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Comment by jader201 | Hacker News Reader

Something I'm not seeing discussion on:

What is/were the cascading effects of this, particularly for drivers?

Many people in buildings were unaffected, as they could fallback to wifi. But I imagine this had a pretty broad impact to drivers.

Just a few things I can think of:

- Packages delayed (UPS, FedEx, Amazon, truck drivers, etc.) for drivers that relied on their phone's mapping apps to get them to their deliveries

- Uber/Lyft/taxi/etc. drivers not able to get directions to their pickups/dropoffs

- Traffic worsened because drivers weren't able to optimize their routes, or even get directions to their destination

Maybe larger companies have their own infra for this, or have redundancy in place (e.g. their own GPS devices)?

I'm curious to hear thoughts on whether these (and others) were impacted, or if there are ways they're able to get around this.

Also, unrelated to drivers, I can imagine there is/was a higher risk of not getting treated for emergencies due to not being able to make calls (I'm not sure whether/how emergency calling was impacted).

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> Traffic worsened because drivers weren't able to optimize their routes, or even get directions to their destination

During Canada’s Rogers outage in 2022:

> In Toronto there was some dependency on Rogers. One quarter of all traffic signals relied on their cellular network for signal timing changes. The Rogers GSM network was also used to remotely monitor fire alarms and sprinklers in municipal buildings. Public parking payments and public bike services were also unavailable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_o...

As it was summer, I recall some park programming for kids had to be cancelled because the employees were required to have a phone capable of calling 9-1-1 (but sounds like that at least still worked here)

This is putting it mildly. The Interac network went down and no one could use their debit cards nationwide.

I'd put that on Interac single-homing itself without redundancy.

Their ops are critical enough you'd expect better from them.

Not the kind of shortcut Canadian banking takes for core stuff.

The funny thing there is that Interac "did" have redundancy i.e. another network provider to fall back onto.

Unfortunately they failed to notice that this was a reseller for Rogers lines.

that explains a lot

Not all of it. My credit union's interac services still worked.

> Traffic worsened because drivers weren't able to optimize their routes

This might explain a huge random traffic jam I hit in the middle of my town this morning.

I had no idea any kind of an outage was happening because I've intentionally scaled back my dependence on my phone. I always used to automatically pull up Google Maps to navigate no matter how short the trip. At some point I realized I was losing my ability to travel without being completely dependent on some company tracking my location and telling me what to do, so as part of my phone de-Googlification I switched to Organic Maps. And even then I try to navigate on my own without any GPS assistance as often as possible. I feel like navigating is a skill you can actually lose if you don't practice doing it.

After running an errand across town this morning, I decided to try getting back home via the biggest arterial through the city that I know about, and I immediately hit a huge westbound backup stretching at least a mile. It was a total standstill. I peeked ahead trying to see if there was some kind of accident or something and didn't see anything. Everyone was just sitting in this traffic jam, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why.

I immediately flipped a u-turn and went 3/4 of a mile north to another westbound road I knew about. That one was completely clear of any traffic at all, and I was able to drive the speed limit all the way back.

The most-used navigation apps I know of suggest alternate routes when there's congestion, so why were all those people just sitting there in that jam while a parallel road less than a mile away was clear? Maybe it was this cascading effect of too many people conditioned into being told what to do by their phones while their phones couldn't tell them to take the other route.

there is also a big of fear, that if you go to an alternate route it may also be congested, and it will all have been for nothing.

radio is pretty good with traffic news, but how many people would even think of local radio?

> if you go to an alternate route it may also be congested, and it will all have been for nothing

Yeah, I get that there can also be a bit of a sunk cost thing along with regret minimization going on too. I think game theory suggests that you should switch routes the instant you hit significant congestion though, because P(congestion on the current route)=1 as soon as you hit it.

I think many many people would check local radio, not everyone lives on their phone or in a tech bubble.

Many people don't have a way of listening to local radio outside of their car. Loads of people don't even have a way to watch OTA TV.

> Maybe it was this cascading effect of too many people conditioned into being told what to do by their phones while their phones couldn't tell them to take the other route

There is a lot of people who couldn't navigate to a neighboring street without a direct directions even if their life depended on it.

Add to that what the most people doesn't have a slightest idea where are they, where are the cardinal directions and what they need to get from point A to point B.

If you use Google Maps, it will automatically prompt you to download a map of the area if there is known poor coverage. It also has automatic (?) local maps.

One beef of mine with Google’s offline maps is that they’re only driving maps, and not walking/transit/cycling maps. Obviously you can kinda figure out walking paths anyway, but since I’m sometimes travelling without roaming access, it’s unfortunate.

I image it would be hard do transit maps if you weren't connected to get the schedule.

They already get them somehow while "online". Offline with beginning & end times and a rough idea of frequency should be good enough for local use.

Offline road maps are subject to construction/seasonal/holiday route closures/deviations too, and so is transit.

Road closure tends to be much more rare. Transit is much more variable in the US.

Have you tried Organic Maps for walking or cycling routes?

No one walks in Mountain View or most of the US so product management doesn't understand the use case.

Worth noting that GPS does not rely on cell service.

The routing does though.

I have Google offline maps downloaded for areas I end up in just in this case. Gotta do traffic rerouting the old fashioned way though.

Or have an old-school GPS map thingy in your glovebox.

(Also have kiwix and a whole archive of Wikipedia on my phone).

I wonder if meshtastic communicators sales took off during this. How’s LoRa traffic these days?

Yes, much that we think of as Google Maps relies on API calls made to the backend. Plus this assumes that you downloaded the offline maps ahead of time, which in my anecdotal experience is not something that most people really consider. GMaps does (or did at one time at least) have a neat feature of auto-downloading your home area map but, the one time I needed it, it didn't work.

> which in my anecdotal experience is not something that most people really consider

Thankfully I’m in Canada where it’s not impossible to end up in the sticks with no service.

Chewing through your handful of gigabytes/month of data wasn’t hard. Only in the past year or so have double digit gigabyte/month data plans become cost-effective.

And our roaming prices are extortionate, so for jaunts over the border (or internationally), I’ll sometimes go “naked”.

Google Maps does offline routing. It doesn't do traffic routing but updating routing is better than nothing.

The "Here" app or whatever it is called did offline maps and offline routing decently enough. It wasn't perfect, but it worked for "here to there", even if it didn't find the best possible route.

Carriers have mapping independent of networks. Drivers keep personal GPS too. You would lose traffic and road conditions, I guess, but nothing proper trip planning wouldn't cover.

> Drivers keep personal GPS too.

Do they? I know there are a lot of old units out there but I figure people would have tossed them.

At least I’ve found Waze has been pretty good at starting off with wifi and loading the map of the whole journey after coverage was lost with some resilience for stops/detours.

Apple Maps has offline navigation with historical traffic included

I've been using this on Android for a couple years and love it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Maps

You click a few buttons to download OSM tiles and then it does routing. The latest OSM even has a decent amount of stores, restaurants, etc., listed.

I am consistently in areas with zero cellular service and I’m reasonably sure Google Maps will route offline. At least, I’ve never switched to another mapping app because I couldn’t route — it’s more usually because Google Maps is more primitive areas is kind of detail-less.

But even if it doesn’t, there are a ton of offline map apps that use OpenStreetMap data.

> Or have an old-school GPS map thingy in your glovebox

You can also install Organic Maps on your phone.

Google Maps and now Apple Maps (as of ~6 months ago) have offline maps, but not by default. If you enable and download them for your area of interest you can use a subset of the normal app.

I make sure to have this around my usual area and anytime I travel to an area with poor coverage, plus my Garmin watch has offline maps and GPS everywhere, but this is not typical.

OSMand usage is even less common.

Offline maps are a life saver in areas with bad coverage. One of the first things I setup for a new phone or when I’m headed somewhere new on vacation.

This is one of the most interesting differences I often notice between users who rarely leave the city and those who routinely leave. Offline functionality often seems unnecessary at best and absurd at worst to the former group, while the more rural/remote the person the more they value offline functionality. For the most extreme example, talk to the average person who lives outside of Anchorage or Fairbanks in Alaska, and they only really care what the app can do when it's offline as that is it's assumed status when on the go (disclaimer: I moved out of alaska a little over 5 years ago so things might have changed somewhat).

Yeah, if I'm going to travel internationally or if I'm somewhere I know I'll have spotty cell service, I'll download maps. I should probably be better about doing it in local areas where I "assume" things will be fine.

I grew up in a rural area and lived in Colorado for a while. Going home or venturing into the mountains often resulted in bad service so it just became second nature. Good observation!

Lots of people dislike the design choices in OSMAnd, so it's worth mentioning that there are lots of apps that use OSM data and provide offline maps and routing.

agreed. On Google Maps app, there is a feature called "offline maps" which allows a user to select a rectangle on a the map and download all the street info inside it. A whole US state can fit in less than a few hundred megabytes. I have all the city I live in downloaded so I can go on walks without needed to use my data plan.

Not as useful as back when google maps required a 5GB download IIRC

Downloaded a whole island yesterday. Was 40mb. That's a lot better now, has less resolutions packed in tho.

That's assuming you have it on and updated before you hit the road.

I think it's off by default, and I'm guessing most people haven't thought to turn it on, or are even aware of it.

I'm pretty sure maps caches the data around you if you've used it somewhat recently. It saves Google bandwidth too.

I’m not so sure.

Anecdotally, I’ve made it to a remote destination using Maps, then hopped back in the car an hour later (with no signal), and it couldn’t load anything. This seems to happen quite often.

Maps used to expire after 30 days (no idea why), and the auto-updating while on wifi wasn't great unless you were in the app forcing it update. Nowadays they last 365d.

GPS on most cell phones uses data connection to download current satellite data in order to decrease the time from cold start to GPS lock. Lack of cell or WiFi can cause GPS to take 5-15 minutes to "search the sky" and download satellite data via low bitrate channel under poor signal conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS

Edit: You can think of it as a CDN for the GPS almanac.

From cold start. Most starts are not cold. The phone knows where it is, approximately, what time it is (within a second or so, from built-in RTC), and orbital parameters of the satellites overhead (maybe without the latest corrections).

My Garmin watch gets a GPS lock in way less than 5 minutes without any cellular connection.

Actually, your Garmin probably gets A-GPS data uploaded to it via the app.

I think that because Huami/Amazfit/Xiaomi smartwatches already do that. We know this from reverse engineering efforts in Gadgetbridge, but support for Garmin is still new and so there isn't as much info about it; either way it probably works in the same way.

My first GPS Garmin watch used for running back in 2011 didn’t have an app and didn’t have any cellular signal. I put it on my wrist and started running. I don’t remember it taking more than a minute to get a signal.

No, it's not paired to the phone, and there is no Garmin app on the phone either.

That’s just not true for modern phones. I use iPhone on hikes without cellular connection and GPS lock is instantaneous. Organic Map app is great for hiking.

You're talking about something very different called a hot start. The GP is discussing time to fix in a cold start scenario. You'd only see this on a phone that had been powered off for months, or "teleported" hundreds of miles away. In this scenario the receiver has to download the new time, new ephemeris data, and a new almanac (up to 12m30s in the worst case) before it can fix. Depending on the receiver, there may also be a delay of several minutes before it enters cold start mode.

If the receiver has recently (last few days) gotten a fix and hasn't moved too much from that fix, it'll be in at least warm start mode. It still needs to download ephemeris data, but this usually takes 30ish seconds to fix.

If the receiver has seen a fix very recently (last few hours) or a recent network connection, it can fix from hot start like you saw, which only takes a few seconds and may not even be observably slow depending on how the system is implemented. Phones go to great lengths to minimize the apparent latency.

You reminded me of my first GPS, which connected to a laptop via RS-232:

https://www.bevhoward.com/TripMate.htm (Not me)

Back then, just getting a GPS fix at all was exciting. Then driving around with it propped on the dashboard or rear window.

The sibling response here covers all of the points I would say. Scott Manley has a nice video covering the history of GPS and how it works, well worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ7ZAUjsycY

It's not as simple as you think.

worth noting that without cell service, GPS can reliably give you time, lat, long and elevation. So if previously you had no actual map downloaded, or an old or out of date map, you'd just get a pretty accurate dot on an inaccurate map, or just raw coordinates.

>> Traffic worsened because drivers weren't able to optimize their routes

I'm not sure that is a thing. The vast majority of drivers are on familiar routes and are not navigating via electronic means.

Better question: How are the autonomous cars doing? Are they parked by the side of the road unable to navigate without cell coverage.

It only takes a few people missing an exit and swerving to create a bunch of traffic. So many people are used to not navigating manually anymore I can’t imagine it doesn’t have a big effect.

I have a 20-mile commute. I used my phone on day one at the new job, then never again since. It just isn't worth the effort for a road I've driven literally hundreds of times before. Do people also use google maps to get them from their front door to their garage? From the grocery store to wherever they parked their cars?

It depends on your daily commute.

If I need to drive 20 minutes with most of it on the expressway, and they’re prone to accidents and there are multiple viable routes, I’m 100% going to load it up on Maps every trip, if it will save me being delayed 10-60 minutes every few weeks.

But if I’m going mostly backroads, probably not worth it, since you can more easily go around accidents, and they’re less common.

But again, I’m guessing more city expressway commuters use navigation daily than you think.

I do. Mostly from curiosity about which way Google will suggest I go; sometimes because the traffic or road-closure awareness is useful. Though it's often the case that I know about the road closures before it does -- but sometimes it surprises me in a pleasant way.

I use it every day. There are two roughly equivalent paths that I could take, so I use it for information on traffic conditions, and then I leave it running on the off chance that it might route me around a slowdown that wasn't present at the start of my commute.

Two jobs ago, Google Maps literally suggested a different route from my home to work every single day during my first week at the job. The traffic on the main arterial was terrible every day, but somehow Google managed to find different detours every day to shave off a few minutes.

> The vast majority of drivers are on familiar routes and are not navigating via electronic means.

I've been rerouted due to an accident many times, and I've seen the detours get backed up because of people taking more optimal routes (without traffic being redirected via other means).

I'd be curious to see more data on it, but I would speculate it's less than the "vast majority".

> Better question: How are the autonomous cars doing? Are they parked by the side of the road unable to navigate without cell coverage.

Yeah, that falls under my point about Uber/Lyft/taxis. I would speculate there is broader impact from those vs. autonomous cars (that are probably still relatively uncommon).

ups is known for optimizing route planning for time and fuel efficiency purposes, particularly biasing towards three right turns instead of a left

Also can't login to sites that require SMS 2FA.

Well ... let's be honest: SMS 2FA shouldn't be a thing.

TOTP or stronger, please.

TOTP or SMS, it's just another text password you're entering in that's fully phishable.

TOTP just "feels" more secure.

SMS 2FA is a code that you're entering from a phone number. The "risk" is that your phone number can be ported without your permission, and then someone else can get the code.

TOTP is more secure because it isn't tied to a phone number. You're right that it's still phishable but that's not the point.

In both cases, the primary benefit to the general population is to have a rotating credential that, if one website is hacked, is useless on another website.

TOTP is more secure in that you can't be simjacked by someone impersonating you in the cell phone store.

That's assuming your attacker already has your password, or the service allows SMS password reset. (thus negating the second factor. Essentially SMS becomes the only factor.)

No, TOTP is far more secure because it has no dependence on a third-party who can mess up in many ways (Denial of service like in this case by being unavailable, Impersonation by allowing SIM swaps or intercepting messages directly).

You fully control how to store the TOTP seed and how you compute the value, so it is far more secure.

Yes, it can be phished if you fall for that, but it removes several attack vectors.

> You fully control how to store the TOTP seed

Sorta. The seed still needs to be issued to you in some way.

> Yes, it can be phished if you fall for that, but it removes several attack vectors.

How was the first factor (the password) compromised?

Assuming the user is using site-unique passwords, in 99% of cases where an attacker obtains a functional password they can get at least one TOTP code or the seed in the same manner. (ie, if I can steal your password DB, odds are pretty good for me stealing your TOTP seed DB as well.)

The outcome of a single successful authentication is a longer-lived session cookie. Once an attacker has that they can reset your creds (usually just requiring re-entering the password) and the account is theirs.

IMO, the only 2nd factor that matters are those that mutually authenticate like PassKeys / FIDO keys.

Isn't that what passkeys are suppose to be? Better and stronger than passwords with TOTP?

> TOTP or stronger, please

One of the biggest weaknesses with TOTP apps I've tried using is that you have to remember to transfer them to a new phone before you get rid of your old phone. I once got locked out of a domain registrar because I set up TOTP on an old phone many years back. That was long gone by the time I wanted to do something with my domain.

TOTP is fine, but always give me recovery codes I can print and out and keep with my other important documents. Too many services don't do that.

SMS 2FA and TOTP aren't mutually exclusive are they?

TOTP -> Time-based One Time Password SMS -> Delivery mechanism.

You can deliver TOTP over SMS.

Obviously, SMS shouldn't be used, but I was under the impression that the code generation mechanism and the code generation algorithms are completely disparate concepts.

Not sure I'm understanding you, but TOTP isn't delivered. It's generated locally/offline, based on the time and a private key that was set up when you first turned on TOTP 2FA.

This really shouldn't be the only way to verify its you if its going to prompt you every single time.

Tell that to $8 trillion Schwab and $12 trillion Fidelity.

If you are their direct customer you should just keep emailing support as much as possible.

Schwab support accidentally broke my account so that it sends 2FA verifications over email and I couldn't be happier.

(Well I could be happier if they supports TOTP, but I'm not holding my breath)

My service came back around 1:30PM in Connecticut. Data and calls are working fine. I requested a 2FA code at 2:30 from a service that only offers SMS. An hour and a half later, I still haven't gotten it.

> What is/were the cascading effects of this, particularly for drivers?

I wish for an economic system in which all causes could be backpropagated to the source and the source be held responsible.

If for example I lost 2 hours of my time today because I had to fight with Comcast, Comcast should be charged for 2 hours worth of my hourly salary.

If I lost a job offer because of bad interview performance because of heating issues because of bad maintainence on part of landlord, landlord should be charged for the difference in time until I get my next job offer or the difference in salary until the next job offer.

If I had to fight health insurance for 5 hours on the phone due to incorrect bill and that caused me additional stress that caused my condition to worsen, health insurance should be held liable for the delta effects of that stress.

In this case the cellular operators in question would be held liable for the lost incomes of those drivers plus the lost incomes of passengers who lost money because they couldn't get to their destinations on time or missed flights and had to rebook them.

I know this level of backpropagation is hard to implement in the real world but it would be awesome if the entire world were one big PyTorch model and liabilities could be calculated by evaluating gradients.

> Maybe larger companies have their own infra for this, or have redundancy in place (e.g. their own GPS devices)?

Modern trucks have cell modems tied to a private APN that are used for updating vehicle firmware & doing telematics. They also typically have a route to the internet that provides a WiFi hotspot in the cab.

Depending where the fault was in the telco stack, that APN may have still been functional

Not saying this was a significant resolution, but at least a possibility.

In Australia we recently had a telecom outage with Optus; there were untold amount of damage - card payments at shops/cafes were out. - rural towns completely cut off (a few in particular are only serviced by Optus) - emergency services unavailable; for example a snake wrangler was unable to receive his call-outs - hospitals infrastructure came to a halt

And I'm only going off of examples I have heard. These outages are very damaging.

cashiers always look at me dumbstruck when I tell them about the mechanical offline credit card machines we had when I was a cashier back in 2004

If we're thinking of the same thing, I have fond memories of those at mall department stores in the 80s and 90s.

I think Sears around '04-06 (?) was the last time I saw one of those used. I think I bought a dehumidifier or air purifier.

When they started rolling out credit and debit cards without the raised numbers I thought fondly of those and how they were definitely done for now.

Oh yeah I didn’t even think about the raised numbers thing! Cash is still king.

Minor in the grand scheme of things, but I thought interesting (or at least unexpected) - a bunch of rides at Disney World went down because they rely on AT&T push to talk for communication between staff, which is required for safety reasons to run some attractions.

What about those mobile card readers like you see in small businesses and food trucks and such? I've never owned one, but assumed they ran over cellular.

There are some models that can batch transactions throughout the day, and then upload them at the end of the day.

I used to think having a World Wide, or City Wide WiFi Network as backup was a stupid idea. May be not so anymore.

We need to maintain paper-based systems of information storage and retrieval. People should be familiar with a physical map. If we are too dependent on the technology, that is a risk.

Just keeping the paper isn't a solution, people need to know how to use the back up, and use it regularly. When I delivered pizzas, we had a big paper map of the city that we used to consult for deliveries, drivers quickly learned where nearly all of the streets in the city were and how to get there. For most deliveries, drivers just knew where to go, for the rare times I didn't, I either remembered the main street near my delivery or wrote down some notes on the box. Someone marked new streets on the map, as well as the names of major apartment complexes.

Just having that map on the wall isn't going to do any good since without regular use, no one's going to be able to use it effectively. And it's doubtful that people can be forced into using it.

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