Australian uses snack bags as Faraday cage to block tracking by employer
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
and being GPS tracked more intensively than ever before. oh, sweet irony :D
If you're not rich, you haven't achieved anything.
To go from that to the parent poster saying he "probably realised he'll never achieve anything in life" is selling a pretty miserable story.
Things changed like 8 years ago, now every security guard needs to scan a bar code at various places to show that he/she is indeed doing his/her rounds.
Pretty easy to look at their scan logs and infer what they were doing.
Using bar codes seems relatively easy to fake, but if you have the infrastructure in place then the access scanner seems to address that concern. Main issue is having the access control in the first place - won't help you if the guards are 'inside' the scanner and would never need to swipe while doing their rounds.
At my work you have to scan to use the lifts, so you can see how long the guards take to do each floor in the logs.
Openly. Made no secret of his subterfuge. Maybe even boasted about it what a dope.
It's hard to fake cell towers, but wi-fi signal is rather easy.
However, they did care that he was not working when he said he did. They probably simply used the subterfuge as damning evidence.
Most employers I worked for would let me infringe some of their policies, as long as I was an otherwise good employee worth my salary.
Some other places were just totalitarian about their rules and I left because of it. They were probably happy they got rid of a bad apple without having to fire me. It's give and take really.
> Aluminum is not a great conductor—it heats up when a lot of power is pushed through it—so a snack bag would potentially melt if it was used to try to block a strong radio signal from inside. But the signals from GPS satellites are weak and can easily be interfered with, intentionally or not, in many ways.
I imagine that if the twisties bag had been grounded, it would be even more resistant to melting if the signal had been too strong for it.
Additionally, you’d need a far more powerful radio than a cellphone would contain to melt a plastic bag. A cellphone radio is what, 3W? You might threaten the bag if you focused all that energy in a dime sized spot on the bag, but a cell radio is intentionally a roughly isotropic radiator.
And why didn't he just leave the device on some bogus location outside the golf court so the tracking wouldn't be interrupted? Surely, when asked where he was all day, he would have to be able to name some location, so it would be better to actually leave the phone there.
Though by about the sixth round of golf I’d be making myself a clean, permanent phone jacket out of Reflectix or something.
Hate to be whoever has to prep it for the next employee though...
Foil would mask GPS signals but I guess cell signals would get through.
If you don't want to get everything else greasy, put the inverted bag inside another bag.
Bonus: Two layers of shielding.
My phone still gets both GPS and LTE inside a similar bag.
You can see how thin the bag is by holding it up to sunlight - you can see through it!
In this case, though, it looks like he mostly did it he so he could say he was working (and get paid) while he was actually out playing golf.
At least as an Uber driver, he can play golf as much as he'd like! Although he'll now have to choose been playing golf and making money.
That flexibility is very valuable itself.
He preserved his own ability to choose, but then when he chose, he chose poorly.
YPTFPSD: Read the book by Anthony Burgess. The exposition character explains the ethics of choice in the context of mechanical fruits.
The main thrust of the book is that if you remove the human capacity to choose to do wrong, you also strip the choice to do right of all its virtue. You have to let Alex and his droogs be thugs, or we would all become robots. We'd all be clockwork oranges on a mechanical orange tree, clicking and whirring away with only our pre-programmed gears to guide us.
It had never occurred to me before that, in this phrase, 'clockwork' is the adjective and 'orange' is the noun. I'd always assumed it was the other way around (and wondered idly what it meant!).
I'll bite, please, can you tell me what that means? Googling brings this post up as the only useful result.
It's what HN tells you whenever you try to write more than about five posts every four hours. I don't know the actual parameters, but they are ridiculously conservative, and very obviously waived for certain accounts.
When it happens, the only way to actually provide a meaningful response to someone in a timely fashion is to edit a previous post. Which breaks the expected flow of a conversation, obviously. It's the thing I hate most about HN, without reservation.
> Aluminum is not a great conductor—it heats up when a lot of power is pushed through it—so a snack bag would potentially melt if it was used to try to block a strong radio signal from inside.
Uh... what? I mean, I guess, if you're operating a tracking radar or long distance microwave transmitter inside that snack bag, sure. But a LTE radio with a GPS? Are you serious?
The business owners would never subject themselves to this...
Not ideal, but frankly I'm not particularly worried. I can leave the phone at home & frankly employer isn't a privacy concern for me.
Big data companies that can make connections between data sets & crunch it for patterns etc...that I'm less keen on.
Stuff like this exacerbates disrespect, distrust and suspicion in employer/employee relationships, in a way I believe no one benefits. Employers tend to use these tools to aggressively police minor infractions, though pretending to only want to catch the few bad apples, driving away the good employees in favour of those who think they can game the system anyway with a tit-for-tat mindset.
In the end trust is eroded, everybody is unhappy, and the underlying issues as to why those bad apples aren't doing their jobs in the first place is never resolved or even investigated.
In practice - and particularly in my circumstances - I've found the tracking clause to be palatable, or at least begrudgingly acceptable.
Perhaps my employer is an outlier, but they don't enforce minor infractions at all. So while the manual says we can track you 24/7 the reality is there is no tracking - I literally get calls from my boss asking what country I'm in because half the time they don't know where I am or what I'm doing.
I've seen the actual policy employed twice - in both cases the employee did something deeply unethical. The top dogs take a very dim view on that kind of stuff so the employees found themselves on the wrong end of HR reviewing policy compliance carefully. So be it - I don't need sketchy co-workers.
How much of the data about you in the Equifax breach do you think came from your employer? How much of your data that has been breached came from Wells Fargo--not because you bank there, but because your employer uses them to process direct deposits? And how many times has your employer themselves been breached to give out your name, date of birth, ssn, driver's licence #, passport, address, details about your dependants, etc.?
I'm curious why you assume that the data your employer has about you hasn't already made its way into the hand of "big companies that can make connections between data sets."
Well a part of it is situation specific - it's a professional service organisation. Everything & everyone is up to their eyeballs in confidentiality agreements so the whole "we'll sell havoc's data for 200 dollars" mindset just isn't a thing.
>I'm curious why you assume that the data your employer has about you hasn't already made its way into the hand of "big companies
They take security very seriously - far more than I do in a personal context. So I don't feel exposed on that front.
So as I said - big brother google is my primary worry here. God knows what they can patch together with their black magic. Supercookies and assorted bullsht. And their eco system is quite difficult to escape (part of the reason I switched to iphone).
But I'm not sure that translates to aluminized-mylar. Sometimes conductors get weird in thin films or at material boundaries.
Organic compounds are great conductors whenever you can find a chain of delocalized p-orbitals, such as in graphene or cis-polyacetylene or polyaniline or polythiophene. PEDOT/PSS is a polymer related to polythiophene that is used in anti-static bags, transparent electrode, electrochromic films, capacitor cathodes, and it is printable. Polyaniline is typically used in batteries and supercaps.
So an aluminized-mylar chip bag is probably not a great conductor in comparison to one made from PEDOT/PSS backed with PET. And obviously, a chip bag made from graphene-on-copper-foil would be the best, if anyone could afford to buy a $1000 snack.
It's that lack of connection which makes it a lousy shield.
A car forms an acceptable Faraday cage to protect occupants when struck by lightning even when isolated by its rubber tires, and a plane can be struck by lightning thousands of feet from the ground and still protect its occupants (though the lightning will still damage electronics if they're in the current path through the machine).
Conductor and isolator are relative terms.
Turn one bag inside out, put it inside another, put your phone inside both. Problem solved, with bonus stronger shielding.
> but how does one ground a snack bag with a phone in it?
I would imagine that (in all but the most contrived of situations) your phone's battery would die before this could build up a charge worth worrying about.
needless to say we had all sorts of attempts to use other numbers but that never would work. since we had ANI numbers I doubt they could be spoofed.
now we never went as far as having them call in hourly, likely that would be dependent on client requirements. still I understand why the guy in the article was fired and honestly if he was skipping out then so be it
Yeah, it's a shame that the framing of the article makes it sound like it's the blocking that was shady, rather than the fraud.
ANI is just the fancy name for what we call caller-id, it's not a special kind of phone number. It's also highly susceptible to spoofing...
Imagine a charge inside a Faraday cage. You wiggle it around, causing electromagnetic waves. If those were not blocked, they would cause various charges outside the cage to wiggle around. Call this experiment #1.
That should mean that if instead of wiggling the inside charge around, you had wiggled all the outside charges around in the same pattern that experiment #1 caused them to wiggle in, the result should be the inside charge wiggling the same way you wiggled it in experiment #2.
I would go further and assert that, in most cases, "people like this" probably aren't any, or are only a negligible part of the reason, only the excuse to allow them such tracking.
Just my general opinion, I have too little information to say if the tracking, in this case, is actually a rational and net-positive policy and not someone's power trip.
What reason do you think they have?
If you pay for butt-in-seat-hour then you have to track hours and butts. Either by newganled gps thingies of olden days methods of assigning a foreman to look at you.