GPS Tracking For Your Laptop? — You’d Be Well Advised

Can’t recall the exact movie at the moment but one of my all time favorite actors, Clint Eastwood had a line that stuck in mind mind for years … I believe it was one of his “Dirty Harry” series, but at any rate, Clint’s character is sound asleep and the phone rings, waking him.  Clint reaches out, lifts the handset and speaks into the mouthpiece in that wonderfully intimidating voice, “You’d be well advised to have a good reason for this phone call.”

Lately a lot of people have had to make calls in the middle of the night to their bosses, to their clients, to law enforcement agencies … all with the same subject … “My laptop was stolen and all the company secrets/client billing data/employee’s personal data information was on it.”

This article pointed up some pretty interesting facts to me.  I knew laptop loss and theft was a big problem but I really didn’t know the costs dimensions very well.  As much as $89,000 per machine stolen, millions of dollars per year according to the FBI.

Stop and think for a moment about what happens if a machine goes missing with say 18,000 employee records on board.  Just the paper, envelopes and certified mail postage alone to notify folks of the theft is going to run $70,000 or more.

Now everyone knows I’m a certified GPS “geek”, known to overstate my case at times.  Am I trying to tell you that GPS tracking for your laptop is going to prevent its theft?  No, even I’m not that much of an enthusiast, but do think very hard about installing theft recovery GPS as well as other standard laptop security options.  The faster you can recover the machine the less dollars it’s going to cost and the greater your return on investment (ROI).

This is one interesting service you can use; https://www.mylaptopgps.com/how.php

They say their technique is proprietary and from what I can tell it’s really not GPS at all, but some sophisticated techniques using various IP addresses to progressively pin down the machine.  But I really don’t care about the nitty-gritty of their technology, I care about the results.  You should to.

• It’s cheap.  $9.95 a month and less, depending upon the number of machines
• It’s effective.  The triple combination of shields is a smart way to escalate response.
• It focuses on the most important thing … the data on the computer, which is normally much more important than the value of the computer itself … even if the computer is not recovered, physically, you get your data back in your hands and out of the thief’s hands.  Slick.

I like this idea in a number of ways, I even think the company is perhaps limiting itself too tightly by marketing this only for laptops.  Desktops and servers go missing all the time to, and very few computers that get stolen don’t get used … the thief is either going to crank up the computer for his/her own use (and exploration for vulnerable data) or s/he’s going to sell it to someone else who will.  Either way, in today’s highly connected world, your data stands an excellent chance of recovery.

“Any organization that fails to take the threat of laptop theft seriously is playing chicken with its stakeholders’ data security,” said security expert Siciliano. “Smart companies leave sensitive data off laptop computers and track their machines with GPS.”

Dave says, you better look into this now, before your machine goes missing, even if the technique isn’t really GPS.  Someone will look back at this message a few months from now and say, “Damn, he was right.”  You’d be well advised not to be that someone.

GPS Adjunct — Learn The Lat/Long or Do Something With Lat/Long

I’m renewing my weekend eye candy tradition … this isn’t directly GPS related but oh can you do things connected with the latitude/longitude basis of GPS.

The Internet is full of sometimes little-known treasures. One of them is at:

http://gc.kls2.com/

here you’ll see how far it is from one point to another, what airports are available, how airlines have to use distance and time in planning flights, how to draw a radius around a point as see how far an airliner can fly … the list goes on. Explore the whole site including the lists of airlines of the world. fascinating stuff … I’ve used the site for years and have neglected to mention it or to give its hardworking founder, Karl Swartz credit. Go, spend an hour or two, enjoy.

Hey Mr., Looking for a Good Time? GPS Provides

A lot of folks don’t think much about time … is that true?  Seems as if most of us are almost obsessed with time … rushing out the door, always late … happens to you, doesn’t it?  It certainly does to me.

But when I said think about time I was talking at the lowest, most basic level, where most of us never give it a thought.  “Standard” time.  When you set your Rolex the time Windows shows down in the bottom right screen corner will be just fine.  When you want that time to be a little bit more accurate that your office mate’s clock you can use a great little program called AboutTime from an amazing fellow name of Paul Lutus (you should read some of his thoughts here).  Paul’s amazing little program will keep your computer clock accurate to within +/- 50 milliseconds or so, so that should be good enough for even a Rolex owner.  It’s certainly useful to have on a home network so that you don’t sit across from your partner and debate whether is’ 19:21 or 19:22

But in many areas of science and in practical world-wide networking, 50 milliseconds (50 thousandths of a second) is like a century to a normal person. Those of us who know the GPS specs are aware that the standards for GPS are supposed to guarantee that SPS (Standard Positioning Service … the one ordinary civil users access) has an accuracy of +/- 170 nanoseconds (millionths of a second), 95% of the time.  That’s getting pretty darn accurate in my book.  But there’s a lot more accuracy needed by some … enter smart, cooperative sharing networks like today’s featured GPS use … Reference Source Here:

Using the Sistema Interamericano de Metrologia (SIM) network, countries throughout the Americas can readily keep their time standards within 50 nanoseconds .. about 3 times better than GPS data alone will do the job.  Kudos to the folks who put this together instead of sitting in a corner and moaning about the money they didn’t have, or the fact it should have been someone else’s job or even that they didn’t like the GPS system because it was US military based and controlled.  Just like a choir only sounds good when they are singing from the same sheet of music, science can only advance when all the players can get on the same page.

International networking has improved significantly since GPS (and GPS-enhanced) timing sources have come into play.  It wasn’t many years ago when entire areas like the Hawaiian islands had no master clocks and thus everything sent between Hawaii and the US mainland had to be reduced to serial analog signals and then reprocessed into digital form that the distant ends.  For years in Cheyenne Mountain, missile warning center for the free world, computer systems were all synchronized to a rubidium crystal (good to a few milliseconds) master station clock.  really smart.  Except that for ’security’, the clock connected to no one in the outside world … it was set buy the building maintenance folks to … you guessed it, the colonel’s Rolex.  Time marches on, to a GPS cadence.

How To Defeat GPS Tracking — And Is There An ROI In Doing So? Part 3

By now I’m sure many have had enough pf looking at hardware and discussing the good, the bad and the ugly about GPS Tracking. And you should be in a better position to weight the ROI (Return On Investment) both personally and business-wise.

But as I promised, there is much more to the tracking/privacy/worker autonomy/big brother issue than GPS. In fact, if a magic wand were waved and GPS was turned off tomorrow, we, as world citizens, would still have a big problem. here’s just one news item this week … there are many more, believe me:

Defense Workers Warned About Spy Coins

(01-10) 15:56 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) —

Can the coins jingling in your pocket trace your movements? The Defense Department is warning its American contractor employees about a new espionage threat seemingly straight from Hollywood: It discovered Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside.

In a U.S. government report, it said the mysterious coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada…. Full Article Here:

Upon careful reading this incident which is totally possible using existing technology has a narrow focus. The coins use passive RFID chips (you can read more about RFID here and here). This means, among other things:

• There’s no easy way to detect them … they don’t emit signals unless scanned.
• They have infinite life … there’s no battery to discharge
• They’re totally innocent to most observes .. who’s going to be suspicious of a common coin?

I’ll also chose to differ with one of the article’s points … where it’s alleged that the idea is flawed since coins could be so easily passed on from the subject person to someone not “of interest”.

US Readers, quick now, you recognize this coin? Of course you don’t. It’s a “Tooney” as used in the scheme referenced. Can you spend it in the US? Not hardly. This is what makes me a lot more convinced the scheme may be real and not some PR stunt. The coin was found on US defense contractors. It’s an attractive coin and unusual to US eyes and it’s worth enough that the average person isn’t going to throw it in the wastebasket as he’s packing. She is going to carry it along as a souvenir of the trip. It only makes sense. Given the task of putting something on the person of a target group a coin certainly has potential value.

I didn’t decide to make this post, however, to enter into the laws of probability, human nature or even numismatics.

What I did want to say is that GPS and the possible harmful uses of GPS are certainly a subject that ought to be in our minds and that we clearly need some answers in a hurry. But again, the issues of GPS use are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Can I buy the data from Safeway for your use of the discount card and thus learn what brand of hamburger extender you use instead of cooking real meals? Can I buy your cell phone records from an online service and reconstruct the who, when and possibly the whys of your phone calls? Can I take pictures of your license plate with an automated ALPR and continually search for data on you just because you happened to drive down the road I was monitoring?

GPS is one issue, but I submit there are one heck of a lot more issues out there and I see little or no effort on the part of “watchdog” organizations to educate and mobilize. What are your thoughts?

How To Defeat GPS Tracking — And Is There An ROI In Doing So? Part 1

A lot of recent searches have involved ways to defeat GPS tracking and ways to avoid being tracked. As many of you know I am an advocate GPS tracking technology and made my living in that field for a number of years. I must be getting a reputation as an advocate, Tim Hibbard over at “Where’s Tim” called me “Mr. GPS” in his blog. Well, hardly. I couldn’t make a pimple on the butt of a real GPS engineer or scientist, but I have been around the program since the days when there was only one GPS satellite in orbit, so I have seen a lot of experts come and go and heard a lot of pros and cons thrown about.

OK, I’ve confessed my enthusiasm, but I’m a fair-minded guy. I can see a lot of reasons why people would worry about being tracked and I certainly don’t trample on anyone’s right to dissent. So I’ll give out a few tips and some practical advice.

First of all, in the majority of cases avoiding being tracked in your own vehicle or in a vehicle supplied by your boss is easy, from a technology standpoint. The vast majority of commercial tracking units have visible components. factory installed systems such as OnStar, a product either on or available in nearly all GM vehicles has two major components that look a lot like this.

You can find a wealth of information on line about how these systems operate and even how to hack them. Google is your friend, I’m not going to make a day out of researching this, but disconnecting any of the components will certainly stop tracking.

Other, third-party tracking solutions take the form of internal “black boxes” or roof-mounted “hats”, like the EMS PDT-100

or the under-the-dash GeoTab I used to sell.

Any of these units can be disabled by disconnecting power cords, pulling a fuse, or, for units that use a separate GPS antenna. simply disconnecting the antenna.

And for the “black helicopter” crowd’s benefit, yes, putting a piece of tin foil over the antenna will also disable it, in most cases. GPS signals don’t don’t penetrate metal very well.

Now, of course, do you really want to take these somewhat extreme disabling measures? well as they say here in the Philippines, “‘Sup to you”. In almost all cases the unit will record an error message when it no longer sees the sky. Most units are continually storing data so if you yank the power cord the boss is going to know where and when the unit ceased to function. He or she probably doesn’t have to be too much of a Sherlock Holmes to figure out who had charge of the vehicle when the signals quit. But if you think it’s advisable, go ahead, it’s not that hard to disable known unit tracking.

Tomorrow I’ll show you some clandestine units that you are not so likely to detect. You’ll have a bit more trouble finding them and if you have an undercover unit on your vehicle there’s liable to be a reason for it more serious than I want to get into.

In part three of this series I’ll tell you a few of the tracking issues you probably haven’t thought of and discuss why GPS Tracking is one of the least of your worries.

What is a Transponder?

Here’s a nice topic suggested by recent queries (search engine questions) which “landed” here at the GPS Tracking blog.

Dictionary definition: A combination receiver, frequency converter, and transmitter package.

OK, that told us a lot, right?  Well transponder is one of those terms like “wireless communication” that covers so much ground the average person doesn’t really want to know the answer to the question they just asked.

Transponder came from the concept of automatic response to a signal.  In the earliest days of “wireless” there would have to be a dedicated transmitter and a dedicated receiver in order for a signal to effectively cross the “ether”.  (Not Ethernet. that came along much much later ;-)).  If someone directed a signal be sent … perhaps a “radiogram” to a ship at sea, there was no way of knowing the message was received unless the ship had a functioning transmitter and a radio operator to key a response back.

So from the very early days of radio (wireless) various schemes were introduced that would let a receiving station autonomously send back some message when messaged to, or even queried for their status, by a transmitter.  A response to a transmission in other words, shortened by common usage to a transponder.

In the modern world, when a technogeek is talking about transponders, s/he is most likely to be talking about one of three things:

• A transponder on a communications satellite (often a TV broadcast satellite).  because of a number of physical factors commercial satellite communication usually involves the uplink (data going to the satellite) being on a different frequency that the downlink (or broadcast) signal beaming back to earth from the space vehicle.  Communication satellites typically don’t send out signals on their own, they act as mirrors for the programming uplinked to them.  Thus an individual broadcast channel selected on your set top box is typically being broadcast by a dedicated transponder on the satellite that receives the broadcast from the ground, converts it to a different frequency and sends it down to your very own babble-box.

• A device on the ground that interacts with a satellite or a ground-based radio frequency (RF) signal.  two typical examples are the transponder on a vehicle being tracked that responds to a communication satellite when asked its position, or the radar transponder in an aircraft that sends back an identification code when the aircraft is “painted” (queried by a radar transmitter.

 

 

 

 

• (most likely reason this question “landed” here) A device attached to a vehicle (little box on the windshield, perhaps) that is queried by a toll gate transmitter and responds back with the vehicle’s ID and toll data charge information.  Also a similar box on perhaps a piece of cargo, and ID badge or even a cardboard carton at Wal*Mart.  Typically this type of transponder is part if an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) system.

Hope that’s been of some help to the fellow or gal with the question … as always I welcome blog comments, direct email at: dave (at) satviz(dot)com or voice at: 1.719.423.8872

Our Big Brother Can Beat Up Your Big Brother, Eh? RFID vs. Plate Readers

Don’t blame me for the headline, it came from Jalopnik.com the guys who originally broke the story. Thought it was pretty cute myself. It also is worth writing about because it illustrates how massive the educational problem still is in the tracking industry, even among engineers investors and marketers who are supposed to be able to “get” the technology .

Here’s the situation in a nutshell. One company, specializing in RFID technology is touting their solution for tracking cars on the highway versus a plan to use ALPR (Automated License Plate Recognition) technology. In one sense it’s just a business squabble but in a larger sense it clearly shows that people just do not “get it”. Let’s review the bidding a bit.

RFID (Radio Frequency identification) is a broad technology that is divided into two main branches, Passive and Active. The basis of both techniques is a chip with a permanent (or at least semi-permanent) identification code … often called a license plate code … embedded in silicon. active chips have a power source and a transmitter that broadcasts to code over short distances to a reader that collects and time stamps codes received from compatible chips. The advantages to Active RFID is that it’s relatively easy to collect data from passing devices. Disadvantages are that the power source has a finite life, the radiated signal is detectable by sensors other than the intended ones and, in common with their passive cousins, the chip has to be placed on the assets to be tracked in the first place. Passive RFID employs an inert chip or wire grid that reflects radio energy back to a receiver when it is excited by a specific interrogation signal. This gives passive technology the great advantage of infinite life (no power source onboard the asset), virtual undetectably … no signals are emitted unless properly radiated and generally much smaller and significantly cheaper onboard units. The disadvantages include more limited range, much greater chance that the chip will be shielded from read command energy by the structure of the asset being tracked, and, in common with Active techniques, the chip must somehow be placed onboard to begin with.

In order to effectively track vehicle activity RFID currently has very limited applications. The most common are automated toll collection or automated truck checkpoint reporting systems. These serve a very useful purpose in commercial applications but because they are hardly ubiquitous they don’t seem to me a very useful technology that will scale to cover all, or the majority of, vehicles on the road.

In contrast we have a much sexier competitor which is just no emerging from the world of clandestine surveillance where it has been effectively in use for many years. ALPR. In virtually every country of the world vehicles have carried license plates for a hundred years or more. The infrastructure for registering and “plating” vehicles is well established and the acceptance factor of motorists is near universal. A vehicle without license plates is readily apparent, even to the casual observer. I’ve written about Automated License Plate Readers here before.

These devices are nothing more than a digital camera and character recognition software … both ubiquitous, relatively cheap and getting cheaper by the day … tried to buy a cell phone without a camera lately? For years many countries have made use of speed cameras at the side of the road that take a picture of speeding cars. The other uses of these systems, should their be any, have been shrouded in secrecy. But I do know that in japan there is a huge government program that tracks movement of every car that passes such a camera. For some years it was even described on a government web site … since removed … perhaps to help secure the “Global War On Terrorism”?

Look up next time you pass under a traffic light. In a growing number of cities you’ll see a camera. Some cities have already experimented with traffic tickets by cameras for red light violations. Much more will come from this, believe me. On one toll road I sued to frequent (where tolls were collected by a passive RFID transponder in the vehicle) the backup for the transponder are cameras at the toll booths that record each and every license plate and send out summonses to those who bypass the tolls by whizzing through without a transponder. Ummm, if they already are recording who goes through can you tell me why the expensive transponder is even necessary? Why not just match each license plate to the know database of subscribers and eliminate them from the auto ticket queue? Hmm, they already do that, so again … what purpose does the transponder actually serve?

Takes away’s from today’s post?

First of all, companies ought to learn what purposes their technology really serves and stop wasting time trying to sell into markets they are not suited from. When tracking vehicles, cameras beat RFID solutions hands down.

Secondly, “geoslavery” and indiscriminate tracking of private citizens and workers is becoming a big issues and it looks like it will be become much larger in the next year or two. Banning or controlling GPS, RFID tags or any other single technology is not the solution, we are already being watched on a much wider spectrum than we think.

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