Can Your Android Phone Be Tracked When It’s Turned Off?

As technology advances, debates continue to arise over geographical tracking. Today, cell service providers, internet service providers, and other parties can track your location through your devices, including your smartphone.

But if you have an Android phone, what happens when it’s turned off? Can your location still be tracked?

I wrote a significate portion of the code used for “Location Services” on Windows Phone 7. I understand as much as almost anyone on obtaining location information from the phone side of things. Obtaining location from the carrier side is different, but I can make some intelligent speculation about that.

The basics of what I read in the article above is true:

When you turn your phone off, you’re temporarily deactivating all of its functions, including wireless communication. By cutting this off, your phone cannot be tracked via cell tower triangulation or GPS. The only location that can be discerned using these methods is that which was last shown before the device was turned off.

So, the general answer is no, your phone cannot be tracked when switched off.

They go on to say:

But this has been called into question numerous times.

There have been talks of certain authorities still being able to track your phone when turned off. For example, various reports have come out over the years claiming that the NSA (National Security Agency) can track a turned-off device. For example, Slate published a piece in 2013 discussing the NSA’s alleged tracking of phones, as briefly mentioned in a Washington Post story.

In the same piece, Slate mentioned that in 2006, it was reported that the FBI had “deployed spyware to infect suspects’ mobile phones and record data even when they were turned off”. A CNET post was referred to here as the source. It is not known if the NSA is truly capable of tracking phones while turned off, but the reports mentioned seem to indicate that this is the case to some extent.

From the referenced Washington Post article:

By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this “The Find,” and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.

This is a very interesting claim.

It was in about 2010 through 2011 I was writing the location services code for Windows Phone 7. Had I read the Washington Post article from a half dozen years earlier I would have given it something like a 25% chance of being correct. That assessment would have been unchanged today except for another data point.

I recently I talked to someone who told me, “I know for a fact that GCHQ can track phones even if they are turned off.” This was not someone who received their electrical engineering degree out of a tin-foil hat. It was someone who I have a lot of respect for as an electrical engineer.

That conversation and the article above which I stumbled across has caused me to reevaluate my position on this claim. I have given the problem some thought. With the right equipment, I can imagine some plausible ways this might be possible.

Here are some hints:

• The power button is not a mechanical power switch. It is similar to other mechanical buttons on the phone. There is at least some portion of the electronics “alive” enough to recognize the switch has been pressed.
• Your credit cards, smart car keys, passport, shoplifted merchandise, automatic road toll cards, and company ID badges can all be identified at varying distances.

Plan appropriately.

I don’t care for the communist spin in the article but the core of the message is intriguing:

The effort to slow down aging isn’t slowing down. The Institute for Aging Research at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine claims we’ve moved beyond hope in turning anti-aging into reality, and we now sit “at the point between having promise and realizing it.”

I expect the middle class have access in less than a decade after the billionaires.

I was at my place in Idaho last month to do some general maintenance on things and this was one of the things I had to take care of:

In the center is a solar panel. The batteries, in the box on the right, were still holding up but were low. I brushed off the snow and charged up the batteries with an alternate power source. They probably will hold out until I visit again. But this is an issue with solar power. You might think of solar panels as near zero maintenance, but they are not. They get dirty as well has get covered in snow and ice. The batteries also need to be replaced every few years.

For some applications they are the best choice available. For general purpose electricity, not so much.

The media claims less that a 100 qubits is really good for quantum computers:

Prototype quantum computers made of a few dozen qubits have materialized in the last couple of years, led by Google’s 54-qubit Sycamore machine.

And 433 is the world record:

IBM has built the largest quantum computer yet. Dubbed Osprey, it has 433 qubits, or quantum bits, which is more than triple the size of the company’s previously record-breaking 127-qubit computer and more than eight times larger than Google’s 53-qubit computer Sycamore.

Just as you know the media gets almost everything wrong about guns, they don’t know quantum computing either. This is what one company is saying publicly:

Photonic is producing 2cm square silicon chips capable of holding a million+ qubits.

I won’t tell you how long ago I knew this, what they are saying now, and what hints have been dropped about the future other than what I said yesterday. But the business model will be, basically, a “mainframe which you can rent time on.” The computer languages already exist to write quantum programs.

I recently asked another source with in depth knowledge of the state of the art in quantum computing, “I know about decryption, but what are going to be the other ‘killer apps’ for quantum computing?” The answer was, “Solutions to logistics problems, weather and climate modeling, and anything with really large numbers of variables.”

Capitol Police, FBI uncover new potential deadly risk to female officers from body armor

The U.S. Capitol Police alerted its rank-and-file this month that FBI lab testing of long-approved body armor has uncovered a previously unknown flaw that can subject female officers to deadly ricochets from bullets.

The advisory, obtained by Just the News, revealed that the FBI first detected the problem, known as the “skip effect,” when it “departed from legacy testing protocols in a desire to test body armor in an ‘as worn’ condition, and to account for various body shapes and sizes.”

“The testing revealed that when a projectile strikes the female body armor at an extreme angle on the upper chest area, the projectile does not penetrate the body armor, but rather, skips or deflects off the surface of the armor into the neck region,” the advisory explained. “Because of the angle at which female body armor lays when worn, projectiles may skip off the top center of the female armor and travel to the area of the jugular notch” in the neck where the jugular vein passes.

This will be an interesting problem to solve. How can the body armor be made to not deflect the bullets into the head and neck and still conform to the shape of women’s bodies enough to be comfortable?

This also points out an weakness of the armor for men as well. With the proper angle of incidence bullets can funneled into areas like the arms. Aim for the “arm area” and the shooter gets a disabling hit even if they miss the arm itself.

For years I have expected some sort of bacteria would be created which would digest waste plastic. It would be tricky because what if it escaped the waste plastic treatment plant and the milk jug in your refrigerator turned into a sieve overnight?

This is probably a better solution:

Two substances in the saliva of wax worms — moth larvae that eat wax made by bees to build honeycombs — readily break down a common type of plastic, researchers said on Tuesday, in a potential advance in the global fight against plastic pollution.

The researchers said the two enzymes identified in the caterpillar saliva were found to rapidly and at room temperature degrade polyethylene, the world’s most widely used plastic and a major contributor to an environmental crisis extending from ocean trenches to mountaintops.

The study builds on the researchers’ 2017 findings that wax worms were capable of degrading polyethylene, though at that time it was unclear how these small insects did it. The answer was enzymes — substances produced by living organisms that trigger biochemical reactions.

For plastic to degrade, oxygen must penetrate the polymer — or plastic molecule — in an important initial step called oxidation. The researchers found that the enzymes performed this step within hours without the need for pre-treatment such as applying heat or radiation.

…

The idea would be to produce the worms’ saliva enzymes synthetically, which the researchers succeeded in doing, to break down plastic waste. Bertocchini said the use of billions of wax worms to do the job has drawbacks including generating carbon dioxide as they metabolize the polyethylene.

“In our case, the enzymes oxidize plastics, breaking it into small molecules. This suggests alternative scenarios to deal with plastic waste in which plastics can be degraded in controlled conditions, limiting or eventually eliminating altogether the release of microplastics,” said study co-author Clemente Fernandez Arias, an ecologist and mathematician at CSIC.

These are believed to be good for anti-material. Not so good for animals you plan to eat:

China is working to downsize its hypersonic weapons program to the small arms level, as seen in recent tests of prototype hypersonic bullets on live targets.

Researchers from an army medical center in Chongqing recently fired 5-millimeter steel projectiles at Mach 11 speeds against sedated live pigs to understand the effects of hypersonic bullets on human targets, the South China Morning Post reported this week.

Citing a paper from the Acta Armamentarii peer-reviewed journal of the China Ordnance Society, the South China Morning Post report noted that hypersonic bullet shots to the thigh did not instantly kill the pigs but caused severe injuries throughout their bodies.

The news report said that the pigs sustained extensive internal damage, mainly bone fractures and bleeding in the intestine, lung, bladder and brain.

It said that the bullets penetrated the thigh at speeds between 1,000 to 3,000 meters per second, but at 4,000 meters per second, the rounds instead left a large wound cavity at the point of impact.

…

The report also said such hits resulted in crater-like wounds, liquefying both bullet and flesh.

4,000 m/s is 13,123 f/s. A typical 9mm handgun bullet is typically traveling about 1,100 f/s at the muzzle. A 5.56 NATO bullet fired from “weapon of war” which “explodes the heads of children”* is typically a little over 3,200 f/s at the muzzle.

I expect they will, or perhaps already have, done testing on human targets as well as pigs. The CCP is like that.

* Registered trademark of the Gifford’s Group.

This was from the SpaceX + T-Mobile Update a few minutes ago but it is not the main message for today.

We would love to have T-Mobile on Mars.

Elon Musk
August 25, 2022
SpaceX + T-Mobile Update

The real message wasn’t quite as cool, but it was still awesome stuff.

Sometime late next your existing T-Mobile phone will have messaging (not necessarily voice or data until later) connectivity anywhere in the lower 48 states, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, large portions of Alaska, and wide areas of U.S. territorial waters.

The vision is no more cell phone dead zones. Emergency services in your most remote areas anywhere in the country and eventually the entire world. The price? Free for most existing T-Mobile service plans.

There were some interesting technical problems which had to be solved. It works in the lab and they are confident it will work in the real world.

Among the problems are:

• The satellites are traveling at 17,000 MPH and compensated for the doppler effect is required.
• The satellites are 50 miles away and the satellite antennas need to be about five meters by five meters to receive and transmits signals to the cell phone antennas.
• Because of the larger antennas they plan to use SpaceX Starships rather than Falcon 9s..

I love living in the future.