44 thoughts on “Hackaday Links July 10, 2016

  1. Activate developer options. Check “Allow Mock Locations”. Install an app to set the mock location. Turn off wifi so Android can’t find your location that way.

    1. Except the app seems to check the mock location setting and says it failed to get your location. Then you need a mock location setting mocker and down the rabbit hole of rooting, xposed framework etc. you go. Not that that’s even possible on all phones, I’m having to break out a Oneplus One because my Blackberry Priv daily driver isn’t rootable.

  2. “Since API 18, the object Location has the method .isFromMockProvider() so you can filter out fake locations.” (from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6880232/disable-check-for-mock-location-prevent-gps-spoofing )

    Very surprising that the app doesn’t check for that. But even if it did,

    https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-15/materials/eu-15-Kang-Is-Your-Timespace-Safe-Time-And-Position-Spoofing-Opensourcely.pdf

    So yeah. GPS spoofing one way or the other…

    1. Well even if it did, I’ve found that mock locations don’t need to be on for some of these spoofing apps. FakeGPS requires root and to be in the system folder, successfully circumventing any mock location technique and any limitation imposed on that.

    1. Thank you for the nice comment. It was always something in my mind that should work when developing the boards, I just never actually got around to writing some code to do it.
      It turned out to be much easier than I thought with antenna diversity. The video shows the screen flash when it hits a thresholded amount, but you have a fair bit of granularity in between. There is a calibration step required (mostly depending on distance between them), but there will be a bit of code that allows you to do this easily and store it on the device.

      1. I know somebody who coordinates a large team of people who care for an even larger group of vulnerable people who prefer to stay in their homes rather than live in specialised facilities. Your device may be of benefit to them in several ways. Can you see if it can detect if you suddenly fall over, or are moving on the floor but clearly not standing up?

        1. In case you were wondering if it was worth the effort, in my country alone it is a +$10 billion a year industry, potentially a huge market involving 10% of all people over the age of 70, and that is not including the separate disability sector.

        2. I am working on code at the moment that detects people walking around the room with 5 nodes, but it’s resolution will be limited to rough heatmaps. Although that could be useful if you had a sudden loss of heatmap information (when you mount these at waist height). It’s something that should be theoretically possible, but I haven’t even thought about getting approval for such a system for medical purposes as of yet (I figure I’d let the hackers see what they can do with it first).
          You could definitely be onto something though.

          1. If you do get something working (medical device certification may not be required depending on what you are promising.) I can make sure it’s potential gets noticed at a high level, the rest is then up to other people, but you never know…

          2. Also, tweaking the design to widen the antenna positions will give you better results and coverage as well. It will be open source in the end so it would be something I or someone else ends up developing.

  3. How much pressure do you need to run the air powered bicycle pump, if it’s low enough maybe you could pump up your tire by “borrowing” some air from somebodies car tire?

    1. Lol. That would get some funny looks, and I doubt anyone would believe the story.
      Reminds me of those special cables you can purchase to charge a cell phone…
      …with another cell phone.

      Search for: phone charger donor cable
      It’s actually an interesting idea; a few brands remind people to please donate blood and such.

  4. >Several years ago, Iran used GPS spoofing to ‘land’ an RQ-170 Sentinel drone operated by the US military. Why is this interesting now? Because this week

    Because this week US Police for the very first time used drone to murder a suspect.

    1. It was not murder, and that was not not standard issue cop gear ether, there are cops and then there are specialists teams who’s operational procedures and mandates are very different from “cops”.

      Murder is an unlawful killing, what law got broken in that paramilitary confrontation?

    2. Well said. Because they were simply suspects, and not convicts, the decision to kill by an officer (using explosives) was beyond the legal right of the officers involved.

          1. Not relevant, he was not being “punished” when he died, they just rendered him incapable of continuing to be an extreme threat to public safety, it just happened to be fatal, but his death was not the primary aim of the action. Even a single rubber bullet can kill you but that is not their purpose and that possibility does not make their use unlawful or inappropriate. If you disagree how to you propose to prove otherwise?

          2. But only one of us, you, is making an unprecedented claim and trying to use contextually irrelevant law to support it. You either have a point of law that is relevant to the actual details of a case or you do not have a point at all. My conventional view is that the police cause the deaths of violent people on a regular basis and in most cases it is not unlawful therefore you need to demonstrate why you believe what you do, because the claim you are supporting is exceptional. This is simple logic that is a lot more general than just law therefore it is entirely correct and proper for myself to apply it. Do you understand now?

            You are also displaying double standards if you say the police are murderers without proving that they are via due process. No surprise there.

          3. What you do is your problem but I’ll continue to ask inconvenient question about the legal claims made by trolls, highlighting the hypocrisy of the poster and or the generally illogical nature of their claims. If you don’t like that bad luck, I am perfectly within my rights to make the reasonable observations that I do.

          4. @PurpleTurdBracket at least 17 people have died due to rubber/plastic bullets (8 deaths were children under the age of 18), it would be be reckless endangerment for any police force to knowingly attempt to use these to subdue suspects.
            https://www.thejournal.ie/state-papers-plastic-bullets-1826664-Dec2014/

            And I suspect that setting explosive to subdue a suspect (innocent until proven guilty), will be looked back at frpom some point in the future as needless reckless endangerment of life.

    3. I fail to see the link between these 2 events… GPS tends to not work whenever there is a proper roof above you and the police robot is direct control only, it has no autonomous features (thus it’s not a fucking drone), unlike the Sentinel which is probably worth more then what the entire local police department owns :P

      Also, none of the regular news mention if the robot just placed the bomb and retreated or if it was a “suicide” mission.
      Kind of interested in that instead, as the robot used robot is fairly big and expensive (not many of them ready to use and it’s about as inconspicuous as a rhino), a humble Packbot Scout would probably be better suited for being an improvised guided munition.

      1. You are making me redundant because you, more often than not, interact with trolls, which helps people to know who all the trolls are and to ignore them, and you.

  5. I get the irony in the air powered bike pump, but remember that news report about the car powered by compressed air, that had an air compressor that ran on compressed air so you could use compressed air to make more compressed air and run on compressed air forever? Someone, somewhere will probably take it seriously.

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