Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

OpenWLANMap: Free WLAN-Based GPS Replacement

Posted by timothy on from the another-side-to-crowd-mapping dept.

flok writes "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."

9 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Better project by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's already a better project.
    http://wigle.net/

  2. Re:Google by Bearhouse · · Score: 4, 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/

  3. Re:Google by LordNightwalker · · Score: 4, 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.

    --
    Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
  4. Already exists by robertkeizer · · Score: 2

    WiGLE.net already exists. In fact it is fairly trivial to scrape information off of their site as well, although they make no guarantees of any kind of stable API whatsoever. They also have an android app for wardriving.

  5. This is useless mental masturbation by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:This is useless mental masturbation by Chris+Hodges · · Score: 2

      But a "real GPS" isn't great in urban areas - precisely where there are the most APs to get a location from (and which tend to have reasonable power uptimes). With a reasonable number of users of the app it should be possible to keep the db reasonably up to date, and if you have 3 APs matching to London, and one to Oxford, it's not that hard to know which one to ignore (or you go from one city to another in a few seconds).

    2. Re:This is useless mental masturbation by DerekLyons · · Score: 2

      But a "real GPS" isn't great in urban areas - precisely where there are the most APs to get a location from (and which tend to have reasonable power uptimes).

      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' is at best limited to major arterials, and at worst is spare to non-existent. (The nearest point to my house on Wingle is over a mile away - and I don't exactly live in flyover land.) Another thing to consider is that GPS coverage is global and (with a maximum five minute wait to download the latest emphemis, even though the old one is probably good enough) always 100% up-to-date, while WLAN maps are only as good as the last update...
       
      So, the OP is 'mostly correct'. There isn't a one size fits all solution - but GPS is a 90% or better solution for most people, most of the time.

  6. Re:MAC Address Spoofing by QuasiSteve · · Score: 2

    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, attenuate them appropriately AND somehow gain precedence (by way of a confidence metric) over the existing ones that lead the software to conclude it's in place B.

  7. openbmap has done this since 2009 by ssam · · Score: 4, Informative

    and they offer full database dumps.
    http://openbmap.org/