5 ms·

Of course Windows needs your location, cookies and data, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to show you a weather widget and ‘relevant’ Bing News about the latest ce

Of course Windows needs your location, cookies and data, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to show you a weather widget and ‘relevant’ Bing News about the latest celebrity make-up flub.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Weather is often presented as one legitimate case of location data necessarily being uploaded to an online service, but I think you could fit compressed county-resolution basic weather data for entire countries into a few kilobytes. Windows could easily download the current weather for the entire US and choose the user-local data out of that set.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > I think you could fit compressed county-resolution basic weather data for entire countries into a few kilobytes. More than that, you could compress city-resolution detailed weather data into couple dozen kilobytes. The easiest way to see it is to observe that, if your app downloads some kind of weather map image generated on the server, then that image already encodes some of this data directly, through colors of the pixels. If you ignore human readability, you can pack much more information per pixel, at the resolution of... the image. And that is not even the most efficient encoding for it. Hell, even dumb weather APIs that respond with weather predictions could pack several times as much data in the response if they ditched the horribly space-inefficient JSON response format. There's no technical excuse at all to not ship you the whole continent's worth of weather data with each update, removing the need for the server to know your location.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    It could be pretty cool to pack all kinds of weather maps into a single TIFF, using different channels for temperature, humidity, cloud cover, etc. TIFF has support for arbitrary bit depth and number of channels, so it seems like a natural (if not most optimal) fit.
    - BizarroLand 3y ago
      Then compress that tiff file with .7z, give it a cool new extension like .WAIF (Weather API Information Format) and standardize it, and baby, you got a stew going.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  Your IP already leaks city-level location. So you don't gain much from not sending it anyway. Presuming that Windows doesn't send GPS level location. I have no idea what it sends, but the weather widget asks just for city name.
vorticalbox 3y ago
simply having it opt in would be a better solution.
- freeflight 3y ago
  That's the last ~10 years of web developement in a nutshell, instead we have darkpatterns as normalized "industry standard".
timbit42 3y ago
Due to my VPN, the weather widget is always wrong.

Of course Windows needs your location, cookies and data, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to show you a weather widget and ‘relevant’ Bing News about the latest celebrity make-up flub.

mcpackieh 3y ago

Weather is often presented as one legitimate case of location data necessarily being uploaded to an online service, but I think you could fit compressed county-resolution basic weather data for entire countries into a few kilobytes. Windows could easily download the current weather for the entire US and choose the user-local data out of that set.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> I think you could fit compressed county-resolution basic weather data for entire countries into a few kilobytes. More than that, you could compress city-resolution detailed weather data into couple dozen kilobytes. The easiest way to see it is to observe that, if your app downloads some kind of weather map image generated on the server, then that image already encodes some of this data directly, through colors of the pixels. If you ignore human readability, you can pack much more information per pixel, at the resolution of... the image. And that is not even the most efficient encoding for it. Hell, even dumb weather APIs that respond with weather predictions could pack several times as much data in the response if they ditched the horribly space-inefficient JSON response format. There's no technical excuse at all to not ship you the whole continent's worth of weather data with each update, removing the need for the server to know your location.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  It could be pretty cool to pack all kinds of weather maps into a single TIFF, using different channels for temperature, humidity, cloud cover, etc. TIFF has support for arbitrary bit depth and number of channels, so it seems like a natural (if not most optimal) fit.
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    Then compress that tiff file with .7z, give it a cool new extension like .WAIF (Weather API Information Format) and standardize it, and baby, you got a stew going.
dist-epoch 3y ago
Your IP already leaks city-level location. So you don't gain much from not sending it anyway. Presuming that Windows doesn't send GPS level location. I have no idea what it sends, but the weather widget asks just for city name.

vorticalbox 3y ago

simply having it opt in would be a better solution.

freeflight 3y ago
That's the last ~10 years of web developement in a nutshell, instead we have darkpatterns as normalized "industry standard".

timbit42 3y ago

Due to my VPN, the weather widget is always wrong.