Mark Atwood (fallenpegasus) wrote,
Mark Atwood
fallenpegasus

Neat localizer service hack

There are some companies, such as SkyHook, starting up that provide IP provided localizer data using an interesting hack. They wardrive the world (and if you would like like a short-term fulltime job wardriving your city, they are hiring), recording 802.11 APs and their locations. A device, such as a laptop, PDA, or wireless webcam, makes a list of all the APs it can "see" along with signal strength information (even ones it hasn't associated with or logged into), sends that list to a server, and it sends back an estimate of it's location.

It's pretty neat. It's something that would be cool for the free wireless and free wardriving maps folks should be willing to put some friendly free competition up with them (update, it looks like someone has, called HereCast). And/or for them to provide a free Web API and a low cost access licence. I would certainly pay ten bucks a year to such a service.

Of course, I would also like it for the IEEE 802 comittee to add localizer data to the 802 meta and control standards, and also for all IP devices to start making their localization data available, maybe via DNS LOC and via SNMP, or both.
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