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Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System
- ralsei 11mo agoGood article, but you could also just use a VPN to trick it.
- wsces 11mo agoNo, a VPN would only change the source IP of your request which the author specifically states isn't how this system works: the browser uses its host OS' Location Services to self report its location based on GPS or Wi-Fi AP locations. That said, I hope the service doesn't implicitly trust data sent by untrusted clients like web browsers, otherwise someone could just use something like this to send it a false location: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/spoof-geolocation/ihdobppgelceaoeojmhpmbnaljhhmhlc?hl=en&pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/spoof-geolocation/i...
- ralsei 11mo agoOhh. Yeah I suppose that's what I meant. I thought a VPN also spoofed the location
- oceanplexian 11mo agoEven if the browser was super locked down you could trivially spoof a few SSIDs broadcast from the desired area in theory..
- DrawTR 11mo agoThe SSID (name, like the article mentions) is different than the bSSID (mac address of the access point), so I don't think it would be that easy to spoof.
- 1bpp 11mo agoShouldn't be any harder than the name.
- DrawTR 11mo agoDo most consumer APs/routers allow you to just change the MAC address on the fly? I don't think the ones I've owned have ever allowed that. But that would certainly be interesting to try (if you were somewhere without any other address interference that would tip it off)
- Aachen 11mo agoPretty sure the laptop I had from like 2012 until 2018 could do that. Haven't tried anymore since (haven't played around with deauths) but I thought this was common functionality Consumer router firmware UIs, typically owned by ISPs, I'd not expect that yeah. Some don't even let you pick a WiFi band anymore and require other changes to be submitted through an ISP portal on the web somewhere (thinking of Belgium here, not sure which ISP it was)
- stackskipton 11mo agoSome will let you change it but it's almost always static since changing AP MAC Address will cause network disruptions for all connected clients. Sure, some hacker somewhere will screw with these databases by rotating their AP MAC Address regularly but 99.9% are not going to touch it and 99.9% is good enough for location databases.
- kbaker 11mo agoThat would be a fun project. Capture some WiFi geolocation data and rebroadcast it later with an ESP32 that switches its BSSID/SSID/frequency/transmit power to match an existing fingerprint. And then see if you can be magically transported somewhere else.
- emilburzo 11mo agoAlready done: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/15/bypassing-airpods-hearing-aid-georestriction-with-a-faraday-cage/ https://hackaday.com/2024/11/15/bypassing-airpods-hearing-ai...
- bitwize 11mo agoA device can triangulate its own location locally, given the WiFi hotspots around it, and transmit that information via a JavaScript API. A VPN won't flummox this mechanism.
- IshKebab 11mo agoSome simple Tampermonkey patching would though.
- Aachen 11mo ago> A device can triangulate its own location Trilaterate (or multilaterate). Angulation uses angle, like a directional antenna, constructive/destructive interference for beamforming (this is how airplane landing systems work if I'm understanding it correctly), or optics like our two eyes, to find the angles to a target from known positions in order to determine its position in space Trilateration is based on distances from known locations, determined either by signal delay (GNSS does that; newer cell towers also but call it "timing advance") or signal strength (used with both WiFis and cell towers) > locally, given the WiFi hotspots You'll also need a local database with the hotspots' positions (usually those aren't actually measured but estimated from observations at different locations). I'm not aware of a device that ships with this, nor popular software that uses it as its primary method, as such databases are many gigabytes. Thus this is typically not local; you're sharing your data (thus location) with the server which then kindly tells you where it thinks you are
- pkulak 11mo agoI use a Firefox preference to pin my location to a spot near, but not at, my house: user_pref("geo.provider.network.url", 'data:application/json,{"location": {"lat": 45.0, "lng": -122.0}, "accuracy": 128.0}'); I _believe_ this also stops wifi data from leaking anywhere.
- flutas 11mo agoThere's also a plugin that allows varying levels of accuracy per-site. - LocationGuard chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/location-guard-v3/hhnhplojcganfmfimkeboiipphklcbih https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/location-guard-v3/h... firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/location-guard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/location-guar...
- notafox 11mo agoAlso, I see options: geo.provider.use_corelocation: true/false # presumably for tracking on MacOS geo.provider.use_geoclue: true/false # presumably for tracking Linux users with Geoclue2 provider [1] geo.enabled: true/false # presumably, turns the whole thing off Some say[2][3], use_ options take precedence over network.url, so you need to set those to false. It also appears[3][4], that setting geo.provider.testing to true might be required. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1063572 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1063572 [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24932199/how-to-change-firefox-location-setting#comment97076486_40377823 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24932199/how-to-change-f... [3] https://security.stackexchange.com/a/268825 https://security.stackexchange.com/a/268825 [4] https://stackoverflow.com/a/24937564 https://stackoverflow.com/a/24937564
- denysvitali 11mo agoI've recently vibe-coded "where-am-i", a small CLI that returns your approximate location using the technology described here. https://github.com/denysvitali/where-am-i https://github.com/denysvitali/where-am-i Tbh, I think this geolocation method is amazing, and I'm grateful it exists, because GPS indoor really sucks.
- jbmchuck 11mo agoHonest question - what's your use case for needing GPS indoors? I generally know where I am when I'm indoors :)
- HPsquared 11mo agoIt's useful in shopping malls, airports, train stations, car parks and so on. Anywhere you need to navigate a large complex.
- denysvitali 11mo agoMaybe indoors is the wrong term: as soon as you don't have direct sky visibility it's relatively hard to get a position. Some examples: on a train, on the underground, in a train station, in a mall, in an office building, ...
- seba_dos1 11mo agoEven if you do, it will often take more time to acquire a fix than most people are used to
- wongarsu 11mo agoProbably depends on the construction of the roof and windows. At least on European trains I've never had an issue getting GPS (unless you are in a tunnel or subway system). It takes a bit longer to get the first fix if you don't have AGPS, but no worse than in a car. Same with planes. On the other hand in a building it it pretty much only works next to a window, and malls don't have windows
- 11mo ago
- p1necone 11mo agoIs it common for North American universities to take attendance? Seems like a whole lot of effort to gain little and infantilize your students. They're paying tuition, and if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments. And if they don't fail their exams/assessments then clearly mandating lecture attendance for them wasn't necessary anyway.
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- savanaly 11mo agoIf you require attendance to graduate, then your degree signals conformity and grit, and thus has some value to show to employers who care about those stats but can't really measure them any other way.
- dataflow 11mo agoI think it's worth pondering why you feel paying tuition enters the assessment of the situation. The justification would seem to stand on its own either way, right? Or would your opinion change if tuition was free?
- bigfishrunning 11mo agoMandatory attendance makes more sense if tuition is free, because it's not the student's resources that are being wasted, it's whoever is paying the universities.
- dataflow 11mo agoI don't follow how this implies mandatory attendance makes sense in one case but not the other. If you believe lack of attendance is "wasting resources", then either you think the class isn't doing its part by teaching what students need, or you believe it is and yet students are not learning the material due to lack of attendance. In the former case, the problem is poor teaching, and so attendance isn't the solution. In the latter case, then the same argument would apply regardless of who's paying. What's the logic here? Is there a third possibility I'm missing?
- ginko 11mo agoMaybe it’s because I studied in Austria where universities generally provide very little handholding to students but I don’t understand the point of compulsory attendance in university lectures. If students think they can pass exams without attending the lectures then they should be able to do that. I certainly did that once or twice when I realized I needed some more credits before the end of the term. It’s a different thing with lab/exercise sessions but your lack of participation there would be noticed anyway.
- shortrounddev2 11mo agoCompulsory attendance used to be far less common in colleges, but teenagers in America mature far more slowly than they used to and undergrads are still effectively children. Universities need to babysit them or they'll wreck the dropout rate
- michaelt 11mo agoMy university didn't take attendance either, but some in my country do. As I understand it, the reasons are: 1. Some students think they can skip class and catch up through self-study, but actually they can't. The same I'd-rather-be-partying attitude that stops them attending lectures also stops them finding time to self-study. College is the first time students' time management is put to the test, and some students can't handle it. Giving them some external motivation to get out of bed does them a favour, in the long term. 2. Some courses are discussion-and-debate oriented. Less so in engineering, moreso in arts subjects. If Socratic debate is a key part of the class, students who don't show up will of course lose grades - and accurate record keeping makes sure that's done fairly. 3. Some governments require certain reporting to ensure people getting student visas are, in fact, students. Taking attendance for foreign students is one way to satisfy this. 4. When someone fails a course they'll often lodge an appeal. Perhaps they'll say the course was badly taught, or the exam covered material that wasn't in the lectures. Knowing whether the student attended the lectures helps adjudicate such complaints fairly. A highly ranked university that attracts smart, self-motivated students has less reason to take attendance - whereas a university with lots of students skipping class, failing and complaining has more reason.
- aidenn0 11mo ago
- incompatible 11mo agoMy PC doesn't have any wireless connections and the Geolocation API always fails. I guess I'd fail this course (which is apparently correct, as I was supposed to be attending in person with a laptop.) Edit: Presumably it would be possible to hack the browser to return a false position. Edit: Make it a convenient browser add-on, perhaps. There must be other applications. Edit: pkulak points out that you just have to set a Firefox option. Why do I even comment on things I know nothing about.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- neilv 11mo agoThe root problem is that a lot of higher education is nurturing a culture of cheaters right now. Your future doctors, scientists, government officials, etc... will have had to compete and gain coveted academic and career opportunities, in an environment that both has been heavily gamified, and is being overrun by cheaters. Insulting measures like this TopHat practically endorses the culture of cheating, by telling students that they can't be trusted, and turning into yet another cheating challenge/task. Schools with any integrity should be bending over backwards to find, nurture, and support students of integrity. And to save those who only got admitted by being sketchy, but first semester is a chance to unlearn the bad lessons from before. Not by treating them as criminals to be monitored, but by treating them like the respectable people they should aspire to be, and which the school expects and requires that they be. And, for any hopelessly shitty students, who fail to honor this first semester extension of trust, the school should smack them to the curb. Lost tuition income, lost named buildings/chairs, and expensive lawsuits from helicopter parents, be damned.
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- munchler 11mo agoIn this moral framework, would it be acceptable for the lecturer to take attendance orally, or is that also insulting?
- neilv 11mo agoThe instructor clearly sets their expectations for attendance (whether it's mandatory, or otherwise), and then just expects everyone to follow that.
- nlawalker 11mo agoIt is verification of attendance, specifically, that "endorses the culture of cheating... telling students they can't be trusted, and turning into yet another cheating challenge/task"? If not, what is fair game for verification, in the pursuit of finding students of integrity?
- IshKebab 11mo agoTL;DR: location API exists. Wifi-based location exists. American universities apparently use this to take "secure" attendance.
- nlawalker 11mo agoOh wow, it's the modern version of the clicker, the physical device assigned to you at the beginning of the term used for classroom participation and attendance checking, and which was most definitely defeatable via "the unpatchable strategy of Having Friends".
- montroser 11mo agoOne time I worked at a zoom competitor, and our team got to prototype a "detect if these people are in the same room as each other" feature for dealing with echo cancellation etc, where everyone's laptop would emit a unique high frequency, and everyone's laptop would listen for other frequencies. Of course it worked in pristine conditions and fell down in the real world. But it was a fun experiment...
- ctkhn 11mo agoPeople need to learn manners, nobody should be using video calling without headphones. It's insane whenever someone joins and we hear all their background, feedback of whoever is speaking, etc as if nobody has ever told them to mute or stop using speaker in their life.
- pinkgolem 11mo ago... I mean Google meet handles it pretty well
- carstenhag 11mo agoThis is about 3 people in a meeting room joining with their laptops, without a meeting room audio setup (or it being bad)
- krisoft 11mo ago> People need to learn manners, nobody should be using video calling without headphones. OK? it still sucks even with headphones. Imagine the following scenario: You are in a meeting using your headphones as you suggest. A coworker a few seats away from you are in the same meeting using their own headsphones. When they talk you hear their real voice reach your ears first (this happens with even the best noise canceling headphones to some extent) and then you hear their voice with some delay from the meeting. This is not about manners or headphones. Better meeting software identifies when this is happening and they suppress the streamed voice of your coworker just for you.
- thmsths 11mo ago
- paxys 11mo agoAs the article mentions this tech has been in widespread use for over two decades now. You have likely used it on your phone today without knowing it. GPS is accurate but also very fickle (takes time to get a lock, battery hog, doesn't work great when surrounded by buildings, doesn't work great when inside a building, doesn't work in bad weather). Wifi data is plentiful today in every urban setting, and you can get an exact location in under a second.
- friedgil 11mo ago> Small digression: did you know that, until May 2000, GPS satellites (which are owned and operated by the United States Space Force) provided the general public a signal with intentional error built into it? What the hell? Why?
- Jtsummers 11mo agoIt was to degrade accuracy. Military (and presumably other gov't and allied gov't owned systems) were able to get more accurate signals. The degraded signals meant that someone couldn't use commercial GPS as a guidance system or for similar applications.
- godsinhisheaven 11mo agoSomething something Yujio Hanma
- guy2345 11mo ago[dead]
- MaulingMonkey 11mo agoGPS started as a U.S. Department of Defense project, and they had qualms about freely giving the high accuracy positioning information they found so very useful for e.g. targeting bombs and missiles, to every unverified third party in the world. Depending on your preferred flavor of jadedness, one could say it was because of security concerns... or one could say it was because said third parties hadn't paid off the military industrial complex enough!
- 00N8 11mo agoThey wanted to keep accurate global positioning as a US military exclusive capability. It's definitely useful for guided munitions, & alternative satellite positioning systems didn't exist or were less mature at the time, so US GPS was the only system one could realistically use for that. A missile able to hit a target within a 3 meter radius is vastly more effective than one that can only hit within 100m, for instance. There are still some restrictions around this sort of thing: IIRC a GPS receiver for sale to the public isn't allowed to give accurate data if it's too high up &/or moving too fast, to prevent unauthorized usage in ICBMs & other similar weapons. I think there would be a lot of red tape involved if you wanted to buy an unrestricted GPS device without this limitation.
- bigiain 11mo agoI assume that smart comp sci kids already have some sort of proxy running on an Android phone that publishes the current in-classroom WiFi environment, and a browser plugin or Linux hack that their stay-at-home friends can run that intercepts the geolocation calls and spoofs the responses with what the in-classroom android phone is seeing.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Genwald 11mo agoThe API just returns coordinates to the website and it's fairly easy to spoof on major browsers. You'd just need to know where the classroom is.
- UltraSane 11mo agoI've had companies send us laptops for VPN access that had LTE modems and GPS specifically for location verification before granting access to the VPN.
- m463 11mo ago> Apple’s instructional opt out page (appending _nomap) to the SSID. this is good information. on the other hand, it is pretty impossible to turn off wifi on some apple computers. (when I look at wifi, I get a greyed out off toggle) You have to get into csrutil to disable the chips from powering up.
- rudimentary_phy 11mo agoTimes are getting so much tougher. I remember my early morning organic chemistry classes using top hat. I never showed up to class, but I had my top hat app open. The answers were usually kept simple, so I'd guess things like 0 or 1 (the questions were never written in the app). I think I ended up with 60% or so on them, which was nice, since it was a bonus component meant to be a little boost to the grade anyways.
- doctor_radium 11mo agoI held onto Symbian longer than I should have, but am surprised this practice hadn't crossed my path before now. IMHO it's insidious. It's one thing for a Google Street View car to war scan my WiFi router, but another for my own phone to secretly rat me out. Not that I use Location myself, but I can't stop other members of the household. I assume this is yet another practice that Android forks like GrapheneOS disables?
- DANmode 11mo agoGives you verifiable control over, at least.
- tnorgaard 11mo agoDoes the "Stop broadcasting SSID" option in most Wifi access points / routers prevent wardriving or is the BSSID still leaked?
- zamadatix 11mo agoIn this case the AP still beacons (which includes the BSSID), just with the SSID field set to "".
- a_state_full 11mo ago[dead]
- palata 11mo agoNow the question: can you spoof your location? Say you are an admin on your system (for instance you run a Linux distro), can you make your OS return the same list of SSID/BSSIDs as your friend who is in the classroom (or as you recorded the day before) to pretend you are there? Would be a fun experiment, and a nice follow-up post :-).
- toomuchtodo 11mo agohttps://github.com/adamhrv/skylift https://github.com/adamhrv/skylift but doesn’t use the OS, it broadcasts the necessary beacons with ESP8266 / ESP32 hardware.
- palata 11mo agoNice! Still would be cool to do it right from the computer.
- ycombinatrix 11mo agoHow come this project needs multiple Skylift devices to work best? Since wifi antennas are generally not directional, shouldn't one Skylift device be able to broadcast each wifi beacon frame with a different transmission power?
- varenc 11mo agoI've experienced this unintentionally when I've moved and taken my access point with me. Fresh after moving in, I'll pull out my phone and it'll tell me I'm still at my old house's location, because its using the proximity to my wifi AP's BSSID to determine that. Waited another 30 seconds and it corrected itself.
- abixb 11mo agoGlad to see a fellow Madisonian make it to HN frontpage. Great work!
- potsandpans 11mo agoI don't think it's appropriate for a professor to use this feature. Am I in the minority?
- mig39 11mo agoIt's a good sales job. Someone sold them a "high tech" solution for a problem that's already been solved. We had attendance rolls long before we had computers.
- djoldman 11mo agoThe question is, can we patch our browser to respond with whatever we want when getCurrentPosition() is called? Then we can be wherever we want, super precisely!