All about Google WiFi Positioning System

WiFi Positioning system is a new way to get precise localisation. It is used in conjunction with GPS to achieve better accuracy. Read through to know how there is a slight privacy intrusion and how you can take care of your privacy issues. I am also sharing some interesting things about this WiFi Positioning System (WPS) that Google offers through its developer API.

It is interesting that Google asks for you to sign up for logging the access point (AP) information in your android phone. Well if you knew when and where it is asked, you will surely hit NO!

They collect your AP information mostly without clear notice and then you have to pay to use the API to access this information. Atleast this is what Google does.

Well some digging says it is just done periodically. My conclusions of how AP information tagged with location is logged are as follows

It is somewhere connected to location reporting from Google Location Services.
It could be just the localisation data that is sent to Google to while you are using your apps that require location.

So Google actually logs all the Access Point (AP) a device connects to and with the help of GPS it is geolocated and the info is tagged and sent to Google servers!

How to opt out of this WPS?

To understand some parts of the Internet!

Thats how my home web server is decorated

I asked this question on www.askubuntu.com

public IP and ifconfig ip are different: how to connect my computer to internet

because I want to setup my own web server and it should be accessed with internet/www/an ip address.

Continue reading “To understand some parts of the Internet!” →

Did I know: A water fountain could produce 1,33,303 ?

I always think how much this setup could pump out?

This is a fountain at Technical University of Dortmund.

Too much in to thinking and I was spoiled by my Statistics for Reaseachers and Engineers (SRE) course!

It made me think, why not compute.

Standing tall quenching the thirst of engineers!

What I found is about potatoes that can be grown out that fountain running through the summer was interesting.

This was more of an academic endeavour for me.

I made a test by conducting a trail for measuring the water flow through it!

Now why not use R project for the purpose of computing?

I know its a lame for using such a powerful tool for a simple math but its not bad for getting around R!

some of the assumptions made:

Diameter of the pipe = 1 cm
flow rate is constant for 6 months

if someone is able to measure it > comment in the post!

Formula used:

http://www.1728.org/flowrate.gif — formula used from www.1728.org will be implemented in R Code

Formula in R

pipeDiameter = sqrt (4 * flow / pi * velocity)
velocity = (4*flow) / (pi * pipeDiameter^2)
flow = 1/4*pi*(pipeDiameter)^2*velocity

A bottle was filled in 21 seconds. Winny was the time keeper. It was a 1 litre bottle. So scientifically saying it took 21 seconds for 1000 millilitres. (Please comment if you have more accurate results to take a list of values from different trails to make the calculations more robust)

> flow = 1000 /21
> flow
[1] 0.04761905 # litres / second

The above data was to get the facts straight and may be I would use it later. Since flow rate is assumed to be constant for 6 months which is the period the fountain is in service. I want the time to be six months since it is only on during the summer and during the winter it is going to be frozen!

Let me try to find out how much water is being pumped out during the service period in the next page.