After a bit of a hiatus I’m back – the break was enforced by
an increased workload due to both the demands of getting the new service centre
open, and of getting married. Of the two the wedding was probably the least
stressful as I’m now getting pretty used to planning complex operations and
then having to trouble shoot on my feet.
Flying out to my honeymoon on a new Emirates Airbus A380-800
was a delight – the economy cabin is more comfortable than some business classes,
but the in-flight entertainment system blew me away. The sheer range of entertainment options meant
that I had trouble sleeping despite the great seats, and the console included
power outlets for laptops as well as allowing me to plug my iPhone into a
USB socket (with a little bit of trepidation, as I really didn’t want to have
to take over flying the plane) for a quick charge. It’s refreshing that the
decrepit entertainment systems that most planes still carry are being replaced at
last – the last generation are getting on for ten years old, so it’s a bit like moving
from a very sluggish installation of Windows XP straight to the slick interface
of Windows 8. You may laugh, but I’ve always wanted to see my house from the
plane, but as I live directly under the flight path the only
way to do this would be from the cockpit; on my return flight I got to use the downwards
facing camera, one of three external cameras, to zero in on my very own roof as
we passed overhead.
Before setting off I did a little research and downloaded a
few apps to help us explore Dubai (18 hour stopover) as well as a few offline
maps of the Seychelles using the excellent MapsWithMe App. This free App is simply brilliant as
you can select countries and download detailed maps before you leave, and then
use it without relying on a data connection. This is something you can also do
with Google Maps, but in practice it’s means zooming in to the required levels of detail and then copying dozens of map tiles to cover an area, and to
describe it as clunky would be to flatter it greatly.
MapsWithMe worked superbly once we arrived in the Seychelles
on our island hopping holiday, but I did discover something about my Wi-Fi-only
iPad which surprised me. While it worked well while I was connected to Wi-Fi, as
soon as I left my hotel it would be unable to locate me on the map. While
connected I did some research and found out that the iPad’s GPS module is part
of the 3G board, so the Wi-Fi only iPads use Wi-Fi to locate themselves. In a city
where there are plenty of Wi-Fi signals to browse this means that the device
can easily position itself accurately, but out in the islands signals are few
and far between, and it gets lost pretty easily.
By chance during my stay at this particular hotel the wireless
router failed, and I lent a hand in diagnosing
the problem. When the hotel replaced the router for a new one I was surprised that
despite it using the out-of-the-box identifier of ‘Linksys’ my iPad still knew exactly
where it was. This got me thinking. A router, like all network devices, has something
called a MAC address which is in theory unique. So how did my iPad know that
the new MAC address was located exactly at our hotel in Praslin Island? Router’s
don’t have GPS receivers, and the ISP couldn't as far as I could see work out
exactly where the router was either even if it were using postcode look-ups. It
seemed to me that the only way it could know my position so accurately is if
another device connected to the same router was telling it. This seemed a little
unlikely, but it also seemed to be the only logical answer to this mystery, so
now I’m back I decided to see if I was right, and after a little digging it
turns out that I had hit the nail on the head.
Simply put, as soon as an apple device with GPS identifies a wireless signal it transmits its position and the unique MAC address back to Apple
who store this information in a database. So even if I want to keep my router’s
location a secret and turn off Apple’s location services on my own devices, Apple
can still locate the router as soon as the first iPhone
without location services disabled sees my wireless signal, and to clarify, it doesn't
need to connect to my router, it only needs to be able to see the station
identifier.
In itself this still isn't really that sinister as lots of people
know where my router is; my ISP, my neighbours, Apple… but now imagine a government
wants to combine this location database with something really useful, such as
a router firmware enhancement which logs and transmits all MAC codes that
connect to a router to, say, the NSA, and you start asking yourself if something
that useful to the NSA won’t already be out there. And if Prism has taught us anything,
the answer is probably yes.
