Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 3, 2013

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REAL LIFE NEWS: WHEN PHONE TRACKING GOES BAD

by Hazed

The “Find My Phone” feature is brilliant. If you lose your smartphone, or it gets stolen, you can log onto a website and track where your mobile has got to.

But it’s not always reliable, as a man in Las Vegas has discovered!

Thanks to a glitch, phones that are in the general area of Wayne Dobson’s home show up as being right in his house. Consequently, over the past couple of years he’s been pestered by people showing up, sometimes in the middle of the night, demanding that he return their phones.

This problem also affects the police. On several occasions they’ve been wrongly directed to Wayne’s home when answering domestic violence calls.

The problem is that cellphone GPS doesn’t provide exact locations, but it uses a combination of satellite GPS and triangulation a signal between nearby cell towers. For some reason his home is the location that gets flagged up whenever a phone is in the vicinity.

The phone company say they are looking into the problem but don’t know what’s causing it. Meanwhile, Wayne has been forced to put a big sign on the front of his house telling people he doesn’t have their phone!

Source: http://www.lvrj.com/news/if-you-lose-your-cellphone-don-t-blame-wayne-dobson-186670171.html

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