At the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (wigle.net), a database and mapping system for "Net Stumbling" or "War Driving" hobbyists, we've seen the iPhone provide a low barrier-to-entry for this hobby. It combines a GPS with a Wifi radio, but it can only work when apps like Wifi-Where, WiFiFoFum and others are allowed to exist.
These apps were inspected for months before finally getting through the nebulous App Store approval process. Some have been available for months or even years. Now, arbitrarily, they are banned. If they use API calls that Apple didn't want them to, why were they approved? Why weren't the developers contacted behind the scenes to address any fiddly technical issues Apple might foresee?
As users all we see is a useful app, that was paid for, that now can not be updated. We can't find the least used frequency channels to set our access points to, can't take surveys of campus wireless coverage or find rogue wifi on a corporate network. And we can't help with wireless mapping projects. There's no app for that.
Nope, this is standard legal boilerplate. The community would dissappear and WiGLE would become useless if we started trying to charge everyone to visit. We're having too much fun to let that happen.
More on topic, we would love any non-U.S. street-level, non-legally entagled, non-expensive, geographic data. Canada has some arcview's with only a few strings attached, Europe has nothing. What would be very nice is if the U.S. government would release the VMAP1 dataset for the entire planet, which us taxpayers paid for (VMAP0 was released, but is much less detailed). For more info
And don't forget that the World Wide War Drive 4 is currently running, from June 12th to 19th. WiGLE is doing file parsing and real-time stats and maps. WiGLE is the largest worldwide database of gps located wireless access points (currently at 1,214,408).
Hope these guys submitted to WiGLE. Enough of this kind of thing and we'll have to actually use the altitude data:)
A friend and I have the same 1 watt amp, nearly the same antennas, he runs NetStumbler and I run Kismet. I routinely get 30-50% more networks in tandem social-stumbling (which is a lot of fun, btw, and it helps to have a navigator for doing targeted drives).
We haven't done one since NetStumbler 0.4 came out, however, which is more active in its searching. Initial reports indicate that it does do quite a bit better now than it used to.
It's unfortunate they had such problems with their GPS, non-located network info isn't as useful. Still a fun story, much like Schmoo group at DEFCON 0xa.
The WiGLE database currently sports 595,496 GPS located wireless networks worldwide. We have java, windows native, mac osx native, and web-based clients to plot points on maps and interact with the data. We accept the data formats from the major stumbling packages (NetStumbler, Kismet, MacStumbler, MiniStumbler, anything that outputs wi-scan, etc), so upload away!
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At the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (wigle.net), a database and mapping system for "Net Stumbling" or "War Driving" hobbyists, we've seen the iPhone provide a low barrier-to-entry for this hobby. It combines a GPS with a Wifi radio, but it can only work when apps like Wifi-Where, WiFiFoFum and others are allowed to exist.
These apps were inspected for months before finally getting through the nebulous App Store approval process. Some have been available for months or even years. Now, arbitrarily, they are banned. If they use API calls that Apple didn't want them to, why were they approved? Why weren't the developers contacted behind the scenes to address any fiddly technical issues Apple might foresee?
As users all we see is a useful app, that was paid for, that now can not be updated. We can't find the least used frequency channels to set our access points to, can't take surveys of campus wireless coverage or find rogue wifi on a corporate network. And we can't help with wireless mapping projects. There's no app for that.
Apologies, link fixed.
Nope, this is standard legal boilerplate. The community would dissappear and WiGLE would become useless if we started trying to charge everyone to visit. We're having too much fun to let that happen.
More on topic, we would love any non-U.S. street-level, non-legally entagled, non-expensive, geographic data. Canada has some arcview's with only a few strings attached, Europe has nothing. What would be very nice is if the U.S. government would release the VMAP1 dataset for the entire planet, which us taxpayers paid for (VMAP0 was released, but is much less detailed). For more info
And don't forget that the World Wide War Drive 4 is currently running, from June 12th to 19th. WiGLE is doing file parsing and real-time stats and maps. WiGLE is the largest worldwide database of gps located wireless access points (currently at 1,214,408).
A friend and I have the same 1 watt amp, nearly the same antennas, he runs NetStumbler and I run Kismet. I routinely get 30-50% more networks in tandem social-stumbling (which is a lot of fun, btw, and it helps to have a navigator for doing targeted drives).
We haven't done one since NetStumbler 0.4 came out, however, which is more active in its searching. Initial reports indicate that it does do quite a bit better now than it used to.
It's unfortunate they had such problems with their GPS, non-located network info isn't as useful. Still a fun story, much like Schmoo group at DEFCON 0xa.
The WiGLE database currently sports 595,496 GPS located wireless networks worldwide. We have java, windows native, mac osx native, and web-based clients to plot points on maps and interact with the data. We accept the data formats from the major stumbling packages (NetStumbler, Kismet, MacStumbler, MiniStumbler, anything that outputs wi-scan, etc), so upload away!