Realistic geolocation altitudes

[gfreivasc]

Short Description

Currently the bot only sends coordinates with consant altitude to Niantic servers, this could be a way of detecting bot users. Geospacial shapes are not flat and a simple SQL query on stored locations could tell a system wether someone has been walking too much on constant elevation.

Possible solution

Randomizing the value might help but I guess that irrealistic altitude is not a good idea either. There are APIs that tells us realistic heights on latitude/longitude that consist in simple queries to return our desired data.

One candidate I've found is Mapzen Elevation API.

How it would help others

It's one less way to detect botting based on data sent to server.

[avexus]

I didn't see a conf entry for altitude.
Is this info actually sent over to server?
It should be kept on GPS signal, right?

[Roekeye]

It could use elevation information from a GPX file. A rout created from http://www.gpsies.com/ has elevation data in the export:

<trkseg>
  <trkpt lat="41.89118048" lon="-87.6108705">
    **<ele>190.00000</ele>**
  </trkpt>

[jboffel]

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/elevation/intro

The bot already require a google maps API key, then let's use the already available functions...

[k4n30]

#2762

[jboffel]

I may suggest something like that in: PokemonGo-Bot\pokemongo_bot__init__.py

import googlemaps

class PokemonGoBot(object):
    @property
    def position(self):
        logger = logging.getLogger('AltitudeFaker')
        logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
        # logger.info('Start to capture altitude for current location!')
        alt = 0
        if self.alt_cache.has_key((self.api._position_lat, self.api._position_lng)):
            alt = self.alt_cache[(self.api._position_lat, self.api._position_lng)]
        else:
            # logger.info('Not in cache yet')
            try:
                gmaps = googlemaps.Client(key=self.config.gmapkey)
                # logger.info('Got client')
                alt = gmaps.elevation((self.api._position_lat, self.api._position_lng))
                # logger.info('Got response')
                alt = alt[0]['elevation']
                # logger.info('Show response: {}'.format(alt))
                self.alt_cache[(self.api._position_lat, self.api._position_lng)] = alt
            except IOError as e:
                logger.info('Cannot get alt: %s' % e)
                alt = 0
        # logger.info('Current lng: {}, lat: {} then alt: {}'.format(self.api._position_lat, self.api._position_lng, alt))
        return self.api._position_lat, self.api._position_lng, alt
.....

I didn't take a close look at everything in the code but it was looking like a central place to retrieve current bot position to be used as input for most of the call.

But I guess there are some place in the code where the returned alt value was ignored and or overwritten eventually...