Tag: network

iPod/iPhone uses SkyHook Location Services in Google Maps

SkyHook has gone to the streets of the US with vehicles similar to Google street view cars and instead of capturing images, captured wireless network information and precise geographic information about those networks. To develop this database, Skyhook has deployed specialized vehicles to survey every single street, highway, and alley in 2500 US cities, scanning for Wi-Fi access points and plotting their precise geographic locations.

Now that Google Maps has made its way over to the iPod touch, the introduction a new feature called My Location has been introduced. Previously this feature was restricted to devices like the iPhone on a cellular network devices using cell antenna triangulation to determine location. With no cellular hardware in the iPod touch, how would My Location work? Enter SkyHook. Have you heard of SkyHook? SkyHook has gone to the streets of the US with vehicles similar to Google street view cars and instead of capturing images, captured wireless network information and precise geographic information about those networks.

To pinpoint location, WPS uses a massive reference network comprised of the known locations of over 23 million Wi-Fi access points. To develop this database, Skyhook has deployed specialized vehicles to survey every single street, highway, and alley in 2500 US cities, scanning for Wi-Fi access points and plotting their precise geographic locations. Source

SkyHook even has a Google Maps plug-in that will show you what areas have been scanned and are in the database. And yes, it works. Eerily well.

Blackberry “Exploit” or Future Feature?

While I understand this is considered an exploit, I feel like it would be really useful to have a feature on the Blackberry where users could connect their laptop to their Blackberry (via USB or Bluetooth), and use the DUN capabilities to establish a secured link back to the internal network.

With the recent exploit “Blackjacking” I am quite surprised that RIM hasn’t considered something like this from the start. Blackjacking is, of course, really only an exploit for Blackberry Enterprise Server users, so standard BIS users need not worry. While I understand this is considered an exploit, I feel like it would be really useful to have a feature on the Blackberry where users could connect their laptop to their Blackberry (via USB or Bluetooth), and use the DUN capabilities to establish a secured link back to the internal network. Verizon already allows their users to connect their devices to their laptops and use the speed of the EV-DO network to dial up, why not take this a step further? Work on it RIM!