Wifi Location Tracking is killing Privacy

<tinfoil hat>

When Google’s “streetview cars” roamed around the world, they were performing wifi scans of their surrounding areas. By mapping the MAC address of your location to the van’s GPS coordinates, they built a map of locations that can accurately find your location, just by knowing the wifi router you’re connected to.

Google claimed this was “by accident”, and many countries objected to the collection of the data and the invasion of privacy.

As of 2010, Google had collected 600 gigabytes of data from over 30 nations. That list is now growing, as each new Android phone that gets purchased has the built-in ability to transfer locations of wireless networks to and from Google’s servers, to help aid in location services on the phone. The unfortunate part is even if you aren’t using these services, Google is still collecting this data via your phone.

So who has your wifi router’s location?

Continue reading Wifi Location Tracking is killing Privacy

Super Easy Way to Mount a Shared Drive in OSX

OSX has problems “mounting” shared drives. The typical process is to open finder, click “Go” and then “Connect to Server”….

By following these quick steps you can get a Shared Drive icon on your OSX Dock.

  1. Open Finder, go to Preferences, Enable “Show Connected Servers”
  2. Connect to a Share via Finder -> Go -> Connect to Server (Typically SMB Share from a Windows Server or computer)
  3. After Connecting, you’ll see an icon for the Share on your Desktop. Drag that icon to the right side (document side) of your OSX Dock.
  4. Click the Icon for the Share anytime you need to connect to it!

Why Apple has to make this so difficult, I’ll never know. OSX needs a “Mount Shared Drive” option like Windows does. Until then, this is the closest solution.