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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

Now this is interesting. Presumably the coordinates of their house are significant in some way. The result of some kind of truncation perhaps? I can't see how a floating-point error could converge on a specific value like this, but I'm no expert in such things. If they could only post their address the answer would surely be found very quickly, but that would defeat the object somewhat.

I suppose it's fortuitous that nobody lives at 0,0...

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Sorry, but it's actually really simple.

It's the same reason why on a Jet Blue flight, my phone shows me geolocated to Long Beach, CA for the entire flight (if I don't hold the phone up to the windows).

Phones prefer wifi positioning, and that's based on the base station mac addresses. If you are in a highly wifi dense area, moving one AP can auto-propogate its new location by phones reporting in bulk groups of mac addresses they scan at once back to your location provider. ("30 mac addresses detected are know to be in Dublin, but one mac address detected is known to be in New York. Let's update the New York mac address to be Dublin now.")

The auto-location-updating is one reason SkyHook wireless died. Once they did the initial scanning, the entire wifi location database can be made reasonably self-updating (and other correlative updates can happen with your drive-every-street-in-the-world mapping vans much less often.

Wifi position is more accurate than GPS positioning (plus, faster to locate and less power intensive), so it's always preferred first. GPS positioning is worse (accuracy/power requirements), so GPS tends to be a fallback if you're in a "broad location" category like cell tower only positioning or zero-location positioning (airplanes, mountain tops, etc).

GPS is definitely more power hungry and easily blocked, but when you get a solid signal it's far more accurate than WiFi positioning. GPS will pretty reliably nail down your location to within 2m or so, while WiFi positioning is probably an order of magnitude worse. The main use for WiFi positioning (besides devices that simply don't have GPS capability at all) is for indoor location, because GPS signals tend to penetrate buildings poorly.

0,0 is Null Island!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island

There's a weather buoy there:

http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010

Must be a hell of a crossing party associated with maintaining that.

Here's their site: http://nullisland.com/

I have pictures I take in Idaho turn up in Mongolia due to a sign error - these are taken with the default iOS photo app.

My guess is that there are probably tools used by criminals to trick anti-theft software into passing a false location. You can quite easily fake your geolocation.

Why would they all go to this one place though? Perhaps the sellers of the tool configured it with a default location. Now that would be cruel.

I wondered if they might live on an integer latitude/longitude coordinate, but checking street view on the few that are anywhere near a street in the Atlanta area seems negative.

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