For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi

Riad S. Wahby rsw at jfet.org
Sun Jun 27 08:15:55 PDT 2004


Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> Jamming GPS is no problem, but then they'll just triangulate you within the
> cell. The only way to prevent that would be to switch off, andn to pull the
> battery (unless the firmware is open source, and peer-reviewed).

A little poking around on google reveals that all but the most recent
Sprint phones don't support GPS at all.  They rely for location on AFLT,
advanced forward link trilateration.  That is, they look for multiple
towers, then report their delay readings to the network, allowing
triangulation.

More recent phones from Sprint must support real GPS, since Qualcomm
offers chipsets with GPS support, which they wouldn't do unless their
only customers (Sprint phone manufacturers) wanted it.

-- 
Riad S. Wahby
rsw at jfet.org





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list