It's not that he didn't want to be tracked, it's that he wanted to play golf on company time. With Uber, he gets to play golf whenever he wants. Makes sense
Think about it - he's 60, probably realized he is not going to achieve anything in life, likely worked a lot before for little benefit to himself (we have no clue if company promised things and later "forgot about them" etc.), so maybe golf was the only thing that was making his work bearable and kept him sane/happy/productive. Now compare it to finance guys, where banks pay them regular brothel visits to relieve their stress and make them more productive. I have more sympathies to this old man...
Because he hasn't been given a luxurious exit because he didn't start a monads-as-a-service startup with no business model other than selling my personal data and hasn't been acquired by a unicorn.
I laughed at that piece too, but I didn't know if it was toned as just matter of fact or some sort of pejorative closing to point out the uncertain work conditions he has to now face as a karmic payback of sorts.
It could have been completely sincere: I know people who are happy to drive Uber/Lyft precisely because of the completely flexible hours. I think you're probably right that Ars intended it as a pejorative though.
When I used to work as a security guard, I used to cheat my security rounds. Who wanted to make a round every hour or 30 mins.
Things changed like 8 years ago, now every security guard needs to scan a bar code at various places to show that he/she is indeed doing his/her rounds.
Take photo of each barcode, print, scan in sequence... I imagine location would be tracked in tandem making it harder, or obviously suspect if there is no location data provided. It’s all very short sighted, they will eventually be caught & fired, most likely through non-technical means.
With scan card access system, the security guards need to scan their passes when doing the rounds.
Pretty easy to look at their scan logs and infer what they were doing.
Using bar codes seems relatively easy to fake, but if you have the infrastructure in place then the access scanner seems to address that concern. Main issue is having the access control in the first place - won't help you if the guards are 'inside' the scanner and would never need to swipe while doing their rounds.
At my work you have to scan to use the lifts, so you can see how long the guards take to do each floor in the logs.
The barcode is on their badge, the scanners are at the checkpoints. You could scan a copy, but if you're the only person in the building you'll still have to go to each scanner.
Apparently the manager didn't really care about the device in the bag. They knew about it and let it go.
However, they did care that he was not working when he said he did. They probably simply used the subterfuge as damning evidence.
Most employers I worked for would let me infringe some of their policies, as long as I was an otherwise good employee worth my salary.
Some other places were just totalitarian about their rules and I left because of it. They were probably happy they got rid of a bad apple without having to fire me. It's give and take really.
There's no point making it a secret, once someone looks at the GPS logs his would have gaping holes in the logs compared to other workmates. You can hide where you are, but you can't hide that you are hiding.
Most indoor locations have little or no GPS signal. I don't know the specifics of their tracking software or whether a chip bag would block GSM signals, but it's plausible that his GPS tracks just looked like he was working indoors.
I just checked and I'm not getting a real GPS signal where I am. My position is being calculated based on cell towers and wifi networks around me. Two of our meeting rooms seem to be (an unhappy accident, most likely) shielded so that no cell networks are reachable.
It's hard to fake cell towers, but wi-fi signal is rather easy.
You're assuming someone actually looks at them. They more than likely just get archived somewhere and are only looked at when there is a strong reason to, like work not being done. It's the sort of feature that sounds good to management that don't think about what they're actually going to do with the data. I'm sure many of us here have worked on similar reports the are just huge data dumps that no one ever looks at but management just had to have it for some reason.
No idea, but it’s pretty widely known even in high school physics that radio waves can often be blocked or interfered with conductive metals such as aluminium foil, hence the “tin foil hat” jokes, and the plastic/rubber antenna lines or windows on smartphones with metal enclosures.
> Aluminum is not a great conductor—it heats up when a lot of power is pushed through it—so a snack bag would potentially melt if it was used to try to block a strong radio signal from inside. But the signals from GPS satellites are weak and can easily be interfered with, intentionally or not, in many ways.
I imagine that if the twisties bag had been grounded, it would be even more resistant to melting if the signal had been too strong for it.
What a load of nonsense. Aluminum is a great conductor of electricity. Not as good as copper, but good enough that it gets used as the conductor for high tension power transmission lines.
Additionally, you’d need a far more powerful radio than a cellphone would contain to melt a plastic bag. A cellphone radio is what, 3W? You might threaten the bag if you focused all that energy in a dime sized spot on the bag, but a cell radio is intentionally a roughly isotropic radiator.
What I don't get: why would you prefer the greasy inside of a snack bag for the PDA over a clean piece of aluminum wrap? Surely, he will have to use the device after he's done golfing.
And why didn't he just leave the device on some bogus location outside the golf court so the tracking wouldn't be interrupted? Surely, when asked where he was all day, he would have to be able to name some location, so it would be better to actually leave the phone there.
I’ve done it plenty of times when ad hoc testing lack of connectivity on WiFi or BT devices and the microwave is too far to walk. Works a treat. Though I generally used Cliff Bar wrappers (our devices were small, and I don’t like chips/crisps).
Though by about the sixth round of golf I’d be making myself a clean, permanent phone jacket out of Reflectix or something.
I love being surprised, I would have never guessed that. Very cool. Porosity of bicycle inner tubes is an inconvenient problem for me and others, I don't suppose a metalic layer would work in that application however with the expansion and all. Cool to know though.
I'm guessing since the device isn't his (and the similar disregard shown for, you know, doing any work) he's not all that bothered about it getting greasy.
Hate to be whoever has to prep it for the next employee though...
He preserved his own ability to choose, but then when he chose, he chose poorly.
YPTFPSD: Read the book by Anthony Burgess. The exposition character explains the ethics of choice in the context of mechanical fruits.
The main thrust of the book is that if you remove the human capacity to choose to do wrong, you also strip the choice to do right of all its virtue. You have to let Alex and his droogs be thugs, or we would all become robots. We'd all be clockwork oranges on a mechanical orange tree, clicking and whirring away with only our pre-programmed gears to guide us.
It had never occurred to me before that, in this phrase, 'clockwork' is the adjective and 'orange' is the noun. I'd always assumed it was the other way around (and wondered idly what it meant!).
It's what HN tells you whenever you try to write more than about five posts every four hours. I don't know the actual parameters, but they are ridiculously conservative, and very obviously waived for certain accounts.
When it happens, the only way to actually provide a meaningful response to someone in a timely fashion is to edit a previous post. Which breaks the expected flow of a conversation, obviously. It's the thing I hate most about HN, without reservation.
You can also "provide a meaningful response in a timely fashion" if any of the recent messages get upvoted. It can be a little annoying but the easy solution is to consider how useful your comment is to the community before hitting submit.
Yeah, the guy was clever but clearly cheating and he deserves to be fired. Now, about that reporter:
> Aluminum is not a great conductor—it heats up when a lot of power is pushed through it—so a snack bag would potentially melt if it was used to try to block a strong radio signal from inside.
Uh... what? I mean, I guess, if you're operating a tracking radar or long distance microwave transmitter inside that snack bag, sure. But a LTE radio with a GPS? Are you serious?
The guy wasn't so clever, because regularly missing location data fosters suspicion. About the reporter, I was also struck by the technical cluelessness. For example, there's no need to ground Faraday cages.
that, and i think the reporter is conflating two similar sounding things he learned in science class: conductivity (electricity) and radio waves (electromagnetic waves).
That movie was spot-on about so many privacy and surveillance issues we have today (almost 20 years ago...). However Faraday cages were already a pretty known trick, this guy "just" innovated with the material used.
I've watched it 20 years ago so I don't remember seeing such scene. I do remember Gene Hackman explaining about cages when his hideout is shown though.
It's in the scene in the hotel lift - Hackman gets Smith to remove various things, and stuffs the trackers in a foil crisp (aka chip) packet, and the techs lose tracking on them.
We are really going full-steam to innate slavery in a trust-less society, everybody's movement optimized for maximal profit, and enforced by crab mentality "why should anyone have fun?"... Is there some sane place left?
The business owners would never subject themselves to this...
Personally, I would not agree to being tracked by an employer, unless there was a really good reason, e.g. safety concerns, as it invites abuse of power, even unintentionally.
Stuff like this exacerbates disrespect, distrust and suspicion in employer/employee relationships, in a way I believe no one benefits. Employers tend to use these tools to aggressively police minor infractions, though pretending to only want to catch the few bad apples, driving away the good employees in favour of those who think they can game the system anyway with a tit-for-tat mindset.
In the end trust is eroded, everybody is unhappy, and the underlying issues as to why those bad apples aren't doing their jobs in the first place is never resolved or even investigated.
In practice - and particularly in my circumstances - I've found the tracking clause to be palatable, or at least begrudgingly acceptable.
Perhaps my employer is an outlier, but they don't enforce minor infractions at all. So while the manual says we can track you 24/7 the reality is there is no tracking - I literally get calls from my boss asking what country I'm in because half the time they don't know where I am or what I'm doing.
I've seen the actual policy employed twice - in both cases the employee did something deeply unethical. The top dogs take a very dim view on that kind of stuff so the employees found themselves on the wrong end of HR reviewing policy compliance carefully. So be it - I don't need sketchy co-workers.
It's interesting to me that your employer isn't a privacy concern to you.
How much of the data about you in the Equifax breach do you think came from your employer? How much of your data that has been breached came from Wells Fargo--not because you bank there, but because your employer uses them to process direct deposits? And how many times has your employer themselves been breached to give out your name, date of birth, ssn, driver's licence #, passport, address, details about your dependants, etc.?
I'm curious why you assume that the data your employer has about you hasn't already made its way into the hand of "big companies that can make connections between data sets."
>It's interesting to me that your employer isn't a privacy concern to you.
Well a part of it is situation specific - it's a professional service organisation. Everything & everyone is up to their eyeballs in confidentiality agreements so the whole "we'll sell havoc's data for 200 dollars" mindset just isn't a thing.
>I'm curious why you assume that the data your employer has about you hasn't already made its way into the hand of "big companies
They take security very seriously - far more than I do in a personal context. So I don't feel exposed on that front.
So as I said - big brother google is my primary worry here. God knows what they can patch together with their black magic. Supercookies and assorted bullsht. And their eco system is quite difficult to escape (part of the reason I switched to iphone).
Depends on the type of employer. Mine certainly won't be selling any data to anyone. Their whole business model is trustworthiness & they're not going to wreck their (profitable) business model for a couple of bucks from selling data.
Except if they get acquired, or go public, or go out of business and are liquidating assets, or just change their minds. You don't need to trust them with your data if they don't collect it and they don't need to collect if for you to do your job effectively.
Impressive, I’m surprised chip bags can make effective faraday shields. I’d consider this grounds for promotion of this guy, he’s obviously too clever for what he’s doing.
This threw me as well. Of the pure metals, the holy trinity for conductivity is silver, copper, and gold, with aluminum sliding in at 4th place. Due to cost considerations, copper and aluminum are the most widely used for conducting electricity, with aluminum about half as conductive as copper (therefore requiring different building code guidelines).
But I'm not sure that translates to aluminized-mylar. Sometimes conductors get weird in thin films or at material boundaries.
Organic compounds are great conductors whenever you can find a chain of delocalized p-orbitals, such as in graphene or cis-polyacetylene or polyaniline or polythiophene. PEDOT/PSS is a polymer related to polythiophene that is used in anti-static bags, transparent electrode, electrochromic films, capacitor cathodes, and it is printable. Polyaniline is typically used in batteries and supercaps.
So an aluminized-mylar chip bag is probably not a great conductor in comparison to one made from PEDOT/PSS backed with PET. And obviously, a chip bag made from graphene-on-copper-foil would be the best, if anyone could afford to buy a $1000 snack.
If you look at an aluminium mylar bag under a microscope you'll see that the coverage of aluminium is actually rather low, and it's more flakes of aluminium on the surface which don't connect with each other in places.
It's that lack of connection which makes it a lousy shield.
Your phone logs when you turn it off and on. It can't log the difference in why you lost signal though. So this guy just says "See, my phone was on the whole time, but there was no signal at the work site..."
There's no need for a Faraday cage to be grounded.
A car forms an acceptable Faraday cage to protect occupants when struck by lightning even when isolated by its rubber tires, and a plane can be struck by lightning thousands of feet from the ground and still protect its occupants (though the lightning will still damage electronics if they're in the current path through the machine).
Turn one bag inside out, put it inside another, put your phone inside both. Problem solved, with bonus stronger shielding.
> but how does one ground a snack bag with a phone in it?
I would imagine that (in all but the most contrived of situations) your phone's battery would die before this could build up a charge worth worrying about.
Grab 10 feet of 12 gauge wire and two alligator clips. Strip off about 3 inches of sheathing from the wire and feed it through the little hole in the clip. Now twist that wire really tight, you don't want it coming loose. Repeat for the other side of the wire. Now, grab one end and feed it under the dash and through the firewall. Drill a hole if you need to. Clip it to a strut housing or something metal like that. Now clip the other end to your bag. Grounded (maybe)!
looks like pants and jackets of the near future will feature Faraday cage pockets - switching the tracking on/off will be as easy as just moving smartphone from regular pocket into the Faraday one.
So I do think this is a cool idea, though I have found that my phone usually gorges on battery power when it isn't in range of a tower (I'd love to hear the exact reason it would if anyone knows). An "airplane mode" pocket sounds handy and interesting, but I'd hate for it to drain my battery while the device is desperately trying to phone home.
Similar, I used to work for a guard company. We implemented a process where employees reported to work by calling from an assigned set of phones at each client. they also signed out of work by calling from the same number.
needless to say we had all sorts of attempts to use other numbers but that never would work. since we had ANI numbers I doubt they could be spoofed.
now we never went as far as having them call in hourly, likely that would be dependent on client requirements. still I understand why the guy in the article was fired and honestly if he was skipping out then so be it
I thought this was normally done by requiring the guard to regularly scan special tags physically located around the premises being guarded (or previously, by keeping "watch clocks" wound).
Automatic Number Identification (ANI) is not the same system as caller ID. ANI is used for billing purposes and is harder to spoof than CID. Caller ID uses in-band tones which is why it's so easily spoofed.
Article states that: "so a snack bag would potentially melt if it was used to try to block a strong radio signal from inside" - but if remember correctly, unless grounded, Faraday's cage will not affect the inner source at all, right? Gauss's law is only about the sum of external sources being 0.
I would think that if it blocks outside signals from getting in, it would have to also block inside signals from getting out, because Maxwell's equations work equally well regardless of what direction time moves.
Imagine a charge inside a Faraday cage. You wiggle it around, causing electromagnetic waves. If those were not blocked, they would cause various charges outside the cage to wiggle around. Call this experiment #1.
That should mean that if instead of wiggling the inside charge around, you had wiggled all the outside charges around in the same pattern that experiment #1 caused them to wiggle in, the result should be the inside charge wiggling the same way you wiggled it in experiment #2.
> I'm not entirely convinced that "people like this" are the sole reason employers want, like, and do track every breath of employees.
I would go further and assert that, in most cases, "people like this" probably aren't any, or are only a negligible part of the reason, only the excuse to allow them such tracking.
Honestly, I think it's mostly to assert their power over workers. It's natural for people to do this if they can: it feels good and makes them feel in control, even if it's not very effective or is downright detrimental to the bottom line. It's also natural to search for plausible excuses for such behavior - nobody wants to admit that they just get a boner (metaphorically) from bossing others around.
Just my general opinion, I have too little information to say if the tracking, in this case, is actually a rational and net-positive policy and not someone's power trip.
I’ve actually never heard of employers tracking employees with GPS, except for cases where there is a specific plausible justification, like truck drivers or Uber drivers.
Depends on what you pay for. If you pay for timely good results then you don't care about whether your employee plays golf in between to get them.
If you pay for butt-in-seat-hour then you have to track hours and butts. Either by newganled gps thingies of olden days methods of assigning a foreman to look at you.
Note that unlike other metals aluminum only blocks some frequencies, not all frequencies. Low ones go through - magnets work quite effectively even through sheet aluminum and can transmit power. Which is what made Rossi's cold fusion "demonstrations" so suspicious to me.
not even original! From the movie "Enemy of the State." This video at the 0:44 mark, Gene Hackman searches Will Smith and puts his stuff into an empty chip bag.
and being GPS tracked more intensively than ever before. oh, sweet irony :D