Coder's Log

After I started working for Collabora in April, I've finally been able to put some time on maintenance and development of Geoclue again. While I've fixed quite a few issues on the backlog, there has been some significant changes as of late, that I felt deserves some highlighting. Hence this blog post. Leaving security to where it belongs   Since people's location is a very sensitive piece of information, security of this information had been the core part of Geoclue2 design. The idea was (and still is) to only allow apps access to user's location with their explicit permission (that they could easily revoke later). When Geoclue2 was designed and then developed, we didn't have Flatpak . Surely, people were talking about the need for something like Flatpak but even with those ideas, it wasn't clear how location access will be handled. Hence we decided for geoclue to handle this itself, through an external app authorizing agent and implemented such an agent

I'm organising a hackfest in London from May 23 to 25 2014. The plan is to improve our location-related components and to get them useful to other OSs: KDE , Jolla and hopefully also Ubuntu phone . If you are (or want to) doing anything related to location and want to attend, please do add yourself to wikipage as soon as possible so I can notify our hosts if we'd need a bigger room. Oh and if you need a place to stay, do contact me! I'm thankful to awesome Mozilla folks for hosting this event and providing an awesome open geolocation service to everyone.

I just rolled out Geoclue 2.1.1 ! Since my last post with Geoclue update, there has been lots of changes. You can find a list of all the changes here but here are the highlights: Modem geolocation: If you got a 3GPP modem, geoclue will now be able to use that to locate you (with neighborhood-level accuracy) using opencellid.org . Additionally if your modem has GPS capability, geoclue can use that as well and as you know GPS is the most reliable geolocation source. One issue with GPS currently is that it takes a while before it can get a lock on and reason for that is that we currently have no support for A-GPS . I'll be talking with Aleksander Morgado during the weekend about how we can add that support but if I've understood correctly, it will need more work in ModemManager than geoclue now that it has all these other sources. Geoclue locating me using 3GPP source WiFi geolocation: In my last relevant blog post, I mentioned that we'll be implementing this