Comments for dougt's blog

Comment on Geolocation – Setting your position manually by skierpage

skierpage — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:21:19 +0000

Judging from its screencast, “ReLuc”‘s Geolocater add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14046/ lets you maintain and then pick from a bunch of locations. Looks very nice, not compatible with Firefox 4.0b2pre/3.7a1pre.

@RayR, you can stop a site using the geolocate JavaScript API from finding your position by a) choosing “Never share” in response to Firefox’s geolocate prompt or b) using this technique or that add-on to lie about where you are. But a site can still figure out your location from your IP address without asking for permission; to stop that, you must use a proxy.

Comment on Desktop Notifications by dougt

dougt — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:24:01 +0000

I updated the api to be lot closer to what we want (need to post about it soon).

For now, try using: http://people.mozilla.org/~dougt/notification2.html

Comment on Desktop Notifications by taz

taz — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:04:33 +0000

I’m using your latest tryserver build and the demo at http://people.mozilla.org/~dougt/notification.html
isn’t doing anything for me.

Comment on Orientation in Firefox and beyond by Go Gadget News » Google Chrome gets accelerometer support

Go Gadget News » Google Chrome gets accelerometer support — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:58:38 +0000

[...] Mozilla has already started working on integrating accelerometer and orientation support into Firefox, which has its own orientation API. Firefox’s accelerometer support has been demoed on the Firefox Mobile browser on a Nokia N900 [...]

Comment on Orientation in Firefox and beyond by Google bringing accelerometer support to Chromium

Google bringing accelerometer support to Chromium — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:58:28 +0000

[...] so Firefox has its own, slightly different API. You can see Firefox's accelerometer support in action today in the version of Firefox Mobile that is available for the [...]

Comment on Geolocation – Setting your position manually by Marc

Marc — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:30:59 +0000

Thanks for the tip. I was happy to find that this also works in Opera 10.60. Just go to ‘opera:config’ in your browser, look up the ‘Location Provider URL’ setting, enter ‘http://snaptome.appspot.com/loc/json?latitude=your_lat&longitude=your_lon&accuracy=10′ and click the ‘save’ button.

Comment on Geolocation – Setting your position manually by Ray R

Ray R — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:38:06 +0000

Unless the users’ goal is to further thwart their location being known.

Comment on Geolocation – Setting your position manually by dougt

dougt — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:39:20 +0000

No, we would still need to use something to convert your IP address into a lat/lon.

Take a look at what skierpage did above. You could use something like that, and just provide a very truncated lat/lon and a large accuracy value.

Comment on Geolocation – Setting your position manually by Ray R

Ray R — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:34:31 +0000

Thanks for the info.

What if we were to blank out/erase Google Location Services? Will the prevent anything other than my ISP’s IP address being “located” regardless of if we do or don’t allow geolocation to operate?

Comment on Geolocation – Setting your position manually by skierpage

skierpage — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 01:20:18 +0000

Ray, read http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/
“If you consent, Firefox gathers information about nearby wireless access points and your computer’s IP address. Then Firefox sends this information to the default geolocation service provider, Google Location Services, to get an estimate of your location. That location estimate is then shared with the requesting website”

Note that regardless of what you set and even if you don’t consent to geolocation, every web site you access gets your IP address and can narrow down your location using that unless you’re using a proxy or anonymizer. (I think the Firefox doc should prominently say this!)