It's your fault my laptop knows where I am
21 comments
·November 19, 2025denysvitali
I've recently vibe-coded "where-am-i", a small CLI that returns your approximate location using the technology described here.
https://github.com/denysvitali/where-am-i
Tbh, I think this geolocation method is amazing, and I'm grateful it exists, because GPS indoor really sucks.
jbmchuck
Honest question - what's your use case for needing GPS indoors? I generally know where I am when I'm indoors :)
incompatible
My PC doesn't have any wireless connections and the Geolocation API always fails. I guess I'd fail this course (which is apparently correct, as I was supposed to be attending in person with a laptop.)
Edit: Presumably it would be possible to hack the browser to return a false position.
Edit: Make it a convenient browser add-on, perhaps. There must be other applications.
Edit: pkulak points out that you just have to set a Firefox option. Why do I even comment on things I know nothing about.
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ginko
Maybe it’s because I studied in Austria where universities generally provide very little handholding to students but I don’t understand the point of compulsory attendance in university lectures. If students think they can pass exams without attending the lectures then they should be able to do that. I certainly did that once or twice when I realized I needed some more credits before the end of the term. It’s a different thing with lab/exercise sessions but your lack of participation there would be noticed anyway.
p1necone
Is it common for North American universities to take attendance? Seems like a whole lot of effort to gain little and infantilize your students. They're paying tuition, and if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments. And if they don't fail their exams/assessments then clearly mandating lecture attendance for them wasn't necessary anyway.
foltik
In my experience it’s common for large intro level classes. While I personally never liked these policies, I do think it’s beneficial to the average student to incentivize attendance. Think 18 year olds who aren’t able to self regulate or fully understand the consequences until it’s too late. A “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality just hurts the average quality of education.
wrs
I was punished by getting into grad school, going to the "meet the faculty" party, and having my Algorithms professor greet me with "oh, you're the one who never came to class". (I can't resist pointing out, now that it's safe, that it seemed like his TA taught quite a few of his classes...)
savanaly
If you require attendance to graduate, then your degree signals conformity and grit, and thus has some value to show to employers who care about those stats but can't really measure them any other way.
renewiltord
You misunderstand. The customer is the government, which pays for student education through 'student loans'. The government is an absentee farmer who pays a farm labourer to produce a crop many years in the future. The labourer would rather take the money and plant nothing, so the absentee landlord farmer wants him to send photos of the seed being planted.
But why won't the crop grow on its own? It is strongly incentivized to live! And yet it does not. So you need to send photos of tilling the soil, planting the seed, watering, so that one day we might come there and see a harvested crop.
dataflow
I think it's worth pondering why you feel paying tuition enters the assessment of the situation. The justification would seem to stand on its own either way, right? Or would your opinion change if tuition was free?
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ralsei
Good article, but you could also just use a VPN to trick it.
wsces
No, a VPN would only change the source IP of your request which the author specifically states isn't how this system works: the browser uses its host OS' Location Services to self report its location based on GPS or Wi-Fi AP locations.
That said, I hope the service doesn't implicitly trust data sent by untrusted clients like web browsers, otherwise someone could just use something like this to send it a false location: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/spoof-geolocation/i...
oceanplexian
Even if the browser was super locked down you could trivially spoof a few SSIDs broadcast from the desired area in theory..
DrawTR
The SSID (name, like the article mentions) is different than the bSSID (mac address of the access point), so I don't think it would be that easy to spoof.
ralsei
Ohh. Yeah I suppose that's what I meant. I thought a VPN also spoofed the location
bitwize
A device can triangulate its own location locally, given the WiFi hotspots around it, and transmit that information via a JavaScript API. A VPN won't flummox this mechanism.
I use a Firefox preference to pin my location to a spot near, but not at, my house:
user_pref("geo.provider.network.url", 'data:application/json,{"location": {"lat": 45.0, "lng": -122.0}, "accuracy": 128.0}');
I _believe_ this also stops wifi data from leaking anywhere.