joelkoen

Looks like a cool website, but after I test a few different keyboards it prompts me to subscribe. After pressing 'maybe later', it comes back again and again, only letting me test three different keyboards before bugging me again. Completely unusable.

> What happens if a train has to stop in the middle of the tunnel, and you phone for help? [...] the system has been deliberately configured to transmit the location of the nearest tube station, where access can be arranged. That’s why sometimes you might check your smartphone map, and it will display the “wrong” location, because that’s the best one for a 999 call to use.

This doesn't seem correct - cell towers don't just transmit a location that phones then pickup and use? Unless this is some emergency specific feature I'm not aware of?

> Bom tried to explain that the site's refresh - prompted by a major cybersecurity breach in 2015

A perfect example of the state of IT in Australia.

That's neat, could you explain how you achieved that?

I tried a year or so ago and had to round trip to my Android over mobile data so it was too high latency for what I needed. If there's a way to connect to a phone on the same LAN/WiFi but scrape using its mobile network I would be very interested.

This is the most impressive demo I've ever seen - no app download, no account sign up, no crap, just works instantly. Well done.

> Point-of-Sale Systems — process transactions regardless of internet connectivity

Mentioning this as an example use case is simply untrue, right?

Haha yeah just noticed they call Bytespider "TokTok's crawler" too

> “OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it’s way more,” he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site.

The IP addresses in the screenshot are all owned by Cloudflare, meaning that their server logs are only recording the IPs of Cloudflare's reverse proxy, not the real client IPs.

Also, the logs don't show any timestamps and there doesn't seem to be any mention of the request rate in the whole article.

I'm not trying to defend OpenAI but as someone who scrapes data I think it's unfair to throw around terms "like DDOS attack" without providing basic request rate metrics. This seems to be purely based on the use of multiple IPs, which was actually caused by their own server configuration and has nothing to do with OpenAI.

If you're lucky a neighbour may already have a compatible weather station nearby, which you can freely collect data from as long as you're in range ;)

Anyone aware of public archives of videos like this? These are so cool and I imagine that in the future this would be an incredibly valuable peek into history given how raw it is.

You can achieve the exact same thing in Firefox using the Sidebery extension: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery

Given his position, is it possible the Intel CEO is a little biased? /s

omg look at this cute puppy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUXcfNkepdg

It is `_nomap`, not `no_map`.

https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632#zippy=%2Chow-...

How is this related to wardriving?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving

I'm 17, recently had a similar experience to what you describe. As others have mentioned, and from my own experience, this may indicate they are avoiding a much bigger problem. If there was a bigger problem they're trying to avoid, do they trust you enough to tell you? Would you truly listen and support them, or would your immediate reaction be against how they feel and in favour of _your opinion_ on "their entire future life"?

Aside from your perspective on their grades and time spent gaming, you don't list any other details...

If you wanted to discuss this in more detail with someone younger feel free to reach out, happy to chat.

Have you tried Better than Adventure[0]? It's a fork of Beta 1.7.3 for exactly this reason!

[0] https://www.betterthanadventure.net/

It is archived here: https://archive.org/details/MLS_Full_Cell_Export_Final

It is rather surprising how many people have started contributing already. I believe that people want to support alternatives to big tech so they aren't completely reliant on these providers, and beaconDB is currently the only database not owned by big tech. Not 100% sure that answers your question :)

Just commented on that issue, thanks!

Distributed referring to the community not yet recognising one specific software as "the go to"? Or distributed physically?

I haven't built any apps for contributing to beaconDB as of yet. The website links to NeoStumbler and TowerCollector, which are Android apps that can be used to collect this data.

Yes, I really want to be able to release data dumps as this opens up a lot of great opportunities. I'm also worried that people may have lost trust in a service like MLS now that it has shutdown and abandoned all of the data contributors had collected.

At the moment, there simply isn't enough data to anonymise contributions.

Thank you, this means a lot!

This is planned to help clients cache data locally, which would improve the privacy of the client and reduce server load. I would like to implement this over the next few days.

I have not yet found any clients that have implemented making use of such data, please let me know if you have found one or are developing one.

You can truncate the hash to cause collisions, meaning that one MAC address does not map to one location. This requires the client to be aware of multiple physically nearby MACs in order to get a location, as it then needs to estimate which "possible" locations are most likely.

This is a really interesting problem, and I've loved thinking about it recently. If you're keen on it too I'm happy to discuss further, feel free to reach out.

This line refers to opting in to using your device to collect this data. Apple and Google are taking advantage of their global user coverage by using their devices to collect this data without their consent.

Your WiFi network is broadcasting its presence 10 times a second in all directions. It is well known that you should not put sensitive information in your network SSID, for example, as anybody nearby can pick that up. Hence, you can opt out here instead.

beaconDB is currently the only publicly accessible project, but I am currently discussing working together with various other projects and organisations.

The project was originally on GitHub, but it has now moved to Codeberg.