Posts by SMobius

Google blames Wi-Fi snooping on rogue engineer

Indeed it is, though not for the reasons you posted.

The Italian judge was "flat wrong", if I post a letter to you and all of your friends ridiculing you and recalling some time I observed people assaulting you, who is to blame for the resulting harm? Is it the Post Office, is it the CEO of the company running the Post office? Or is it perhaps me?

Google deserve to be smacked for the data packets they retained. But we must not conflate that with the legitimate actions of scanning the MAC/SSID/signal strength of local AP's for location data which streetview vans will/should continue to do.

No hardware needed

Streetview vans already, and have always, carried wi-fi identification hardware. They plot AP mac/ssid's along with the lat/long so that google location service users can get a rough position simply by having wi-fi on.

The only new bit of this entire fiasco is traffic fragments from unencrypted AP's being retained without corporate intention to do so

Google tries to patent tech that snoops Wi-Fi networks

Mundane

This isn't related to the traffic capture "incident" this is a patent on the usual streetview van process of locating AP's and storing their MAC and ssid to allow other used to identify where they are via wi-fi only.

The problem google had was about accidentally retaining fragments of the traffic on unencrypted networks. Not the simple (and reasonable IMHO) act of logging the location and identity of AP's something that has always been broadcast in-the-clear.

Note that the patent is all about packet timings not packet content, retaining a packet would not help the location system detailed in the patent at all.