walking down to the student union to get our guns and get the photos taken, when we look on the TV to see that some no-name high school in Colorado just had 2 kids go nuts and waste a dozen people.

      They decided that "assasins" was no longer PC, and tried to make it "sticker" tag, where instead of blasting someone with a super soaker in the back of the head during their dif-eq final, we now had to place cutesy stickers on their clothing to tag them out.

      Oh, the irony of it all.
    • "He's right behind you!!! RUN!!!!"
  • This is a great hack. Keep track of your friends on campus, sneak up on them for a little mischief, etc.

    I wonder how many are going to bust each other for fibbing about their location ;)
  • when I was 15 all I did was play video games and get drunk in parks. I guesse some people are just more productive at a young age :(

  • Should be... (Score:5, Funny)

    by da3dAlus ( 20553 ) <dustin.grauNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @03:59PM (#3681466) Homepage Journal
    from the marco!-...-polo! department?
    • nono.. you misinterpreted it.. it's not "after" as in someone who is following someone else. it's after as in "gah! someone's tracking me!" ;)
  • A hack here and some ducktape there and you've got yourself a game!

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I would not take a bribe to be tracked in that manor. Of course, even if you paid full price they could still track you. But I would not willingly give my permission to do so.

      Its kind of like the people who drive those cars wrapped in advertisements. I can't stand them. All they are doing is perpetuating greedy capitalist marketing scum.

      (Kinda like that big f'ing banner ad in the middle of the page when reading the slashdot article.)

      Speaking of which, when does Slashdot plan on giving up its .ORG for a .COM, since its clearly a for profit company, and not a .ORG.

  • I'd be more impressed if he were measuring the trajectory of the packets. :)

  • Xerox (Score:3, Interesting)

    by scott1853 ( 194884 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:03PM (#3681492)
    I remember seeing a show many years ago about XPARC and how they developed a system that would track an employee anywhere in their office by using transmitters on their ID badges. Problem was nobody would were the badges after they got through the front door because they didn't want to be tracked. Duh.
    • I liked when Principal Skinner was trying to find bar, who was playing hookie. It shows him look up that huge electronic map of the school and go "Damnit, if only more of the children had gone along with the electronic tracking devices!"

      It cuts to Martin Prince in class with this massive LED coming out of his temple starting giving off this rythmic pulsing+beep, it was great.
    • The trick is then to get the employees to carry the tracking devices without prior knowledge.

      Here, have a free company-sponsored T-shirt and pen!
      • Actually, as someone who is working on a security taskforce at a school, the key is to make it difficult to do things without your badge.

        Want to make copies? Swipe your badge.
        Want to eat in the company cafeteria? Show your badge.
        Need to get into the restroom, access this part of the building...?

        I think you get the picture.

        You can require badges to be displayed, but a better motivator would be to make it inconvenient not to have your badge with you.
        • Yes, that's a plan -- essentialy a membership card. I'm sure the likes of Blockbuster and the public library could track what you rent/borrow. Certain grocery stores can if you use their cards. An idea, which probably has crossed other people's minds, is to have everyone carry a national/state/county/city ID card for swiping for government services.
          &lt deep end &gt
          It gets really ugly if you have to swipe by a certain time every day at some designated official clearing post, something like a curfew.
          &lt /deep end &gt
    • seeing a show many years ago about XPARC

      I was about to say, "I think you mean AT&T", and in searching for links, I found this [berkeley.edu] interesting page. I had never heard about any such efforts at PARC and was surprised to see that you were in fact correct.

    • The Active Badges themselves were made by Olivetti, I believe. They operated on an IR-based system, so if you didn't want someone to know where you were, you could just put in your pocket and point the LED towards your leg, or something similar.

      The social aspects were explicitly explored, and left a legacy of awareness at PARC. For example, see "Challenge Five: Social Implications of Aware Home Technologies" in At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges W. Keith Edwards and Rebecca E. Grinter [parc.com].

  • ummm... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Xaoswolf ( 524554 ) <Xaoswolf.gmail@com> on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:04PM (#3681501) Homepage Journal
    "Maybe students aren't out of the closet and don't want people to know they're going to the Gay & Lesbian Resource Center. Maybe you're cheating on your girlfriend and you don't want her to know you're in somebody else's dorm room. It's creepy Big Brother."

    Gee, instead of leaving this tracking device in my desk, I'll take it with me when I decide to do something wrong.

    If you wind up getting caught because you have one of these on you, then its you're own fault. Unless it's actually wired to you, then just leave it at home. This isn't big brother stuff, more like his little cousin's.

    • Re:ummm... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dryueh ( 531302 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:14PM (#3681576)
      Gee, instead of leaving this tracking device in my desk, I'll take it with me when I decide to do something wrong.

      Of course, nothing would stop me from taking my free tracking device, planting it in my friend's backpack, and seeing if they really are going out to that gay-club...or to my girlfriend's dormroom, or whatever.

      You don't need to let anyone track your device if you don't want them to, but now everyone has immediate access to a moblie, and plantable, tracking device.

      ..ah.. I yearn for the yesteryears of SpyTech [farmgoodsforkids.com]

      • Just leave your tracking device on and hit every strip club in the world...or make sure you get caught at one of her friend's houses.

        This is the sack-less man's dream! My friends that avoid their girls for weeks before the she gives up would get to kill the covert ops and get right down to some good old fashioned bachelor fun!

        Of course, I am mostly hooked...so I could only live vicariously through them.

      • Re:ummm... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by psaltes ( 9811 )
        > now everyone has immediate access to a moblie, and plantable, tracking device.

        These are $550 PDAs, not $1 tiny spy bugs! I think most people aren't going to carelessly toss them in their friend's bags just for fun. Especially not now that everyone's seen this article.
      • Yeah, like James Bond did in Goldfinger - he had a couple of tracking devices, I think one that he carried in his shoe, and one that was magnetic that he attached under Goldfinger's car, these could be monitored from the dashboard screen of his Aston Martin. Hey, that was 1964, nothing new under the sun.

    • Gee, instead of leaving this tracking device in my desk, I'll take it with me when I decide to do something wrong

      Yea, carry it with you while you are stealing illegal cable [slashdot.org] :)

  • I'm expecting Katz to respond to this anytime now... The digital generation of cyber-enabled college students in the post-Orwellian, nay, pre-Ashcroftian period find themselves the vicitms of marginalization by haXoring non-GPS compliant systems in the Stephensonian future of Southern California. or something like that.

  • Until... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's a fun little toy, but it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. The first time someone gets malevolently stalked over the system, there'll be some crap ont he fan.

  • This is not *exacty* new. (Score:5, Informative)

    by His name cannot be s ( 16831 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:05PM (#3681505) Journal
    There is a company Cell-loc [cell-loc.com] that has been working on this same sort of thing, wireless location technology, without GPS.

    I can certainly see that this sort of thing is going to get big, and a large number of companies are going to want it bad.

    It's kinda neat stuff, and it nicely fits where GPS doesn't: Downtown. GPS requires line-of-site to the satelites, and without that you get no position. When you are downtown, amongst big buidlings, you can't find anything.

    Asset tracking is going to be big too. Help! I lost my car/pet/wife/computer!

    BUUUUUT!

    I just can't see how that information is going to be private, I mean when the cops can simply get a warrent for the information, bam! instant confirmation of location. Privacy Agreement or not.

    • as long as the cops have to go through a reasonable procedure to get the warrent,and have to have a specific warrent to even begin looking, I don't see a problem.
      However, the real problem comes in when someone is looking for someone to commit an illegal act. again, as long as the info is kept to just an unique ID, this would be minimize.
    • So that's cute, but it degrades in the city for reasons similar to why GPS fails... Big metalic objects. At many points in time, you are probably in sight of 1-2 of the cell towers you are communicating with. This does mean that you have an idea of the area you are in. As soon as your signal path is no longer direct propegation however (ie, bouncing off buildings) all you get is an upper bounds as to someone's distance from a tower. Timings, strength, and even if you were to try to calculate angles from the tower are all going to be inaccurate unless you are in a big open space. Even better, in a city towers are closely packed enough that you might have a path to a tower further away from you than another you cannot reach just due to position, making the possible area outside the cell.

      So yeah, I know what city my "car/pet/wife/computer" is in, but if any of them is stolen/lost/having a heart attack/being broken into, the best you've got is a big square.
    • Three points:

      1. If you really need to run from cops, you can leave your PDA somewhere and travel without it. I don't think there will be a situation within the next thirty to sixty years where you'll actually need a PDA on your person to function.

      2. I think the location tracking information would be kept under security similar to an IM buddy list, where if you wish to let a friend track you, you authorize his request and then your location will appear. This could by bringing your devices together in person (IR link) and then entering passwords on each device - making it hard for crackers to spoof authorization and track people illegally.

      3. Yes, if it's from a private corporation or government then the cops and other law agencies will have access to the information. However, what about a peer-to-peer equivelent? Surely there would be some way to spoof MAC addresses to each antenna so triangulation data would be useless (you would seem to be three people, each on only one antenna, no location known).

      Then, using local software (open source of course, for your linux running PDA's ;-) monitoring the signal strength from each source, your own location is calculated and sent to the people on your private list.

  • Pretty pointless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:06PM (#3681512) Homepage Journal
    The official goal of the PDA project is to test whether location trackers will encourage students to find each other more easily on a sprawling and rapidly growing campus.
    That is the dumbest justification I have ever heard. Cell phones are infinitely cheaper (at retail price), many many students have them, and allow you to phone the friend you want to find - they can then, if they want to, not only tell you where they are, but tell you what their movement plans are.

    There is nothing technically innovative about triangulating a radio signal, and as compared to cell-phones, it is a terrible way to try to meet up with friends.

    Basically, the most valuable thing about this is as a publicity tool for HP and UCSD.

    • In case you didnt read the article, the pdas werre donated by HP. So cell phones being cheaper doesnt really hold true here.

      Though gotta agree most ppl who want to keep track of each other would prefer a cell fone to this.

      • In case you didnt read the article, the pdas werre donated by HP. So cell phones being cheaper doesnt really hold true here.
        It seems that you might be the one that isn't reading stuff, I said:
        Cell phones are infinitely cheaper (at retail price)

        I assume that, in the highly unlikely event that this caught-on, that HP won't be giving the PDAs out free to the rest of the world.

        • That's right. If this were an actual retail device, you wouldn't want to deploy with PDAs. The point of this exercise is to see if kids would use the functionality if they had it.

          Yes, he misread you. Yes, you missed the point.

  • oh well (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    so much for beating off in the library bathroom with my pda porn collection, you know they will be watching for that!

  • Easier in the UK (Score:5, Funny)

    by MartinG ( 52587 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:06PM (#3681516) Homepage Journal
    No need to mess around with all that. With the new legislation [slashdot.org] you can just ask one of your mates that works at one of hundreds of pseude-randomly chosen places to hand over the phone location records that he suddenly has access to.
  • Back in my misspent university days, 99% (made up statistic!) of the phone calls I overheard on campus consisted of: "Hey, it's me, where are you? Cool, be right there!"

    This would save making those phone calls.

  • This guy must be new... (Score:4, Funny)

    by bravehamster ( 44836 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:07PM (#3681524) Homepage Journal
    "The approach we've taken is to put control into the hands of the user and explain to them what it means. The students at this university are very bright, and we expect them to all be able to understand the things we say to them."


    Such starry-eyed naivete and optimism baffles me. Surely no one actually expects college-aged persons to think for themselves?

  • AFAIK, this kind of solution only works (well) when the area in which it is used is profiled, because of multi-path fading, and other mysteries of radio technogolies :)

    Similar technology, based on for example WLAN, is good for inside tracking, in clearly designed buildings. Because of it's relatively cheap cost of implementation (cheap devices available of the shelf), we might see this in near future in many applications.

    Another interesting application would be building of "open" wlan tracking project, in which thousands of "nodes" in a city for example would be utilized to provide tracking within entire city. A system like this, with some sense in design, could be created in a manner which provides "zoom-like" tracking, focus could be tightened based on reports by a mass of nodes.

  • 35-year-olds (Score:5, Funny)

    by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) <chris@swiedler.org> on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:08PM (#3681535)
    "What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow."

    Don't you mean, "what 35-year-olds will be doing with them in 15 to 17 years?"

    • Re:35-year-olds (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LinuxHam ( 52232 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @05:06PM (#3681947) Homepage Journal
      No, he knew what he was saying. When parents see what their teenagers are doing with tech, they often say, "Cool! Can I do that with mine?" They take it to work, show a couple of coworkers, and voila, it catches on with the 35 year olds. Think about how long MP3's were popular in universities before they clogged up corporate servers.
  • I hate to be that guy with the government conspiracy ideas, but I wonder if the US government has these kind of techniques in their arsenals for tracking people on WiFi networks. Although I guess it depends on whether the network uses encryption (I don't even know if there is 128 bit encryption for WiFi). This "new" terrorist fighting government scares me sometimes...
  • Great, now Little Brother is watching too.

  • That method is taken from the same system my Grandfather designed in WWII to track the German U-Boats.

    At least now they're using it for something useful. ;)
  • If this project is developed further on the sofware side, it would be interesting to be able to have a "friends" list of people who are able to track you. You could also be able to 'go offline' if you wanted to use your PDA without your stalker knowing where you are. Or a hardware on/off from turning on or off the wi-fi. Integrate this with existing IM's and this could be a really great campus tool.... Especially for finding elusive professors.

    I'd like to see something like this on our campus, it'd make a great addition to our file sharing [sourceforge.net] project.

  • Not your REAL location. (Score:4, Funny)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:13PM (#3681565) Homepage Journal
    Idea for a campus business (imagine this being an ad printed on a blue/yellow paper with bold white/black letters):
    "Tired of being constantly tracked by your girlfriend? Need a getaway? You can buy our unique services for as low as 19.99 a month. For this amount of money one of our operatives will carry your PDA with him/her from 9AM till 6PM. For an additional .50cents an hour we will move your PDA from place to place within the campus premises until midnight."

    I should write a full business plan, name it something like "Nano/Security" present it to some investors and spend the rest of my days in Bahamas!
  • Griswold says. "What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow."

    Drop them, lose them, spill beer on them, ...
  • "Nick Van Borst, a 25-year-old senior majoring in world literature who criticized the tracker system in a university magazine"

    Fuck you, you Shakespeare quoting fag! Props to the 15 year old!

  • The Buddy List, false. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by imta11 ( 129979 )
    They say that you can omit yourself from view using a buddy-list like hide. That is bullshit, and will only protect you from the application layer. Any time the thing transmits a packet it has the MAC address of the wireless card attached. A knowledgable person could "war walk" with custom software and snoop other peoples wireless packets. Finding the hot blonde from math class got a whole lot easier.
  • I'd like to go ahead and buy stock in this adolescent kid.

    My god I wish I would have been cranking out stuff like that when I was still in high school.

    best of luck kiddo!!!

  • i wish they had this when i was in school...would have made it so much easier to stalk that cute freshman girl in the next dorm over...

    seriously though, this has the potential to get pretty creepy...people always knowing where you are...

    "oh look, jane is in the bathroom"..."hey, why are frank and amy's locations so close together?"...etc...etc...
  • I don't care much about the "big brother" aspects implied. If you aren't required to have a PDA, then there's nothing to see here, move along. But this just strikes me as completely stupid.

    A much more friendly and less 'technical for the sake of being technical' solution is just to have a text messenger built in, possibly with a vibrate/alert feature on the PDA so one PDA holder can alert the other if he/she is being sought. That gives the person being sought the ability to filter based on whether or not they in fact want to be found. And even that is a bit of a stretch since most college students seem to have cellphones which could be used for the same purpose. So all-in-all this is a non-story except to highlight again that companies (and universities) are all too often persuaded to do things based on some perceived coolness factor rather than being based on practical applications.

  • Using 2.4Ghz cordless phones and microwaves near the antennas!
    Or are there enough antennas to provide redundent signal info?

  • PDAs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iofire ( 521067 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:19PM (#3681612)
    I am one of those CS students who receieved a free PDA and I've never seen anyone do anything other than goof around on the internet in lecture with them.

    We did however make use of another app called activeclass that was semi-interesting, allowing students to post quetions to the professor during lecture (moderated by a TA). Unfortunately it tended to take so long to input the question on the PocketPC PDAs (which I find to be clunky and sluggish, I ended up giving my PDA to a family member to use) that the question was no longer relevant by the time I entered it.

    you can read about it here:
    http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/
  • Click click...

    Let's see here... I wonder if Joe wants to get together to study for the physics exam.

    Click click... log in... search... triangulate... click click click...

    HEY! What's he doing in my girlfriend's dorm room?!?!?!

  • Why is it that when you put a tracking system in your car its a great idea, but when you put it on your PDA, its "too Orwellian" for most people? Asset tracking doesn't have to be an evil thing. I reallize the project is aimed at tracking usage/position of the people, but come on... Not everything has to be a conspiracy. If you don't want to be tracked leave the PDA at home/take the batteries out/turn off the software. Remember this is an experiment... Plus you're not forced to participate. (The article states that many students are not going to participate for fear of breaking the PDA and having to pay for it.)
  • For finding the way back to the dorm after a long night of partying.
  • Here's another way for businesses to keep their workers on call 24/7 and even monitor them 24/7. It could even become big brother watching. This hella sux!
  • Geeks can use this technology to know the location of every girl on campus!
    girls can use this technology to avoid geeks!
    but since (i am figuring) that most geeks will have 2 generation of technology ahead most of the time -- this means that the gene pool will finally be filling up (a bit) with our genes

    j/k of course -- sigh, unfortunately they (girls) can still pick up the smell of skin came in contact with PCB material too many times / irradiated from CRT / solder fumes / etc and avoid avidly

  • This has been around for years... Even for wavelan (Score:5, Informative)

    by DeathB ( 10047 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:26PM (#3681649) Homepage
    Carnegie Mellon University [cmu.edu] has had a wireless network for years now. A few years ago all of the academic buildings had full coverage, and in the past year this has been extended to dorms and most outdoor areas.

    The computer science department at CMU as well as the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have been putting out papers on actual implementations of campus location systems. Most deal with its use for contextual/location aware computing (one of the more recent papers [cmu.edu]). Although some have dealt with the privacy implications (I should know, I was an author of one published at IEEE Wireless 2001). Project Aura [cmu.edu] deals with quite a bit of reasearch around what can be done positivly with this technology as well.

    As one last thing, I wrote software to poll wavepoints and figure out a location over 1.5 years ago... It was less than 50 lines of C, so I have trouble being impressed by this.

  • The university is using a program called "Active Campus" that you can download for your Journada. You have to have an account, though, to track someone from the web. Here is their webpage [ucsd.edu].

    NOTE: They are using PHP :)

  • Who's trianguating what? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Squeamish Ossifrage ( 3451 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:26PM (#3681656) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone know about a more detailed write up of this?

    Specifically, I'm wondering whether each portable device is computing its own location based on the relative intesities of the access points as measured at the device, or the other way around.

    If the devices are determining their own position, then, at least in theory, it should be possible to be selective about who gets access to that information. Done properly, there wouldn't need to be any central point of failure, so an attacker would need to compromise the software on their intended victim's PC. Or, more likely, they would have to discover an unintentional fault in that software and exploit it. On the other hand, if an external system is determining the location of the devices, then a would-be snooper need not compromise the software on the victim's computer, but only the central system.

    In the first scenario, your own Pocket PC is trusted, while in the second, a device outside your control is. This isn't really that big a distinction in practice, because most of us extend trust to third parties by using software and hardware the properties of which we cannot or do not verify, but it's still important: It's possible to some extent to verify and monitor the behavior of systems in our physical possession, but nearly impossible to do so with someone else's.
  • Girl meets boy.
    Girl lets boy put her on buddy list.
    Girl dates boy for a while, then realizes he is a bad boyfriend.
    Girl tries to gain a little freedom by not letting bad boyfriend spy on her whereabouts.
    Bad boyfriend flips out and accuses her of (fill in the blank).
    Girl not only can't dump bad boyfriend, he now knows her every move.
    Girl joins convent to get away from bad boyfriend.

    Next time youse guys are wondering where all the geek girls went, you'll know they're all hiding in convents because they played a little fast and loose with their PDA permissions and will be paying for it forever...

  • MS Research did this a while back. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    [microsoft.com]
    A Software System for Locating Mobile Users:
    Design, Evaluation, and Lessons

    MS Radar: RADAR uses signal strength information extracted from the wireless network interface, in conjunction with a Radio Map of the building, to determine location. Over the past year we have deployed this system in multiple buildings on our campus using two different wireless LAN technologies and two widely used operating systems.
  • Bah! No source to be found anywhere. :-( So, is there a Linux project underway to do something like this?
  • Swap devices with your friends occasionally. This isn't scary until the technology is the size of a piece of confetti that can be attached to someone who doesn't realize it. Did anyone else see that Buffy?

  • They've got this fifteen year old student who has a neat idea, so they implement it to feed off the publicity generated by the issue of privacy.

    "Look at us, we've got fifteen year old students building contrversial technology. Give us money."

    The justification they give of helping students find each other is a crock.

  • 15-year-old at the University? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AndrewCox ( 180128 ) on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @04:36PM (#3681713)
    A 15-year-old student at the University? Man, it kills me to hear stuff like that. That poor kid probably thinks he's tough stuff now, but I'm betting he'll regret his lack of a social life later on. There are more important things in life than advancing quickly.

    There are probably tons of people here that could've skipped grades at a time, but wouldn't you at least want to be in your sexual prime when you went to college?

    Somebody needs to watch American Beauty again - you gotta stop and smell the roses.
    • A 15-year-old student at the University? Man, it kills me to hear stuff like that... There are more important things in life than advancing quickly.

      Did it occurr to you that it may be a case of the highschool system being too slow for him rather than him rushing? In highschool half the kids don't want to learn, and the teachers pace the class so the average/sub-average students can keep up. The teacher explains everything four or five times. When you want to learn, and you got it the first time, it's mind-numbing to hear it three more times.

      No, I never skipped any grades. I think I would have been better off if I had.

      -
    • I started university at 13, and I have to say I'm really glad that I did. I had a good social life as an undergrad, and also had a "normal" undergrad experience during my first years as a grad school. I think it's the best of both worlds, plus the extra salary is amazing. 3-4 years at your highest salary (you have to count the last years of your employment) is also around $1m (today, inflation-adjusted)!

      Talk to people like us before you feel sorry for people like us. If I had gone to high school, my peers would have been morons and I'd be bored stiff.
    • As a person who went to university at 16 (when the norm in Ontario was 19 because of OAC), I can honestly say that I don't regret it and didn't experience this lack of social life that you speak of. As far as being in your sexual prime, university does take ~4 years minimum (I took 6 years since I was in co-op and took a double major), so males will peak while they are there. In addition, it really was easier for me to make friends and find romantic interests in university. When I was 14 I had an 18 year old girlfriend that I couldn't relate to because she just wasn't into intellectual endevours. The 3 long term relationships I had in university were with more mature (yet still young-at-heart, well, the 1st and 3rd were still young-at-heart), intellectual women who I could bond with more, the last of which I married and am still married to. In university, I had a large group of friends (one Thanksgiving get together I threw drew 26 people and a large portion of the people I knew were at home for the holidays). Contrast this to the 3 friends I had in grade 7, and maybe 7 I had in OAC.

      So, no, I can't say I regret it.
    • In case you didn't get enough posts saying this already, I started out in college at 16 and it was one of the best choices of my life.

      I went to college where everyone started out when they were 15 or 16. It's called Simon's Rock [simons-rock.edu]. Anyone who is still reading this old thread and is thinking about starting college early, go check it out.

  • Source code (Score:2, Informative)

    by hiero ( 75335 )
    The "ActiveCampus Locator" software for Jornadas and other platforms can be found at http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/locator.html.

    There is even Linux source code there for "ActiveCampus-locator.cc", which has the description "Gets the access point list seen by the wireless card and sends it to the ActiveCampus server so it can geolocate for the user."
  • is here: http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/

  • Students can log in to a Web site from anywhere and check where their friends are.

    I don't see it on the public site.

  • ATTWS offers the same thing (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vegeta99 ( 219501 ) <rjlynn@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday June 11, 2002 @05:39PM (#3682148)
    Launching VERY soon, a new mMode service will allow you to locate your friends using the GSM e911 service (Enhanced Observed Time Difference). You can be "invisible", but thats I'll I know about it. TDMA customers are out of luck.

  • "Maybe you're cheating on your girlfriend and you don't want her to know you're in somebody else's dorm room."

    Yeah, but alternatively you could set it up to alert you to stop fooling around and start pretending to study when your SO gets within a certain radius of that dorm room.

  • We did this back in the day with Ricochets.

    It's a little known bit of trivia that the original Ricochet system used Geographic Routing. Every poletop knew its Lat/Long, and portables associated with their "Best Node," or strongest RSSI (signal strength)/lowest latency poletop. There was a nameserver that did modem name/number -> lat/long translation, and the system routed by sending the packet in its visible node list that was closest to the destination.

    If you type ATS311? into a Ricochet modem, you'll get the best few nodes on that node list, including RSSI and latency. There was a Newton app that parsed ATS311, did a weighted average based on RSSI, and gave you a position.

    Worked pretty well, actually, though the sample rate was low, since it could be several seconds between updates of the node list.

  • The project homepage, with papers and downloads, is here [ucsd.edu].

    You can read a piece about the 15-year-old kid behind it here [calit2.net].

  • GPS uses triangulation (Score:2, Informative)

    by stere0 ( 526823 )

    The GPS system calculates your position using GPS too! Here's a little bit about triangulation. I'm using GPS satellites because you get them for cheap in theory land and they come with these cool weightless levers. However you can replace them with 802.11 access points, cell phones, whatever suits you.

    Imagine having three satellites on a chess board, the first one on a1, the second one on a8 and the third one on 1h. You're somewhere on the checkboard, and you know where the other satellites are. You know the speed of light is one square per second.

    To find out where you are, you take out your brand new iBook and send five pings to the satellite in a8, using radio waves, which are light after all:

    --- satellite-a8 ping statistics ---
    5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max = 14.00/14.00/14.00 s

    Light takes fourteen seconds to go to the satellite and back. You now know you're anywhere in a seven squares radius from a8 and decide to ping the satellite in h1:

    --- satellite-h1 ping statistics ---
    5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max = 14.00/14.00/14.00 s

    You now know you're also seven squares away from the satellite in h1. You look at your map and understand that you can only be in a1 or h8. How do you find out? You ping the satellite in a1:

    --- satellite-a1 ping statistics ---
    5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max = 22.00/22.00/22.00 s

    Looking at this, it becomes clear that you are in h8. You can even use pythagoras to make sure I didn't get the distances wrong :). We use this method to locate any radio device, from the GPS in your car to your iBook.

    • Quite close, but you missed on a rather small point. With GPS, they don't send Pings in the same way that you would ping a server.

      How it works is that all GPS's are synched time-wise. Now, every millisecond (or smaller fractions) all of them broadcast their times. Now the GPS device takes the times broadcasted from 3 or 4 GPS satellites and calculates the time differentials.

      Click here to see a very good flash demo of GPS Triangulation [trimble.com]

      The way that you mentioned, simplified the complexity of the system, however, your method will not SCALE at all nor work at all. First of all, as more and more GPS devices are used, the satellite will be bogged down by requests. It will turn into a DDoS to the GPS sat. Secondly, your way would require that the GPS device not only receive but also broadcast. That would require a significant amount of energy and add to the cost. Lastly, when you are worried about a signal going to and from the satellite, you introduce a number of possible sources of errors. In addition, it would take more time to get to a satellite that you're farther away than the one that you are closer to. This would require that it takes longer to calculate your triangulation due to the fact that you have to wait for the slowest response.

      But yes, you did make it understandable to a layman.
  • No one is forcing students to use the $549 Hewlett-Packard Jordana PDAs, which are provided for free,

    Does MJ [amazon.com] get a royalty for each one of those sold? I think they probably meant the HP Jornada [amazon.com]. Not that a Jordan themed PDA wouldn't be a good idea, but somehow I think he would probably go with a SONY rather than an HP.

  • I haven't noticed anyone taking note of the fact that this sort of technology is probably around 50 years old or more.

    Pilots have been using signal strength and direction of radio beacons (including radio stations, actually) to figure their position for at least that amount of time. The instrument is called ADF, for Automatic Direction Finder, for those who want to know about it.

    Implementing it in a PDA is kind of neat, but not exactly ground-breaking.

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