Ringing Cell Phones Lead to Jail Sentences

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/9664.shtml

"An Indian courts plans to sentence a man for contempt of court for allowing a cellphone to ring during a court case were disrupted, when a policeman's own cell phone also rang during sentencing. The high court in Patna, the capital of the eastern state of Bihar, was sentencing Madhu Kumar, an employee of the state education department, to three days in jail and fined him US$34 for keeping his phone on when attending court.

However, during the sentencing, the ringing sound of a cell phone owned by Rajesh Prasad Paswan, a police officer in the courtroom was heard. The police officer was then duely charged with the same contempt of court charge as the education employee. The police office now faces jail and a fine, and has until next week to respond to the contempt charge."

Wow. 8O Makes you realize how important the "silent" mode is, doesn't it? Thankfully, I'm pretty good at remembering to put my phone into silent mode when I'm in church, a movie theatre, etc. Fundamentally though, any system that relies on a human being to remember to do something will ultimately fail.

We've heard about mobile phone blockers in the past - but what about something that would just broadcast a signal that would put the phones into silent mode as long as they're in the area of effect? When you left that zone your phone would return to the previously set ring mode. Has anyone ever heard of this being implemented? You'd need some intelligence on the phone side of things in order for this to work - and I wonder what the best protocol would be to use? Bluetooth? Cellular network?

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/9664.shtml

"An Indian courts plans to sentence a man for contempt of court for allowing a cellphone to ring during a court case were disrupted, when a policeman's own cell phone also rang during sentencing. The high court in Patna, the capital of the eastern state of Bihar, was sentencing Madhu Kumar, an employee of the state education department, to three days in jail and fined him US$34 for keeping his phone on when attending court.

However, during the sentencing, the ringing sound of a cell phone owned by Rajesh Prasad Paswan, a police officer in the courtroom was heard. The police officer was then duely charged with the same contempt of court charge as the education employee. The police office now faces jail and a fine, and has until next week to respond to the contempt charge."

Wow. 8O Makes you realize how important the "silent" mode is, doesn't it? Thankfully, I'm pretty good at remembering to put my phone into silent mode when I'm in church, a movie theatre, etc. Fundamentally though, any system that relies on a human being to remember to do something will ultimately fail.

We've heard about mobile phone blockers in the past - but what about something that would just broadcast a signal that would put the phones into silent mode as long as they're in the area of effect? When you left that zone your phone would return to the previously set ring mode. Has anyone ever heard of this being implemented? You'd need some intelligence on the phone side of things in order for this to work - and I wonder what the best protocol would be to use? Bluetooth? Cellular network?

[freitasm]

One of the Bluetooth scenarions was a mobile phone blocker, but it would need all mobile phones to have it implemented. We know this is a long way to go...

The network alternative could be ideal: either locate the mobile phone using a location sent by the mobile itself, collect by GPS (doesn't work indoors this GPS thingy), or using the tradional methods (angle of arrival and time of arrival of signal, plus triangulation).

Either way it would be a huge load on the network...

[freitasm]

Or have a look at this software (for SE P800 and Nokia 3650)... I'm sure they could have this developed for the WMS 2003:



"miniGPS main goal is to perform defined actions based on your location taken from your network.

It also shows the details of the network cell, to which your phone is logged in at the moment. At the current stage, due to some problems in the Sony Ericsson firmware only the cell id is shown, but it seems to be good enough for performing some events.

You can create your own database of network cells by adding the ones you are logged to and also the ones you want to type in.

Once you have a few cells in your database you can create events on the basis of those cells:


Log in/out alarm
Log in/out switch profile
Log in/out power off
Log in/out change image
Log in/out SMS

The author suggests you can create an event to have an alarm at the moment your phone logs in (or out) a selected cell. So you will be able to sleep calmly in your train to work or school - it will wake you up precisely at your station. Since in some cities you are usually in range of a few network cells you can collect them all and put them to the groups like Home or Office and than you can create events for the whole group instead of individual cells. "

[Neil]

I'm not convinced that cell ID (or any other location technology) has good enough resolution at this point to do any kind of automatic profile switching. My cell ID is the same regardless of where I am within my building at MS, and yet there are times when silent is appropriate and other times when it isn't. Even GPS and whatnot can't get accurate enough to know the difference between my office and a conference room a few doors down.

The same thing holds true for basing it off data in the phone. Smartphone has an "automatic" profile that will swap between normal and meeting profiles depending on entries on your calendar. The problem is I often have appointments in my calendar that don't mandate a silent profile - things like "work on your review" or "write specs".

Personally, I just leave my phone in silent profile all the time, and then there's no problem