
Playing Ingress in Antarctica - zeristor
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a37v7z/inside-antarcticas-illegal-ingress-gaming-scene
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Robotbeat
I don't know the bandwidth requirements of Ingress, but if you're desperate
enough, the Iridium Go (a mobile hotspot that connects to a LEO satellite
network) might work:
[https://www.iridium.com/products/details/iridiumgo](https://www.iridium.com/products/details/iridiumgo)

Once SpaceX's StarLink constellation is fully deployed (i.e. Polar orbits as
well as the initial lower inclination ones), this should be a piece of cake
without violating any terms of service.

Iridium's (and SpaceX's future Starlink) constellation is unique in that it is
in LEO and uses intersatellite links. That means it works everywhere,
including Antarctica. NSF's local network is connected via a bunch of Iridium
radios at great cost. Other constellations like GlobalStar's and OneWeb's are
bent-pipe designs, essentially just repeaters that rely on nearby ground
stations. They don't work too well in Antarctica or far out to sea.

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turrini
The Iridium transfer rate is ~2400 baud, too slow for Ingress I suppose.

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vortico
Is there a verifiable way to determine someone's location? I'm not talking
about phones or Ingress, because I know this can be spoofed with rooted phones
and careful "traveling" of your fake GPS coordinates. But what if the game was
set up in a way that required photos to be taken of the surrounding area to
match (but not exactly match) existing photos? That could be bypassed, but
it'd be an additional annoyance. What about sending surrounding WiFi access
points or nearby phone IDs to the server as a means of verification? That is
worse for privacy and again could be spoofed. Thinking bigger, what if the
game could only be played with satellite phones, and the satellite would send
the location of the transceiver to the server? Would be harder to spoof unless
you own physical devices left in different parts of the world.

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ClassyJacket
Are there even any sattelite systems available to the general public that can
track objects on the ground? GPS can't, they're one way. Satellite phone
systems would know which satellite the phone is connected to, but would they
get any more information than that?

I'm not sure there's any realistic way to do this.

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dpark
If a satellite phone is connecting to multiple satellites (or at least
multiple satellites can receive its signal, even if communication is not two
way), something akin to GPS in reverse seems viable.

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gevz
Wouldn't it be trivial to hack and link portals in Antarctica, or anywhere,
with a jailbroken/rooted device and location spoofer?

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kissickas
People do that all the time for other portals in general. When I played
regularly a few years ago it was every few months or so that we saw a huge
field linked up near the North Pole (Svalbard or similar). Often the field
would be real but spoofers would take it down; sometimes the opposite happened
but not as often.

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noobermin
Ugh, this article gets a number of things wrong. "Hacking" a portal in Ingress
is just resource collection, sort of like visiting pokestops in PoGo (in fact,
the portals are pokestops in Niantic's database). You have to "capture"
portals by destroying them. Of course, if the portal is owned by the other
team, they can recharge them as you attack them essentially making you play
against other players in real time. Ingress is pretty competitive that way,
since you play directly against the other team.

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zeristor
Don't you accrue points for your team for a triangle set up?

Triangles would be HUGE

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hexane360
Yes, although I believe it's weighted by population density inside the
triangle (the in-game explanation is that you gain points by influencing minds
inside the field, in a global struggle for control of the human race).

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vinchuco
I remember the Ingress community to be avidly involved with the game's
competitive aspect, trying to get their friends in and coordinate almost in a
hierarchy. However, I never personally liked the 'pay to get ahead' idea. I
wonder if games like these could be turned into solving a real problem for
some actual impact.

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ris
See "Kort - An OpenStreetMap Game"

[http://www.kort.ch/](http://www.kort.ch/)

(p.s. you don't think Google aren't using Ingress to gather data?)

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NickNameNick
I thought they were explicit about using walking data to learn about paths. Of
course, Google don't even own Niantic any more.

