Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The Mozilla Location Service does use MaxMind for GeoIP, but the service's primary use is to map Wi-Fi SSIDs to longitude/latitude position. Mozilla has its own Wi-Fi database continually fed new data from the Mozilla Stumbler app (on the Google Play Store and F-Droid markets) and Firefox for Android. The Mozilla database also has a partnership with commercial Wi-Fi company Combain and the OpenCellID project for fallback results.

https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2015/03/06/combain-deal-he...

(I work at Mozilla and I used to work on the Location project. :)



I pitched the idea of Mozilla creating a free GeoIP database by collecting (opt-in) traceroutes from Firefox users to some Mozilla servers. The traceroutes could then be overlaid to create a physical map of the Internet. I know other projects have mapped the internet, but this approach would work from the endpoints in, not from some centralized crawler.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: