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What is the purpose of OpenWLANMap?
Similar to the OpenStreetMap-Projekt OpenWLANMap will become a free alternative project comparing to similar commercial offers. It will offer a general database with WLANs, their exact position and some additional information.At the moment there are several companies out there that scan networks and collect data about them without asking the owners. These companies make profit with the data of other people. So it should be the time now to create a project that offers these data for free and where users can decide if they want to share their data with the public or not.
Possible applications for these data are navigation systems and position calculation without the need to use a GPS recevier or a directory that contains a list of public and freely usable WLAN access points.
To ensure the data to be free and to avoid abuse of commercial providers we have several security mechanisms. Beside of that all the data are licensed and published using the therms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL).
This license gives users the possibility to use data out of the database with no need to get the permission from the originator. So for these data in every case the conditions of the GNU FDL are valid. A "document" according to the definitions of this license is a single data set out of the database (not the database structure and organisation itself).
What next?
The current first approach allows it to enter the data of your own WLAN access point or router here. We also request information about closed, encrypted and not publicly accessible networks. As soon as we have an acceptable stock of data within a second step several free services will be available here. As an example that could be a list of public, freely accessible WLAN-Networks, a possibility for WLAN-based location services without the need to use GPS (or in best case a software that is able to do that), or much other things. Already implemend is a programming interface that gives the possibility to use this database and its location services out of other applications. Beside other useful things this gives programmers the possibility to implement a navigation software that also works within closed buildings.All that only depends on the community and how much people take part at this project - the provider of this service does not have any commercial or financial interests (beside the interest to pay this server also when the traffic increases heavily).
Isn't that dangerous?
Resulting from that there will be some questions regarding the security of your network. Isn't it dangerous to publish information about WLAN networks here? Isn't that a good source for crackers to get information about networks to break into?The answer is absolutely clear: no, there is no additional risk.
- The so called wardrivers do not need such a directory to find networks, these people scan their environment by their own using a car and some special hardware (and very most of them are not criminal, they only have fun in finding as much networks as possible without intruding them).
- The search function of OpenWLANMap will not deliver the exact position of WLAN networks. Here the database works in other direction only, it requests basic information about networks to calculate the position.
- Your WLAN should be encrypted and closed using the best encryption algorithm that is available in every case,