Playing Ingress in Antarctica | Hacker News Reader

Playing Ingress in Antarctica

motherboard.vice.com

73 pointszeristor17 comments

I don't know the bandwidth requirements of Ingress, but if you're desperate enough, the Iridium Go (a mobile hotspot that connects to a LEO satellite network) might work: https://www.iridium.com/products/details/iridiumgo

Once SpaceX's StarLink constellation is fully deployed (i.e. Polar orbits as well as the initial lower inclination ones), this should be a piece of cake without violating any terms of service.

Iridium's (and SpaceX's future Starlink) constellation is unique in that it is in LEO and uses intersatellite links. That means it works everywhere, including Antarctica. NSF's local network is connected via a bunch of Iridium radios at great cost. Other constellations like GlobalStar's and OneWeb's are bent-pipe designs, essentially just repeaters that rely on nearby ground stations. They don't work too well in Antarctica or far out to sea.

The Iridium transfer rate is ~2400 baud, too slow for Ingress I suppose.

Is there a verifiable way to determine someone's location? I'm not talking about phones or Ingress, because I know this can be spoofed with rooted phones and careful "traveling" of your fake GPS coordinates. But what if the game was set up in a way that required photos to be taken of the surrounding area to match (but not exactly match) existing photos? That could be bypassed, but it'd be an additional annoyance. What about sending surrounding WiFi access points or nearby phone IDs to the server as a means of verification? That is worse for privacy and again could be spoofed. Thinking bigger, what if the game could only be played with satellite phones, and the satellite would send the location of the transceiver to the server? Would be harder to spoof unless you own physical devices left in different parts of the world.

Are there even any sattelite systems available to the general public that can track objects on the ground? GPS can't, they're one way. Satellite phone systems would know which satellite the phone is connected to, but would they get any more information than that?

I'm not sure there's any realistic way to do this.

If a satellite phone is connecting to multiple satellites (or at least multiple satellites can receive its signal, even if communication is not two way), something akin to GPS in reverse seems viable.

Wouldn't it be trivial to hack and link portals in Antarctica, or anywhere, with a jailbroken/rooted device and location spoofer?

People do that all the time for other portals in general. When I played regularly a few years ago it was every few months or so that we saw a huge field linked up near the North Pole (Svalbard or similar). Often the field would be real but spoofers would take it down; sometimes the opposite happened but not as often.

Ugh, this article gets a number of things wrong. "Hacking" a portal in Ingress is just resource collection, sort of like visiting pokestops in PoGo (in fact, the portals are pokestops in Niantic's database). You have to "capture" portals by destroying them. Of course, if the portal is owned by the other team, they can recharge them as you attack them essentially making you play against other players in real time. Ingress is pretty competitive that way, since you play directly against the other team.

Don't you accrue points for your team for a triangle set up?

Triangles would be HUGE

Yeah and the longer they stay up, the better as every few hours they calculate the total score which then gets averaged out over the course of a week I think.

I played a few years back, just by bike. But players in cars would always be quick enough to take down what I built.

As a rural player that lives in the city nowadays, I don't even feel remotely interested anymore as you can't impact the scores as much as you can in a rural area.

Yes, although I believe it's weighted by population density inside the triangle (the in-game explanation is that you gain points by influencing minds inside the field, in a global struggle for control of the human race).

I remember the Ingress community to be avidly involved with the game's competitive aspect, trying to get their friends in and coordinate almost in a hierarchy. However, I never personally liked the 'pay to get ahead' idea. I wonder if games like these could be turned into solving a real problem for some actual impact.

Well the original idea was to get people to walk more, and to learn about their environment.

Pokemon egg hatching took this to a new level.

That's why I kept Ingress and uninstalled Go. It's a great simple resource when you're in a new town, and it is a lot more interesting then Google maps.

See "Kort - An OpenStreetMap Game"

http://www.kort.ch/

(p.s. you don't think Google aren't using Ingress to gather data?)

To gather data? Maybe. It definitely uses the data Google already has, which vastly outweighs the number of people using Ingress. I'd assume Google Maps is far more valuable than Ingress is.

I think it's also worth mentioning for context that Niantic is not owned by Google anymore, though Google is a major investor still.

I thought they were explicit about using walking data to learn about paths. Of course, Google don't even own Niantic any more.

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