Archive for the ‘Recent News’ Category

The Oppressive Parental Force has done it again - only this time, they’ve employed the type of villainy you probably read about in high school, taking a page out of George Orwell’s 1984 in order to keep closer tabs on their rambunctious progeny: meet Life 360, the always watching Eye geared to monitor the whereabouts of kids.

With the growing national appreciation for GPS comes an infinite number of applications that harness its adeptness at locating that which loves to be lost, and falling neatly into the category (right between Places Where You’re About To Be Late and Places You Were Supposed To Be Five Minutes Ago) are the darling little munchkins that give parents grey hairs. Life360 is but one of many emergent monitoring systems offering to Big Brother little Timmy on his way to school...but the question some individuals are asking is when does this trend become too much?

When Fox News asked one California mother about her take on Life360, she had nothing but praise to offer – she brings the program into play on a regular basis, using it to watch as her husband escorts their two children to school, and then to keep track of her babies throughout the day. "You just never know," the woman said. "In the safest of situations, something could happen whether it be a kidnapping, stranger danger, getting hurt or anything like that, and you want to keep track...It's just making sure they got where they were supposed to be - end of story."

Surely, Life360 offers some degree of equanimity to anxious parents – but is the supposed assurance of one’s child’s safety lulling guardians into complacent naiveté? Aside from the inevitable accessibility of any and all information recorded on the internet (thus allowing strangers to potentially track your children as well as you can), naysayers of family monitoring software also argue that users tend to assume no possible malfunction on the part of the equipment – a grave error in judgment in an age when many GPS applications are notorious for imprecise localization, and when kids (being kids) might easily lose the instruments used to keep them safe.

Chris Hulls, CEO of Life360, has acknowledged such consumer concerns, but insists that such software will raise the bar for child protection, and will quickly become a vital tool in parents’ day-to-day firewalls. "It's beyond just safety," Hulls said. "Every single electronic device is soon going to have a location associated with it, and that brings up a whole host of new products as well as concerns. But it really is a new world, and parents are adopting this technology at a very quick rate.”

While we understand the cynics’ fears, we can’t help but support a program that will inevitably serve to both greatly reassure nervous parents of their children’s safety and come to the rescue if needed. Our conclusion? So long as mom and dad don’t invest in a Thoughtcrime department to fend off a planned cookie jar heist or late night TV, this Big Brother can stick around.

The last few weeks you couldn't randomly toss a homing device in the air without it latching onto a story about the use of GPS tracking in the law enforcement arena. Okay, you could have, but none of those other stories ever seemed to go anywhere.

Back on August 28th, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the DEA was justified in attaching a GPS to the vehicle of one Juan Pineda-Moreno; Whether or not Pineda-Morena was involved with the maintenance of a large-scale marijuana operation, Constitutional rights buffs and George Orwell enthusiasts alike have been having a debate-filled field day on the legality of the warrant-less tracking practices of law enforcement .

The main point of contention is that the use of such a tracking device on an unproven hunch, without the express consent provided by a warrant, violates the terms of "illegal search and seizure"– a key component of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

This hot button topic reared it's argumentative head again today, as the Virginia Court of Appeals made a similar ruling, upholding the decision that convicted Sex Offender David L. Foltz did not have his rights violated when the Fairfax Police outfitted his vehicle with a GPS device.

Authorities zeroed in on Foltz after a rash of 11 sexual assaults occurred in Eastern Fairfax in 2008. The defendant had previously been convicted of rape, having spent 17 years behind bars.  Police used the prior conviction as justification for tracing his vehicle. By doing so they were able place him at the scene of a previous incident. Thanks to their GPS deployment, Foltz was caught in the act of assaulting a woman.

While the positive yield of nabbing criminals in the act will no doubt provide a valid argument for the use of global positioning systems as a preventative measure to criminal offenses, the bottom line is that even those who have previously committed crimes are subject to the same protections under the constitution as those who have not. The placing of a GPS device on the basis of suspicion is akin to a breach of property and privacy. If officers believe they have probable cause to breach property, then they also have sufficient reason to seek a warrant and take that extra legal step.

Unfortunately, the luxury of taking the extra legal step is not always there. When time is of the essence in law enforcement, and matters of public safety clash with procedure, officers must err on the side of public safety.

While we find it hard to argue with the idea of "better safe than sorry," the crux of the issue is that once a legal precedent is set on the use of  tracking devices without a warrant, then the majority of us are vulnerable to such an invasion of privacy –whether or not we've done anything to infer probable cause. After all, if a mere blip on our record can be leveraged as such, then we all our going to have to do our best to stay squeaky clean.

In the vast canon of techie terms, the word "dongle"  ranks somewhere between "thingamajig" and "whoseamawhatsit" as an official-sounding device. It may be fun to say, but it doesn't exactly instill much technical confidence in the person or entity that is pushing the newfangled "hoobajoob" on you.

In Nike's case, the sneaker stalwart was charging $29 for running enthusiasts to track their jog-gress (jogging progress!) via their various Apple devices working in concert with the Nike + Shoe-dongle– a device implanted under the inner sole of your active footwear.

Well, after a lengthy experimentation period, Nike is no longer requiring Apple-using fitness freaks to monitor their training by slipping their tiny dongle where the sun don't shine. Instead, they'll stay hot on the trail of your cross-trainers with those magical monitoring initials: GPS

By spending a mere $2 in the Itunes App Store, runners can download the new Nike + GPS to their favorite iThings and run like the wind– or the tortoise. No matter what you run like, the program works by connecting with the GPS radio in most newer Apple gadgets (iPod, iPhone, iPad) to allow you to record your time, map your runs and browse previous runs. Users can also share their runs and get competitive by comparing themselves with other users on the Nike + site. You might be tempted to best your local rivals times, but remember, slow and steady wins the race– though you could stand to pick up the pace a little bit.

Sometimes when former college athletes are out of the spotlight for some time, the media will see fit to look back upon their glory days by tracking them down to answer the question, "Where are they now?"

The Hamilton County, Indiana police had raised that very same inquiry about former Indiana University basketball hero Todd Leary. Their reasoning was not one of nostalgia for his Hoosier glory days; rather, Mr. Leary had been suspected of robbing appliances from foreclosed homes in the area– quite a step down from hitting buzzer-beaters. 

Two of Leary's thieving cohorts had been identified by a neighbor of one of the burgled houses in a police lineup; rather than arrest the two on the spot, the police decided to keep up their location inquiry with the help of GPS tracking, aiming to take down their entire small-town syndicate.

Following the positive identification of Leary's two accomplices the cops covertly slapped a GPS device onto their van and waited for them to commence criminal activity. They only had to wait a few weeks to catch the duo in the act; only this time it appeared they were taking directions from Leary stationed in a nearby Chevy Avalanche. Leary now faces charges on five felony counts in the state of Indiana, but at least if anyone sees fit to locate him for a "where are they now?" segment, they won't have any trouble tracking him down behind bars.

As for the recent controversy over the legality of law enforcement tagging GPS devices on vehicles, we'll chalk this one up to probable cause.

Jack Sparrow is a legendary pirate captain (kind of). He is daring (sometimes) and romantic (with enough rum), an excellent swordsman (Best Performance Involving A Poker) and an inspirational leader (no). But what sets him apart from Barbossa and Blackbeard? Is it his rugged good looks, his dreadlocks and multiple piercings? His bizarre charisma and dogged persistence? What makes him such a successful buccaneer?

Why, to that we laugh and state the obvious: his GPS.
Ok, maybe not GPS per se – or at least, a model contained in a very, very old version of today’s smartphones – but if Jack Sparrow can find the Fountain of Youth with his outdated tech, then the good folks of the (hugely improved) GPS have contributed to your ability to do the same, with recommended side trips for your pleasure (although you have to pay extra to find the Fountain. Maybe.)

Meet the newest iPhone App that will make us thank G-d for GPS: the mTrip, companion to travelers in foreign countries and savior of those indecisive tourists who just don’t know where to go first. Created by travel guide publisher Sparks,  mTrip combines GPS technology with the iPhone’s compass and internet services in order to provide users with a map to local points of interest. Tourists will be able to open this up on their iPhones and see pictures corresponding to different destinations they can visit at their leisure, with this handy dandy app pointing the way.

But the mTrip is STILL way more than that. More, you say? Yes! This is the GPS of the future, after all. mTrip is an augmented reality program, which combines real and virtual images to best serve users in a real-time setting. Through this technology mTrip provides the ability to view not only a customer’s chosen stopping point, but to simultaneously peruse the surrounding area. This option indicates other potential destinations, shopping areas, and restaurants, complete with store times and customer reviews. As follows with Sparks’ general tour-guide philosophy, the mTrip experience is a combination of administrator expertise and customer reviews, offering input from all ends of the spectrum to curious travelers. Further incorporating this audience-friendly attitude in the app is a comments section, allowing users to add their own insights to this collection of shared experience. The final tidbit of awesomeness in this beautiful GPS app is mTrip Genius. Similar to iTunes Genius, it looks at attractions you’ve already enjoyed and visited, and designs an itinerary to accommodate your sightseeing preferences.

Like any piece of technology, mTrip does have its limitations. While customers have generally reported satisfaction with the app, there is the age-old GPS complaints of barely-there battery life, as well as some dissatisfaction with precision in locating a path from user location to desired POI; we personally haven’t tried this out, but we’ll keep you posted on how strongly to consider individual complaints.

With twenty-two big cities on the docket, we aren’t too worried that everyone will be able to come across something to love about this app – good for both tourist and native, you can either find yourself utterly enmeshed within the life of your chosen vacation spot, or discover something entirely new in your own backyard. And, at the very least, you’ll know if cannibals live in the neighborhood.

For many parents the summer is a carefree time when keeping tabs on your kids is as easy as sending them to summer camp, or having them accompany you on a family vacation to a Old West desert mining town where the only danger is boarded up, abandoned mine shafts.

But as the toasty weather (eventually) subsides, the reins of your kids’ safety get handed over from an irresponsible 18-year-old making $500 for the summer to the somewhat less-trusted hands of the public school system. With the transfer, the fear of deranged, candy-pushing derelicts in minivans scoping out the bus stop –before students are shipped off to Barricade Fortress Jr. High– clouds the minds of protective parents everywhere.

One Southwest Chicago school district is doing its part to quell the constant amber alerts being issued in the brains of watchful guardians– with the use of GPS.

The Palos Heights 128 School District is keeping tabs on its bus-riding students with ZPass IDs (provided by Zonar Systems). The labels log passengers into the district’s database every time a student steps on or off the bus. The new process is sure to frighten some people with its big brother potential, but for parents who want to make sure their kids travel safely to and from their local center of learning, the system is a win-win. True, it doesn’t ensure their kids will pay attention and get straight A’s when they get there, but making it to homeroom in one piece is a pretty important piece of that battle.

The program itself is an update of one run by the same district the previous three years, in which all buses (but not the students) had been equipped with the same ZPass technology. It cost the district $16,000 to cover passengers on 10 buses, a small price to pay for the safety of its students. If the initiative proves an overwhelming success, other districts are sure to make room in the budget for the implementation of such a measure.
 

Treasure hunters became rescuers last week, when two Geocachers stumbled upon two stranded women in the deserts of the Western US. Roy Joseph and Paul Fox were "geocaching" in their off-road jeep on the Colorado-Utah border the week of August 25th. As they motored along, they passed a stationary van - an uncommon occurrence in the desert - and decided to investigate. Inside, sat a woman and her elderly mother; they had been going for a drive two days earlier when their van got stuck in the mud and debris left behind after heavy rain. They were unable to budge the van, or call for help. The women had no food or water and had been sitting alone for two days. Joseph and Fox helped tow the van out of the mud and gave the women food and water. Joseph remarked, "If there had been more rain and runoff, it would have been more serious. Just down ravine, the creek dropped down into a bigger canyon."

Thankfully, these hobbyists helped avert a possible disaster. But what exactly were they doing out there? Who are Geocachers and what do they do? A growing hobby in the 21st century, Geocaching involves the use of satellite tracking and the Internet. It's basically a worldwide treasure hunt. Geocaches are containers hidden in an exact location by fellow enthusiasts. They can be large boxes or tiny, mini-caches. Each cache contains a logbook for finders to sign and a place to leave little "treasures" for the next Geocacher. The geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) are posted on the Geocaching website (see below) for members to find. Geocachers use GPS devices to guide them to the cache. Once they find it, they post their victories online, recording their successes.

Owners of caches are encouraged to hide their treasure chests in interesting places to provide fun experiences for seekers. Members often leave little gifts for the successful finders inside the watertight caches. One rule of Geocaching, however, is that anything removed from a cache must be replaced by another item of equal or greater value. Sometimes, objects have a Travel Bug or Geocoin attached to them. These devices tag an object and contain directions to help the object travel to a specific destination. Any Geocachers who feel they can help it along its way take it to another cache on the route. The tags can also be followed online, tracking the travels of the objects using GPS technology.

With the help of GPS tracking, geocaching is able to excite around 4-5 million enthusiasts who search for over 1 million caches worldwide. The adventure begins at www.geocaching.com. 

There are many ways to break the law, most of which lead a criminal straight to prison. White-collar and non-violent crimes are just as rampant, if not more so, than violent crimes, and yet we choose to punish the offenders the same way: by confining them in dingy prisons controlled by the government. Do carjackers and DUI offenders really deserve to be incarcerated in prisons with violent criminals where they are likely to harden and become even more offensive to the law-abiding American lifestyle?

There are currently 2.3 million Americans incarcerated, putting America in the lead for having the most prisoners. Americans make up only 5% of the global population, making this a humiliating statistic. China, which is four times as populated, only has 1.6 million people in prison. They come in a very distant second for countries with the most prisoners. This is a disgrace to America, so-called Land of the Free. We also have the highest percentage of citizens imprisoned, approximately 7.5 for every 10,000 people.

BI, a company that specializes in GPS tracking devices for parolees, maintains that using trackers for parole surveillance is an effective solution. They run on programs that are designed on a unique tracking system that enables the caretaker of the client to draw specified zones on Microsoft MapPoint and Bing Maps for Enterprise, mapping technologies that are the best in the industry. These programs can then be assigned to alarm the caretaker and/or call the police if the client goes into a non-safe zone. The client doesn’t need constant surveillance, just the thought that someone could be watching him/her at that given moment creates enough of a Big Brother effect that he wouldn’t even feel comfortable skimming the ground around a non-safe zone.

There’s no reason that these technologies shouldn’t be integrated into the federal judicial system. Some of the more technologically savvy local court systems have already implemented such systems to ease the work load of their overburdened parole officers. It is still yet to be seen if this will ever be put to use on a larger scale.

It has come up in many a court whether or not tracking a suspect with a GPS tracker is legal. Is it a breach of the fourth amendment? Is a tracker a form of “unreasonable searches”? Need it be dependent on a warrant “upon probable cause supported by Oath or affirmation”? Is it in violation of the clause “describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”, because you can’t exactly specify where you will search someone if you are tracking them? All words in quotations come directly from the Constitution, the legal body that almost 350 years after composition our nation still follows.

If the words are taken literally, then it would be almost impossible to use a GPS-enabled tracker to assist in the capturing of a suspected criminal. A tracker in any shape or form would qualify as an unreasonable search by most legal definitions. Any covert tracking generally requires special permission by a legal enforcement authoritative figure. The thing is, issuing a warrant for a GPS tracker would be problematic. There’s almost no way to describe what’s going to be tracked and where, and the whole point of the warrant is that it must be as specific as possible to ensure a legal search.

The dilemma has been brought to court before by suspects that felt that they were violated. They appealed their cases to some of the country’s thirteen federal Court of Appeals. The 7th U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of a criminal found guilty on proof that was documented by a GPS tracker. The defendant claimed that such surreptitious tracking was an “unreasonable search”. The courts ruled that placing a tracking device on a car does not qualify as a “search or seizure” because they equated the device to a police car physically tailing the vehicle. The judge reasoned, “if police follow a car around, or observe its route by means of cameras mounted on lampposts or by satellite imaging as in Google Earth, there is no search”. From that ruling, issuing a warrant wouldn’t be necessary.

There was a difference of opinion between the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals to that of the D.C. Circuit. Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote a 41 page opinion as to why he and his two fellow judges chose the verdict that favored privacy. “It is one thing for a passerby to observe or even to follow someone during a single journey as he goes to the market or returns home from work,” Ginsburg wrote. “It is another thing entirely for that stranger to pick up the scent again the next day and the day after that, week in and week out, dogging his prey until he has identified all the places, people, amusements, and chores that make up that person‘s hitherto private routine.” He felt that GPS tracking was equivalent to the kind of police tracking that requires a warrant.

There’s only one court above the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court. Being as that there is no official verdict yet, it is entirely up to the national court to announce a verdict to apply in all 50 states. It will be interesting to learn the conclusion when the next historic decision is announced.

Due to poachers and hunters who use giraffe’s skin to produce cloth, the giraffe population in Western Africa has unfortunately become extremely scarce. They are slowly making their way up the endangered species list, and scientists have had to act quickly.

In order to gather more information about these long-necked, majestic creatures of Africa, eight giraffes were fitted with GPS tracking collars. These GPS collars were specially designed to fit around the giraffe’s long neck, and are also camouflaged to match the color of the giraffe’s skin so that the giraffe doesn’t become easy prey.

Using the information gathered from the GPS devices, scientists can better understand where the giraffes are most commonly gathering, which helps them figure out in which areas giraffes need the most protection from hunters. The devices also serve as a precautionary measure: many giraffe hunters may be a bit less willing to fire a gun at any giraffe wearing a GPS collar because hunting giraffes is illegal in West Africa.

Getting the GPS collars onto the giraffes is probably the most difficult part of this entire process. Scientists must first fire a tranquilizer dart at the giraffe, and then an anesthesiologist must keep the giraffe unconscious until the GPS tracking collar can be been safely placed around its long neck. It takes a team of seven men to hold down this enormous animal so that it doesn’t make any sudden movements while it is incapacitated.

With this new technology, scientists also hope to find the mating grounds of the giraffes in Western Africa. With this information, scientists will hopefully be able to relocate more giraffes to these mating grounds, thus expanding the giraffe population in Western Africa, and consequently having them lowered them on the endangered species list.

There is also another serious threat that faces the giraffe population in Africa. With industrialization just starting to grow in Western Africa, more and more trees are being cut down, and even more watering holes are being taken over for human resources. The giraffes’ natural habitat is shrinking, which is causing many giraffes to die from lack of food and water. While environmentalist efforts are still trying to limit this harming of the ecosystem, scientists are using the information they gather from the satellite tracking collars to discover better locations for the giraffe population to inhabit.

With the help of this advanced new GPS based technology, the giraffe population will hopefully live on, and these gorgeous, majestic mammals of the dusty planes of Africa can continue to thrive in peace.