pterjan's diary

  Supermarkets in London

As I now know my future address in London, I was looking for supermarkets around and found no easy way to find all the available ones. After looking on each supermarket website I decided to gather the information.

So, I collected positions of ASDA, Tesco, Morrison, Sainsbury's, Poundland and Waitrose (with opening times for some) and pushed them into a Google map.

I actually have info for all UK but if Google map paginates it becomes unusable as you need to go through all pages to know the supermarkets in your area. If someones knows a way to restrict the list to current view on "static" maps, I am interested.

  Google Geolocation API

I found today the API documentation to use http://www.google.com/loc/json in order to get a location from the seen wifi APs or GSM/CDMA cells.

It is very easy to use:

$ curl -X POST -d '{
  "version": "1.1.0",
  "host": "perdu.com",
  "request_address": true,
  "address_language": "en_GB",
  "wifi_towers": [
    {
      "mac_address": "56:7a:e8:68:15:4B"
    }
  ]
}' https://www.google.com/loc/json
{"location":{"latitude":48.868646,"longitude":2.355392,"address":{
"country":"France","country_code":"FR","region":"Ile-de-France","county":"Paris",
"city":"Paris","street":"Rue Sainte-Apolline","street_number":"2","postal_code":"75003"
},"accuracy":150.0},"access_token":"2:yWOkYM4kI79VH1Bj:cvMZFkJhXSflywZB"}

I guess this is what was used for this attack, and this seems to be used by Firefox and Chrome geolocation features.

Update: I found on http://code.google.com/p/gears/wiki/GeolocationAPI the following note: "Note that the JSON protocol described here and at http://code.google.com/apis/gears/geolocation_network_protocol.html is published to allow developers to provide their own network location server for use through the Gears API. Google's network location server is only to be used through the Gears API", so this is nice but you can't use it.