[AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

[Mark Andrews]

In message <6D536E9BB0D29041B7F40B41E885EFFA2338AF974C at WSMSG3154V.srv.dir.telst
ra.com>, "Pinkerton, Eric" writes:
> My understanding of Geolocation is that it looks at the wifi nodes your compu
> ter can see, and makes a best guess - based upon where else a combination of 
> those SSID's exist. (I think I remember reading about some researchers who we
> re able to fool it by advertising a range of SSID's available somewhere else)
> 
> So if the list of SSID's in your locale consists of common ones, say NETGEAR 
> or DLINK, or you don't have a wifi connection at all obviously it's going to 
> be harder/impossible to guess so it has to fall back on your ip address which
> is far less specific.
> 
> Interestingly If you have a phone with a GPS installed, then it can also make
> use of the coordinates provided by that, and in this instance I imagine it w
> ould be possible to also grab the list of SSID's visible, and further augment
> the SSID/Geolocation Database....
> 
> What does your browser say about you?

SSID + MAC (bssid) should be globally unique as the MAC should be
globally unique unless the vendor has stuffed up or the MAC has
been overridden.

>  scan
OK
> scan_results
bssid / frequency / signal level / flags / ssid
00:18:4d:8b:f2:64       2412    0       [WPA-PSK-TKIP]  ISC SQL1 Wireless
00:26:18:90:bc:23       2462    0       [WPA-PSK-TKIP]  BigPond0A19
>

Mark
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org