Uh huh. Headphones returned.
Another officer returned to this scene and asked if we got the headphones back. I held them up and he says: “OH $&@# YEAH!”
So I phoned the police. They never turned up.
I opened up a credit card chargeback. But I was complaining about this to someone in the school playground and someone else overheard it. Turns out she was his next door neighbour. Said "I'll get it back for you". Sure enough that afternoon she turned up with it! Turns out the guy was a convicted paedophile and she knew that and said if he didn't give it back she'd tell everyone on the estate.
You need leverage or a good police force against criminals. The latter is rare so I suspect that taking matters in to your own hands is sometimes required.
I've also learned the hard way, there again I have had police make so many mistakes for crimes in the past and ignore hard evidence that I lost faith in them years ago sadly. But this is the UK.
Though in your case, at stage it was at, once you had asked the recipient for it back and they said no, the police should have intervened due to the law of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_by_finding and acted.
Equally, the onus to prove delivery is upon the courier and again, you had a case there with them, so shouldn't of had to go thru that.
I agree, taking the law into your own hands alas seems to be the best solution in so many matters in the UK from my experience, sad and wrong but heck, we all want a simple life.
Also note from experience, the police (from a UK perspective) are not as aware of the laws as you would expect and had them tell me a matter was a civil matter and not criminal and raised complaint and had that upheld (lots of those) as they were wrong and the common laypersons expectations of the police is far short from reality, so always stand your ground and don't let anything slide as I used to do as it only erodes you away and enables incompetence to prevail.
That all said there are some good police (those that care and do their job properly) but sadly not as common as one would expect.
What do you expect the police to do in this situation? They can't just walk into people's homes over your word. OP at least had a noise which in the states I assume is probable cause or something. And even then they'd have to come back with a warrant but got the headphones because the suspect felt defeated.
Your situation is bizarre, the helpless feeling of knowing where your stolen item is and not be able to do anything about it. But it's not solvable by the police unless you have more evidence. For example you could have recorded your neighbor saying those things to you.
Here in Sweden petty theft is 99% an insurance issue. I even heard one case where their boat was stolen with an airtag on it and it was traced to a particular driveway.
The police here won't even pick up the case, it goes into a pile of other theft cases and the owner can use the ID to file an insurance claim.
It's very sad on the surface. But maybe they have their reasons.
More detail: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/somethings-gone-w...
I’ve personally experienced their lack of competency when they refused to follow up on stalking/harassment of a friend. They said there was nothing they could do even after I’d tracked down what free texting service was being used and gave them the abuse email address for law enforcement to use. They just straight up refused to do anything. Finally I was able to get my friend’s number blacklisted from the free text message service’s side to stop the abuse (the scumbag would change phone numbers every time he was blocked so we couldn’t just block the number). We even knew who was behind it and they wouldn’t do anything. And before you think this was mild he was sending 100’s of texts a day and calling multiple times. He also keyed the victim’s car but again, cops wouldn’t do anything about it.
Compared to SFPD, who took about 8 hours to even show up to my burgled apartment so I could file an insurance report, it was a breath of fresh air.
Online or telephone stuff won't. It is much more complex and requires system knowledge.
It's that simple.
Edit: being able to use my iPad with Find My was an amazing experience, it’s almost worth having one just for that situation, where I didn’t have to bumble around with 2FA and logging in from my laptop, which isn’t Apple. I could also erase my stolen phone remotely, which gave me so much peace of mind.
Depends on the generation, the new ones with ultra wideband (UWB) are really awesome, you can locate the item to tens of centimeters. I think you already have to be in a certain range for UWB to kick in. So might not really help if you could not identify the apartment otherwise.
Then I saw the phone was at someone else’s house right by the one I showed up to the following evening. I used public records to track down the owner and he said it was a rental. He called his tenants and they said they didn’t have it. They were also telling the truth. Once I told them where it was stolen they said that another neighbor actually worked at the gym.
He did have my iPhone and returned it once his manager told him to. I worked at the gym part time as a fitness instructor.
This was back in the iPhone 4 days admittedly when Find My relied on GPS.
There is no other way to contact them that I can see?
Open and shut case, Watson.
My flatmates and I were all sound asleep in our rooms. I remember half-waking a few times and seeing a shadowy figure in my room, but being half-asleep remember thinking "ah just my flatmate probably doing something" and went back to sleep.
Awoke a short time later and realised what had happened with the charging cables for my laptop/phone pulled towards the doorway and a few things strewn here and there. Got up and went to the hallway and found the rest of the house in disarray and banged on my flatmates doors to panic/get them to call the police. This was at about 4am.
They hadn't hit up my flatmates rooms, only mine (closest to the front door/road) and the main areas of the house. While the police were on their way, I realised my desktop was still there (it was a full-tower) and turned it on to see if I could locate the phone: success! It showed my phone as being in a carpark near a Macca's a few areas over.
My flatmate was still on the phone to the police so we relayed that and they said they'd take a look, but a separate team was coming to see if we were okay. That second team arrived and we made 'em some tea and all sat around being reassured by 'em until the first team had reported in; they got the stuff back! (Well, most of it).
Turns out the guy had: stolen a car, burgled about a half dozen places before ours, then burgled our place and driven to get get Macca's to celebrate. Apparently he was the only car in the carpark and the police walked up seeing that the car was chock full of people's stuff.
My stuff was returned and so was the car and the police were apparently trying to get the other stuff back to their owners, too. I got a follow up call a couple months later "we can't tell you who he is, but for your information he'd already been pulled up on this before and this time he's going to prison". There's nothing quite like the feeling of justice, like "yeah FUCK you for entering my house and taking my stuff".
The scariest thing of the entire scenario was me realising that my phone/laptop were charging on my bed, next to me. Which meant he'd leant over me while I slept to take my stuff.
After moving to the UK, unfortunately after a few years with getting away with walking around London at night, I got mugged. These guys clearly did this stuff all the time because my phone had clearly been turned off, so was not able to be located.
But it really shows the importance of technology helping mitigate/prevent these sorts of things; we should really be holding companies to higher standards and have universal ways to make theft of anything like phones/laptops essentially impossible.
Another thing was the reaction of NZ police; fast, efficient, caring and really eager to just help out someone who had been wronged. Whereas the response I got in London/Met police was basically "ya we can't do anything and there's no CCTV of it" (the most surveilled city in all of Europe, apparently.
>The officer went back and said “listen, we know they are in your apartment, we can hear them, either go get them or we are getting a search warrant.” The guy said “ohhhh well I did have a party last week and there’s this backpack…”
>Uh huh. Headphones returned.
I mean from your description sounds like the guy was telling the truth, or is your theory that he stole your airpods, went on vacation and came back home after several weeks - which of course is also a possibility, but I think backpack left over from party sounds also reasonable.
on edit: hmm, early in the morning, so now I understand it was a week after being stolen they showed up on Find My..guess need more coffee.
When I met the guy that night a week later he opened the door and it was pretty obvious he was the guy. Same sandals.
Beyond a reasonable doubt? Eh, probably not.
My Fitbit has a "find my phone" feature that uses Bluetooth to tell the Fitbit app on the phone to make a loud whistle. It's kind of handy and ive made use of it several times around my house, but obviously isn't useful outside Bluetooth range.
MAC address, but devices don't care, by design they will connect if the SSID and encryption type are the same, actually, you can create a mesh wifi network at your house with regular routers or access points by doing so, connecting them with wired ethernet.
(That's how it should work, not how it does in practice)
I don't know why more devices don't support WPA Enterprise, it's not _that_ complicated a protocol. I can imagine a "secure router" product with a normal WPA3 network for management and an "enterprise" network with a simple username/password list selling quite well in some niche circles.
You can build such a network yourself, though, with almost any OpenWRT device, though it's clearly not something most end users can manage themselves: https://github.com/ouaibe/howto/blob/master/OpenWRT/802.1xOn...
A Wi-Fi network is the abstract concept of "all access points using the same name and passphrase", not an individual instance of an access point.
If you connect the two access points (e.g. using wired Ethernet), clients can actually roam between the two fairly seamlessly without any other setup required, and this even works across brands!
Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear?
Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife looked at Google Earth, identified the likely turnout and high-tailed it. She found it about five minutes after stopping at that turnout.
There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped. It amazed me that we got a little piece of our property back through operation of planetary-scale infrastructure.
Imagine if anyone, not just Apple, could build on that, creating an automatic sneakernet. Populous areas without cell towers would come online, with ultra high latency. Throughput would also need to be throttled by the owner of each device to accommodate battery consumption preferences.
NB-IOT and LTE-M, along with the possibility that SpaceX can use Starlink satellites to provide low bandwidth LTE coverage, seems to give a viable path for global coverage soon
Only problem is that in the short term NB-IoT/LTE-M devices are rather expensive, both upfront and monthly costs. Guess that will come down over time though
Ay, there's the rub!
Find My should also give you a push notification if you leave a device somewhere? But you'll get false positives if you turn off Bluetooth.
It does.
Wouldn't the phone tell Apple servers where it was? No need for passer-bys.
I'm not sure I understand why you would need nearby devices to locate your phone. The phone itself already had GPS and a network connection, right?
Looked for it several times on the path with no luck. Then I remembered my old iPhone was in the backpack. Did a Find my phone on the backup phone and it showed exactly where it had lost touch with the primary phone. This is all without cell or Wi-Fi service. Saved me a $1000.
Best to put your phone in DND, if you need directions have them in voice only.
Were you able to access it right there without signal, or did you need to move to an area with coverage for it to sync?
Also, modern iPhones use tower-assisted GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, BeiDou, and NavIC) so the satellite isn't necessarily Navistar. With fewer or no towers, and positioned in an odd orientation on the ground, a good fix becomes much less likely, and the range can increase from <1m to 10's-100's of m.
Even if they hadn't had the local map, they can still get some useful signals from Find My (and they can still push Ring requests). However, in their case, their old phone still had the log of the last seen location. Again, no Internet required.
"Hey, did you just grab my phone" can take some courage to say to a stranger; "Hey, I can hear my phone ringing in your bag when I press this button!" was much more convincing.
I don't know if Apple IOS is correct enough to log the time and position of AirTags when the device itself is disconnected from a network...
I guess sometimes a late ping is better than no ping.
Since the central office switch is usually powered by generators I was used to the phone always working even during outages. But I found that the landline phone only stays functional for only a day now. I believe the deployment of fiber to the node means there are battery backups at the nodes that only last that long.
So he bought one of those keyrings where you whistle and it beeps. This was a Saturday and we were visiting my grandparents, his parents. He told his dad, by now with a mild case of the Alzheimers, that he’d got this thing and that “you beep and it tells you where your keys are”.
Well my grandad, who never drove a car let alone used a computer, his mind was blown. He just had no idea how this thing could do that.
This went on for a few minutes.
Dad, increasingly frustrated: “you just beep and it tells you where your keys are!”
Grandad, increasingly confused: “... but ... how?!”
It turns out that my grandad was imagining that you whistled and that this little device shouted out, “they’re in your dressing-gown pocket!”
If you just want to home in on a transmitter, there's a much simpler algorithm: Try walking into various directions and keep heading into the one that makes the signal strength nunber go up :) Not sure if there's a name for that.
Most devices are Class 2, with a maximum transmit power of only 2.5 mW; that's not a lot compared to Wi-Fi's ~20-30 mW.
AirPods are notably Class 1, which goes up to almost 20 mW! They accordingly have much better range as a result.
Bluetooth LE in newer version has new low-bitrate coding methods to allow for even greater ranges (called "Coded PHY"). Assuming Bluetooth LE classes are the same as for EDR (I don't know if they are!), this source [1] claims a 4 times greater range using coded PHY, which would be in the range of several hundred meters.
[1] https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/exploring-bluetooth-5-going-t...
Yes and no. Bluetooth is 2.4GHz, WiFi has many bands, including one around 2.4GHz. Those can share an antenna, but I think that means only one can be sending at a time (they could mix the signals, but I guess that would mean connection would fail for the less powerful Bluetooth signal)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth:
“It employs UHF radio waves in the ISM bands, from 2.402 GHz to 2.48 GHz”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels:
“The 802.11 standard provides several distinct radio frequency bands for use in Wi-Fi communications: 860/900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 3.6 GHz, 4.9 GHz, 5 GHz, 5.9 GHz, 6 GHz, 45 GHz and 60 GHz. Each range is divided into a multitude of channels. In the standards, channels are numbered at 5 MHz spacing within a band (except in the 45/60 GHz band, where they are 0.54/1.08/2.16 GHz apart), and the number linearly relates to the centre frequency of the channel. Although channels are numbered at 5 MHz spacing, transmitters generally occupy at least 20 MHz, and standards allow for channels to be bonded together to form wider channels for faster throughput.
Countries apply their own regulations to allowable channels, allowed users and maximum power levels within these frequency ranges. The ISM band ranges are also often used.”
I'm interested in, for this particular problem (finding a device using just wifi or bluetooth), which one would have the greater effective range.
On the other hand, i can walk an entire day through the forest (with some other people around every now and then) without a single position update from the tag.
Big in my experience. 15 - 20 feet vs 100+ feet for wifi out in the open like that.
Sometimes, (if i charge the phone) eventually contacts real names appear on the home screen. This seems just the information one shouldn't be sharing?
It is really odd how garbage the tech is here.
The solution needs to not require any configuration.
You can call your own phone of course but then i have to keep it charged. If it dies the sim locks.
On iPhones, there is the ability to get the medical id (their name and emergency contact) from the Lock Screen too, if people set that up. I set my notifications privacy setting to show preview only when unlocked, so that it won’t show names of my contacts or one-time PIN codes texted to me
I can think of a number of ways to improve the finders experience. Give the provider something to configure. Say a dedicated helpdesk number where I report finding your phone and you can report losing it. Perhaps with a pin matched to the phone.
Say the finder manages to unlock it (0000) they can create a facinating phone bill. If reported as lost the provider can at least cap the bill at something more usual until your id is fully validated.
Could create an app for registered lost and found spots. Then can do all kinds of magic.
Having 1000$ bricks sitting on shelves looks kinda..dumb?
>We'd already called and sent some WhatsApp messages, so we knew the phone wasn't reachable.
How did they do that without coverage?
WiFi network mirroring is smart.
Yep, so smart that I used to name my WiFi “McDonald’s Free WiFi” when I lived half a block from McDonald’s. Everyone’s phones would connect but to my goatse’d image network.
I thought devices would start remembering the base station MAC addresses to avoid hijacking but I guess not.. maybe I should start doing this again at my local Home Depot
Edit: just remembered I used to do this on planes too. I would MiTM the AP and people would connect to my WiFi device. Then I would serve an obvious incorrect Bank of America page. No one logged in to it though :(
The use of multiple APs with the same SSID is a feature, not a bug. It enables roaming between them.
Thanks!
I don't usually use bluetooth _that much_ so I didn't think about it. My cousin's truck was around, which was indeed paired with the phone - but it would have been a bit more cumbersome to use in the search anyways.
Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, or even just a simple presence signal.
You'd put it on everything you own that's portable and easy to lose. When you want to find it you just search for signals. Maybe it could have an NFC silencing feature. Perhaps it could only activate after 10 minutes of not detecting movement, while also not being near a base station (The base stations would mark a location as the "safe place you won't forget").
So you won't get any interference from anything people are carrying. You won't pick up anything safely stashed where it actually belongs.
But you can quickly sweep an area for any lost property (Which could be good or bad, depending on if it's a helpful security guard or someone who believes in finders keepers looking...).
You wouldn't ever have to receive any data, except to detect base stations, which would only need maybe a 2ft range.
But it wouldn't solve the big issue with losing stuff, detecting when you leave a location without a thing.
Well, then you could only ever track 255 different tags :)
AirTags are already pretty minimal. Their battery lasts about a year, and I imagine an open source equivalent should be possible to build for under $5.
This is purely guesstimated based on the fact that I have a couple of Bluetooth LE thermometer/hygrometers that cost me about $3 a piece that last about a year on the same battery (CR2032) – and these run custom firmware and need to run a display and data logger (to on-chip flash) as well!
Why? If you're using your smart tag to track your car, you can hide it somewhere deep inside and connect it to the vehicle's battery so it always has power. Then you never have to worry about changing batteries.
You'd have to do some guesswork though to figure out what's going on but it would be better than nothing, and you might be able to get the size down below what CR2032 allows.
As soon as I landed my family member couldn’t see the AirTag I carry anymore, nor my phone.
(I already have a roll of DOT stuff for bicycles, required on the front and rear forks if riding at night)
SO steampunk to see a group of adults shouting around "HEY GOOGLE" in the woods to find a lost phone.
This is obviously harder to use for searching for the phone than the method they used, but it's a privacy nightmare you should be aware of. Hiding SSIDs is almost always a really bad idea for this reason.
I was skeptical when I bought the airtag, I thought I'd just lose a bike _and_ an airtag, but now I can't recommend it enough!
We found it accidentally during a hike in the summer, when the snow was gone.
Always be prepared to lose everything.
My daughter was perfectly fine, but that is another story: fingers crossed, she has some special powers.
So probably not. But if the lost phone was an iPhone, walking around with another iPhone would have reported it (once the walking one was connected to the WiFi back again).
Cool :)
I thought about "relaying" the place's Wi-Fi connection through a chain of phones sharing via bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but luckily we could find the phone without having to try that. The setup would have been something like:
Router <-Wifi-> Phone <-Blutooth-> Phone <-WiFi-> Phone <-....
I feel like this is not true.
Walking in a city it'd be even worse since there would be 100's networks to check to see if it can connect too. Which I don't think matters much.
Bad cellular reception which you'll hit if you are coming and going out of coverage would matter.
Similarly a wifi you can connect to will drain the battery with background apps and if reception sucks also bad.
But zero wifi you can connect to, I can't see mattering.
https://www.hackers-arise.com/post/software-defined-radio-pa...
I assume I would need two wifi USB dongles for my PC and some sort of way to determine the time a beacon packet arrived but I don't know if the time difference is granular enough to be able to tell a difference in time between the two.
Has anyone tried something like this with wifi?
If I had just read this message before. This is an ingenious solution. He created a thetering wifi network with the same name and password of a network the phone would recognize. When there's a connection, it means the phone is near:
"I’ve used my own phone’s tethering feature to create a wifi network with the same name & password as my cousin’s home network - and we started walking around the place. We made sure the other guy helping us with the search had his own wifi off, to avoid false positives, and waited to find a new connection to the hotspot. And it worked! The connection was made when walking nearby the parked truck, but it turns out that the phone wasn’t in the truck - it was lying on one of the ATVs that was parked by its side."
I remembered my old home's wifi SSID and password, so created a hotspot on my phone with the same SSID and password, and the Fire-stick got connected. All went good after that.
I expect not, because they don't have bluetooth on in their charger, and I don't think the charger itself has bluetooth. But just in case someone knows a miracle for me: Sony WF-1000XM4.
