Presence and IntComm WG

[Candace Holman <>]

Hi all,

I'd like to tell you about two news articles regarding location 
services.   There was a great suggestion during the member meeting 
conference call,  to try to expand user agents to provide location 
services for rich presence.  Perhaps we can start with geolocation? Or 
maybe eliminate it as an option?  Here are some ideas:

The first article is about a new patent that was issued to the NSA for 
location tracking [1].  It appears that the location tracking patent is 
based on creating a "network latency topology map" based on IP addresses 
that are already located and known to be static.  Then an unknown 
computer location can be estimated based on the latency of connection 
attempts with it.  There are fears that this could be used for spying, 
but it seems to me that it would be pretty simple to confuse any program 
that is attempting to locate you based on round trip time variations to 
your IP address.  Not to mention that these latencies would have to be 
constantly monitored, and the topology map would have to be updated in 
real-time.  But the basic idea is interesting.

A related story [2] has some great Use Cases, social implications, and 
real-life examples of geolocation but also lacks a good technical 
explanation.  I found some details on IP address geolocation online in 
the Linux Journal [3], and came across the July '05 internet draft on 
SIP location conveyance [4] which describes the use of  PIDF-LO and geopriv.

[1] NSA granted Net location-tracking patent
http://news.com.com/NSA+granted+Net+location-tracking+patent/2100-7348_3-5875953.html

[2] Geolocation: Don't Fence Web In
http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64178,00.html?tw=rss.TOP

[3] Geolocation by IP Address, October 2004
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/7856/print

[4] SIP Location Conveyance
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sip-location-conveyance-01.txt

Candace