The other day I wrote about my experiments with Firefox’s implementation of the W3C geo location API.
I was able to package my modifications as a Firefox Extension, which anybody can use to the change the coordinates reported by the geo location API. Check it out at the Geo Location Firefox Extension project page.
The other day I watched an episode of Hak5 – Spoofing the W3C Geolocation API were Darren was introducing us to the W3C geolocation API. (Btw. Hak5 is so awesome, you definitely have to check them out right now if your don’t know them already). This API uses certain informations like IP address, RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses, and GSM/CDMA cell IDs to determine the exact location of a users computer. It’s implemented by browsers like Firefox and Chrome.
One can test the geolocation API by going to Google Maps and clicking on the “Show MyLocation” icon. The geolocation API is actually pretty simple. Browsers make it available through a JavaScript object, which can be queried by the web application for the location. For privacy reasons, the browser will ask you if it is allowed to detect your location, since it has to transfer WiFi addresses and the likes over the net.
<script type="text/javascript">
// locate position
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(displayPosition);
// callback function
function displayPosition(pos) {
var mylat = pos.coords.latitude;
var mylong = pos.coords.longitude;
alert('Your longitude is :' + mylong + ' and your latitude is ' + mylat);
}
</script>
Building Firefox on Linux is actually pretty easy. It used to be a bit harder with earlier versions of Firefox, but since Gecko 5.0 it’s not hard at all.
Since we are building on BackTrack 5, which is a Debian offspring, we more or less need to follow the instructions on building Firefox on Ubuntu. Some details about that can be found at Simple Firefox build. As you will see later, the only tricky part is to get all the required packages for the build process.