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How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?
- gwill 3y agothis is pretty smart, i didn't realize the hotspot tells you how many connections there are although i don't really use mine. my mind went straight to bluetooth pairing.
- m463 3y agoI thought "find my" on newer iphones could do local non-cellular location services, like airtags.
- dan_linder 3y agoThey can, but the AirTag has to be "seen" by another connected device and that device must relay the GPS position it was "seen" at. I don't know if Apple IOS is correct enough to log the time and position of AirTags when the device itself is disconnected from a network...
- solardev 3y agoThe newer devices can locate each other via ultrawideband triangulation too, completely detached from the cell network. They have special chips for this built-in: https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/apple/149336-how-apple-s-u1-chip-adds-amazing-new-capabilities-to-the-iphone/ https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/apple/149336-how-app...
- Scoundreller 3y agoI wonder how well the relay phone does store and forward, I guess it does otherwise AirTags are useless outside of cellular footprint territory. I guess sometimes a late ping is better than no ping.
- sergers 3y agoSamsung has their own "offline finding" as they call it, if enabled other Samsung devices/wearables can locate it somehow, brief on how that's done on their site
- acdha 3y agoIt’ll show up in Find My even if it can’t connect to the internet. BLE and UWB both work offline.
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoThere were only one or two iPhones among the 12+ people party we were - and this specific phone was an Android one.
- marcod 3y agoSo, there is no security feature that prevents a phone from connecting to a cloned wifi network??
- dhosek 3y agoHow can you tell a wifi network is cloned if the SSID/password match? After all, it might legitimately be a new legitimate access point in the network.
- redox99 3y agoObivously using certificates and TOFU. APs would share the certificate. (That's how it should work, not how it does in practice)
- cj 3y agoI’ve always wondered how commonly black hats clone and exploit mass deployed public SSIDs like the “xfinitywifi” network you see in all major US cities with xfinity. Presumably you could get a lot of random devices to automatically connect and then hijack DNS to cause trouble.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- solardev 3y agoEven if you hijacked DNS, most things are HTTPS now and you'd have to get a copy of a certificate from a trusted CA.
- lazide 3y agoAt least 50% of such APs I ran across didn’t work right. I chalk it up to broken implementation on the ISP side, but a decent number may be issues like this.
- lxgr 3y agoIt's not that easy, unfortunately: Many networks span more than one access point, either simultaneously or across time (mediocre CPEs are notoriously being swapped out all the time by cable providers, in my experience). Initially loading and then synchronizing certificates across APs would be anything but trivial. I've surprised my friends a few times by keeping my SSID + password constant over the years and across several moves within the city (and across ISPs) and even internationally – whenever they come to my place, they have Wi-Fi the second they step through the door :) It's also nice not having to re-configure various embedded devices, many without a sane user interface to type a passphrase or even accept a new TOFU public key, every time I set up a new router at my family's place.
- monsterofcookie 3y agoWait until dark, shine a flashlight around and look for reflection off the glass. Or use a metal detector...
- Scoundreller 3y agoNote to self: put a piece of retroreflective tape on my phone. (I already have a roll of DOT stuff for bicycles, required on the front and rear forks if riding at night)
- kgabis 3y agoI did that with my dji drone, figured that when I eventually crash it and it ends up in some dense foliage, I could just go back at night and look for it with my torch looking for shiny 3M reflective tape.
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoIt was dark already. We did a lot of grass-searching with flashlights - but the phone was on top of the ATV, in a tough-to-spot location (by the handlebar or something, between some cables).
- smortaz 3y agonot directly relevant, but was riding my motorcycle in the boonies, and lost the phone which was on the handlebar (bumpy rocky path). Looked for it several times on the path with no luck. Then I remembered my old iPhone was in the backpack. Did a Find my phone on the backup phone and it showed exactly where it had lost touch with the primary phone. This is all without cell or Wi-Fi service. Saved me a $1000.
- lxgr 3y agoOh, wow, I didn't realize "Find my" worked even when both devices are offline! But it makes sense – all that's really needed is GPS and Bluetooth. Were you able to access it right there without signal, or did you need to move to an area with coverage for it to sync?
- oldbbsnickname 3y agoNot really. The phone only appears "off" but is in-fact in a low power mode providing beacons. It won't work if the battery were removed. Also, modern iPhones use tower-assisted GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, BeiDou, and NavIC) so the satellite isn't necessarily Navistar. With fewer or no towers, and positioned in an odd orientation on the ground, a good fix becomes much less likely, and the range can increase from <1m to 10's-100's of m.
- lxgr 3y ago> Not really. The phone only appears "off" but is in-fact in a low power mode providing beacons. It won't work if the battery were removed. Sure, how else would it work? But people usually don’t disassemble their phone before losing it on a train/in a taxi etc. > modern iPhones use tower-assisted GNSS Yes, but GP says they didn’t have cell coverage where they lost it, so that wouldn’t help.
- JCharante 3y agoYou might not want to mount your phone on the handlebar. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37230198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37230198
- hnbear 3y agoI assumed it would be Bluetooth. Walking/driving around with headphones powered on waiting to pair. WiFi network mirroring is smart.
- grepfru_it 3y ago>wifi network mirroring is smart Yep, so smart that I used to name my WiFi “McDonald’s Free WiFi” when I lived half a block from McDonald’s. Everyone’s phones would connect but to my goatse’d image network. I thought devices would start remembering the base station MAC addresses to avoid hijacking but I guess not.. maybe I should start doing this again at my local Home Depot Edit: just remembered I used to do this on planes too. I would MiTM the AP and people would connect to my WiFi device. Then I would serve an obvious incorrect Bank of America page. No one logged in to it though :(
- hnbear 3y agoI really meant the choice to use it here, not the implementation of how it works.
- userbinator 3y agoI thought devices would start remembering the base station MAC addresses to avoid hijacking The use of multiple APs with the same SSID is a feature, not a bug. It enables roaming between them.
- oldbbsnickname 3y agoCreating rogue APs is criminal-adjacent, unethical behavior because it denies and interferes with a network. It could even be criminalized in some jurisdictions.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoTell that to Xfinity.
- eternityforest 3y agoI wonder how cheap and low power we could make tracking beacons if we didn't actually have to send any data and could accept some privacy risk. Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, or even just a simple presence signal. You'd put it on everything you own that's portable and easy to lose. When you want to find it you just search for signals. Maybe it could have an NFC silencing feature. Perhaps it could only activate after 10 minutes of not detecting movement, while also not being near a base station (The base stations would mark a location as the "safe place you won't forget"). So you won't get any interference from anything people are carrying. You won't pick up anything safely stashed where it actually belongs. But you can quickly sweep an area for any lost property (Which could be good or bad, depending on if it's a helpful security guard or someone who believes in finders keepers looking...). You wouldn't ever have to receive any data, except to detect base stations, which would only need maybe a 2ft range. But it wouldn't solve the big issue with losing stuff, detecting when you leave a location without a thing.
- lxgr 3y ago> Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, Well, then you could only ever track 255 different tags :) AirTags are already pretty minimal. Their battery lasts about a year, and I imagine an open source equivalent should be possible to build for under $5. This is purely guesstimated based on the fact that I have a couple of Bluetooth LE thermometer/hygrometers that cost me about $3 a piece that last about a year on the same battery (CR2032) – and these run custom firmware and need to run a display and data logger (to on-chip flash) as well!
- juanuicich 3y agoApparently there are Find My compatible generic tags coming out of China already, and they cost less than $5, shipping included. I say apparently because I’m still waiting for one to arrive and test.
- lxgr 3y agoInteresting! I would have thought that Apple would add some sort of tamper-proof hardware authentication mechanism, given how expensive and privacy-sensitive AirTags are.
- dzhiurgis 3y agoWalk around shouting Hey Siri
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoWOW. I love this approach. Didn't think of it since I don't usually use Siri (nor Google Assistant, since I'm on Android - as my cousin). SO steampunk to see a group of adults shouting around "HEY GOOGLE" in the woods to find a lost phone.
- mgarciaisaia 3y ago(I've just asked my cousin, and he says Google Assistant is not enabled)
- xen2xen1 3y agoDone this in my car to find my phone when it slipped under a seat.
- askvictor 3y agoWhat's the difference in signal strength between bluetooth and wifi? I had assumed since they use the same frequency, and usually the same chip and antenna, they would be much the same (perhaps there are regulatory differences between them?) If anything, I'd guess that BLE would be more useful in this case as there is less handshaking, which means on a very poor connection you've got more of a chance of getting some data through.
- willcipriano 3y ago> What's the difference in signal strength between bluetooth and wifi? Big in my experience. 15 - 20 feet vs 100+ feet for wifi out in the open like that.
- lxgr 3y agoDepends on the Bluetooth device class. Most devices are Class 2, with a maximum transmit power of only 2.5 mW; that's not a lot compared to Wi-Fi's ~20-30 mW. AirPods are notably Class 1, which goes up to almost 20 mW! They accordingly have much better range as a result. Bluetooth LE in newer version has new low-bitrate coding methods to allow for even greater ranges (called "Coded PHY"). Assuming Bluetooth LE classes are the same as for EDR (I don't know if they are!), this source [1] claims a 4 times greater range using coded PHY, which would be in the range of several hundred meters. [1] https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/exploring-bluetooth-5-going-the-distance/ https://www.bluetooth.com/blog/exploring-bluetooth-5-going-t...
- sllabres 3y agoI've been using three AirTags and two of the cheaper clones mentioned above. I can activate both about 100m away in the forest, if there is a line of sight. On the other hand, i can walk an entire day through the forest (with some other people around every now and then) without a single position update from the tag.
- Someone 3y ago> I had assumed since they use the same frequency, and usually the same chip and antenna Yes and no. Bluetooth is 2.4GHz, WiFi has many bands, including one around 2.4GHz. Those can share an antenna, but I think that means only one can be sending at a time (they could mix the signals, but I guess that would mean connection would fail for the less powerful Bluetooth signal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth: “It employs UHF radio waves in the ISM bands, from 2.402 GHz to 2.48 GHz” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels: “The 802.11 standard provides several distinct radio frequency bands for use in Wi-Fi communications: 860/900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 3.6 GHz, 4.9 GHz, 5 GHz, 5.9 GHz, 6 GHz, 45 GHz and 60 GHz. Each range is divided into a multitude of channels. In the standards, channels are numbered at 5 MHz spacing within a band (except in the 45/60 GHz band, where they are 0.54/1.08/2.16 GHz apart), and the number linearly relates to the centre frequency of the channel. Although channels are numbered at 5 MHz spacing, transmitters generally occupy at least 20 MHz, and standards allow for channels to be bonded together to form wider channels for faster throughput. Countries apply their own regulations to allowable channels, allowed users and maximum power levels within these frequency ranges. The ISM band ranges are also often used.”
- jukea 3y agoI once found my phone buried in the sand on a beach with no coverage. I had a year worth of pictures on it, so I stewed in anguish for almost a day until we thought about installing a Bluetooth signal monitor on a friend’s phone . Given the sluggish update frequency, we resorted to triangulating the phone’s position. As we were pulling it from its sandy grave, I swear it felt like we were cheating fate itself.
- lxgr 3y agoI recovered a lost device (satellite messenger in my case) via Bluetooth as well! It had just fallen into some ferns a meter or so off the trail, but without Bluetooth I'm sure I'd have never found it again.
- WanderPanda 3y agoNot to nitpick but I think you mean trilaterate ;)
- lxgr 3y agoIf we're being nitpicky it was probably neither – multilateration requires taking multiple measurements, drawing circles/lines of equal signal strength (or timing advance) and then intersecting these. If you just want to home in on a transmitter, there's a much simpler algorithm: Try walking into various directions and keep heading into the one that makes the signal strength nunber go up :) Not sure if there's a name for that.
- dharmab 3y agoDirection finding! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_finding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_finding
- lxgr 3y agoI was looking at that too, but doesn't that usually imply using a directional antenna, rather than just measuring the received signal strength at different locations?
- janus 3y agoHa, last winter I lost my phone while snowboarding in the last 300-500m before mountain base. I noticed because I was listening to music with my airpods when I got to the bottom the music had gone silent. Thankfully I had my Apple watch with me, so I immediately got off the board and start running uphill while incessantly spamming the "ping my phone" button. At some point I saw in the watch screen it briefly connected and then immediately disconnected again. I realized somebody had probably grabbed it and skied by me. I went back running to the chairlift while still spamming the button and finally found the person who had grabbed it, a few seconds before he got into the chairlift. I felt that day that the watch investment had been worth it hah.
- lxgr 3y agoMy friend was able to retrieve his phone that had just been pickpocketed out of his backpack that way! "Hey, did you just grab my phone" can take some courage to say to a stranger; "Hey, I can hear my phone ringing in your bag when I press this button!" was much more convincing.
- pestatije 3y agocan you not power-off an iphone without unlocking?
- lxgr 3y agoYou can; the thief just didn’t get to do that because they were busy getting away in a non-conspicuous way. But even turned off, “Find my” stays active these days (although you can no longer make it ring, I believe).
- oldbbsnickname 3y agoThat option can be disabled by turning off "Find My network" such that the phone will be off and radio silent. With it on, it will continue to beacon until the battery reaches the final BMS low voltage point.
- andromaton 3y agoIf all else fails, build your own Stingray. https://www.hackers-arise.com/post/software-defined-radio-part-6-building-a-imsi-catcher-stingray https://www.hackers-arise.com/post/software-defined-radio-pa...
- gauravphoenix 3y agoThis reminds me of the kind of hack I came up with, almost 20 years back. I used to work in Bangalore, and now and then, we would have a power outage in the evening that lasts for a few hours. I was single and used to live alone. I did not want to go home from the office and find myself without power. So how do I find out there is power at home? During those days, there were no IOT devices so checking them is that's out of the question. But I did have a landline phone that was powered by electricity and had a replaceable battery as a backup. I used the phone only to connect to the internet. So I just removed the batteries and when the power goes out, my phone wouldn't 't work. So before leaving work, all I had to do was call my landline. If it rings, it means there is power.
- codetiger 3y agoGood one, Living in a place like that, I can understand how important it is. :)
- darkwater 3y agoHow long was the commute from office to home? Depending on this you still had risks of phone working while at the office, power out when back home, no?
- gauravphoenix 3y ago10-15 mins walk. ~5 mins by motorbike
- bonton89 3y agoI used the same trick recently where a long power outage had me staying at my relatives until power was restored. My answering machine doesn't work without power but the phone does so if it doesn't pick up I know the power is out. Since the central office switch is usually powered by generators I was used to the phone always working even during outages. But I found that the landline phone only stays functional for only a day now. I believe the deployment of fiber to the node means there are battery backups at the nodes that only last that long.
- mgarciaisaia 3y ago
- theendisney2 3y agoIn my job I regularly wonder how to get a found phone laptop or notebook back to their owner. The notebook is the easiest. The apple laptop the most stupid. I have the locked laptop i have my iphone you would think, with the closed eco-system, there to be some magic ritual i can perform for the laptop to register on the owners "find my device"???? Or at least let me type a number for them to call? Sometimes, (if i charge the phone) eventually contacts real names appear on the home screen. This seems just the information one shouldn't be sharing? It is really odd how garbage the tech is here.
- dicknuckle 3y agoOn my Android phone, the homescreen can have a short message, I changed it to "If found, call {wife's phone number}"
- theendisney2 3y agoI know, great in theory but i havent seen one where it was configured. You can also configure a phone number to call. No one apparently does that. The solution needs to not require any configuration. You can call your own phone of course but then i have to keep it charged. If it dies the sim locks.
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoWhenever I go to big concerts or gatherings, I set my lock screen to a screenshot of a WhatsApp story (that I never publish) saying something like that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- manwe150 3y agoDo they usually have guest account access disabled, and would that help if enabled? I once saw a theory that guest account access can help because it grants the third party the ability to connect it to any WiFi network, allowing it to “phone home” On iPhones, there is the ability to get the medical id (their name and emergency contact) from the Lock Screen too, if people set that up. I set my notifications privacy setting to show preview only when unlocked, so that it won’t show names of my contacts or one-time PIN codes texted to me
- userbinator 3y agoBefore reading, I thought it would be about a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector ; but then again, that can find not just lost phones but other electronics too.
- aaron695 3y ago>I’ve learnt to save battery by switching my phone’s wifi off whenever I go into the woods or mountain I feel like this is not true. Walking in a city it'd be even worse since there would be 100's networks to check to see if it can connect too. Which I don't think matters much. Bad cellular reception which you'll hit if you are coming and going out of coverage would matter. Similarly a wifi you can connect to will drain the battery with background apps and if reception sucks also bad. But zero wifi you can connect to, I can't see mattering.
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoRationale is "I will be offline, so don't even try to connect". When I'm hikking in the mountains, maybe spending a couple of days up there, I only use my phone for GPS and/or photos - so everything else goes off.
- bayesianbot 3y agoI use this sometimes when I can't find my daughter in a large shop - just turn on my wifi tethering and when I have a device connected, I know she's nearby.
- Agent766 3y agoHere's a fun question, after the device connected to the wifi hotspot, would the "find my" feature work?
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoThe hotspot didn't provide real Internet connectivity, since there was no service - only the places' WiFi, but out of reach, and the phone can't connect to the WiFi and provide the hotspot at the same time. So probably not. But if the lost phone was an iPhone, walking around with another iPhone would have reported it (once the walking one was connected to the WiFi back again).
- wslh 3y agoA few years ago I also found my mobile phone in Mar del Plata, Argentina, after a young horse passed over my daughter... it was using the find me option in a Fitbit watch linked to a Samsung mobile phone. My daughter was perfectly fine, but that is another story: fingers crossed, she has some special powers.
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoTe abrazo, hermano
- secsubsc 3y agoI did something very similar to connect my Amazon Fire-stick with my new TV at a different place when I had lost the remote (of Fire-stick). The TV remote was helpful, but only after I could connect the Fire-stick with a working Internet connection. I remembered my old home's wifi SSID and password, so created a hotspot on my phone with the same SSID and password, and the Fire-stick got connected. All went good after that.
- ridgeguy 3y agoFind My came to the rescue when my wife unknowingly dropped her phone during a pullover to take some pix. The turnout was on New Priest Grade, the best way to Yosemite from our home. Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear? Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife looked at Google Earth, identified the likely turnout and high-tailed it. She found it about five minutes after stopping at that turnout. There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped. It amazed me that we got a little piece of our property back through operation of planetary-scale infrastructure.
- Maxion 3y agoEven with all the hate Apple gets in the tech sphere, they do have a lot of very handy features in their products.
- simondotau 3y agoIMHO the volume of hate isn't so much once you calibrate for Apple setting high expectations for its products, and Apple selling these products by the metric crap-ton.
- quitit 3y ago[dead]
- psd1 3y agoThought: hate for a product is at least partially a factor of who buys it - or, more precisely, how often you see dickheads with it. Self-infatuated people are attracted to premium brands, and entitled people and premium brands are both more visible than the converse. Hands up if you've never been cut up in traffic by a BMW? Likewise, when someone cuts in line at a cafe and then sits down with a macbook, it's going to sensitise you to the failings of Apple
- 3y ago
- eternauta3k 3y agoI thought he was going to find it by its local oscillator emissions like the TV detector vans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van
- semireg 3y agoI had AirPods Max stolen from our car a few months ago. A week later they popped up on Find My a block away. I hopped on my bike and tracked to a small apartment building. Using Find My will show you a “warmer … warmer … colder” kind of UI and whenever I lifted my phone to a particular window (shades drawn) Find My would say “Nearby.” I called the police and they were genuinely excited to knock on the door. A guy answered and denied having headphones that fit the description. Another police officer brought me around to the window and had me “play sound to locate” and sure enough you could hear the beep-boops through the window. The officer went back and said “listen, we know they are in your apartment, we can hear them, either go get them or we are getting a search warrant.” The guy said “ohhhh well I did have a party last week and there’s this backpack…” Uh huh. Headphones returned. Another officer returned to this scene and asked if we got the headphones back. I held them up and he says: “OH $&@# YEAH!”
- squarefoot 3y agoEmbedding a LoRa module in the phone could come handy in similar situations; it could trigger a timed transmission of the latest known position before a given event, say a big bump followed by no movement or usage for X time, too long exposition to temperature and humidity incompatible with a house, etc. LoRa allows transmission at impressive distances using very low power compared to WiFi and other systems; a phone configured to turn itself off and use just the LoRa module to repeat a very short <phone code>+<position> say every 10 minutes wouldn't tax the spectrum too much (RF in that context is a very scarce resource) and its battery would likely last weeks.
- stevage 3y agoWow, that's pretty creative.
- jen729w 3y agoBack in the mid-90s my dad lost his car keys. Turns out they were in his dressing gown (we’re British) pocket, in the wardrobe. So he bought one of those keyrings where you whistle and it beeps. This was a Saturday and we were visiting my grandparents, his parents. He told his dad, by now with a mild case of the Alzheimers, that he’d got this thing and that “you beep and it tells you where your keys are”. Well my grandad, who never drove a car let alone used a computer, his mind was blown. He just had no idea how this thing could do that. This went on for a few minutes. Dad, increasingly frustrated: “you just beep and it tells you where your keys are!” Grandad, increasingly confused: “... but ... how?!” It turns out that my grandad was imagining that you whistled and that this little device shouted out, “they’re in your dressing-gown pocket!”
- stavros 3y agoTo be fair, if someone said to me "you just beep", I'd also be confused as to how exactly I can beep.
- psd1 3y agoprintf(0x07) or similar
- Blahah 3y agoNo wonder he was confused - how does a person beep? Surely you whistle and it beeps?
- jen729w 3y agoHaha sorry typo. Indeed, one whistles and the other beeps.
- Reubachi 3y agoAm I crazy? are beep/whistle interchangable?
- atoav 3y agoMy brother dropped his iPhone during a powder snow traversal down the back of the mountain to a hut. We found it accidentally during a hike in the summer, when the snow was gone. Always be prepared to lose everything.
- psd1 3y agoI'm so paranoid about dropping my shit from a ski lift that I've taken to a chestpack, lanyards and karabiners. It makes me feel better.
- Floegipoky 3y agoWatch out for any of those dangly bits getting caught on the lift, I almost got dragged by my backpack strap a few years ago. IMO better to lose the gear.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agoIf you ever connected to a network with a hidden SSID (or one where the phone thought the SSID was hidden for some reason), the phone will actively beacon for that WiFi, including the "hidden" SSID. This is obviously harder to use for searching for the phone than the method they used, but it's a privacy nightmare you should be aware of. Hiding SSIDs is almost always a really bad idea for this reason.
- speedgoose 3y agoThat’s an interesting design flaw. You connect to a hidden wifi network once and then your device will emit the ssid when you are not connected to a wifi network, or all the time?
- Ayesh 3y agoBasically, yes. There was a really nice article here in HN about it, I couldn't find it but hopefully someone will point at it.
- derelicta 3y agoThis is surprisingly smart
- nehal3m 3y ago>Largely beautiful as this country is, as you get into more rural areas, there's a high chance you won't have cell phone coverage there - I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to choose if that's a feature or a bug. >We'd already called and sent some WhatsApp messages, so we knew the phone wasn't reachable. How did they do that without coverage?
- speedgoose 3y agoYou call from an area with coverage. Sometimes it’s enough to walk a little bit to be on the other side of a hill for example.
- nehal3m 3y agoBut if that's the case then the test is invalid: The point is to determine whether the lost phone is in coverage range. If you can get in range by moving around a bit then the lost phone might also be in such a place.
- Liquid_Fire 3y agoThe purpose of calling is probably to hear it ring, rather than to guess where it is based on the lack of signal.
- itpcc 3y agoMaybe with their place's Wi-Fi?
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoThe place had Wi-Fi, but the phone was just enough apart from the router to not reach it. The calls were WhatsApp Calls because we knew there was no cell service to make a standard call (don't know if the phone has VoLTE).
- nehal3m 3y agoSo awesome that the authors of linked articles hang out here. Thanks for clearing it up!
- yanovskishai 3y agoOn a somewhat related note, due to the ongoing war in Israel, GPS is being heavily jammed to deter terrorist drone attacks. An intriguing side effect of this is that services like "Find My Phone" and AirTag are experiencing disruptions. This interference sometimes results in devices appearing to be located in neighboring countries, hundreds of miles away from their actual location. Here's an article detailing the jamming situation: https://www.gpsworld.com/gps-jamming-in-israel/ https://www.gpsworld.com/gps-jamming-in-israel/.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoIn Korea too “Find My” is disabled. As soon as I landed my family member couldn’t see the AirTag I carry anymore, nor my phone.
- pnw 3y agoThat’s allegedly due to a Korean law which requires 6 month retention of location information, which Apple thankfully is not OK with.
- 93po 3y agoThere's ongoing military conflicts happening inside Israel?
- williamdclt 3y agoFind My is great. I hid an AirTag in my bike, which got promptly stolen (as bikes tend to be in London): I had near-zero hope but police _actually_ was keen to retrieve it, it evolved into a multi-week adventure where they tried to retrieve it several times but the thief just rode away. Ended up finding it in a shady bike shop, with a fresh new coat of bright silver paint. I was skeptical when I bought the airtag, I thought I'd just lose a bike _and_ an airtag, but now I can't recommend it enough!
- klinquist 3y agoI recommend removing the speaker from the airtag for this use case. Plenty of youtube videos showing you how.
- williamdclt 3y agoI do too. I'm not sure how the thief hasn't heard it over several weeks... it was very well hidden and the sound was pretty muffled, but still
- kebsup 3y agoThere are apps that show Bluetooth signal strength of all nearby devices. I've used that to find phones a few times.
- _giorgio_ 3y ago??Phones *identify the wifi by name* only, and try to use the same password??
- oynqr 3y agoBoth sides have to prove they have the PSK/password before the connection is established. This is of course done without sending the password in plain text.
- grav 3y agoTL;DR: created a wifi-network on another phone with same SSID and password as the one that the lost phone usually connects to, walked around waiting for the phone to connect, receive the "Find my phone" notification and send out a sound. Cool :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mgarciaisaia 3y agoThis, but without the "Find my". Not sure if my cousin would have been able to log into his account from another phone (maybe MFA would be a blocker if he tried), and my hotspot didn't actually provide Internet anyways. I thought about "relaying" the place's Wi-Fi connection through a chain of phones sharing via bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but luckily we could find the phone without having to try that. The setup would have been something like: Router <-Wifi-> Phone <-Blutooth-> Phone <-WiFi-> Phone <-....
- sschueller 3y agoIf I had 2 wifi access points a meter apart would that me enough to be able to locate the device either behind or in front of the two antennas? I assume I would need two wifi USB dongles for my PC and some sort of way to determine the time a beacon packet arrived but I don't know if the time difference is granular enough to be able to tell a difference in time between the two. Has anyone tried something like this with wifi?
- neves 3y agoI've had this exact same problem last week while going to Mount Roraima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Roraima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Roraima If I had just read this message before. This is an ingenious solution. He created a thetering wifi network with the same name and password of a network the phone would recognize. When there's a connection, it means the phone is near: "I’ve used my own phone’s tethering feature to create a wifi network with the same name & password as my cousin’s home network - and we started walking around the place. We made sure the other guy helping us with the search had his own wifi off, to avoid false positives, and waited to find a new connection to the hotspot. And it worked! The connection was made when walking nearby the parked truck, but it turns out that the phone wasn’t in the truck - it was lying on one of the ATVs that was parked by its side."
- SandroG 3y agoIf you have an Apple Watch, there is a nifty trick of pressing and holding the "Locate Phone" button in the Control Center. Doing so also engages the phone's flashlight so you can find it at night.
- bahro 3y agoThe butterfly you've seen is a Diaethria species, also known as the "eighty-eights" for obvious reasons.
- mcv 3y agoNice! Now does anyone know a way to find my wireless earphones? Presumably in their charging box. I expect not, because they don't have bluetooth on in their charger, and I don't think the charger itself has bluetooth. But just in case someone knows a miracle for me: Sony WF-1000XM4.