Panoptican People

[mercalia]

<SNIP>
so far iphones and on another thread android? well what about Windows phones?

[Cours]

<SNIP>
I watched The Matrix (or The Mattress as my nan calls it) before xmas and was struck by nuances in it which id never seen before but really hit home now.

Almost everyone has voluntarily taken ' the red pill', and i keep waiting for the backlash but it never seems to happen. We really have sleepwalked into 1984, without even bothering ask why.

[SimonCelsa]

A regular little Leonard Skinnard and no mistake

Lynyrd Skynyrd (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)

[kwackers]

Almost everyone has voluntarily taken ' the red pill', and i keep waiting for the backlash but it never seems to happen. We really have sleepwalked into 1984, without even bothering ask why.

Classic stuff.

There's a flat earth thread on here with the same claims. If *only* everyone would wake up, smell the cheese and join those 'in the know'.
What can you do? The world is full of sheeple, you'd think given the sheer number of conspiracy theories that abound telling them the same stuff that they'd have figured out by now that they'd taken the wrong pill wouldn't you?

But perhaps they didn't. Perhaps the problem isn't them...

Personally I'd love it if I thought the government really was that clever. Current circumstance doesn't hold up much hope for that though.

Right off to Google to see what targeted ad's they've got for me! (Ad's are great these days aren't they? Remember when they just used to shotgun you with irrelevant nonsense? Who wants that!?)

"Alexa, run Google"

[thirdcrank]

... Right off to Google to see what targeted ad's they've got for me! (Ad's are great these days aren't they? ...

I'll know they've got that right when they stop sending me ads when my searching stops because I've found what I wanted and bought it.

[kwackers]

I'll know they've got that right when they stop sending me ads when my searching stops because I've found what I wanted and bought it.

That is one of the most irritating things.
I quite like targeted ads, but once I've bought it why keep recommending it? You'd think buying it off Amazon would stop Amazon from recommending it but no...

When faced with that level of stupidity I find it unbelievable what some folk think is actually happening. For all this supposed access to our data nobody seems to do a good job with it, how often do we see our security services muff stuff up? Far more often than they should if you believed this rubbish.

[Cugel]

What long and depressing posts, not that I've bothered to read them. What a very humdrum life you must lead.

Back to playing with your consumer gew-gaws, Mr Two! You may thus remain happy, with no obligation to not-read my ramblings or to make meaningless judgments on things you haven't read.

Cugel, just chawing on a brick (another kind of entertainment from the usual).

[Cugel]

I'll know they've got that right when they stop sending me ads when my searching stops because I've found what I wanted and bought it.

That is one of the most irritating things.
I quite like targeted ads, but once I've bought it why keep recommending it? You'd think buying it off Amazon would stop Amazon from recommending it but no...

When faced with that level of stupidity I find it unbelievable what some folk think is actually happening. For all this supposed access to our data nobody seems to do a good job with it, how often do we see our security services muff stuff up? Far more often than they should if you believed this rubbish.

The AIs are coming! Many are already here and algorhythming your life for you, the rascals. They might be a bit dumb as yet but they're still pulling our strings and opening or closing the doors they think we should be allowed through (or not). Soon they will be very clever indeed - well beyond our understanding .... and perhaps beyond the understanding (and control) of those who think they own them.

Ask yourself: which of my thoughts are my own, derived not from a mass media channel or some other pre-structured set of assumptions, given-truths, common-senses and similar? In our age, it's extremely difficult to think orthogonally about anything, as so much is already categorised or otherwise defined in various vast schemas of "knowledge".

None of that is new, as humans are all cultural constructs in their minds and have been for millennia. But now the construction process is becoming a set of tools that can be bought and employed in many forms. It's controlled by a few, not via an evolution in the wider public space based on eveyone's everyday experiences. I know many people who are walking Daily Mails or jogging Guardians. Some are crawling things manufactured by The Daily Stormer or Breitbart.........

Me and you are both constructed by cultural armatures of various kinds. The only question is: what kinds? Some seem to produce humans rather more dangerous than others.

Cugel

[Pastychomper]

Here is the Snowden article referenced by RT. In it they confirm that the ability to track phones, location find transmit data, even when switched off and the battery removed. The NSA call it 'The find'. I'll post the actual Snowden article when I have
<snip>

I expect an apology from your thinly veiled insult. Thanks.

Enjoy your wait.

Rather than linking to an opinion piece please link me to something that actually constitutes evidence.
With a background in electronic engineering, particularly RF I'm telling you it can't be done.

To power the phone, particularly for long enough that stuff can actually work and get a signal back that wasn't lost in the noise would require many mega-watts of power from the base stations - nearby stuff would break, street lights would flash.
You should see what happens with just a few hundred watts of RF!

With a battery in it I wouldn't bet on any aspect of phone monitoring, phones are complex digital devices, anything could be hidden in there. But without one you genuinely need magic or for the person to be no more than a few feet away.

Such phrases as "superpower themselves up" are laughable and designed to appeal to the naivety of the 'comic generation'.
How you can type it with a straight face is beyond me - I can't.

I've no evidence either way, but take a passing interest in what can or might be done. I thought Canuk was asserting that something in the IMEI chip could respond to a special signal to let the spooks know where the 'phone is. If that's all that's wanted, rather than full data access, there would be no need to turn the entire 'phone on.

Consumer RFID devices only work over short distances because they are designed that way, partly by using pathetic antennas. Crystal radios long since proved to the world that an rf transmitter can provide enough power to drive thousands of small speakers over a distance of many miles. Non-amplified receivers were still being sold as kits a few years ago.

I don't think it would be impossible to design a device that could receive a "special" signal and use the carrier to charge an on-board capacitor until it has enough to transmit its own unique code, which could then be triangulated. Iirc 'phones transmit at somewhere around 2W, and an identification code wouldn't take long to send. I doubt a "super-powered" signal would even be needed.

I am not convinced that phone mast triangulation is as good as some say, but the above system would at least give an idea which cell to look in, and therefore be useful to some "authorities". The part of a 'phone that reads the SIM and identifies itself is relatively tightly controlled, so an extra function could be quietly added without too many people knowing or caring, though I doubt it could be kept secret.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on the above, kwackers, since you sound more qualified than me in these areas - I'm interested in electronics but can just about be trusted to hold a soldering iron by the cold end.

[kwackers]

I don't think it would be impossible to design a device that could receive a "special" signal and use the carrier to charge an on-board capacitor until it has enough to transmit its own unique code, which could then be triangulated. Iirc 'phones transmit at somewhere around 2W, and an identification code wouldn't take long to send. I doubt a "super-powered" signal would even be needed.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on the above, kwackers, since you sound more qualified than me in these areas - I'm interested in electronics but can just about be trusted to hold a soldering iron by the cold end.

Nothing is impossible, I used to build radios that used a strong signal to power the receiver allowing me to tune to a much weaker signal - although these only had to power a very low power single stage receiver that subsequently drove a high impedance crystal earpiece.

There's actually nothing that complicated in a phone in terms of the actual electronics, particularly in the RF stages. These are just off-the-shelf modules.
What's obvious is there's nothing in there that can be used to charge up and respond to an outside RF spike. If there was it would be blatantly obvious.

So there are a number of points. You can't charge up a circuit on the phone from a standard mast, it would take an age even assuming the phone had the capability. The received power is in the micro watts.
You could run stupidly high spikes and charge it from them (eventually) but then you don't only have to hide your nefarious hardware from the user and the manufacturer, you also have to hide it from all the engineers that work on the masts and the service providers.

Even if you can do all of this without providing solid evidence that someone could use to make a nice amount of cash and infamy by demonstrating it on YouTube you still have the problem of the returned signal strength and discriminating between potentially thousands of phones all woken up and blindly sending their info back.

And what do you get from all that effort and risk? A very rough position of where the phone is.

There are a whole host of ways phones can be compromised. Hacks, physical exchanges or just waiting until they announce themselves on a network.

The whole "they can track you when your phone is off" nonsense is designed to sell the conspiracy.
It's not necessary or required for 'the man' to be able to do this, particularly as it would be fairly easy to prove they were doing it and an absolute doddle to get around (Faraday bag)
Manufacturers wouldn't countenance the fitting of the required hardware and you don't need much equipment as a layman to demonstrate this was being done.

So why risk it?

[Pastychomper]

<snip>

Thanks, that makes sense - looks like I was massively overestimating the power available to one device.