Improve iPhone's 'Locate Me' Accuracy

"Teams of Drivers"? They paid people to just drive around the world for a few months? How did they manage that! Seems like it would cost a fortune to build that database.

I wonder if the iPhone "automatically" can do this. That is, when you spot a wifi, AND you're being triangulated, publish that result, and eventually, you'll get a "good guess" as to where the wifi radio is.

yet another way for apple to track where you are.

yet another way for apple to track where you are.

lol Oh you.

yet another way for apple to track where you are.

I doubt they need to tell you they know by showing you.... they can find out behind the scenes.

I was really wondering why this wasn't available from the get go.

I have two wifi points in a very porely mapped neighborhood and I am certain that some one would appretiate a way around.

Not to mention the more we build the data base the more we can shut-up those voyager users.

May as well do my part and map out the places around me.

I just added my home router, but prolly won't be able to add any others I frequent, because the submission form requires you to add the MAC address of the router. Does anyone know of a way to get a router's MAC address if you don't have physical access to it, or can't log into the router's admin page?

I just added my home router, but prolly won't be able to add any others I frequent, because the submission form requires you to add the MAC address of the router. Does anyone know of a way to get a router's MAC address if you don't have physical access to it, or can't log into the router's admin page?

Try something like istumbler http://www.istumbler.net/

I just added my home router, but prolly won't be able to add any others I frequent, because the submission form requires you to add the MAC address of the router. Does anyone know of a way to get a router's MAC address if you don't have physical access to it, or can't log into the router's admin page?

iStumbler will let you see what Wi-fi access points are near by. And give you the mac addresses.

I just added my home router, but prolly won't be able to add any others I frequent, because the submission form requires you to add the MAC address of the router. Does anyone know of a way to get a router's MAC address if you don't have physical access to it, or can't log into the router's admin page?

I am pretty sure that when the wireless router feeds your computer an IP address (I am assuming DHCP), that it uses its own MAC address to "authenticate" itself to you.

Here's one way to get any wireless router's MAC Address: First, you need to find out the router's IP address. Usually, it is the first address in the subnet, so if your address is 192.168.0.x, probably the router is 192.168.0.1.

Now, you can either run the Mac OS X Network Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) and click the "Netstat" tab, then select "display routing table information" and click "Netstat" below, OR you can open a Terminal window and type "netstat -r" followed by . Either way you will get an output like this:

Routing tables

Internet:
Destination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire
default 10.0.1.1 UGSc 15 53 en1
10.0.1/24 link#6 UCS 1 0 en1
10.0.1.1 0:1c:62:d1:1b:b1 UHLW 12 6 en1 899
10.0.1.39 localhost UHS 0 0 lo0
10.37.129/24 link#7 UCS 0 0 en2
10.37.129.2 localhost UHS 0 0 lo0
10.211.55/24 link#8 UCS 0 0 en3
10.211.55.2 localhost UHS 0 0 lo0
127 localhost UCS 0 0 lo0
localhost localhost UH 2 8470 lo0
169.254 link#6 UCS 0 0 en1

when you look at the table, you should verify that the default gateway (1st entry, marked "default" in the left column, highlighted in green above) is the same as what you found it to be, and then look for the address in the 2nd column just to the right of "default," find the matching entry with that address in the leftmost column. Above that's in red. In that entry, look at the text in the second column. That should be the base station's MAC address.

Note that the above is NOT my router's MAC, I garbled it up for security reasons.