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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

"In a world where a $100 smartphone can be tracked for free, the $250 million jet vanished."

It sounds like Inmarsat is now making basic ping location available for free:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182223-inmarsat-now-givin...

That quote is disingenuous in the extreme. You absolutely can not track a $100 smartphone in the middle of the Indian ocean, for any price.

That's Bloomberg's comment not mine. Not sure where the sudden need to downvote is coming from. My point is that it's now a free service to track planes. It was possible to track MH370, for example, but it required a fee.

Yeah, I know what quotation marks mean... My point is that the quote makes it seem much easier to track an airplane than it actually is. It's great that Inmarsat is providing the service for free now, but the quote makes it seem like the service is trivial to provide when it really isn't.

Your comment would be better if you weren't so aggressive.

Curious, what language did the poster uses that implies aggression? I see none.

> Curious, what language did the poster uses that implies aggression? I see none.

This: "Yeah, I know what quotation marks mean..." It comes off as snappy.

Hyperbole in the news happens all the time. At any rate, the quote is also inaccurate because according the May 2014 article that I posted, we have been able to track a jet for free for almost 2 years. I wasn't trying to start a discussion about how easy or hard one of them is.

Well, they didn't say in the ocean. You need a $250 gizmo for that http://www.amazon.com/Delorme-AG-009871-201-DeLorme-inReach-...

That quote had me thinking too. Could I not be tracked please? What would that cost?

Don't cell towers need to know your position to transfer you from tower to tower?

Nope

edit: though I guess that fact that you are connected to a specific tower leaks location information

The "need to know your position" is a consequence of how they measure signal strength to allow handoff between cells, so you get overlapping coverage and each tower has a signal measurement for the same device.

A post I saw here a couple of weeks ago suggested a simpler method of reducing location tracking than ones I had been thinking of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985599

You would add extra RF spectrum overhead and a little bit of latency for making and receiving calls.

In general the basic thing that should happen to recover location privacy in mobile services is completely decoupling payment, device identifiers, and routing. Right now they are all linked or trivially linkable (your carrier sees you register with your IMEI and IMSI, and it assigns you a phone number -- rather than registering with a random per-session IMEI, paying for the service with a blinded digital payment token, and getting a phone number, if you want one, from a third party VoIP provider).

Great. Here's your next phone. It puts out 2,000 watts and comes with a free tinfoil helmet. Battery life isn't great, but at least you're not being tracked by local cell sites.

:-) It is already being done.

no tower.. you need a satellite and they have been checking even since and no information. The most weird was, nobody in penang tower or langkawi tower detect the oddness. And also army radar. Next time, tower must be on 24 hour

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