How active are GeoCode and GeoClue?
Is there enough interest to maintain a regularly curated list of ip geolocation services, taking them off when they break and adding new ones?
Where do IP Geolocation services get their information anyway? Could we source the data directly from whois? I use it on my command line all the time. I don’t see why geoclue couldn’t figure out its own public ip, and whois it.
Then again we might have more than one public IP. ipv6 right?
What should we do when ipv6 and 4 don’t agree? i’ve used a tunnelbroker before so that was the case for me.
And how do we handle geolocation when VPNs are in use that act as a default gateway redirecting all traffic?
i.e. if we use a public service for ip geolocation and we expect that service to tell us where we’re connecting to that service from, then they will tell us the tunnel’s exit point.
Many services let us query any ip we want. So geoclue could figure out our true public ip first, and then query public ip geolocation services about THAT ip to be more accurate.
Do users WANT their computer to know where it is when they’re on a VPN? I do, because I use that data to get current weather, and I’d like it to be as local accurate as possible.
I also think there could be some facility to have “pinned locations” like home and work that you could detect without using any webservices at all.
I should be able to pick wifi networks from my history, and if I’m connected to a specific Access Point, with a specific radio mac address, and a specific Ethernet gateway mac address, then I should be able to pin a Lat/Lon/Alt/Radius to that network. Perhaps the interface to add a location pin can look up location via geoclue one time real good and put a dot and circle on a map that I can move and adjust.
If I’m connected to a pinned network, then geoclue doesn’t need to spend any time looking it up any other way. If I’m connected to more than one pinned network, then the one to which I most recently connected should take precedence.