Posts Tagged ‘cell-phones’
Police Blotter of the Day: Driver throws hammer at motorist yakking on cellphone
The man called 911 and reported he was just passed by a car driven by a 44-year-old Waterloo man who suddenly stopped his car in the middle of the roadway, forcing the caller to stop in the roadway, at which point the man in the car began waving a hammer at the other man yelling “get off the phone,” he then allegedly threw the hammer at the caller. …
“These types of conflicts can easily go bad and are best left to authorities,” stated Sheriff Todd Nehls.
Full report (Dodge County, Wis., Sheriff’s Department via WMTV-TV)
E911: Needle, meet haystack
Exactly two years ago tomorrow, I wrote an msnbc.com piece about the accuracy of 911 calls from wireless phones. The takeaway was:
[T]he accuracy of location data generally drops in rural areas, where older, less-advanced cell towers can be farther apart, the Congressional Research Service found in a background report for lawmakers late last year. And it can drop in densely populated cities, where a phone might show up as being at 1 Main St., with no indication of whether it’s on the seventh or the 77th floor.
Depending on the technology a carrier is using — GPS or tower triangulation — FCC regulations allow a margin of error of up to 300 meters for some E911-capable phones. That’s longer than three football fields.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission published proposed E911 regulations that wouldn’t allow carriers to rely on tower triangulation — that is, measuring a phone’s distances from its three closest towers, which is the measure that yields the 300-meter margin of error. Instead, carriers would have to use location services on the device itself (GPS, for example), which is supposed to be accurate within 50 to 150 meters.
It would take Usain Bolt almost 15 seconds to sprint 150 meters — assuming stairs weren’t involved. Not all GPS services measure or report altitude, so they can’t indicate which floor you’re on if you’re in a high-rise building.
The technology to make wireless E911 work is incredibly difficult, but the new regulations mean that even under optimum conditions, you could still be waiting a good amount of time for emergency crews to find you.
That’s the first caution. The second is that the new regulations wouldn’t take effect until after an eight-year sunset period; the current three-football-field allowance would be OK until 2019.
What do you think? Is that close enough? Do you expect better technology to be created in the near future? And if it is, what would the implications be for individual privacy?
Reporting: Police on radio scanner apps: That’s not a 10-4
Police Scanner is available for $2.99 in the iPhone App Store.
This report was cross-posted on msnbc.com’s Technolog blog. Read it in context here.
Matthew A. Hale, 29, was arrested last week in Muncie, Ind., after he allegedly fled the scene of a failed stickup at a pharmacy.
Police accused Hale of being the getaway driver for an accomplice who was supposed to rob the pharmacy. But Hale drove off when things went sour, only to be stopped and arrested shortly thereafter, they said. Bail was set this week at $25,000 on felony charges of attempted armed robbery.
It’s all pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, except for one thing: How did Hale know the heist was falling apart inside the pharmacy as he sat outside in the car?
How did he know to take off?
Matthew Hale, it turned out, had a smartphone — specifically, a Droid from Verizon Wireless. And on that Droid he had an app that he used to monitor Muncie police radio traffic, Detective Jim Johnson said.
If you’re one of the millions of smartphone users who’ve downloaded scanner apps with names like iScanner, PoliceStream and 5-0 Radio Police Scanner, pay attention:
You might be breaking the law.
‘This is about social networks that are beyond the reach of Mubarak’
Cross-posted from Technolog: read in context
Large parts of the Internet essentially went dark about midnight Egypt time after the government of President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of Washington, ordered service providers and cell phone companies to shut down.
While it looks like Egypt has been cut off — attempts to get to pretty much any Web site in Egypt are unsuccessful, and Twitter.com is unavailable inside the country — protesters and sympathizers have been able to get their message out through a variety of means because “what the government does is very effective for stopping the most basic users, meaning average users, the folks who probably aren’t Twitter users,” says Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington and author of “The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam.”
“Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out,” he says. “It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what’s going on.”
Here’s the text of our full conversation with Howard:
Schools rethinking bans on cell phones
As ever more powerful cell phones come closer to mimicking the laptop computers many pupils carry each day, teachers and administrators are wrestling with whether their utility as a teaching tool outweighs the disruptions they can pose in the classroom.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 