In an interesting coda to the Apple consolidated.db story that I blogged about here and here, some German hackers have started crowdflow.net, a Web site dedicated to generating an open source database of WiFi and Cell sites similar to that being built by Apple, Google, SkyHook Wireless, and others. They are doing this by asking people to send them the log files from their iPhones. They have a Java applet that you can use to extract the files from your iPhone backup and a file upload widget on their site to send them the extracted files anonymously. Currently, they are accepting only iPhone logs but they plan to include Android devices as well.
So far most of their data is from the EU, particularly Germany. They have some nice visualizations of the data on the crowdflow site. There’s also a blog and a link to download the database they have to date.
I’m not sure how successful this will be long term, especially since Apple will shortly stop including consolidated.db in the iPhone backups, but it’s a nice hack and could prove useful.