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by daedalus_j 818 days ago
The service has indeed been getting worse and worse over the last few years. In the tools I've got that use it the number of inaccurate hits I've gotten has been increasing. People who move and keep their same wifi gear seem to be the cause of it. Then it happened to me when I moved, and I tried to find a way to update MLS and couldn't, so my Linux laptops can no longer be set to automatic time zone mode, or they revert back to my old time zone whenever I'm at home...

I very much hope they release the information about which patents are a problem so that future attempts at a service like it can hopefully avoid that problem, but considering the state it's been in I'm not terribly upset that it'll be shutting down.
1 comments
seba_dos1 818 days ago
> and I tried to find a way to update MLS and couldn't

Up until a few days ago when the submission service was turned off on MLS side, it was just a matter of setting `submit-data=true` in geoclue.conf and going for a walk.

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daedalus_j 818 days ago
True, I do recall that! But you'd have a buy a usb/Bluetooth GPS to plug in to your laptop I think, there was no android option. In the end I just decided it wasn't worth it, my laptops can just be manually placed in my home timezone.
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seba_dos1 818 days ago
Geoclue works on phones too (which is how I contributed data about my neighborhood, which resulted in instant massive improvement for all my devices), and for Android there are apps like Tower Collector that let you do it as well [edit: though on second look, it seems like it only collects cellular stations and not WiFi APs]
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