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geolocation, which is what Google obviously wants them for

Bingo. A neat idea made almost moot with GPS chips in cell phones. If you know where the WiFi is, you can look up the location of the WiFi via Google -- without a GPS. I mentioned in a similar /. article about placelab.org which I think maps whichever radio they're able to get data from.

I experimented with this stuff back in 2002 when I created wifimaps.com, which is a wardriving map application, which harvests data from wardrivers. I'm not a math guy, so I used a weighted average for estimating the WIFi signal source. Mapserver is kinda neat too, which I used since Google Maps didn't exist yet.

There is the Placelab.org project, but their mailing list has died down over the years.

Why not use PlaceLab?

http://placelab.org/publications/pubs/pervasive-placelab-2005-final.pdf

"Place Lab is software providing low-cost, easy-to-use device positioning for location-enhanced computing applications. Place Lab tries to provide positioning which works worldwide, both indoors and out (unlike GPS which only works well outside). Place Lab clients can determine their location privately without constant interaction with a central service (unlike badge tracking or mobile phone location services where the service owns your location information).

The Place Lab approach is to allow devices like notebooks, PDAs and cell phones to locate themselves by listening for radio beacons such as 802.11 access points, GSM cell phone towers, and fixed Bluetooth devices that already exist in large numbers around us in the environment. These beacons all have unique or semi-unique IDs, for example, a MAC address. Clients compute their own location by hearing one or more IDs, looking up the associated beacons' positions in a locally cached map, and estimating their own position referenced to the beacons' positions. "

Sounds an awful lot like Intel's PlaceLab to me.

You can do geolocation with WiFi, if you have a large enough database. We have one, and there are others. Here is a good example of this kind of action. There aren't many applications that deal with location, but as you can imagine, there is a point to location-based blogging, and apparently a need for it. I wasn't successful in building a killer location-based app, but I like to see the other valiant attempts by others.

Hay, I'm looking for a gig too, Apple and Google.

It's possible to get to 10m resolution in built-up areas where there are plenty of masts and it even works in urban canyons where GPS is a bit hit and miss at the best of times.

The really nice feature is that it doesn't need extra hardware which gobbles up your battery and it works on many phones already on the market.

There's an interesting project called Place Lab that is building a database of, among other things, cell tower ID to physical location mappings. Their goal is to allow you to "[provide] low-cost, easy-to-use device positioning for location-enhanced computing applications."

Now, they don't have all the data that these guys have, since they just sample the tower that your phone currently happens to be talking to, so you may not be able to get accurate short-term speed readings, but I bet a lot of you could think of fun things to do with it!

Disclaimer: I'm not in any way associated with Place Lab, but I'm considering using it for some LBS experiments and would love to see as many people contributing to their database as possible. :)

Sorry, I don't have a torrent hosting setup -- someone else want to grab these?

• Windows XP (and probably 2000)
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Generic (no scripts)

  -theGreater.

Sorry, I don't have a torrent hosting setup -- someone else want to grab these?

• Windows XP (and probably 2000)
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Generic (no scripts)

  -theGreater.

Sorry, I don't have a torrent hosting setup -- someone else want to grab these?

• Windows XP (and probably 2000)
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Generic (no scripts)

  -theGreater.

Sorry, I don't have a torrent hosting setup -- someone else want to grab these?

• Windows XP (and probably 2000)
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Generic (no scripts)

  -theGreater.

There's no need for GPS when you have an internally-accessible geoposition system available.

Dodgeball goes a light year beyond this,

PlaceLab has been doing this for a while, and it's free.

Okay, hams have been playing fox-hunts for decades, and 802.11 is just another digital mode. What's the breakthrough here?

Try setting your phone number as the SSID and see who calls. (Works best with a throwaway number, of course.)

This is a good way to advertise geek gatherings. A pocket-sized AP perched near your local 2600 meeting works fine. As far as I know, Notacon, the technology conference is planning to toss a few APs up around Cleveland with SSIDs along the lines of "IfYouCanReadThisComeToTheHolidayInn".

I'm a bit dismayed at the lack of technical sophistication displayed by TFA. Battery, inverter, adapter, accesspoint? Most APs take straight 12v in, and are quite happy to run directly from a battery. That's much less wasteful and noisy than the roundabout method. The WRT54G/GS rev 2.0 is stable down to about 4.5v input, long after the inverter would've shut itself down.

Many modern APs have enough brains to act as a pretty sophisticated standalone server too, without an uplink. With an extra meg of storage, you could run a telnet BBS or whatever, right on the AP. Or you could be sneaky, and implement a rolling SSID, or FakeAP, or have the thing hide itself when it hears a NetStumbler probe frame, so only Kismet kids can find it.

For antennae, I'd like to see some experimentation with equipment that has diverse receive capability. Mounting a dual-antenna adapter in the focal plane of a dish, so the antennae are slightly right and left of focus, could create a "stereo" antenna. With appropriate software to read signal strengths on each one, you could drastically ease the task of finding an AP.

As long as you're driving around, why not contribute to the PlaceLab location-aware database while you're at it?

From the article:

And with proliferating access and declining price, the user's physical location has become less important than ever before.

I beg to differ on this point. Since we can change our location -- Wi-Fi allows us to unchain ourselves from our desks -- location can now be used to provide a richer computing experience, as in applications like Placelab, and Plazes.

Chalk another site up on the list to wardrive.

Intel Research shows the way...

http://www.placelab.org/

Place Lab is a software base and a community-building activity that facilitates widespread adoption of low-cost, easy-to-use user positioning for location-enhanced computing applications. Unlike existing indoor and outdoor user-positioning systems, Place Lab endeavors to provide planetary-scale and privacy observant user positioning by making use of existing infrastructure and offering a low barrier to participation. Furthermore, Place Lab allows clients to determine their location entirely privately without constant interaction with a central service.

The key motivation for Place Lab is the widespread proliferation of WiFi technology. Based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, WiFi hotspots are now mainstream --- at homes, enterprises, university campuses, and in public spaces in many cities and towns around the world. Leveraging this ubiquitous deployment of WiFi access points, Place Lab provides a way for a WiFi-enabled client device to automatically determine its position. Place Lab exploits the fact that each WiFi access point has a globally unique MAC identifier that the access point periodically broadcasts as part of its management beacon. Combining these beacons with a service that maps MAC identifiers to (latitude, longitude) coordinates, Place Lab allows client devices to passively listen for nearby access points and triangulate their own position based on the positions of these access points.

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