Snoop unto them as they snoop unto you
blog.dataparty.xyz
blog.dataparty.xyz
- Tazer/Axon makes some kind of police oriented hw/sw platform thats deployed on police bodies and cars
- which uses BLE
- Tazer/Axon has their own BLE MAC address prefix, which is published by the FCC
- The less significant bytes of BLE MAC address are a unique id for the hardware, which usually maps 1:1 with 1 officer or 1 car
- So by listening to or probing some BLE crap you can infer cops are present close to where that MAC address prefix is, and by recording over time and area figure out movement patterns even to the level of individual hardware.
In more than 100 countries, Tetra (Trans European Trunked Radio) is used.
This was published a couple of months ago.
https://github.com/MidnightBlueLabs/TETRA_burst
http://rageuniversity.com/PRISONESCAPE/JAMMING%20RADIO%20GSM...
The web offers a fairly universal cross-platform, network-accessible GUI that can be developed with really high-level languages which happen to offer tooling that includes an extremely-empowering degree of readily-available utility libraries. What other language or ecosystem is as easy and broadly-accessible?
I still watch it once every couple of years, still love / hate it.
No regrets! It was over-the-top, corny and very fun.
Teenage-me would have been totally infatuated with the glamorous hacker lifestyle!
For those who might have missed them, these may be entertaining, if not inspiring: www.ign.com/articles/best-hacker-movies
“The little boat flipped over.”
Gets me every time.
Super cool talk, thanks for sharing.
Speed traps are the worst.
The city has (imo) a psychotic driving culture, but is still roughly middle-of-the-road in us news and world report's ranking of most dangerous US cities to drive in.
Large speed deltas are (conjecture I haven't bothered to research) probably unsafe under any conditions. Exceeding safe speeds for the conditions is obviously dangerous, but the size and design of the road and it's lanes are some of those conditions.
I don't particularly care which, but in order to minimize speed deltas I do think it should be incumbent on the state to either set low speed limits and fastidiously police them or else set speed limits that are close to the natural speeds a given road supports to cut down the gap between people who drive the road as it feels and those who drive the signage.
https://dot.ca.gov/programs/safety-programs/setting-speed-li....
By now the evidence is clear: people will drive at the speeds they feel comfortable at given their environment (sight lines, spaciousness, density, etc.). Just putting a sign on the side of a wide and spacious road is not going to do much to affect driving speeds.
The most interesting one to me was how tree-lined streets encourage slower driving without any speed limit signs, because it feels more like a tunnel and less like an open road.
Somewhere near me (south UK) has a dual carriageway that approaches a roundabout. There is a fence on the side of the road as you approach the roundabout, so that you cannot see what traffic on the adjacent road is doing, forcing you to slow down on the approach, rather than maintaining a higher speed when it appears you might get away with it. Seems to work quite well.
I don’t know what you really mean by acceptable, but there are plenty of roads with a 65 mph speed limit where 80 miles an hour is perfectly safe, and there are of course plenty of roads with a 65 mph speed limit where 70 mph is and unsafely fast. And there are road conditions in all of those roads where 45 mph would be on unsafe. It is difficult to make blanket statements about what a safe speed is knowing nothing other than the posted speed limit.
To put the same point in a different context, remember that it wasn’t really that long ago that there was a national 55 mph speed limit, and many of the same interstates that used to have a 55 mph speed limit now have an 80 mph speed limit.
IMO roads with 80 MPH speed limits are much safer. Even the crazy folks don’t go much over, so you don’t get a huge delta in speed, which is a lot more dangerous than any absolute number.
There's stretches of flat, straight-ish interstate in the US that continue for dozens of miles with near-perfect visibility. Sometimes, there's no traffic. Go 120 for all I care, just slow down when you're near something.
Or the road is in good condition.
Or that your tires are rated for that speed (T or higher).
That's the wrong approach for a left turn.
> Imagine actually having protocols around traffic flow, and following them!
Like limits on the magnitude of vehicular velocity?
That depends on the highway. If it's a limited access motorway, like the interstates, Autobahn, or M-class then sure. Perhaps not coincidentally, that is where the right lane rule you propose is mandated.
Otherwise, it fails often. Reality is messy.
If you truly want to make the roads safer, follow the posted speed limits. (Energy follows the square of the speed.) Also, always ensure you leave enough room to stop (the "2 second rule").
I observed that it especially works best in concert with a rule that people entering/merging from the right have the right-of-way, since this reduces uncertainty around "who will go?" that I often witness here in NA (where "keep right to except to pass" is merely a suggestion, or not enforced even if enshrined in law).
Regarding speed limit, I'm not arguing against speed limits or adhering to them, and indeed the more consistent the speed of traffic, the safer it is. On that note, my observation is that simply adhering to the speed limit (and attempting to stay at that speed) means regularly passing vehicles -- that is, in most cases, people are indeed following speed limits and a "keep right except to pass" policy correlates well with maintaining consistent speed and flow of traffic. People who want to drive slower can stick to the right lane without any hassle or problem (it's accepted and normal for them to drive slow there), and those who are driving faster can safely pass and then return to that right lane. If there are deep flaws in this process, I'm absolutely not seeing them and have not observed them.
(yes, of course, the "two-second" rule makes sense and is a minimum IMO - I imagine if more people followed this, crashes would be massively reduced)
In Germany you get fined and ticketed for it. In NA you don't. It's that simple.
I almost want to become a cop just so I can write tickets for this.
There's really only one solution that works to prevent speeding: road design. Make roads less straight, less big. Add more obstacles and flow interrupts.
Private cars are obsolete anyway. Replace more lanes with bus lanes and be done with the problem altogether. It's frankly insane that we allow people to operate a private car with nothing more than a license they got at 16 years old and never tested again for for the 70+ years after they'll be driving.
More space, time, and energy efficient transportation options have existed for nearly 200 years. These options move more people further more quickly and safely than private cars. Furthermore, these options are more environmentally friendly, and improving them as technology advances can be done through retrofitting. My friend does retrofitting of classic cars with electric drive, it's prohibitively expensive for mass adoption.
These options being cable cars and trains. Modern electric busses are pretty good too.
It seems quite obvious to me the private car is obsolete. What advantage is there considering that mass adoption of the private vehicle leads to more death, more environmental harm, and less people getting to less places, slower, and more pissed off because they had to stay focused the entire drive?
Obsolete doesn't mean, "I don't like it so it should be gone".
But... this simply isn't true. Group transportation is the only viable way across the least dense places on earth: oceans. You almost always take a plane with hundreds of other people on it. Not to mention the fact that high speed rail is vastly superior way to get across a country than a car. Taiwan has several massive freeways running the length of the west side of the nation. The drive time north to south is between 6-10 hours depending on traffic. In the high speed rail, it is 2 hours, every time, to the minute. It moves 130,000 people per day, far, far more than the capacity of the freeways.
Exactly, retrofitting cars is not economical. Right now everyone drives combustion vehicles, those will all essentially need to be thrown away or recycled as we switch to electric. Think of all that waste. Meanwhile a diesel train needs the engine, or whole engine car at worst, swapped, and a third rail installed or overhead power installed. Every other aspect of the thing can remain the same: the cars, the tracks, the stations, everything. For a retrofit of an entire city's train transit system, you have maybe 20 or 30 train engine cars in the garbage or to be recycled, maybe some supporting diesel fuel infrastructure (the piping for which can be re-used for power transmission if necessary), that's it. Meanwhile millions of cars are about to be trashed or need to be recycled. You can't even reuse their tires.
I don't like cars, you're right, mostly because they keep killing people, but I'm really not trying to be annoying here, I literally see no advantage. Even in the USA, one of the more rural-focused countries on earth, you have a deep history of using public transit to access the remote regions of the country, that you simply stopped using over the last hundred years. I have had the delight of visiting some of these old train lines and encountered stations sprinkled all throughout places that are now accessible only by car - and some of these small towns even had street or cable cars for local transportation connections! You had it, you just got rid of it. And nowadays you can have even better - combine trains and streetcars with public electric bicycle infrastructure (take your pick of tens if not hundreds of cities with functioning examples) and you have a wonderful modern transportation system that serves the needs of people rural or otherwise, without poisoning the environment and without getting people killed every day.
> the odds you get a ticket from a hidden camera are very low if you just respect the speed limits
And the comment I was responding to was about how speed limits are unreasonable. So I maintain that the comment did not refute OP's point. The reasonableness of the speed limits is irrelevant to whether or not you get fewer tickets when you drive below the posted speed limit.
I could get a ticket for jaywalking a red light even though it's 4am, dead silent and can't see a car for a mile. "The law is the law", if some traffic cop came from around the corner he could ticket me. Now is that right? I think it isn't. Now what are my options? Spend an inordinate amount of time trying to change the way society works or figure out ways to go about my life without having to obey some over-bearing public official's rules.
Many speed limits are set lower than they need to be. On many roads, including freeways, the average speed of traffic is higher than the speed limit. Driving the speed limit on these freeways is dangerous.
Additionally, many speedometers read slightly higher than the actual speed. Driving the exact speed limit on many roads as shown by your speedometer means you are actually driving quite slow.
Repecting the speed limit as a strict rule is dangerous.
...the only correct response to which is to contact the state government and complain while continuing to respect the law. Breaking the law while remaining silent is diametrically opposed to the democratic system that the US, at least, aspires to.
> need to be
...oh, and vehicle inefficiency increases superlinearly with speed[1]. Until the majority of the vehicles on the road are electric, lower speed limits help fight climate change. Speed limits don't "need to be" anything, and picking lower limits when there's a good reason is good.
> On many roads, including freeways, the average speed of traffic is higher than the speed limit.
Because drivers follow this flawed line of thought en masse - which doesn't excuse it.
> Driving the speed limit on these freeways is dangerous.
I guess we need more enforcement, then. Plus, I've never encountered a dangerous situation while driving in the right lane. I suspect that there's an implicit "...in the left lane" on your claim.
> Driving the exact speed limit on many roads as shown by your speedometer means you are actually driving quite slow.
Citation needed for the claim that you're "driving quite slow". I've never seen a speedometer that was off by more than 4 MPH (measured as the difference between that and GPS), and a difference of 4 MPH when you're going 55 is not "quite slow".
> Repecting the speed limit as a strict rule is dangerous.
It's called a "limit" for a reason, and the only reason it's non-trivially dangerous is because of other drivers significantly breaking the speed limit, too.
This has inspired me to contact my local state's transportation department and request that they step up enforcement of speed limits.
that is, btw, the history of why we have a 55 speed limit. In 1973 there was a gas crisis, so in 1974 President Nixon drafted the National Maximum Speed Limit (NMSL), ostensibly to conserve gasoline.
They're most rare at 0 mph. In fact, they're so rare to be impossible.
Once you've accepted non-zero speeds (including walking), you've also accepted some level of risk. We're just arguing about what level of risk is acceptable.
The users of the roads -- drivers -- are the ones who should decide what the speed limits are. The current system is a type of tyranny because the users are subject to rules without input nor representation.
People seem to have a distorted view on what freedom means.
If the majority of users say the speed limit is 80mph, then that is the just speed limit. Localities which decide -- for what ever reason -- that they know better have the seeds of tyranny inside them. History is filled with people who "knew better" for the populace.
We have the technology to measure in realtime what the mass consensus for things like speed limits are. This type of voting is implicit, automated, and accurately captures the will of the people without friction. Right now, this technology has been hijacked by creepy advertising vermin to sell us things we don't need. I think that a time is coming soon when it is reclaimed and put to proper use.
Correct, and there's a way to do that: by contacting your local transportation department and/or representatives.
> The current system is a type of tyranny because the users are subject to rules without input nor representation.
I don't know where you live, but in the US we have these things called "elections" where you can vote for who you want and the policies that they implement, and after the election they'll usually even listen to their constituents if they're contact on large enough scales. There's no tyranny.
> If the majority of users say the speed limit is 80mph, then that is the just speed limit.
You're intentionally conflating terms. The "speed limit" by definition is something that the state sets - it cannot be set by drivers.
> Localities which decide -- for what ever reason -- that they know better have the seeds of tyranny inside them.
This is absolutely crazy. One of the primary functions of a democratic government is to determine and then implement consensus, such as how fast cars should travel on roads. The speed limits around my area literally reflect my preferences. Taking the public's desire and implementing it is the exact opposite of tyranny.
Maybe you should come to the US, where we actually have elections and you can email your governor if you don't like the speed limit - it sounds like you live in a non-democratic country. In the meantime, you've inspired me to contact my governor and ask them to step up speed limit enforcement.
You've presented a false dichotomy here. Advocating for a change of the law while respecting the law, and breaking the law silently are not the only option.
You can also break the law while advocating for its change. This is called civil disobedience and is a very American thing, going back to at least Thoreau.
Electric vehicles are not actually better than gas for continuous use, they're better in the city when the traffic is stop and go.
Losing minutes (and hours) of your life for a minor improvement on the climate seems odd. Spending that energy on reducing corporate offenders (like shipping with bunker oil) would be more effective in achieving closer the maximum 20% reduction. Lobbying for better public transportation is better than slowing everyone down. (though it's unfortunate how often those lobbying want to replace instead of augment cars.)
If the majority of drivers feel the limits are too low, and the limits stay low, can you argue democracy is working? It's more likely you favor the status quo and know that contacting a politician is rather unlikely to get it changed.
Electric cars are more efficient in general, the relative efficiency is what I am comparing. Keep in mind, that the best path is to drive your current car until it's irreparable before buying any new car electric or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law.
> Martin Luther King Jr.
The speed limit conversation seems a distraction. Why drive at all? It's annoying.
I hate dealing with the other humans on the road and the stupid things they do. I hate the constant uncertainty, not being able to assume anything because people don't even signal turns properly. I hate the roads, poorly maintained, full of speed bumps, full of potholes, full of people walking around without a care in the world. I hate having to maintain my car.
I hate being forced to drive. I only do it because I hate other forms of transport even more.
I have done this. It resulted in the gov asking me to prove it. I ran a study and responded that something like 80% of drivers (I don't have numbers with me any more) go above the posted 25 mph speed limit.
The results? Nothing. The gov said thanks for the data and ignored it.
To this day, that stretch of road continues to see daily speeding tickets given. It is not a speed limit for safety, but for revenue generation.
At least here in Australia, you'll be completely ignored. Been there and tried it. Doesn't work, at least not as individuals. ;)
No, this would take more hours than there are in a decade.
Sounds like you are a qualified expert and know more about road design, traffic flow and pedestrian safety than those doing the job now.
Clearly you need to apply for a position so you can right these so obvious wrongs.
Please, don’t pretend you can do the job better than qualified experts
Majority of speed limits are in residential areas set up by the neighbour who complains, as the poster above just proudly did [1]. So the speed starts at 50kph set up by experts when the suburb is created, and 20 years later a random subset of streets is down to 20kph, because somebody somewhere lived there and was bored enough with their life to pester the city hall.
And while that may sound cynical and hostile, it is literally what happened in my last 2 neighbourhoods. There was no expertise, no statistics, no evaluation. Just complaints and no political will to ever refuse or re-examine.
On hwys in my area, experts and studies have repeatedly over years suggested increases are feasible. But it keeps getting delayed. Here's the reality - those who want to go faster will silently go faster. Those who want to go slower will very loudly insist that everybody goes slower. And bureaucratd will be bureaucrats and take the low risk route.
I hate it so much.
We will never have meaningful discussion if we pretend that the only safe speed is 0kph and we all need to stay home and anybody driving is a dangerous maniac. Because if you take the categorical stance that e.g. 40kph is reasonable and all people who want to do 50kph are dangerous drivers who must be stopped, be aware that somebody else thinks 30kph is reasonable and you are a ridiculously dangerous stunt driver for suggesting 40.
It's the old "everybody who drivers slower than me is a moron, everybody who drives faster is a maniac". Have the self awareness that your preferred speed is not the only way to be.
There are many dangerous driving aspects other than going 105kph on a 6 lane straight modern hwy.
I absolutely think 50 kph is a bit high for small inner city streets. There could be children, animals, old people. Shit happens. Driving slowly lowers the risk. Also, fuck car sound. I hate it. I hate pointless driving, which happens to be most of it anyway.
Based on your handle, I'd say you are from Serbia or Hrvatska. Or something like that. It's been almost 20 years since my last visit. Here in Bulgaria there is a massive contingent of extremely dangerous fucks with 20+ year old cars. The type with "blood type audi" and such. Fuck these people. They shouldn't be breathing, let alone driving and breeding
In France, some *départements* adopted the 80km/h limitation while some other kept the 90km/h one, this has to deal with a compromise between safety, co2 emissions and current road behavior and population requirements. So maybe for each country, before experts gave roads their current speed limitations, the way the population drove was taken into account by those experts or was taken into account *in place* of experts analysis, in order for the limitations to be a negotiation/compromise between current habits and experts analysis, in the best cases, and only an affirmation of the population *sentiment* in the worst cases.
The problem is not the road experts analysis in EU, but the political decision to apply or not the analysis, and the population refus to follow the limitations.
Washington refers to modifying speed limits with the goal of noise abatement: https://wsdot.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-10/ENV-ANE-Noi... page 20
Delaware includes modifying speed limits (classed as traffic management) for noise abatement: https://deldot.gov/Programs/highway_noise/index.shtml
as a counterexample, https://wisconsindot.gov/dtsdManuals/traffic-ops/manuals-and... various pages: Wisconsin forbids using speed limit reductions as noise abatement.
It's unmarked cop cars while I'm over taking that bother me the most.
My comment isn't anything about you personally, and I've had similar reactions to even cheaper software. But it still find it striking when I think about it more.
In my experience, doing the math on monetary value of time spent on random activities or interactions just makes everybody sad and doesn't lead to better decisionmaking.
My family is well above the median household income in my state and my county (maybe almost 2x the median), yet due to horrible timing awards, the median house payment would put as at 40% of gross pay, or 62% of take home pay.
No one is well off right now.
Edit: ah, found it myself by searching the web: https://github.com/datapartyjs/rfparty-monitor
I always wondered if there was a particular RF signature to LE vehicles(say, the radiated IF from their radios). This seems more reliable and easier to setup.