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> they do interact with the environment.

Yup. Got plaster walls, vinyl flooring, narrow room, different sizes of rattling single-pane windows…

Neighbors with leaf blowers…

I really like my noise canceling headphones. :)


> When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore.

It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.


They were also supposed to be for state’s rights.

My entire life it’s been about nothing more than domination of the “immoral” and the end justifies any means when the alternative is someone else winning the vote.

They are the people the phrase “there is no hate like Christian love” is referring to.


I absolutely believe it could be 90%. And it happens a lot more often than people think. The estimated average across the general population is roughly 1 in 4 for girls and 1 in 6 for boys. The vast majority are by family (3 in 4).

But I'd hesitate to say that is conclusive without seeing how it is across other professions as well.

I suspect it's more strong correlation than strong causation without more data to the contrary.


That's because the applications in macOS are in the sealed volume as part of the operating system.

On iOS, apps are managed by the operating system. On macOS, they're files.


From the article, it was reported to the police. The lawsuit came later and Uber didn’t try to deny it happened.

From a civil law perspective, it doesn’t matter who did it.

The police report is substantial evidence that the event wasn’t made up for the purposes of the lawsuit. Her story was credible to the jury. And Uber’s own algorithms showed significant increased risk for that ride. In other words, Uber knew this could’ve happened and deliberately did not do anything to mitigate the risk.

Even if a rape didn’t really occur in this specific case, Uber knows it has happened many times before. This isn’t a criminal case and they don’t get the assumption of innocence when they have a pattern of guilt.

Let’s put it this way, it’s wrong to assume that an innocent man is always going to be abusive. It is reasonable to assume that someone with a long history of abuse will continue to be abusive.


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The driver acknowledged he knew she was drunk, and that he didn't get explicit consent.

Uber had already flagged it internally as a high-risk ride (drunk female, alone) and didn't take additional security measures.


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> Are you in effect saying the driver admitted to raping her?

https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...

"In a deposition for a federal sexual assault lawsuit against Uber, former driver Hassan Turay admitted that Jaylynn Dean could not consent when he had sex with her in the back of his car in 2023. 'I had a responsibility to make sure she was in a right state of mind, and I did not do that,' Turay said in a video deposition played in court Wednesday afternoon."

"'Honestly, I didn’t do too much to make sure that she could consent,' Turay said when asked. He never checked in with her or asked if she was OK. 'You’ve just made me see another aspect with the whole thing of consent.' By the end of his deposition, Turay said he was wrong to have had sex with Dean."


He admitted to having sex with her without explicit consent.


Then perhaps Uber should find a new business model? Lyft lets women specifically request a female driver.


Emergency services (with the proper software) have been able to get your precise location from your phone for a while now.

This isn’t a new capability and shouldn’t be surprising.


None of this should be happening without the user's knowledge and consent. Swap out your phone carrier for Facebook and it should be plainly obvious why the current state of affairs is undesirable.


I think this feature is required for emergency calls if your specific carrier is not available/in reach - in emergency mode after the phone is restarted, it does connect to any carrier when calling 911, not only yours?


It does indeed. When making emergency calls a phone can switch carrier though generally it will only do so when the main carrier is unavailable or overloaded.


What is it’s a mentally ill person who is about to kill themself?

That’s the majority of uses for the system in the UK. People love to run away and waste police time.


That’s not a good excuse for mass privacy violation.


“A mentally ill person called 911 and said they were going to kill themselves” is a much better justification for pulling GPS data off a phone than any of the rationales I’ve heard from US companies or the government.


What about the other 329,999,999 Americans who aren’t trying to kill themselves at that time?

It’s a cost vs benefit analysis and the cost is pretty damn high.


They’re not calling 911, so their phones wouldn’t respond with a gps location.

I’m not arguing all locations should be collected, just that “during a 911 call” is a really reasonable time to do it by default.


But the question is - does the functionality just open the door for everyone else?

If it could be adequately controlled so that it couldn’t, I would agree


You know about it because your regulatory body requires the system exist.


And it’s typically disclosed in one way or another.

Between buying a phone and reading the OS EULA to providing an E911 address to my carrier, I can count at least three disclosures of this feature.

Nothing is secret or magic here.


I spent ~5 years volunteering for a search and rescue team in New Mexico.

We definitely got the cellphone tower triangulation data. I never once saw GNSS data provided by a carrier. We used FindMeSAR https://findmesar.com/, the subject would usually text back the coordinates from the phone.

Just one data point.

The revolution that's occurred since my SAR volunteer days is the wide availability of satellite messenging on consumer phones. I'm guessing that's really changed the situation quite a bit.


One method is a "hidden sms" which your device sends after you called the emergency number on your own merit.

The article seems to describe another system which can be involved externally.


Surely that only happens when the phone user dials 911 ?


The cell network routinely does TDoA triangulation in order to help choose which tower should serve the client mobile device. Accuracy is about 20m, and may be better at 5G frequencies. 911 gets the location from the mobile network provider, but the network provider could provide it to anyone, and they do.

Tons of "free" and crapware apps are also recording location, and sending it to data brokers.

https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...


Using LTE Timing Advance feature, especially on 5G, accuracy can be much higher.

https://5g-tools.com/5g-nr-timing-advance-ta-distance-calcul... shows an example of the parameters necessary. I don't think you can get your smartphone to dump those stats for you, but the granularity of the individual distance measurement is in the tens of centimeters.

Of course this strongly depends on cell infrastructure being placed precisely, continuously updating correction factors, and a bunch of antennae being around the target to get measurements for, but in most cities that isn't much of a challenge if the operator is working together with whoever wants to spy on citizens.


> Tons of "free" and crapware apps are also recording location, and sending it to data brokers

The last time I checked, that included Google Play Services, and some of their iOS apps.


In the UK, it happens when you call 999 or 112. I don't think 911 is supported, although it probably should be (it'd be a mess to get everyone to agree to add it to their routing tables, but I bet there's a nonzero proportion of people who watch American TV programmes and think the emergency number is 911 - or, for that matter, American tourists).

When you dial 999 it forwards your phone's GPS location if it has a lock to the provider, who then forwards it on to one of the 999 call handling centres in the UK, who then in turn forward that on to the appropriate emergency service control room. All the various services use various different products for telephony and dispatch but they will show the incoming location, and often will prepopulate an incident with the location.

The system that does this is called "EISEC" - Enhanced Information Service for Emergency Calls - and has a lot of cool stuff defined in the spec (which is publically available! You can just go and read it! BT offer a "Supplier's Information Note" with the protocol and details of how the information is encoded) that also handles calls from landlines. These are easy - your telephone provider knows where you live. OMG! The phone company know where I live? Yes, dumbass, they pulled a wire right into your house, of course they know where it is. For VoIP the situation is a little different but you can notify your VoIP provider of the location that the number is being used at, and it'll inject that into the EISEC request.

You can do other cool stuff like if you've got fixed mobile telephone in a vehicle, you can assign the make, model, registration number, colour, and so on in the EISEC database, so given a call from a phone number they know what car they're looking for. No-one uses this.

The very great majority of calls coming in to 999 are from mobiles. It's extremely rare to get one from a landline.

None of the providers use triangulation for determining where a phone is, it's all GPS.


You're thinking of Phase II E911 in the US.

That's true, but you can always be triangulated down a couple hundred meters by figuring out which towers you're connected to.


Triangulation is far more accurate than that in cities. And in rural area that accuracy is already enough to identify the house you're in.


How would that work?


Phone detects that you call emergency service and enables gps.

Last time I called 911 (well, it's 112 in my country) my android phone asked if I want to provide gps coordinates. I did, but they still asked for address, so probably this is not integrated/used everywhere.


They may also ask simply to confirm the location is correct and to help responders more quickly locate you in the vicinity.


The phone could literally pop up a consent alert asking whether to respond to a GPS ping request from the carrier. Or just not honor the pings at all unless you dialed 911 within the last hour.

This is a specific service inside the phone that looks for messages from the carrier requesting a GPS position, it could just refuse, or lie. It's not the same as cell tower triangulation.


I can imagine situations where the emergency is noticed by other people that might not be near the location itself, and the person whose location would need to be determined is not able to use the mobile phone, such as could be the case in many accidents.

I think it would be sufficient to just have a log of this information being queried, and cases where the information has been pinged without a legitimate use case would the be investigated.


The article does not explain in detail how all this works. But educated guess is that if a baseband SoC provides this information, that's it. The phone operating system (iOS, Android) does not get a chance to decide what to do, since baseband soc is a sort of autonomous computer, it has its own firmware, cpu and ram.


You might not be able to fix this in the OS alone, but phone manufacturers are responsible for the whole phone. The baseband doesn't need to behave that way.


Well, yes. But autonomous is acting in accordance with one's duty (a law) rather than one's desires.


That’s not happening today. I meant how is it happening today, such that it can only ever happen when you dial 911?


A phone knows if it’s dialing 911. It can activate features on this criteria


Send the GPS location only when dialling a 3-digit number? Phones probably know which numbers are emergency numbers


Carrier* Android and iOS both integrate with RapidSOS UNITE. RapidSOS then processes the rich emergency information from the user's device (enhanced location, videos and photos, etc), and is available to the 911 dispatcher in their dispatch software. 99.99% of Americans are covered by RapidSOS integrations in their municipalities.

https://rapidsos.com/public-safety/unite/

When the call comes in they can click a button and query RapidSOS for current 911 calls for that number and pull the information inwards.

https://www.baycominc.com/hubfs/2025%20Website%20Update/Prod...


It already exists. Emergency call is spec-defined.


Concrete is smooth and flat. Emergency services have easy access. If you land at a shallow enough angle, you’re just scraping. Given how many planes there are in the air, gear up landings on a runway are well understood.

Plowing the plane into a soft, uneven surface is far less predictable. You never know if you’re going to hit a stump or large rock hidden by grass.

It doesn’t make sense trying to save the air frame if you’re going to risk destroying it and killing the pilot in the process.


> Maybe that’s how my wife feels

The good thing is it isn’t necessary to know how someone else feels to have compassion.:)

It’s enough to accept you don’t understand the other person‘s thought process and stop trying to tell them what they are thinking. You don’t need to fix things, you just need to listen and not make them justify or explain themselves to you.

Doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing.

This comes from my own personal experience. I can’t relate to people on an emotional level. Every relationship is processed with deliberate, logical action. If I love a friend, I need to figure out what would change their internal state so they can experience that love.

From the outside, this looks like I can relate on an emotional level.


Precisely. That's what I took from the experience as well. If that's so hard and I had no idea about it until now, maybe there are other things that I don't know, and some that I will never learn, and I should tread lightly.


A large number of people don’t want the existing system.

They want Jesus on the throne, enforcing morality and making sure the poor people to work instead of being lazy grifters that take good people’s hard-earned money.

This isn’t a hot take. I’m a Christian who grew up that community. :(

It’s everywhere. And I hate what they are doing to my LGBTQ friends.


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