In article <krs3jj$vnq$1...@news.grnet.gr>, ÃΪëûÏÎ»Î±Ï <ni...@superhost.gr> wrote:
> But then how do you explain the fact that > http://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip_demo pinpointed Thessalon£ki and not > Athens and for 2 friends of mine that use the same ISP as me but live > in different cities also accurately identified their locations too? I just tried 24.136.109.105 on that demo. It comes up with: US Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, United States, North America 07632 40.8915, -73.9471 Time Warner Cable Time Warner Cable rr.com 501 Not bad. Google street view shows that as a very pretty residential neighborhood in one of New York's fancier suburbs. Unfortunately, it happens to be in run-down industrial building in a factory district about 20 km away. There are lots of interesting (and superior) ways to do geolocation other than looking up IP addresses. Here's a few: 1) GPS. Obviously, if you're on a device that has a GPS receiver and you have access to that data, and you've got a good signal, nothing is going to beat GPS. Well, other than Glonass. And Galileo and IRNSS, whenever they become operational. And whatever the Chinese are calling theirs. 2) Cell (i.e. mobile) phone tower triangulation. The phone systems know where all the towers are and know which towers your phone is receiving signal from. Since they know the signal strengths from each of those towers, they can do a rough triangulation. It's kind of messy since signal propagation depends terrain and obstructions which aren't well mapped. But it's better than nothing. 3) WiFi triangulation. Right now, I can see four WiFi networks (Worb, J24, MusicWiFi, and jcglinksys). There are databases of WiFi network names and approximate locations (obtained by wardriving and other ways). If you can see enough networks, it's easy to look in the database and figure out where you must be. 4) Who knows what the future will bring. I suppose some day, inertial nav will become cheap enough that we'll all be walking around with INS in our phones. In general, mobile operating systems control direct access to all of these signals and only allow applications to get the location data when the user agrees to such access.
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