"Microsoft Location Finder" - how is it supposed to work ?

No. You must have a usable internet connection. The Location Finder looks at the "available wireless networks" to see if any of them are in its database. You don't need to be connected through one of them.

There is a hotspot near me. I don't connect to it. When I am connected to my wired LAN, Microsoft Location Finder locates my position. If I disable the WiFi, my indicated location changes to my ISP's location.

This is the same thing from Microsoft:

a few words of explanation. Note that it's specifically for "Wi-Fi enabled laptops", etc.

You might also find these of interest:

apparently use whois to guess the location.

Many thanks Clarence, for your quick and good explanation. I was hoping that MLF would be more than a "toy" and now understand why uSoft had me confused, it's because they never said something like:

"If you are connected to the Internet and wonder where you are this free program is what you need" :-)

Cheers, QE |QuienEs wrote: |> It determines your location, when it can, by accesing a uSoft |> database of WiFI MAC addresses. | |> Is the database built into Microsoft Location Finder ? | |No. You must have a usable internet connection. The Location Finder looks |at the "available wireless networks" to see if any of them are in its |database. You don't need to be connected through one of them. | |There is a hotspot near me. I don't connect to it. When I am connected to |my wired LAN, Microsoft Location Finder locates my position. If I disable |the WiFi, my indicated location changes to my ISP's location. | |-- |--- |Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8,-122.5

It doesn't blatantly say

Seriously, did you think that Microsoft would admit that it was snooping on your available connections? What I'm wondering is if they add new SSID's and MAC's to their database every time you use MS Location Finder. Digging through the privacy statement at:

They collect connection info and add it to their database.

Obviously, they're pushing for location based services: "Location-related information in the request or derived from the request, such as latitude and longitude, is used for calculating payments to our data vendors so that we may operate the service."

Generally more useful also. Methinks the MS incantation is just a front for MS pushing location based services on their web pages. "Click here for a free token entitling you to a 0.1% discount on a pizza next door after you're done guzzling your coffee". Yech.

I tried it in my favorite parking lot, that's within sight of 3 free coffee shop hot spots. If I connect to any one of the three. It says I'm inside. If I don't connect to any of them, it seems to use the last one that I was connected. I didn't seen any fancy geometry.

I'm not sure that would be a good idea. Too many people contributing false locations to confuse the internet police.

Incidentally, if there's any elaborate cartography under the MS Location Finder, it's well buried considering the large number of mapping and algorithm "Service Credits" cited at the bottom of:

It doesn't blatantly say We need to connect to the internet, not necessarily via a wifi connection, to look up the addresses of WiFi hotspots that appear in "Available Networks" even if you cannot connect to them.

That is more fully featured than the fallback option at VirtualEarth, which only uses your IP, doesn't allow you to key in something else, and it has more verbiage.

Right now, virtualearth brings up a map centered on the same point, and tells me that it has used my IP address, but it doesn't specify what city I'm in, like IpLocator does. Of course, when the locator finds a wifi spot in it's database, it can be spot on. It even makes adjustments if it finds multiple hotspots. I can't tell if just averages them, or does something finer than that.

I wish I could contribute some locations to the database.

It uses GeoBytes. Says so. Brings up the same map.

Please note that I'm guessing that they add additional access points as the system is used. I don't know this for a fact and might actually prove to be wrong if MS finds the privacy issues more important than the possible revenue. As far as I can determine, the primary purpose is to provide location based services on their web pages, not data collection for the mythical internet police.

For applications, you might want to look at the various web and email services offered by GeoBytes:

web page content based on location. Spam filtering by location. At the very least, it would be nice to have the local weather appear on my favorite web pages instead of having to type in my zip code.

Yesterday, when I said, in an intentionally mocking tone:

"If you are connected to the Internet and wonder where you are this free program is what you need" :-)

I was looking forward to additional posts where denizens of this ng might expose my lack of imagination by giving examples of the application's usefulness.

It didn't occur to me that they might be collecting information from users to enhance *their* database - but that insight at least provides an understandable reason for its existence - thanks.

And thanks for all the other responses, links etc - it's been fun and educational reading them.

BTW, Microsoft Location Finder is integrated into the new Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006, just released. I have always found SnT to be great value for the money.

Cheers, QE in NJ

Snooping? You're asking them to look up your location.

Which SSIDs and MACs? The requestor? Kind of like double-click does with cookies, but difficult to circumvent?

There is an existing set of databases that tries to guess at your location by analyzing what people search for when thay are connected to a particular IP address. The presumption is that the zip codes searched, or provided in certain online forms, will often be local to the IP address that they are using.

For crying out loud Jeff, what do you think they're doing with it? That intent is plastered all over the pages. They go to great lengths to tell you how much better Virtual Earth is than Google Maps, because it follows you down the road, without you having to figure out where you are and doing a new zip code based lookup.

Not at all. If it is accurate, it is only accurate to within tens of miles. If it is misleading, it's off by thousands of miles, depending on your choice of ISP.

Somebody has to pay for it. It becomes useful and ubiquitous if everyone shows up on the local listings, which Google Maps tries to do for free. MS misses the mark with Streets & Trips, which doesn't include enough businesses. If you can have everybody listed for free, and allow some of them to pay with clickthroughs, life is good.

Some folks suggested geometry, but that might be guessing. Not sure the extra granularity would be worth the level of sophistication required, if all you are trying to do is locate nearby retail establishments.

For someone driving down the road, it becomes almost like a GPS and a dedicated mapping program like Delorme Streets & Trips, which has a "radar" search function, allowing you to look for business or points of interest within a radius of your current position.

One of the Microsoft pages references driving down the road, and at each stop, you can search for local businesses and attractions without having to first figure out what town or zip code you are in.

Enhancing their database is not usable in the sense that Jeff suggests. The only way they know where you are is because there is a nearby WAP that is already in their database.

Tracking your travels seems a bit Orwellian, but certainly possible.

FasTrak transponders are already used for driving time estimations on commute routes in the San Francisco Bay Area. The data is supposedly scrambled to prevent personal identification, but it's there.

Embedding another identifying feature into your web searches, now that the Intel Serial Number has been bashed, is interesting, and avoids double-click patents. I wouldn't venture that they are doing that, though.

Gathering information about Access Points would be impossible, unless they already have another access point in the database that can be seen at the same time, at which point, unreliable information about a new access point is unneeded. Eventually, they could build upon those unreliable points to make an unreliable mesh, but then, that would be ... unreliable.

How do they get that location? Based on your ISP? I suppose it depends on the granularity of location that you are interested in, but does it even point to your zip code? It doesn't point to mine, in any of the places that I have checked.

Right. Let's say you're in my favorite shopping center and it picks up Starbucks and two other access points that it doesn't know the location. It could arbitrarily decide that the two other access points are near the Starbucks, for which it knows the location. What I would find interesting is if they recorded the MAC address of the access points so as to distinguish between all the access points names "Linksys" or "Default".

It's unreliable now so this would make it somewhat less unreliable. Progress in small steps.

At this time, yes. The assumption is that you're located somewhat near your ISP. Of course my home DSL points to my ISP located 12 miles away in another zip code. My office DSL is off by 50 miles. More work is needed to do this reliably, but it's a start.

ok, ok. Perfection will have to wait until the (unreliable) database is grown sufficiently to accurately determine your location.

Evil global domination conspiracy through mapping?

There may actually be some geometry under the covers. See the bottom of:

lists lots of map sources including: "Dr. Geoffrey Dutton, who first described the Quaternary Triangular Mesh (QTM) reference system used in Encarta Interactive World Atlas in his paper, "Locational Properties of Quaternary Triangular Meshes," in the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spatial Data Handling, Zurich, July 1990."

The RFC for extending DHCP allows for entering GPS coordinates that would be delivered from a DHCP server to a "port". The grand scheme is to be able to locate an IP phone within a building for E911. If T-Mobile mapped that data into all of the WAPs, and Boingo, and ... We could be there. I suppose geobytes is all over that possibility, just waiting for it to come to fruition.

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Option for Coordinate-based Location Configuration Information

Yep. That's the plan. Problem is that the hot spot owner had to program the location into the access point. That would certainly make GeoBytes and MSN Location Finder more accurate and useful. Of course, there will be those that setup their access points with bogus locations, so there's still not guarantee of reliable locations.

According to ARIN - I'm in New York, but the last identifiable IP you see in a traceroute is near San Jose, California, and I'm actually near Phoenix, AZ. For more giggles, the subnet below me is in France, and the one above me is near Los Angeles. I can guess this based on the hostname, but those hostnames don't resolve (or are reachable) from the Internet. Seems that some people don't want everyone knowing the "company secrets".

That might eventually work for DHCP settings - but not static. I also wonder how this will fly when IPv6 eventually gets here.

The earlier attempt at adding location information to DNS (RFC1712) made it as far as "Experimental" status. I suppose that's better than a draft - but I've not seen many people using it.

Old guy

ICMP traceroute echoes can easily be forged. I had my office inside network returning that it was routed through an assortment of RFC1918 non-routable IP addresses for a while. Kinda slowed down the attacks from the internet for a while. TCI/Comcast was doing the same thing, although probably not intentionally.

's a fair assumption that VoIP phones and PDA's do not use static IP addressing. One local ISP was having problems with users inventing their own IP addresses, so they just convinced the RADIUS server to not authenticate anyone that did not use their DHCP assigned address.

It shouldn't be a problem. The LCI is just another DHCP data type and does not affect the underlying protocols.

The intent of RFC1712 was not to provide VoIP phone locations for 911. Using DNS for that is ridiculous. Large system may have only one or two DNS servers located almost anywhere on the planet. Caching DNS servers will repeat stale location info for days. Short expiry used to flush and update local caches will increase traffic un-necessarily. I'm not sure why anyone would even want to know the location of a DNS server.

However, RFC3825 is quite different. It's designed to provide E911 information sufficient to locate the user in the event of an emergency. Since the data is stored on the client device (VoIP phone), the release of that information to NENA is under the control of the client, as with GPS cell phone location info.

From where I am right now, it seems to think I'm in Montreal. Not surprising that it might be a long way off, as I'm in a federal government office, but I'd have thought Ottawa would be more likely.

All of the Verizon CDMA phones with GPS that I've tinkered with (mostly Motorola) have a setting for something like "Enable GPS for

911 only". In theory, only the PSAP E911 center can access the GPS data. As usual, Verizon has hidden some of the "advanced" GPS settings. See bottom of: In any case, it's a rather convoluted exercise because the GPS cell phones do not directly calculate or display Lat-Long. They send the raw doppler delay data to a service provider who calculates the Lat-Long using additional information from the cell site (such as ping times) for improved accuracy (AGPS). Also, at this time, the local PSAP dispatcher must punch a command on the console to interrogate the location of the caller. I'm not sure why it's like that but I'll guess(tm) that it's because Verizon pays the service provider by the lookup.