Dear Aunt TUAW: iPhone 3G and GPS

Interesting. I also live in Minneapolis and this has happened to me 3 times and a co-worker once.

You can get the new iphone 3g without a contract!!! This is where I got mine:
http://www.xpango.com?ref=91473182

Auntie TUAW is wrong. There is a problem with the location service on the 3G network that only affects people in certain areas (and, I suspect, certain 3G towers).

I live in Salt Lake City and the "locate" button places me in Minneapolis. WiFi is almost always turned off so that's not it, and there are many areas in the city where it happens.

Worse, when this happens, you NEVER get a GPS signal, the 3G location seems to prevent it from happening.

Turning off 3G fixes the problem. Turning it back on brings it back. Driving a few miles away fixes the problem too.

I can't seem to get anyone (Apple or any of the blogs) to pay attention to this issue because it doesn't affect people unless they're in certain areas - Salt Lake City, some areas of Oregon, and apparently Minneapolis.

My 3G is so bad i just shut it off until they fix it...

Vendors have been known to reuse MAC addresses, and it possible for users to change them. (They might twiddle a few digits to get around an access point's MAC-based blocking, for example.) That's not much of a problem when there's little chance duplicate devices are directly in contact, but with a global registry like Skyhook, collisions could be an issue.

Maybe 3G towers also have some 'global' ID that's really only unique locally -- especially if the tower operators are in different companies?

This is funny. When I plug in my iPod, it thinks I'm living in the 70s....

Aunt TUAW, no one knows for sure where the Simpsons live. Here's a site dedicated (in almost a freakish manner) to discovering which "Springfield" the quirky family resides.

http://www.snpp.com/guides/springfield.list.html

Keep on writing!

Of course, the skyhook database may be wrong because people are deliberately salting it with false data. Why? Why would you want your physical address (I.E. your home router's map location) made available to unknown 3rd parties? Malicious websites capable of collecting MAC addresses from visitors, or even just unscrupulous advertising companies running address harvesting in banner ads can easily use Skyhook to reverse look-up your current spatial location when you view a web page.

Personally, that bothers me, and is reason enough for me to ensure that my own router is not in their database, and if it is, to either screw with the location, or change the MAC address.

Mine put me somewhere off the coast of Africa the other day!

if you have screenshots of WPS in action on flickr, or are willing to post them to flickr please add them to the WPS location pool @ http://www.flickr.com/groups/iphonewps/

thank you;-)