beacondb
ichnaea
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beacondb
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Show HN: BeaconDB – An Alternative to Mozilla Location Services
Reading the MLS retirement issue[1] it seems that multiple established organizations (e foundation, Graphene) are also interested in providing an alternative service. Does this mean that we're now in a situation where multiple open source location service providers are competing, or is this the only publicly accessible project in this space for now?
This project is cool and all, but seems to just be a one person effort with not a lot of engagement on GitHub[2]. Are you in talks with other people with similar goals to expand and collaborate on the project? Having the backing of an existing developer community could really bring this to the next level.
1) https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065
2) https://github.com/beacondb/beacondb
ichnaea
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Show HN: BeaconDB – An Alternative to Mozilla Location Services
Reading the MLS retirement issue[1] it seems that multiple established organizations (e foundation, Graphene) are also interested in providing an alternative service. Does this mean that we're now in a situation where multiple open source location service providers are competing, or is this the only publicly accessible project in this space for now?
This project is cool and all, but seems to just be a one person effort with not a lot of engagement on GitHub[2]. Are you in talks with other people with similar goals to expand and collaborate on the project? Having the backing of an existing developer community could really bring this to the next level.
1) https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065
2) https://github.com/beacondb/beacondb
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Mozilla will be retiring the Mozilla Location Service
The rather troubling part of this announcement in a GitHub issue is that this nugget comes out in a seemingly innocuous comment[1]:
>> Firefox still uses MLS for `browser.region.network.url`; will that also move to Google Location Services?
> This endpoint will be migrated to another service (classify-client) that will return the expected response. We'll adjust DNS entries when it's time to make that move so firefox won't see any difference.
What exactly is this "classify-client" service?
Note also this led me to discover for the first time that this is a thing[2]:
> Geolocation for default search engine
> In order to set the right default search engine for your location, Firefox will perform a geolocation lookup once by contacting Mozilla's servers and store the country-level result locally. This connection happens on the first start of Firefox – in case you want to prohibit that, you will have to preconfigure the browser and set the browser.search.geoip.url preference to a blank string.
Also related is [3].
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065#issuecomment-...
[2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/iq27wa/disabling_l...
- Retiring the Mozilla Location Service
- How, what, who, and, why?
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WiGLE: Wireless Network Mapping
I don't know what WiGLE users do with the data, but the WiGLE admins sold Wi-Fi location data to Microsoft to bootstrap Bing Maps back in the day.
I helped bootstrap Mozilla's Location Service (MLS) to support geolocation on Firefox OS without Google Location Services. Mozilla even had its own Wi-Fi "wardriving/stumbling" app (MozStumbler https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler) and an opt-in stumbler in Firefox Android. But once Firefox OS was retired, there wasn't much need for MLS. However, Mozilla still runs a Wi-Fi geolocation service open to other projects (like GNOME's Geoclue service).
Mozilla also publishes cell tower location data and shares with the OpenCellID stumbling project. I worked with Mozilla's privacy and security teams to see if we could publish the Wi-Fi location data, but we didn't find a privacy-preserving way to do that.
For more information about MLS, check out https://location.services.mozilla.com/
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Mozilla, Google, and Manifest V3
Google mainly makes a search engine deal and pays Mozilla to use Google Location services rather than Mozilla's. Google doesn't control the development of Firefox, or its browser engine Gecko (at least directly, they do maniplulate the market so other browsers are forced to implement their stuff, Manifest v3 itself being an example).
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What methods are used to locate a phone?
The same is possible with bluetooth. Source: Mozilla Location Services
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MLS for CellMapper Users, Primer
Tower Collector, as an app, collects for both https://opencellid.org/ and https://location.services.mozilla.com/ . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla\_Location\_Service
- Happy Windows 11 Laptop Users in 2023
What are some alternatives?
rfparty-monitor - its like a tricorder, for your wireless world.
UnifiedNlp - Alternative network location provider for Android, with plugin interface to easily integrate third-party location providers.
webinterface-wifi - View the web interface over wifi. For the ReMarkable Tablet.
WiFi-Automatic - Automatically turn off WiFi if you don't need it
apple-corelocation-experiments - Experimenting with Apple's WPS location service
webappsec-permissions-policy - A mechanism to selectively enable and disable browser features and APIs
TowerCollector - The OpenCellID and BeaconDB contributor's app.
MozStumbler - Android Stumbler for Mozilla
FlyingCarpet - Cross-platform AirDrop. File transfer between Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows over ad hoc WiFi. No network infrastructure required, just two devices with WiFi chips in close range.
location-guard - Hide your geographic location from websites.
webappsec-feature-policy - A mechanism to selectively enable and disable browser features and APIs [Moved to: https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-permissions-policy]
AnsiMail - Fullstack, security focused, personal mail server based on OpenSMTPD for OpenBSD