BSSID Search in Apple's public WPS service. Contribute to christianrowlands/wavedigger development by creating an account on GitHub.

138 points•882542F3884314B•8 days ago•28 comments•

28 comments

luma6 days ago
Looks like an open version of SkyHook from way back in 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless

For a while they had a paid program, I had a Windows Mobile app I could run with an external GPS dongle that would record wifi APs and location, upload to skyhook, who would occasionally cut me a check for my trouble. I made tens of dollars!

Mashimo6 days ago
Ohhh, there was money to be made with war driving? I just got points on a German bb forum.
newtwentysix6 days ago
Wow! That reminded me of an interesting article in NYT about Skyhook wirless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/technology/start-ups/01lo...

drnick17 days ago
I started rotating my BSSID weekly after I learned Apple and Google abused it to track the location of people and devices.

Permanent hardware or software IDs, such as the Windows GUID or machine-id on Linux (systemd) are inevitably abused for surveillance sooner or later.

S0und7 days ago
You have all the good intentions, but since no one else does this around your location, I don't think you're achieving anything.
XorNot6 days ago
The same physical location showing a different SSID every week but the surrounding ones not changing would be deanonymizing you much more aggressively.

People mostly don't change SSIDs or even move networking hardware - e.g. AirBnBs.

Edit: and also are you still carrying a smart phone while doing this? The device which has GPS and a cloud internet connection?

astrange6 days ago
You mean, they used it so people trying to use their maps apps didn't have to wait several minutes for a cold GPS fix?
gpm6 days ago
> wait several minutes for a cold GPS fix

My phone doesn't take several minutes to get a GPS fix even when I'm in the middle of nowhere well beyond the range of cell towers let alone wifi routers...

I understand that in theory it could if it had no clue what time it was either for some reason... but in practice we're talking seconds (though more than 2) not minutes.

skinfaxi6 days ago
How do you coordinate across all of your devices?
anigbrowl6 days ago
Isn't this just wha WIGLE does?
jcims6 days ago
Basically except it's using an Apple service for the backend.

Which will likely get cut off at some point.

mcculley6 days ago
Why would it be cut off? Doesn’t Apple use this on devices?
OptionOfT5 days ago
Apple says you can opt out of this collection by appending _nomap to the SSID:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102515

> The owner of a Wi-Fi access point can opt it out of Apple's Location Services by changing the access point's SSID (name) to end with "_nomap." For example, "Access_Point" would be changed to "Access_Point_nomap."

bryancoxwell6 days ago
Worth noting that the coordinates for cell towers returned by the WLOC API are coarse enough to be just about useless for locating towers. For APs it’s much better but still not great.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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