[clug] OT: Location from IP

[Francis Markham]

This is an implementation of HTML5's geolocation service. While the API
does not specify an implementation method, how it works with Firefox:

1) The website requests your geolocation from your web-browser. using
javascript. If the client permit's it, then
2) The browser accesses your wifi or WAN card and records the MAC
addresses, SSIDs and signal strength of visible wireless access points, and
the equivalent information for cell towers
3) The browser formats that up into a JSON format and sends it to google's
geolocation service (the destination address can be changed in Firefox's
preferences).
4) Google triangulates your address based on its database of wireless
access points and MAC addresses, collected when they drive the town for
StreetView. The webservice returns a spatial coordinate pair and confidence
estimate to Firefox. Firefox passes this back to the requesting javascript
application.

Presumably if you had a GPS chip in your client hardware the browser could
by-pass steps 2 and 3, and get your coordinates directly.

Cheers,

Francis

On 25 October 2012 21:15, Brett Worth <brett at worth.id.au> wrote:

> Between 8pm and 8:30pm I had problem connecting to the 'net.  I connect
> via Transact and Velocity (NetSpeed) so I thought I might be able to get
> on-line with tethering to my Testra attached mobile.  This sort of worked
> but was also having major problems so I just waited on the terrestrial link
> until it all came back 30 minutes later.
>
> This made me reminisce about the olden days when you'd  get an email from
> your ISP when an outage occurred telling you what happened.  Hmmm... that
> was good.
>
> I then did a bit of googling in search of somewhere I might find Internet
> status from somebody - anybody - when this kind of things happens.  During
> my quest I stumbled upon this telstra page:
>
>  http://servicestatus.telstra.**com/servicestatus/goc.do?q=**
> technology.html&service=**Internet<http://servicestatus.telstra.com/servicestatus/goc.do?q=technology.html&service=Internet>
>
> Just for fun I clicked the "Allow Location" when chrome asked for
> permission to send it. It then gave me a "No Problems Found" response along
> with a lat-long in a text box.  This I plugged into google maps and got a
> marker that was within 30M of where I'm now sitting!
>
> How does that work?  I do have a fixed IP but I can't see how that gets to
> a location.  It wasn't from my address because it actually pointed to a
> neighbour's place.  How would Chrome even know what to say when asked?
>
> Does that mean that Telstra knows approximately where all the
> Transact/Netspeed/IInet end points are?  Or is the information in Chrome?
>
> Brett
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