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 X server maintains three different selection buffers, PRIMARY, SECONDARY and CLIPBOARD. The PRIMARY buffer is usually used for copying and pasting via the middle mouse button. And the CLIPBOARD buffer is used when the user selects some data and explicitly requests it to be “copied” to the clipboard, such as by invoking “Copy”.
The VirtualBox client tool synchronizes the Windows clipboard content to the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD buffer of a Linux host. But it only synchronizes the CLIPBOARD buffer back out to the Windows host. The reason why it’s not using the PRIMARY selection is that by only selecting a text in Linux overwrites the Windows clipboard immediately, which is an unexpected behavior for Windows users. At least that’s their excuse.
It might not be the expected behavior for Windows users. But it’s definitely not the expected behavior for Linux users. The forums are filled with posts like “Copy/Paste from Linux guest to Windows doesn’t work”. It is especially annoying that the selected text from a terminal window can not be easily pasted out to the Windows host. There are a couple solutions. But none are really satisfying.
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.
I was recently setting up a new test environment (BackTrack 5) inside a VirtualBox VM. Half way down the road of my project I realized that I was way to stingily with the amount of space I assigned to the virtual drive. Well, I thought no problem – I am going to enlarge the virtual drive. The steps would be easy:
Easy in theory. In reality it was still a little bit tricky.
Note, that everything that I describe in steps 2 and 3 also applies to a real linux machine. Step 1 is only necessary, because I happened to work inside a VM. On a real machine, step 1 would be something like copying the data of the old physical drive onto a newer bigger drive with dd or the likes.
I also realize that there may be more professional programs like partition magic, which would have saved me some trouble. But I wanted to make it work right here and there with the things I had at hand. Which was parted. Or even the plain old fdisk would have done I guess.
It also goes without saying, that before you do things like this, that you need to make a backup if the data is of any value to you at all.