iPhone 14 Satellite Feature Saves Stranded Man In Alaska (macrumors.com) 49
Apple's iPhone 14 Emergency SOS via Satellite Feature was put to the test in Alaska yesterday, when a man became stranded in a rural area. MacRumors reports: In the early hours of the morning on December 1, Alaska State Troopers received an alert that a man traveling by snow machine from Noorvik to Kotzebue had become stranded. The man was in a cold, remote location with no connectivity, and he activated the Emergency SOS via satellite feature on his iPhone 14 to alert authorities to his predicament. Apple's Emergency Response Center worked with local search and rescue teams and the Northwest Arctic Borough Search and Rescue Coordinator to send out volunteer searchers directly to the GPS coordinates that were relayed to Apple using the emergency function.
The man was rescued successfully and there were no injuries. The area where he was located is remote and on the fringes of where satellite connectivity is available. Apple says that satellite connectivity might not work in places above 62 degrees latitude, such as northern parts of Canada and Alaska, and Noorvik and Kotzebue are close to 69 degrees latitude. Troopers who helped with the rescue were "impressed with the accuracy and completeness of information included in the initial alert," with the Emergency SOS via Satellite feature designed to ask several questions ahead of when an alert is sent out to expedite rescue missions.
The man was rescued successfully and there were no injuries. The area where he was located is remote and on the fringes of where satellite connectivity is available. Apple says that satellite connectivity might not work in places above 62 degrees latitude, such as northern parts of Canada and Alaska, and Noorvik and Kotzebue are close to 69 degrees latitude. Troopers who helped with the rescue were "impressed with the accuracy and completeness of information included in the initial alert," with the Emergency SOS via Satellite feature designed to ask several questions ahead of when an alert is sent out to expedite rescue missions.
Good! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's about time we started to solve the 'no service' problem in respect to contacting emergency response teams. Too many people needlessly die because cell signals are terrible masters when things go pear shaped in the wilderness.
I'm glad Apple stepped up to (finally) close the emergency service connectivity gap. There have been alternate solution proposals, but this one makes a lot of sense as a consumer-facing product.
Re: Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
The nice thing for Apple is we will only hear success stories. The failed rescues will just be rotting or frozen corpses.
Re: Good! (Score:2)
We have a population problem, at least in a lot of places... yet we encourage the stupid to flourish. Someone should put alternating magnets on and around Darwin's corpse...
Seriously, though - if anyone can think of a third option besides "eugenics" and "Idiocracy," I'd love to hear it.
Re: Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
Callous as fuck... but hardly wrong.
We have a population problem, at least in a lot of places... yet we encourage the stupid to flourish. Someone should put alternating magnets on and around Darwin's corpse...
Seriously, though - if anyone can think of a third option besides "eugenics" and "Idiocracy," I'd love to hear it.
I take it that you two want to live in a world where help to anyone is refused.
The guy you apparently wanted to die to serve Darwin lived in Alaska. He wasn't a thrill seeker, it was his home.
Alaska can be an unforgiving place. Then again, people die in Florida when hurricanes hit. People die in Tornado Alley. People die in Summer heat in places like Chicago. People die in floods in the northeast. I have routes I drive through in Pennsylvania that are wilderness. If I'm hurt there, I can be in deep yogurt.
There is no place on earth that is free of risk factors. The idea that no one gets help is fascinating.
Eugenics? At least we see your worldview, Mein Freund.
Re: (Score:2)
It is worth remembering that the Nazi program was based on early American eugenics movements.
We ended up recognizing it for the evil that it was. And the Nasties used that same claim.
But if you really want to claim first thought gets the blame, Old Plato wanted to get that ball rolling around 400 B.C.E., and if you want to stick to modern times, in the 1800's Great Britain got that ball rolling.
The Nasties went beyond, and wanted thought and "racial" eugenics, which is probably what happens with any such program eventually.
Re: Good! (Score:1)
Re: Good! (Score:1)
Eugenics? At least we see your worldview, Mein Freund.
I've only been posting my "free-range, tree-hugging anti-corporate, live-and-let-live, lowercase-L libertarianism" on here for twenty plus years but if you want to put your foolishness on full display, who am I to judge??
Re: (Score:2)
My current UID easily passes that metric, yet it's still the third /. account I've created.
People sometimes lose access to an old account and recreate them, or they get stolen/hijacked, or other things. Just a heads up.
Re: (Score:2)
My current UID easily passes that metric, yet it's still the third /. account I've created.
People sometimes lose access to an old account and recreate them, or they get stolen/hijacked, or other things. Just a heads up.
Even so, his claim is that somehow based on time here, he wins the argument. I'm not certain when I joined up with /., it might be heading onto 20 years now, but I wouldn't use it as an argument. I mean someone might write "Okay Boomer!", and then I'd get booboo feelings, yaknow?
Re: (Score:2)
Eugenics? At least we see your worldview, Mein Freund.
I've only been posting my "free-range, tree-hugging anti-corporate, live-and-let-live, lowercase-L libertarianism" on here for twenty plus years but if you want to put your foolishness on full display, who am I to judge??
Let's face it - you wanted no help for a person in the area they lived. You can think I'm a fool - no problem, after reading your stuff, that's no insult AFAIAC.
Does your FOAD based mantra include people who get stranded in snowstorms in the midwest of the US? Happens every year.
There is a big difference between say someone in a wingsuit, auguring into a mountain, or extreme mountain climbing, and a guy getting stuck in the cold.
Either way, in civilized society, we help people who get in trouble.
I
Re: (Score:2)
The guy you apparently wanted to die to serve Darwin lived in Alaska. He wasn't a thrill seeker, it was his home.
Then I have a question for you: Why did he not have emergency equipment as standard practice? Living somewhere doesn't make the case less potential Darwin award, it makes it more so.
Then again, people die in Florida when hurricanes hit. People die in Tornado Alley.
Great example. I know nothing about hurricanes or tornados, but when I visited my American friends in susceptible areas I actually was quite bemused. They still had AM radios, they had petrol stored in canisters, they had flashlights (not the on the phone kind but the actual glue to your gun in a zombie apocalypse kind). We joke
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They needlessly die because they choose to take a risk where rescue is impractical. It is not the responsibility of society to reduce risk to zero.
It doesn't have to be wilderness, of course. Or, it can be the kind of "wilderness" that has a nice paved road and millions of visitors every year, like a National Park. I used to go down to the coastal plain in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park all the time when I lived nearby, and simply driving down the road past a certain would would be "choosing to take a risk" by the standards of this thread, because no carrier had cell service down there at that time.
Same island, up between the mountains (on the highw
Re: (Score:3)
They needlessly die because they choose to take a risk where rescue is impractical. It is not the responsibility of society to reduce risk to zero. This tool provides another means that we as a compassionate society can help people who get in over their heads
This. Not only this but they take dumb risks or don't take sensible precautions. I'm originally from Australia and the number of tourists that need rescue because they don't understand the harshness of the Australian climate or the reality of the sheer distances involved is far too high. People drive off into the bush without thinking to bring water, a spare tyre or even ensure their vehicle isn't about to fall apart. They think it's like driving in Europe or America where there's a town with everything ev
Re: (Score:2)
It is not the responsibility of society to reduce risk to zero.
It's not the responsibility of society to do anything whatsoever about anything. But that's because no outside-of-society sentient entity exists to make rules for what is and is not the responsibility of society. Society is what it is and does what it does. It's the aggregate result of what the people inside of the society choose to do, not what some self appointed authority tries to say it should be.
Observationally from this story, it is clear that a variety of members of society, some of the Apple employe
Re: (Score:2)
Did you see how he was SEVEN DEGREES OF LATITUDE north of where the phone was supposed to work? [...] He should have had a Personal Locator Beacon which is good up to 70 degrees.
There is no latitude limitation for a PLB anymore. Polar satellites and newer GPS satellites can receive the emergency signals anywhere on earth.
Cospas-Sarsat is in the process of upgrading its satellite system by placing search-and-rescue receivers (i.e., repeaters or transponders) on new GPS satellites operated by the United States, navigation satellites of Russia (GLONASS) that began deployment last year, and European GALILEO navigation satellites that began launching 12 October 2012. Once qualified as operational, this system augmentation will dramatically improve both the speed and location-accuracy for detecting beacons.
Re: (Score:2)
How about don't get in a predicament where the only lifeline is a cell phone.
I don't get any further from safety than I can walk injured (I don't ever carry a cell phone).
Trust in technology *can* literally get you killed.
Re: (Score:2)
Because shit happens.
You chew your food all the time. Yet, there's always a chance you might choke on something you're eating. This is a perfectly normal activity that everyone does, and no one thinks about choking on the food they're eating.
You're driving down the road. Ever consider what
Re: (Score:1)
Saving rich people from the perils of their own adventures, yes what a huge act of philanthropy Apple is doing here. You can only outrun Darwin for so long though.
Re: (Score:3)
In most cases, I'd agree with you. However, nowhere does it say that this was some rich guy out on some adventure. If he was a regular guy living up there, using a snow machine to get to a store, doctor, or whatever over long distances would be a normal part of life.
Good that he's ok.
Re: (Score:3)
It's about time we started to solve the 'no service' problem in respect to contacting emergency response teams. Too many people needlessly die because cell signals are terrible masters when things go pear shaped in the wilderness.
When you go into the wilderness you take on the possibility of dying. It is not up to the world to rescue you.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
At a basal level, I do agree with you here -- I was raised old school, so I tend to take my own wilderness jaunts quite seriously. The modern masses are generally dumbfucks when it comes to bear-season style problems (ie, we have bear season, so there are less bears, so dumbfucks usually die less in the woods).
However, the population is steadily growing, and the pro-nature campaigns are putting more and more people into the wilderness without sufficient survival training. So we have a choice - supplement existing consumer tech with useful lifesaving features, or let the fools die and hope the rest of the masses don't just scroll over their death-story lesson, because the latest Taytay ticketing fiasco is obviously a "more important" use of their reading time.
Hm. When I put it exactly like that, it does seem difficult.
Re: Good! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's about time we started to solve the 'no service' problem in respect to contacting emergency response teams.
I've been using my Spot GPS for this purpose since it first came out I think in 2009. Wikipedia says it's led to 6,000 rescues up to 2019. I don't understand why people are gushing over Apple, while Spot has been providing a (in my mind) better and cheaper service for years...
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's great if you go out routinely.
This is a consumer-grade solution aimed at people who didn't expect to be in an emergency. Either because they're morons, or because they found themselves in a situation unexpectedly. Like breaking down in the middle of nowhere when you were just passing through.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a consumer-grade solution aimed at people who didn't expect to be in an emergency.
The guy in question was going from Noorvik to Kotzebue. No one "passes through" this area and if he didn't have his toy on him he'd qualify for a Darwin award for not having an emergency beacon. This isn't a quick trip down the road where you just happen to not have 5G service.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Spot is good if you routinely go out into the wilderness and thus buy one.
But there are plenty of situations where you don't anticipate being stranded, or you go camping for a week once a year as the most "wild" you ever get and thus buying a Spot and activating it and keeping it activated for that infrequent use isn't really practical.
Perhaps you're on a road trip, and then your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere with no coverage. I can bet 99% of the people who travel those roads don't have any form of beacon, Spot, satellite phone, or other mechanism to contact someone in case of emergency. It's just something people don't think about.
Spot devices are wonderful yes, there are plenty of situations where they're useful - there are plenty of pilots out there who carry them because they will easily fly out of cellular coverage and thus need to be prepared. But your average family driving cross country on a road trip?
PLB (Score:2)
If you go out in the wilds (which includes between settlements by snowmobile) in Alaska in winter (or anywhere else like that) you should carry a PLB and if you do not then you are foolishly under-equipped for an 80km journey off-road in winter within the Arctic Circle.
A PLB, when activated, will send your coordinates to a satellite using the well-tested COSPAS/SARSAT system.
Personal Locator Beacon (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Nifty devices! And only $250-$400 for one more thing to carry.
Though of course it's a thing with batteries that you're not going to exhaust by talking, texting, taking pictures, etc. -- which is why I'd expect PLBs/EPIRBs to remain popular with the most extreme 1% of wilderness-going folk.
But I just saw a story yesterday right here on Slashdot about how smartphones have taken 97% of the pocket-digital-camera market. People will buy product A that they use all the time, even if it only has "most of" the fe
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's about time we started to solve the 'no service' problem in respect to contacting emergency response teams. Too many people needlessly die because cell signals are terrible masters when things go pear shaped in the wilderness.
There is no 'no service' problem. There is only people who needlessly die because they go somewhere unprepared and ill-equipped. Apple didn't invent satellite emergency beacons. They only packaged them in a more fragile device marketed at people who prefer to spend money on shiny toys rather than on basic emergency equipment. Proper gear isn't expensive and is built to actually last, unlike say the battery of an iPhone in Alaskan weather.
Alternate headline: "Apple lowers quality of the gene pool and denies
Re:"..fringes of where" (Score:4)
It depends on the exact search-and-rescue protocol being used. I'm not sure what Apple put in iPhone 14, but COSPAS-SARSAT [noaa.gov] is pretty close to the gold standard. The latitude cutoff mentioned is pretty close to the MEOSAR coverage range, but that is probably a coincidence because the other SARSAT systems should still see a 406 MHz distress beacon.
Re: (Score:2)
There are places in the US that can't find DirectTV, XM and or Dish because of mountains and hills in the way.
Re: (Score:1)
So I'm not exactly sure what they're comparing this to when they complain about unavailable connectivity.
Re: (Score:2)
I assume the complain here is something around:
Damned Sunday Ticket! Fuckin rain fade ruining the sport-ball show! Need to see those glistening spandex hinds, or next week at the shop will be just awful!
Re: (Score:2)
But you don't use DirectTV, XM or Dish to call for help. So I'm not exactly sure what they're comparing this to when they complain about unavailable connectivity.
You don't understand. Pointing out a situation where a barely related technology won't work completely negates any usefulness for this technology. If it doesn't work 100% of the time, including in 100% of hypothetical situations, then it's useless.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The point is, there could be "no service" areas due to terrain for any satellite service/
Typical feature launch (Score:2)
Apple says that satellite connectivity might not work in places above 62 degrees latitude, such as northern parts of Canada and Alaska, and Noorvik and Kotzebue are close to 69 degrees latitude.
Something I think hardware and software have in common is that you spend ages crafting a feature then the very first ways it gets used are what in the design phase you all considered an extreme outlier...
Congrats on it actually working rather than the alternative of discovering if FindMy works when the phone is insi
Re: (Score:2)
Congrats on it actually working rather than the alternative of discovering if FindMy works when the phone is inside a bear!
And if it does work when the phone is inside the bear, then the really hard question is just how do you make that loud chiming sound stop coming from the bear?
Slashvertisement, a positive one... (Score:2)
Have a bone to pick (Score:2)
"Too many people needlessly die because cell signals are terrible masters when things go pear shaped in the wilderness."
Advertise much?
You're implying that since 1 person died traveling beyond the reach of technology, BECAUSE cell networks don't cover every square inch of the earth, that we must all buy iPhones for our "safety".
Network coverage is not a human right. It is circumscribed by the tremendous cost in money, environmental damage, and human suffering. I'm not saying networks and