4 ms·

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-

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.

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.