OpenWLANMap: Free WLAN-Based GPS Replacement 39
A user "There are a couple of commercial products which can tell you where you are by the MAC addresses of access points in your neighbourhood. E.g. the iphone uses a system like this. There's now an open offering for this: OpenWLANMap. With this website, you can enter your access point mac address with your GPS location and then others can use that to navigate. There is also an app for your mobile which automatically enters this data, and you can upload data from e.g. Airomap and other wardriving applications."
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Right, in the middle of the Amazon, I presume?
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Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
No, this is voluntary.
From the summary:
There is also an app for your mobile which automatically enters this data, and you can upload data from e.g. Airomap and other wardriving applications.
So yes, it's voluntary for the person collecting and uploading this data, just as it was a voluntary decision on Google's part. It is however not at all voluntary for the people who own the AP's whose data are being collected.
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So yes, it's voluntary for the person collecting and uploading this data, just as it was a voluntary decision on Google's part. It is however not at all voluntary for the people who own the AP's whose data are being collected.
Sure, it's voluntary. Don't want people to know your MAC address/SSID for some obscure reason? There are other options: http://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-TL-R860-Cable-Router-Office/dp/B003CFATSS/ [amazon.com]
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Which is great, but your average Joe doesn't know about that; most still run "Linksys" or whatever as their ESSIDs. Heck, I didn't know about the _nomap tag. Sure makes your ESSID look ugly, btw. Anyway, two flaws: requires uncommon knowledge, it's opt-out instead of opt-in.
That being said: I fail to see the problem, but haven't given it much thought either. As far as I'm concerned, you bought a device that you know broadcasts radio waves to do its thing. You know radio waves don't stop at the boundaries of
Re:Google (Score:5, Informative)
No; your SSID & MAC are broadcast, so you hardly claim it's private data. This was supposed to be the only data they collected.
The idea was that - together with its GPS location, (that they supplied and recorded) - you would then be able to know approximately where you were just from the SSID & MAC.
The problem was, they "accidently" collected a shitload of additional data, (from 'open' networks).
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/14/google-admits-to-accidentally-collecting-personal-data-with-street-view-cars/ [techcrunch.com]
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Better project (Score:3, Informative)
There's already a better project.
http://wigle.net/
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MAC Address Spoofing (Score:1)
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Yep, if the software relies on a single AP to tell you that you're in Nowheresville because that's the only AP it has on file for it, and you're in Someotherhamlet that has no APs on file, and you set up there with your AP spoofing the Nowheresville one, people visiting Someotherhamlet will be utterly confused about why their devices are telling them they're in Nowheresville. Pretty trivial.
Good luck trying that in a more data-rich environment, though. You'd have to spoof the multiple APs of place A, atte
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Yes it has to be robust enough to cope with this - never mind the spoofing, there's the fact that people move and take their wifi routers with them.
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Actually, this would be more interesting to set up multiple routers with a New York MAC, a Los Angeles MAC, a Tokyo MAC, and a London MAC. That way no one can pinpoint your location with this technology. Instant stealth mode.
free iphones! (Score:2)
Already exists (Score:2)
This is useless mental masturbation (Score:2, Insightful)
1) It won't work when there is a local electrical power outage.
2) When people move ( they do this, and quite often these days )
their AP will no longer be "there".
3) A real GPS which uses both GLONASS and the US GPS sats is
trivially cheap to buy and will work in any situation short of all out
nuclear war.
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That's only true if you limit your definition of "urban" to "dense high rise city cores (where GPS signals are blocked)", which is an infinitesimally small fraction of the area usually described as "urban" and an invisibly small fraction of the total land area of pretty much any country. There's also an awful lot of us who live where WLAN 'coverage' i
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The biggest problem with GPS is that it does not work inside a building.
With dense enough Wifi AP mapping you are able to still at least point to the right house/street.
What the hell? (Score:1)
Just paint a target on your AP for the bombers... and/or SWAT teams.
openbmap has done this since 2009 (Score:5, Informative)
and they offer full database dumps.
http://openbmap.org/ [openbmap.org]
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Nobody should contribute to a database that doesn't specify the license right on the front page. This site doesn't mention the license on the entire site. IOW, this is another "open" project that is anything but.
+1
Google has an API to their data (Score:1)
> curl "https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/browserlocation/json?browser=firefox&sensor=true&wifi=mac:00-14-bf-28-80-69|ssid:10160|ss:-26&wifi=mac:00-26-50-38-ca-11|ssid:2WIRE084|ss:-69"
{
"accuracy" : 27.0,
"location" : {
"lat" : 37.32097479999999,
"lng" : -122.0276630
},
"status" : "OK"
}
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i am sure a lot of people would be grateful for a database dump they could download, so that a) that can figure out where they are without incurring data charges, b) without uploading details about their location to a website. in that case the openbmap database dumps look good.
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i might not mind manually turning on logging, and then uploading the data somewhere after a few weeks with the date and time stripped out.