[HN Gopher] Mozilla will be retiring the Mozilla Location Service
___________________________________________________________________
Mozilla will be retiring the Mozilla Location Service
Author : foresterre
Score : 175 points
Date : 2024-03-16 09:41 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| onli wrote:
| Fuck. I just last year integrated this in a project of mine.
| Thinking: "Yeah, Google fucked me over here before when I used
| their, but it's Mozilla, it will be fine."
|
| It is not okay to stop providing a service like this. Not if you
| are Mozilla, with that mission and money, not something that is
| so deeply entrenched. Though, reading it more calmly, I can see
| how them being hit by a patent troll can make their investment in
| this project untenable.
|
| There is a comment about the Graphene Foundation maybe providing
| an alternative. That would be great - but having
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0 in mind, with that
| maintainer still active the project and foundation is a complete
| no-go. The organic maps comment is the one to follow instead.
| Yoric wrote:
| Well, money can be used to power a service that (almost) nobody
| uses, or to power services that Mozilla hopes will be more
| useful.
|
| I, for one, had assumed that this service had been retired ages
| ago.
| onli wrote:
| Imho that location service is an important piece of
| infrastructure for web apps that need IP geolocation,
| especially for FOSS software given that there is no
| alternative, and useful for Android without Google services.
| Both things Mozilla should support.
| bananapub wrote:
| > an important piece of infrastructure for web apps that
| need IP geolocation
|
| er, isn't it entirely for physical location based on wifi
| and mobile network towers?
| onli wrote:
| My script is calling `https://location.services.mozilla.c
| om/v1/geolocate?key=geocl...`. That's the service linked
| in the announcement. I assumed they would should down
| everything.
| dingensundso wrote:
| A lot of people running degoogled androids depend on the
| location service:
| https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/issues/2237
| pona-a wrote:
| "Nobody uses"...
|
| Do you understand what you just said? Raw GPS is universally
| unusable, requiring up to half an hour of waving your phone
| under clear sky, hoping it a) will actually work; b) will not
| loose signal; c) will not drain the battery before you reach
| your destination.
|
| The only way to get reasonable estimation of location?
| Location services. Guess who are the only providers? About 5
| or something companies, all with expensive licenses and weird
| terms of use.
|
| And here comes Mozilla, providing this same expensive
| exclusive service for free as a convenient API. Just send
| some WiFi SSIDs and signal strength, cell towers, and
| Bluetooth devices, and without even having to turn on the
| actual GPS, you get a faster, more accurate estimate of
| geolocation, down to a few meters.
|
| This service is vital to mobile Linux or even deGoogled
| Android or non-Chrome browsers. In its time Canonical had to
| plead with Here maps for years to give their devices proper
| GPS. To say a project unique in its entire domain on which
| hinges the existence of entire ecosystems is less important
| than a yet VPN or email alias service seems downright silly.
|
| Besides, it's not like Mozilla did it on their own volition.
| A patent troll had come to destroy their competitor on shaky
| legal footing, knowing they won't fight back...
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Raw GPS is universally unusable, requiring up to half an
| hour of waving your phone under clear sky,
|
| Sigh. The increasing amount of unsubstantiated FUD finding
| its way on to HN recently is depressing.
|
| Two glaringly obvious points to make at your nonsense:
|
| 1. What you describe is ancient history. It applied to old
| previous-generation devices with single-frequency chipsets
| (L1 GPS signals). However, effectively 100% of devices
| released within the last 3-5 years (and more in the case of
| certain manufacturers !) (a) have L1,L2,L5 GPS chipsets and
| (b) have multi-frequency GPS chipsets whch work not only
| with the "original" GPS but also Galileo, QZSS and others.
|
| 2. Even if we accept your argument, which we should not,
| then the rapid adoption of Apple's FindMy network (and the
| equivalent for Google) surely cannot have escaped your
| attention ? These serve to increase accuracy.
|
| The reality is there is fast becoming no need for a third-
| party service such as the one Mozilla provided, because
| there is now first-class support for sufficiently robust
| high-accuracy positioning.
| stavros wrote:
| This is correct. I use GPS in RC planes and only the
| initial sync is that slow (when it has to download the
| ephemerides). Subsequent boots/syncs only take a few
| seconds, and you obviously get great resolution with just
| the GPS unit.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I'm assuming you're using a UBlox M8 or F9P or something
| similar? Most of the built units have a small battery or
| supercap that allows them to retain almanac and ephemeris
| data while powered off. If the ephemeris data is less
| than 4 hours old this will allow it to very quickly re-
| sync to the visible SVs and get a lock again.
|
| It's quite impressive, though, at how the hardware has
| improved. For a complete cold start one of the
| challenging issues is to actually find a single satellite
| to listen to. For GPS there's 32 different spreading
| codes and each transmitted signal is affected by Doppler
| shift depending on its position and velocity relative to
| where you are on the Earth. You basically have to iterate
| through (spreading code, Doppler shift) pairs and run a
| correlator to see if there's a signal present.
| Contemporary hardware has a ton of correlators that can
| run in parallel which can significantly improve the TTFF
| (time to first fix). As soon as you find one SV and start
| to get a bit of almanac data you can quickly eliminate
| (spreading, Doppler) options from the problem space by
| dropping SVs that you know are not going to be visible.
| stavros wrote:
| Yep, exactly. And a mobile phone has an internet
| connection, which means that it always has an up-to-date
| ephemeris.
| sham1 wrote:
| I use the Mozilla location services to have my Linux
| desktops and laptops automatically figure out where they
| are in order to properly apply blue-light filtering at
| night. How might one be able to integrate either the
| aforementioned Apple or Google services into the system
| to provide the appropriate location data? Or would it
| instead require the purchase of separate GPS units for
| these computers in order to have them know just where
| they are?
|
| Dismissal of Mozilla being forced to bring down an
| essential service like this because the concerned post
| has some FUD in it, and that proprietary alternatives
| exist so what's the worry, is frankly disgusting.
| Especially when it's done via the blatantly immortal (but
| technically legal!) abuse of the legal system like this.
| onli wrote:
| And it's not even FUD. The phone I use has no working GPS
| since it got degoogled, as it takes too long to get a
| poosition. Yes, it's older than 3 years, but maybe being
| able to integrate the mozilla location service (with
| something more adequate than LineageOS) was a factor in
| me thinking the ungoogled Android route was viable
| anyway. But here we are.
|
| Not everyone wants to use the newest hardware.
| javajosh wrote:
| I have a watch that I don't connect to my phone that gets
| GPS signal and lat lon and it works better than you
| describe. You made general claims despite your situation
| being specific to you - intentional or not, that's FUD.
| onli wrote:
| I did nothing, I'm not parent.
|
| Is that watch de-googled, running only with FOSS
| software, without a proprietary location service? How it
| the AGPS system mentioned in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39725522 working,
| who provides the data? Was it stale?
|
| If you can't answer that or if it's backed by (recently
| acquired) proprietary data, then you just do not know how
| GPS behaves in the scenario we are talking about.
| lxgr wrote:
| > the rapid adoption of Apple's FindMy network (and the
| equivalent for Google) surely cannot have escaped your
| attention ? These serve to increase accuracy.
|
| Do you mean Apple's and Google's Wi-Fi positioning
| databases? These are different from Find My: Find My is
| crowdsourced positioning of (themselves usually
| unconnected) trackers; the positioning databases are (at
| least partially) crowdsourced Wi-Fi (and maybe Bluetooth)
| signal to location mappings.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It's you who doesn't make much sense in this thread.
|
| > released within the last 3-5 years
|
| So, pretty much only the very fresh devices then.
|
| > have L1,L2,L5 GPS chipsets
|
| That's not going to reduce cold TTFF to seconds without
| online assistance (which, by the way, is _not_ what MLS
| is about).
|
| > work not only with the "original" GPS but also Galileo,
| QZSS and others
|
| Same as above. None of the constellations or assistance
| data help when you can't see the sky.
|
| > then the rapid adoption of Apple's FindMy network (and
| the equivalent for Google) surely cannot have escaped
| your attention
|
| How is it relevant and how can it be used by anyone who
| isn't Apple or Google?
|
| > The reality is there is fast becoming no need for a
| third-party service such as the one Mozilla provided
|
| The reality is that I'm not aware of any currently
| existing alternatives to MLS that could be used by
| Geoclue or microG, which provide non-GNSS location on
| many phones out there, which is essential to provide
| anything resembling a good user experience when it comes
| to location. The opposite of what you said is true -
| there's a rapidly growing need for this kind of service
| as more FLOSS starts to be used on mobile phones.
| overstay8930 wrote:
| What year did you last use GPS, it's even usable deep
| within cities now. Modern devices use GPS, GLONASS,
| GALILEO, and various regional ones too. Locking on is super
| fast and it's hard to lose unless you walk inside of a big
| building. I can even get a good GPS lock inside my house,
| it's really good these days.
|
| You're right that it can use more power, but it's really
| not that bad with modern hardware.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| With an up to date AGPS database, GPS is quite usable.
| AGPS is also distributed as a service, though, often by
| companies that made the GPS receiver chips. If that were
| to fall away, you'd struggle to make GPS usable for
| phones.
|
| You may not need Google for a GPS lock, but you certainly
| can't get a good fix without an external party. I've
| unwittingly tried this, when I saw a weird HTTP URL on my
| network being polled in the background; I blocked it in
| my Pihole and found out not much later that my phone's
| GPS started taking longer and longer to get a fix. Not
| "waving your phone 30 minutes at a clear sky" long, but
| definitely to the point where using Google Maps with
| cell/WiFi scanning disabled become very annoying.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I run a modest fleet of mostly-offline data collection
| devices that rely on GPS; we pay a lot of attention to
| how long it takes before they can sync. With a good sky
| view, the GPS chip often has a 3D position lock before
| Linux has finished booting.
|
| What you're seeing is the effect of AGPS and the
| interaction with the phone's aggressive power management.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS
|
| It's not really a limitation of GPS, it's about using the
| external service to let you minimize the time your GPS
| receiver is active. You can get a great fix without AGPS,
| but you can't both keep the GPS off 99.9% of the time
| _and_ get a fast, great position fix.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > You can get a great fix without AGPS
|
| Yes, after waiting minutes with good line of sight for
| almanac and ephemerides to download from the satellites.
| Anything that gets a fix faster is already "assisted",
| usually either by fresh data downloaded online or not-
| yet-fully-out-of-date data stored locally.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Sure. I was simply observing that this phrasing:
|
| > but you certainly can't get a good fix without an
| external party.
|
| is not true. You can get a great fix without a third
| party. You just have to be more patient for your TTFF.
|
| * Unless you want RTK-level accuracy, in which case
| you're back to needing a third party.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I've been working on a phone that didn't have well-
| integrated AGNSS and used MLS for WiFi and cellular-based
| location when it didn't have GNSS fix. I'm perfectly
| aware that what you're saying is technically true, but
| try to explain that to the users :P
|
| From the user perspective, it's not going to be a good
| experience if you rely on cold GNSS only on a mobile
| device (unless the user is already well aware of what to
| expect and how to behave).
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Fair enough, I suppose. I think in the context of
| smartphones, continuously operating the GPS chip is
| simply not an option, but in other types of devices that
| isn't as big of a problem.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Fun fact: almanac and ephemeris data that makes (at least
| basic) AGNSS work is mostly available publicly, either
| from agencies that operate the constellations or from
| observatories worldwide. After reverse engineering the
| expected format I was able to feed the module I worked
| with with fresh data without having to use the
| proprietary (and unreliable) AGNSS service it came with.
| codethief wrote:
| Weird, I have a Pixel 8 and that's not been my experience
| at all. GPS locking still often takes a long time.
| ianburrell wrote:
| AGPS provided by the mobile carriers is sufficient. It is
| downloading the ephemeris that is slow, not getting the
| fix. That isn't considered Location Services.
|
| You could test this by disabling WiFi, downloading AGPS
| from mobile, and then driving to place without service or
| putting in airplane mode. GPS fix will be fast cause
| ephemeris is good for days and corrections are small.
| tehbeard wrote:
| > ...power services that Mozilla hopes will be more useful.
|
| Hmm, more likely to end up as another C-level bonus/salary
| bump.
| thayne wrote:
| Or another project that nobody wants that gets shut down
| after a couple years.
| deprecative wrote:
| Mozilla is funded by Google. Mozilla doesn't seem to have much
| of a clue what it ought to be doing, either. I use Firefox, but
| I wouldn't trust anything else to last unfortunately.
| berkes wrote:
| > Mozilla is funded by Google
|
| You aren't saying it, but it is implied or can easily misread
| as such. But Google is not directly funding Mozilla.
|
| Mozilla gets its funds from many places, and one of them is
| Google; paying for being the default search engine. It's by
| far the largest amount. But not the only, nor a direct
| funding.
| eganist wrote:
| > But not the only, nor a direct funding.
|
| Being paid directly for a service by a company (Google
| paying for the privilege of being the default) is to be
| directly funded by that company. You're right that it's not
| the only source of revenue, but it's absolutely a direct
| source of funding.
| malfist wrote:
| If I go buy a box of crackers at Walmart, am I funding
| Walmart? Is Walmart now beholden to me?
| 1over137 wrote:
| Does your cracker purchase represent the majority of
| Walmart's revenue? Not the same thing.
| smashed wrote:
| No but if Walmart distributes 81% of the production of
| that particular cracker brand, it could suddenly find
| itself in a huge crisis if Walmart decided to cease
| distributing it and fill the shelves with great value
| crackers.
| eganist wrote:
| > Is Walmart now beholden to me?
|
| They owe you a box of crackers. Once you've departed with
| it, they're no longer beholden to you.
| mozempthrowaway wrote:
| It would be if you were willing to pay an ungodly amount
| for that box of crackers that not only made Walmart a
| viable business but was also an amount no one else was
| willing to pay.
|
| Mitchell got Google to pay nearly double what Yahoo was
| willing to pay and has gotten Google to pay more each
| year for a dwindling user base.
|
| If someone was going to Walmart and paying millions for a
| box of crackers, you'd be right in assuming the
| transaction wasn't about the crackers.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I approximately _is_ their only source of revenue
| actually. It 's over 80%.
| eganist wrote:
| You're entirely right. I was mostly just picking nits at
| op saying the funding wasn't direct. But it's
| functionally both direct and exclusive in that if Google
| pulls out, even if e.g Bing comes in with a bid it'll
| likely be drastically less, and Mozilla would be stuck
| restructuring pretty substantially in order to survive.
| berkes wrote:
| I've worked at many startups and companies where 80% of
| the revenue comes from 1 or 2 companies.
|
| That's still "just" a B2B relation and not "that one
| company is funding is".
|
| Now, I'm not arguing about how good this situation is
| (it's bad, for a startup it's actually worse) just that
| it's not "funding".
| rglullis wrote:
| > It's by far the largest amount.
|
| Without Google funding, Mozilla wouldn't be able to
| maintain its operations. That is more than enough to treat
| the "Mozilla is funded by Google" statement as objectively
| true.
| jsnell wrote:
| Without Google, Mozilla would be selling their default
| search setting to the next highest bidder instead.
| They've done so in the past (selling the US search box to
| Yahoo).
|
| It's a bit of an odd market, since there aren't _that_
| many buyers or sellers, and since Firefox users are about
| the least valuable user segment. But that should already
| be reflected in the money Firefox is making from Google.
| And just back of the envelope it doesn 't look like
| Google is overpaying Firefox compared to other browsers
| where they buy being the default search engine. We know
| from the recent lawsuit that Google paid Apple $26B in
| 2021. We also know from Mozilla's financials that the
| Firefox deal pays only about $400M/year.
|
| Microsoft should definitely be interested in this, based
| on the statements their execs made under oath about the
| value of economies of scale and of query/click streams
| just last year. DuckDuckGo is already more than happy to
| pay Apple for being a non-default search (i.e. they pay
| Apple, and rather that complain about it being unfair
| they tried to keep it secret). There's no reason why
| Firefox couldn't get in on that action too.
| rglullis wrote:
| Doesn't matter. As it is, "Mozilla is funded by Google"
| is true. If Microsoft outbid Google, we would say
| "Mozilla is funded by Microsoft".
|
| We can try to justify one way or another but that's just
| the current reality.
| jsnell wrote:
| Of course it matters!
|
| It means Google doesn't actually get to say how Mozilla
| runs Firefox. They have a contract for a service ("make
| us the default search for the next N years, and we'll pay
| you X% revenue share on those searches"), Mozilla
| fulfills their part of that contract, and that's it.
| Google can't, for example, demand that Firefox must
| support some web standard proposal as a condition of
| being paid. If they tried making such demands, Mozilla
| would just sell their service to somebody not making such
| unreasonable demands.
|
| And the reason people keep parrotting this idea on HN is
| to imply that there is some kind of wrongdoing and
| malicious use of funding as leverage going on. But that
| idea only works if this isn't a normal commerical
| arrangement with multiple potential bidders.
|
| Another way it matters is that the utterly moronic ideas
| people throw around for this being an antitrust figleaf.
| Paying for default search engine placement is just how
| that business works, and worked before Chrome even
| existed.
| rglullis wrote:
| > Google can't, for example, demand that Firefox must
| support some web standard proposal as a condition of
| being paid
|
| They don't need to demand _that_ , but how would you
| explain that Mozilla (despite all their talk about
| privacy and safety in the Internet) never considered
| putting an ad-blocker in the default install?
|
| The point is: Mozilla needs funding from _any_ of the Big
| Tech more than any of the Big Tech need Mozilla. They
| have, for all intents and purposes, sold out to the
| highest bidder and it doesn 't matter who it is.
| Devasta wrote:
| > Mozilla doesn't seem to have much of a clue what it ought
| to be doing, either.
|
| They know exactly what their purpose is: to provide a figleaf
| that Google can point when facing allegations that they
| control the browser market.
| echelon wrote:
| This is the only purpose for Mozilla: a convenient ruse for
| distracting regulators.
|
| If Google thought they didn't need this ploy, Mozilla would
| be snuffed out.
| lxgr wrote:
| Can you summarize the concerns addressed in that video, or is
| there a text source?
| onli wrote:
| Easy to write a summary that would risk being banned for ;)
| But that basically says it all, the user hostile and
| insulting behavior and his vendetta against projects he
| hallucinates at somehow being hostile to him - completely
| delusional - makes the project something that never should be
| on anyone's hardware, especially not something security
| relevant. That guy would have root.
|
| But best to watch the video, there are a plethora of sources.
|
| Last time I wrote something like that here someone else from
| GrapheneOS accused me of being unfair, since he is out by now
| - now I see the old maintainer writing in the name of the
| foundation and that he still commits to the project.
| codethief wrote:
| > since he is out by now - now I see the old maintainer
| writing in the name of the foundation and that he still
| commits to the project.
|
| What do you mean? At least to me knowledge, Daniel Micay
| has been the maintainer of GrapheneOS throughout (from day
| 1 until now).
| onli wrote:
| No, that changed, see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36089104
| aesh2Xa1 wrote:
| How would GrapheneOS target a specific person? You said
| "that guy would have root." To be frank, I do not think
| that's true.
|
| He is definitely not "out by now." He said he would step
| down, but I am under the impression that gesture (and the
| original Twitter post) was retracted. He's still listed
| as a director with the Canadian Business Registry record
| on GrapheneOS Foundation:
|
| https://ised-
| isde.canada.ca/cc/lgcy/fdrlCrpDtls.html?p=0&cor...
|
| The GrapheneOS project, and its sub-projects, are a net
| positive. You can dislike any individual person or aspect
| of the project and still take from its success. "Don't
| throw the baby out with the bathwater."
|
| That said, you and I might just have differing views on
| the project and its management. I feel the project itself
| should be assessed/characterized on its security-focused
| initiatives first and foremost.
| onli wrote:
| Just to explain, the root thing is also a reference to
| Shuttleworth, see
| https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44512/what-
| does....
|
| I won't discuss more here as it gets OT. Your comment's
| conclusion paragraph is a good conclusion, with which I
| just completely disagree :)
| onli wrote:
| He just made it on-topic: https://github.com/mozilla/ichn
| aea/issues/2065#issuecomment-.... For real, that's
| acceptable to you?
| codethief wrote:
| Wow, how did I miss this!
| wkat4242 wrote:
| GrapheneOS doesn't use this though on Android. microG does but
| they hate microG with a passion, for some reason. They have
| their sandboxed Google play as an alternative.
| miduil wrote:
| Thank you Skyhook Holdings, Inc.
| cebert wrote:
| It looks like Skyhook Holdings was recently acquired by
| Qualcomm according to their website. I wonder if this was more
| for their IP and patents rather than product(s).
|
| [1] https://www.skyhook.com/
| andybak wrote:
| Anyone know where on the spectrum of "Fair enough. That's clever"
| to "Oh come on! FFS..." these patents fall?
| michaelt wrote:
| I'm not surprised this drifted into disuse.
|
| Both Apple and Android smartphones come with a built in location
| service, which also has GPS. Firefox OS, which might have needed
| this service, is no longer around.
|
| Desktops and laptops are rarely used for navigation - the only
| uses of the geolocation api for desktop web browsers I've
| encountered are when you go to a retailer's store finder page,
| and they have a button to use your current location. And even
| then, the geolocation api is competing with IP geolocation (which
| doesn't show the user an ominous consent popup)
|
| And I don't imagine it was easy for Mozilla to get quality data -
| if their service is mostly used by the most privacy-focussed
| users, I don't imagine those users were lining up to submit their
| geolocation and wifi data to a public database.
| eek2121 wrote:
| Location is used for far more than simple Navigation.
| edude03 wrote:
| Can you provide some examples then?
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| Broadly auto-picking the correct language and currency?
| Populating from a regional feed for news or alerts?
| michaelt wrote:
| That's usually done with IP geolocation, which can be
| done without a user consent popup.
|
| If you don't see [1] then the site hasn't used the
| browser's location API.
|
| [1] https://assets-
| prod.sumo.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net/media/u...
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Picking language using geolocation is kind of dumb, I
| hate when google does it and I have to put "&hl=en"into
| the URL somewhere, often twice before it'll stick.
|
| Did everyone forget there's a standard for this? e.g. my
| browser sent a "Accept-Language en-US,en;q=0.5" header
| when it loaded this page.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| I can not recall experiencing a single instance of the
| geolocation API being used for either of these things.
| zaat wrote:
| Perhaps you should travel more? Try using a browser on
| cloud VMs in different regions, Google, Bing and Amazon
| will be happy to serve you their services in the language
| that indeed relevant to their local employees who are
| busy maintaining the infrastructure running your VM.
| zaat wrote:
| It's impossible to infer the right language using
| geolocation information, and in many locations the chance
| of correctly guessing the native language of a user is
| extremely small.
|
| Some services, Google for example, ignore this simple
| fact and as a consequence force major inferior experience
| and usability. Many people waste considerable amount of
| time to fix the issues caused by that, with varying
| degree of success. The solutions usually have limited
| lifetime, due to changes in the services. So much
| needless pain.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I've never seen location, which requires a permission
| prompt, used to guess language.
| thayne wrote:
| Finding the nearest location of a store or restaurant.
| Sayrus wrote:
| Some laptops use-cases I've seen:
|
| - red shift at night: if you move around countries, you
| don't want to reconfigure or use IP location. Having
| location from WiFi allows this.
|
| - Weather application without picking a city or using GPS
|
| - Night/Day wallpapers
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Geoclue uses MLS and provides location not just on desktops and
| laptops, but also on phones; and uploading data is (well, _was_
| now) one toggle away from being enabled in its config.
|
| MLS is also used by microG, also on phones.
| botanical wrote:
| It had 2.4 billion unique WiFi networks, and 64 million unique
| cell networks:
|
| https://location.services.mozilla.com/stats
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Who the F is Skyhook) Holdings? :-\
| raybb wrote:
| Reminds me of a problem I had in NYC back in 2019. There was one
| station in Manhattan and when I went in there my phone always
| though I was somewhere out in Brooklyn. Even with WiFi off. It
| only happened on Android no IOS. It was like this for a long time
| and I tried many times reporting it as an issue on Google maps.
| Confirmed the issue with many friends who used Android.
|
| I don't know exactly how these things work but I always suspected
| that some WiFi AP got repaired and moved to a new location and
| was broadcasting an SSID that used to be somewhere else for a
| long time.
|
| Or could it be caused by something else?
| dfc wrote:
| Turning wi-fi off on android devices does not stop it from
| being used for location services.
| lxgr wrote:
| It was probably using mobile network base stations. These can
| sometimes span quite large physical areas underground.
|
| Additionally I'd assume they're quite hard to automatically
| update: The crowdsourced updates these databases depend on only
| work when at least one device has both a GPS signal and can see
| a cell or Wi-Fi base station, which is obviously quite hard
| underground.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| There's a separate "WiFi scanning" setting that's enabled even
| when WiFi is switched off. Same with Bluetooth. This passive
| scanning is quite power efficient, so in practice you probably
| wouldn't notice that the WiFi is still powered.
|
| I've experience this when a company I worked for switched
| offices. As soon as I got into range of the WiFi access points,
| my phone got confused. I'm pretty sure it was the WiFi access
| points + the IP address of the work WiFi's IP address.
|
| It takes a while for location services to heal themselves. I
| run a VPN server at home, so ever since I took my phone and
| tablet to Amsterdam for a day, Google associated my IP address
| with that city, probably because my phone and tablet got so
| many data points there. I've seen it happen before, but that'll
| switch back eventually too.
| Angostura wrote:
| Pretty sure Apple use Skyhook - or at least they used to for
| geolocation
| lxgr wrote:
| I suspect it's by now a crowdsourced database as well: Updates
| seem to happen way too frequently to make manual car-based
| tracking plausible.
|
| Skyhook might still be running the actual database and
| augmenting it with their own manual scans, though, but I
| strongly suspect that any Apple device with GPS is contributing
| its location data back to it.
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| Skyhook apparently threatens companies that try to
| crowdsource such things, case in point Mozilla. So, you're
| either paying off the patent troll or using their services.
| lxgr wrote:
| What I mean by crowdsourcing here isn't Apple bootstrapping
| a parallel database, either using Skyhook or their own GPS-
| only data, but rather them feeding into Skyhook. I'd be
| very surprised if Skyhook was opposed to that.
|
| Given the ubiquity of Apple devices, I wouldn't even be
| surprised if Skyhook paid Apple at this point.
| demurgos wrote:
| Really sad to see it go. It powers KDE Plasma's geolocation for
| its Night Colors feature among other FOSS projects.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| For those wondering, Skyhook is a "location technology company"
| that was acquired by Qualcomm
|
| https://www.skyhook.com/
| lioeters wrote:
| Some context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
| jijijijij wrote:
| Wow. I don't know what's exactly protected in their patent,
| but I have a suspicion they shouldn't have gotten it in the
| first place. Looks like their business model is mostly
| trolling, or rather keeping everyone else hostage by their
| overreaching IP.
|
| Also:
|
| > In 2016, Skyhook introduced a range of innovative [ _sic_ ]
| products tailored for the advertising technology sector:
| Retailer Personas, Power Personas, and On-Demand Personas.
| Leveraging Skyhook's vast processing capabilities handling
| billions of location data points, these solutions empower
| marketers to finely tune consumer targeting by analyzing past
| locations, enabling personalized mobile marketing campaigns.
|
| Lovely.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| What service can replace this in microG? Most Android ROM relies
| on it for location services :(
| wkat4242 wrote:
| There's a plugin for apple's but I think it's unmaintained :(
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Also proprietary.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well yes but better than Google.
|
| The plugin is open source though
|
| https://github.com/microg/AppleWifiNlpBackend
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Crap. This was so great with microG :(
| nanis wrote:
| 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...
| codethief wrote:
| classify-client is probably this project:
| https://github.com/mozilla/classify-client
|
| Looks like it depends on a GeoIP database.
| joveian wrote:
| Searching for the file name the default database seems to be
| MaxMind's free database:
|
| https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geolite2-free-geolocation-data
|
| They are the comany that infamously set the default US
| location to a farm in Kansas, causing all sorts of trouble
| for the people who live there. From the file name it sounds
| like classify-client is by default only trying to identify
| the country you are in.
|
| I'm not seeing a browser.search.geoip.url setting, however I
| have geo.enabled set to false and various other setting that
| might cause that to not be present.
| kps wrote:
| >> Firefox still uses MLS for `browser.region.network.url`;
| will that also move to Google Location Services?
|
| Is that the latest rename of `geo.provider.network.url`? And if
| so, have they changed the json format again too? I set that
| manually on my desktop because Mozilla's regularly put me far
| away (and in a different legal jurisdiction).
| daedalus_j wrote:
| The service has indeed been getting worse and worse over the last
| few years. In the tools I've got that use it the number of
| inaccurate hits I've gotten has been increasing. People who move
| and keep their same wifi gear seem to be the cause of it. Then it
| happened to me when I moved, and I tried to find a way to update
| MLS and couldn't, so my Linux laptops can no longer be set to
| automatic time zone mode, or they revert back to my old time zone
| whenever I'm at home...
|
| I very much hope they release the information about which patents
| are a problem so that future attempts at a service like it can
| hopefully avoid that problem, but considering the state it's been
| in I'm not terribly upset that it'll be shutting down.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > and I tried to find a way to update MLS and couldn't
|
| Up until a few days ago when the submission service was turned
| off on MLS side, it was just a matter of setting `submit-
| data=true` in geoclue.conf and going for a walk.
| daedalus_j wrote:
| True, I do recall that! But you'd have a buy a usb/Bluetooth
| GPS to plug in to your laptop I think, there was no android
| option. In the end I just decided it wasn't worth it, my
| laptops can just be manually placed in my home timezone.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Geoclue works on phones too (which is how I contributed
| data about my neighborhood, which resulted in instant
| massive improvement for all my devices), and for Android
| there are apps like Tower Collector that let you do it as
| well [edit: though on second look, it seems like it only
| collects cellular stations and not WiFi APs]
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Key part of the article: a patent claim from Skyhook forced
| Mozilla to alter the service in a way they couldn't keep it
| working.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| So skyhook lays claim to an aggregate of wifi and gps, both
| technologies of which they have no chance developing.. Patents
| involving other advanced technologies should have much stricter
| requitements
| deely3 wrote:
| How you differentiate between advanced technologies and not?
| Animats wrote:
| Will that break Mozilla UnifiedNip Backend on Android?
| cpeterso wrote:
| I helped stand up MLS and worked on the Android "stumbler"
| submission app. The original motivation for MLS was to provide a
| free location service for carriers that would potentially ship
| Firefox OS devices but not want to pay for Google's or Qualcomm's
| location services.
|
| We always wished we could release the Wi-Fi location data, but
| there were privacy and safety concerns. Google was sued in
| Germany for recording Wi-Fi access points' locations and some
| data packets. And we were considering publishing similar location
| data, which would be an even bigger liability. The Google lawsuit
| lead to a lame opt-out system: to opt out of Google's Wi-Fi
| mapping, you're supposed to append "_nomap" to your SSID. To opt
| out of Microsoft's Wi-Fi mapping, you're supposed to append
| "_optout" to your SSID. I'm not sure how you're supposed to do
| both. MLS honored both "_nomap" and "_outopt" anywhere in the
| SSID string, filtering out those access points from submissions
| and lookup requests on both Mozilla's clients and server side.
|
| A potential safety concern for releasing the MLS location data
| was the "stalker scenario": if you knew someone's access point
| MAC address and they moved, you might be able to find their new
| location by looking up their MAC address in the location
| database. This scenario was less of concern for lookup requests
| to the MLS server server because lookups include a list of MAC
| addresses that the client sees. The server returns an average of
| those neighboring MAC addresses' locations, but shouldn't return
| the location of an individual MAC address. (I don't know if MLS
| currently implements this restriction.)
|
| Another protection (not implemented, AFAIK) could be to require
| lookups to include the SSID that matches a known MAC address and
| SSID pair. This would allow an access point's owner to change
| their SSID so lookups using the old SSID don't return the new
| location.
|
| I thought we might be able to release the location database
| leveraging that restriction of requiring multiple MAC addresses.
| Instead of releasing a database mapping raw MAC addresses to
| locations, the database would map hashes of MAC1 + SSID1 + MAC2 +
| SSID2 to locations. Offline database lookups would need to know
| the MAC addresses and current SSIDs of two access points that had
| previously been seen together. I'm not a cryptographer, so
| there's probably some hole in this idea. :) It would also
| significantly increase the size of the database.
|
| Requiring lookups to include multiple MAC addresses and matching
| SSIDs could also reduce the impact of poisoned location
| submissions because lookups (online or offline) would only see
| poisoned data if they included multiple poisoned MAC addresses
| and valid matching SSIDs pairs that can previously been submitted
| as neighbors. Poisoned data in the database doesn't affect
| clients that don't fetch it. :)
|
| Another way to reduce the impact of poisoned location submissions
| could be to filter out submitting clients' new access point
| locations outside the submitting client's GeoIP region.
|
| A neat trick from lookups including multiple access points is
| that the service can learn about new access points and their
| locations. If the service has seen MAC1 and MAC2 before and a
| client's lookup says they see MAC1, MAC2, and MAC3, the service
| can return the location average of MAC1 and MAC2 and tentatively
| record that new MAC3 exists at that average location and is a
| neighbor of MAC1 and MAC2.
| vrinsd wrote:
| I think this is a good thing in the long-run.
|
| Relying on WiFi access points to geolocation was always a bit of
| a hack and in my experience it's allowed phone manufacturers to
| roll back on the quality of their satellite-based GPS
| implementations and worsened phone battery life ; now the phone
| is constantly scanning for WiFi access points and Bluetooth and
| shuffling that data back to the mothership(s) on the user's data
| plan.
|
| My old Samsung S4 could get a GPS lock (sans Internet, WiFI, in
| airplane mode) in doors usually in < 30s. I had a few different
| iPhones, 6, 6S, 7 and XS where GPS wouldn't reliably work unless
| it had "network" (Internet) connectivity due to the reliance on
| WiFi-geolocation. Similar experience with Pixel 3's, with
| noticable improvements on Pixel 4s satellite GPS acquisition
| time.
|
| For Android phone users, if you can use a slightly older version
| of microG (due to some recent unfortunate change microG made
| making the use of other backends more difficult), I found this
| backend to consistently be the best:
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fitchfamily.android.gsml...
|
| The above backend lets you use a database of CELL TOWER IDs to
| speed up location acquisition. As you might expect, cell phone
| towers rarely (ever?) move and even without a SIM card or celluar
| connectivity, a phone can scan for CELL IDs.
|
| The other cool thing about this backend is it can create the
| database from the phone, or you can do it offline on a PC and
| push a sqlite.db file to phone. I suggest the PC route, the
| script is pretty simple to understand and you can filter out
| countries that might not be relevant to you.
|
| And f** Skyhook.
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