Giguhbite Random Musings

Today I jailbroke my iPod Touch to firmware 1.1.4. I previously had it jailbroken to 1.1.2. The 1.1.4 jailbreak has to be the easiest jailbreak so far. There are probably more than three different tools created just for this purpose (Liberty+, and Ziphone are the only ones I know of). I jailbroke my phone using Ziphone, and it was a simple procedure of restoring to 1.1.4 and running a program on your computer (Mac or PC). Compared to what I had to do when the touch just came out, this is cake. No more typing in commands in the terminal or running DOS apps that have a chance of bricking iPhones/iPod Touches, just a simply GUI interface with large buttons.

After reinstalling all the applications including the Apple January update, some games, some network tools, and some utilities, I tried the new Maps application. I was interested in seeing the Locater function of Maps. I tried it, and it was spot on accurate (within 250 feet). I first assumed that it looked at my name and retrieved my home address from the entry. But after a few more tests, I realized the scope of the area it determined I was in directly correlated the strength of the wifi.

After digging around on the internet, I found that Apple runs their location based service through a company called SkyHook. According to them, they have cars drive around and pick up wifi networks (wardriving) and store them in a “self-healing” database. While I don’t live in the middle of nowhere, I don’t live in a city either. I was surprised it was that accurate because I live on a dead end of a street that leads to another dead end. Other websites such as ip-adress.com which base your location off the ipaddress of the computer showed that I was in the closest town to my house. SkyHook also allow you to submit your location and mac address of your wireless router also enhancing the accuracy of the system. If you don’t have an iPhone/iPod Touch, you could also use a nokia n95, a symbian enabled phone or even a computer capable of running Firefox (IE also, but FF preferably). There is an extension made by Skyhook called Loki that installs itself which also locates your location based on wifi access points.

It, indeed, is an interesting service. On Loki’s site, they said they hope to expand to incorporate local advertising into browsers by locating your current position.