Posts by JetSetJim

Re: Is this an advert

Perhaps some perspective is needed on a few of the figures - subscribers is easy enough as most folks know the population of their country. Masts, however, are less appreciated. China Mobile seem to have more 5G masts in their network(s) than the UK has masts for all technologies (struggling to find a definitive & publicly available source to reference, but most estimates when you Google it max out at around 40k in the UK for all networks in the country - my personal knowledge is that at least 2 of the largest networks in the UK had less than 10K sites each as of a couple of years ago)

Re: First question

Also true, but 3 & 4G both use wide beams (120°) from the site. 5G can use very narrow ones which gives performance gains. Suspect 5G in 700MHz band offers better than LTE performance in some scenarios

Re: First question

Why bother? Mainly because it's not aimed at voice calls but rather high bandwidth data. Beyond the initial "my shiny is better than your shiny" use case at initial roll out, there's domestic broadband offerings to those hard-to-reach places. The base station can tune a fine beam of rf to a small group of houses and give them decent broadband much cheaper than running copper or even fibre to the premises, or installing an exchange closer to then.

Re: If you don't like it...

You think Google still don't collect location data? They can infer a lot from the WiFi signatures you pick up. There used to be s time when you might occasionally see jumps in your location trace because of someone having moved house but keept their WiFi access point on the same settings - sniff that one and Google would put you near their old address.

I suspect there's a bunch of info sent back to the Apple and Google motherships all the time

>> So how are those countries getting the data?

>...Governments seem to have a tool already developed...

Nope - the operators do, though, and use it to help optimise the network. An optimised network = fewer miffed customers = better retention rate = more money. There is no sinister, lizard-driven purpose.

Re: But I don't have a so-called "smart" phone.

What you're talking about seems to be the periodic location area update (about every 30 mins, typically) - I'm surprised any phone did it when powered off as it's only to help paging for an inbound call, not to help the phone contact the network

Re: But I don't have a so-called "smart" phone.

IMEI = International Mobile Equipment Identity - aka the handset. Nowt to do with the SIM, which contains the IMSI, which is ties to you (subject to being acquired in a time/place where legislation requires you to prove this)

Re: But I don't have a so-called "smart" phone.

> A long time ago now

In a galaxy far far away?

I've done a fair few tests with mobiles with private SIMs in on a private network and never noticed that behaviour in the call trace (using open source network infrastructure, so unlikely to contain "hidden" messaging). Mobe would have to wake up, search for network, acquire it, signal attach request to get connected, then signal something (who knows what - if it's Google/Apple then it's at the application layer so this behaviour would not be tied to a SIM, and there is nothing like this in the standards for phones doing this at lower layers), and then power down.

In airplane mode, a mobile will still record GPS/WiFi/Network locations - these only rely on the device listening to signals, not transmitting. The phone will then wait for airplane mode to be switched off before transmitting that info back to the mothership

Re: Makes no sense

Possibly automatable with visits to known first responder locations - hospital, police station, etc..Information might not need to be 100% perfect, just try and discard outliers who fit with a first responder pattern and measure from there.

Equally could correlate with trace data from responder vehicles.

Even that woouldn't catch everyone as I'm sure there are essential people who won't be detectable with this method - but their movements might well influence the spread of the virus anyway

Re: Maybe

> Unfortunately the crowds flocking to beaches

Crowds are as intelligent as the least among them

Re: Naomi Klein

> That's strange. I thought the UK Government was following a declared strategy that involves continuous escalation, timed for maximum impact, using measures planned for weeks ago in addition to incorporating new information and taking into account resource availability.

That sounds like a line from a spin-doctor. Maximum impact would have been shutting down quicker, slowing the infection rate trajectory. This was known about by senior figures in January and f*** all was done, which is now leading to the NHS being swamped unneccessarily. Yes, there's an issue with locking down for sufficient time to stamp on this thing - people will get tired of it and break the quarantine. This will kill more people. The govmt chose to go with "behavioural science" rather than epidemiology, and thought "herd immunity" to a mutating virus was a thing they could obtain when everyone else in the world, particularly those with a couple of weeks more experience of CV19, said otherwise

Re: Naomi Klein

Agreed, it's not zero sum. In the UK at least, however, I'd hope the risk to people from just staying indoors and shopping as little as possible is moderately minimal - I can't speak for other countries, although would hope that us in the richer countries at least try to help them out.

I suspect the US would not lose @10m to such restrictive measures either.

Re: But I don't have a so-called "smart" phone.

> besides, it's NOBODY'S BUSINESS where you are, except YOURS

Under normal circumstances I might agree, however if you're now the equivalent of Typhoid Mary, I'd rathre know where you are. And if information can be garnered to help work out where CV19 incidence will rise due to high numbers of highly mobile people, I would think that would be rather useful in determining where resources could be focussed to minimise loss of life

Re: Naomi Klein

Saw a study by a data cruncher who has come to the conclusion that if the Yanks did absolutely nothing (and it seems like this is not the case), then they'd be looking at 10mill dead. Do absolutely everything and you can pull that number down into the low numbers of thousands.

Re: But I don't have a so-called "smart" phone.

Your "dumb" phone will also be tracked. If it's 2G only, it can still be easily tracked by the network

Re: Makes no sense

They can easily be disregarded with an IMSI black/white list

Re: But I don't have a so-called "smart" phone.

Absolutely every mobile can be tracked to a quite fine granularity while it is active on the network either sending/receiving data (e.g. your app notifications) or making a call. When not doing that, the tracking is less granular - at best it is to cell level, but after a succession of timeouts to a lower granularity (grouping of cells). Networks can improve this by doing periodic paging which forces the phone to reconnect, or by tweaking the timeouts, or by reconfiguring cell groupings.

Re: Doesn't check out

> No, I don't think this virus is really as scary as people make it, the main problems are that it seems to spread easier and quicker than an influenza and that there is no vaccine.

...

> Mortality seems to be comparable, so maybe we are overreacting a tad?

On the face of it, mortality seems to be reported as in the 1-2% range, whereas 'flu is in the 0.1% range. So only an order of magnitude more fatal.

However, not sure if this initial estimate of mortality is now falling due to people actually getting treated rather than just attempting to shrug off a nasty cold/flu, or more cases getting diagnosed due to increased awareness of the issue..

A possible problem for the nation, however, is the rate at which people require hospitalisation for the bit of the virus that causes breathing difficulties. There are only just over 100K hospital beds available for General/Acute patients (source), and they're usually over 90% occupied. That leaves fewer than 10K beds available for such patients (assuming they can be suitably quarantined away from other patients, and that the bed availabilty matches the spread of the virus).

As a healthy(ish) person, I have no significant concern about the virus, but I *do* have a concern as to the ability of our health service to cope with the numbers of those that might be affected

Re: I'm not sure I understand all of this

You can look them up here. There's a couple of correspondence addresses listed

Nice idea, but might possibly fall foul of some technical difficulties for a bit. Particularly IP telephony where you can set your own CLI. In practice, it would be nice if global telcos would enforce this, but it would basically result in these spammers running their operations out of whichever country lets them get away with it until either the country gets blacklisted from anyone making calls internationally, or implements modern products. Additionally, will probably have to do something about false reports, too.

What, like this one?

Re: > signing a waiver reneging any claim against the US government for damages

Apparently not if a government does it