Comment by iTarek | February 15, 2008 | 12:37 pm

Hello
Is there any chance to have the source code of this app??

Comment by fsaint | February 19, 2008 | 8:01 pm

Cool program, works very well. Does it do triangulation or it just queries based on one tower?

Comment by Erica Sadun | February 19, 2008 | 10:21 pm

Right now it just picks the nearest tower. It could theoretically triangulate but I found that the lat/lon data returned by google maps wasn’t fine enough to do much more with.

Comment by eric.muir | February 22, 2008 | 9:32 am

this is cool, you should talk with twitter / facebook about making a facebook app that lets ppl see where i currently am, im constantly traveling, so my friends would love to know where i am, thanks again!

Pingback by   iPhone FindMe: Free Anti-Theft Software for Apple iPhone to Retrieve GSM Cell Id Location via Twitter by Tech[dot]Blog | February 22, 2008 | 5:02 pm

[…] Erica Sadun has released the first beta version of a freeware anti-theft application for Apple iPhone called iPhone FindMe. Findme is a command-line utility that returns the location of the cell phone tower nearest to your iPhone. When run, the utility tells you the GSM tower’s cell id as well as its latitude and longitude with the help of Google Maps. It then autosubmits the information to Yahoo, and gets back the name of your city and state in return. This is not a full fledged anti-theft cellphone recovery software but just serves the basic purpose of retrieving data to locate the mobile phone. […]

Comment by fiefie | February 22, 2008 | 6:50 pm

Can you make it send the IP as well.. that way we can at least track which IP it’s coming from.. that might be useful.. =P

Comment by white | February 23, 2008 | 12:39 am

Are there any way you can add an option to make an output with your location only and do not make any external calls to other servers? This would really help. Some people don’t have an unlimited Internet connection, it could be limited to certain ports or for proxy use only. In such situation, the code would not work unless you have a full unrestricted Internet access. Thank you and looking forward your update.

Comment by ericboehs | February 23, 2008 | 12:40 am

I was wondering if you could change the ll in the google url to q. This will put a green arrow at the location instead of just centering it on the map with no marker. Example: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=36.375338%2c-98.047962 instead of http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=36.375338%2c-98.047962

Comment by jaxx | February 23, 2008 | 5:30 am

Hi Erica, and thanks for your awesome work…

Here in Europe (or at least France in my case) we have precise tower locations and applications like LocateMe are up to 50m precision in dense city situations, I really believe a triangulation version would be great.

Along with a tunable output of findme (in case we want to push the results in another form and/or to another website).

http://twitter.com/happyjaxx/

Cheers

Comment by white | February 23, 2008 | 2:11 pm

Also, there is no problem running ./findme when the iPhone has Internet connection (Wi-FI). When it doesn’t or the connection is limited, it hangs for few minutes and says “bus error”. iPhone running 1.1.3, upgraded from 1.0.2 OTB - 1.1.1 - 1.1.3. The Google Maps still works fine even with limited Internet connection.

Comment by wrboyce | February 25, 2008 | 12:27 pm

Hi Erica,

First off, cracking job with findme! It’s brilliant!

I’ve been using it and submitting the data to my own database with a view to to using the Google Maps API to display the data.. I am finding that findme is often unable to find a location, when the Locate Me button is having no trouble (I have just got home, the accuracy is nigh on perfect in Google Maps, but ‘findme’ fails to find anything).. Have you any ideas what could be causing this?

Also, as a final, very cheeky request - any chance we’ll get a peek at the code?

Thanks very much! Keep up the good work (please)!