Slashdot Mirror
Bluetooth Ads Beamed from Billboards
dylanduck writes "Billboards in the UK have been using Bluetooth to beam media clips at passing cellular phones. The system has been dubbed Bluecasting and 17,000 people accepted the ads. When billboards know your name that's when to really worry."
Hope someone hacks it and starts bluecasting goatse in its place.
I hope high gas prices are depriving your children, you fucking dumbass.
Watch out, when someone figures out how to hack your bluetooth automatically, grab all your personal information and talor its advertisements accordingly, thats when I'm going to be afraid.
Now that's what I call radio interference.
These filthy marketers are getting desperate.
As if there weren't enough distracted drivers on the road. Now if people aren't yapping on their cell phones they'll be reading the myriad advertisements being beamed to them.
My name is double ROT13 encrypted. They can't use my name without violating the DMCA.
Thank you for travelling in the tube, Mr. Yakamoto. May we suggest some purchases for you?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
for me if this is the kind of crap(innovation) we get with it. that would get old very quick. as if my phone doesn't interrupt my life enough, i need to add spam to it too?
no thanks
Of course, how many /.'ers actually leave BT enabled on their phones/PDAs?
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
This reminds me of Minority Report where the billboards were scanning peoples eyes and addressing them by name. Is this a case of life imitating art?
It would seem a lot more useful if they beamed you coupons or discounts that you could use for say the next 24 or 48 hours. Of course, that would also involve setting up the infrastructure for redeeming those coupons...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
They could just beam the tickets out from the billboards. "If you are reading this message, you are under arrest".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
great..
now we will have bluetooth spam everywhere we go..
just what we need..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Otherwise, it's like a pop-up on your phone, asking if you'd like to see a pop-up ad.
"from the bricks to the booth...I predict the future like Cleo the psychic..."
I've beeing seeing lots of ads for products that whiten teeth lately, but but who in their right mind would want...oh wait, nevermind.
Of course, how many /.'ers actually leave BT enabled on their phones/PDAs?
Forget enabled - you've got to be a real cabbage to leave it enabled and discoverable! This shows there are 17,000 really stupid people in that city. Or at least 1 really unfortunate guy who happens to live within blasting radius of the Bluetooth antenna.
Are the billboards going to be solving the problems in our life too? [imdb.com]
However they have had interactive billboards on the Tube for some time.
They concerned the use of unlicensed faux-minicabs to lure women into situations where they are abducted and often sexually abused.
The billboards allowed you to align your phone's IR receiver with a flashing icon to receive information on how to better protect yourself if you happen to be a woman.
I daresay Bluetooth seems rather more invasive as a means of delivering content - particularly commercial advertising rather than citizen's advice.
Most people don't get too many bluetooth messages on their devices so when something like this happens they say "okay" to accept and see what the ad is all about. After a while people will get sick of it though, and fewer and fewer will accept them.
So this is good advertising.... for now... =)
This is exactly the same idea as email spam, sending off an advertisement to as many people as you can whether they asked for it or not. Forcing the user to have to click 'no' to get rid of it. We shouldn't have to cripple technology (IE turn off features on the phone) just to avoid being bombarded with a commercial for Dominoes Pizza. At least with a normal billboard if I don't want to see the message I can look somewhere else. I wish I lived there with a mobile phone just to be the first one to file a lawsuit against the companies sending out these ads.
LeoPolus Web Design: http://www.leopolus.com
trials of the system were recently held at six London railway stations
I imagine roadside billboards would not be used, it's bad enough in the US with intrusive bill boards on road sides.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Let's send the signal thru giant antennas and it will be encoded with electromagnetic waves, using Amplitude and Frequency Modulation. The devices are so simple they don't require digital technology.
With this, you can even choose with an analog dial, which emitters (let's call them "stations") to listen to the advertisers! Furthermore, why stop with advertising? Let's add content, like news or music, too!
Forget about podcasting, bluecasting. The future is "wavecasting"! It'll rock!
*Rushes to the patent office*
I was walking central London today when I got a message saying my mobile's bluetooth had an incoming message and asked if I wanted to accept it. Thinking I had finally found another toother, I quickly accepted thinking I was about to engage in depraved anonymous sex. Alas, 449 days of toothing in London and still no takers. Pretty soon I'm going to just assume bluetooth is a crap technology and just switch to raising the collars on my green polos.
http://www.mample.net
We are having enough with Email spams. Now they want you get Cell phone Spams. Really, when this gets worse, people will stop using technology altogether.
Oh, I don't know. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. You want to be where you can see our troubles are all the same. You want to be where everybody knows your name.
Cheers,
Ian
at least this one sort of makes sense. I mean assuming "X"casting is birthed from the idea of broadcasting, which if is not the case please kill me now, then yes you are broadcasting via the Bluetooth TM protocol to cell phones.
BUT...someone slap the marketing flunky who came up with "podcasting" because the content is actually pulled by clients (like RSS). I know I know it seems nitpicky but i hate it when technical words lose meaning and actually mis-describe things. It merely sets us back further as a whole on the road to technical progression/innovation.
Nope, it hasn't been dubbed BlueCasting, except by marketing twits in Italian suits and advertising twerps in Emo glasses.
The real world calls it SPAM. If you have to get trendy, BlueSpamming. Or if you want to get really wild, based on IM SPAM = SPIM, you get BLUE SPAM = SPLUE.
We let them use Hacker for Cracker, and we let them take Digital Rights Management for Digital Restriction Mechanisms. We control the names, folks, not them. A dog does not lay bioreclaimable fertilizer on the path, it shits on the sidewalk. "BlueCasting" sounds like a neat 21st century hip thing. "Spam" is a nasty annoyance that Russians get beat to death for. Give it the correct name.
We are having enough with Email spams. Now they want you get Cell phone Spams. Really, when this gets worse, people will stop using technology altogether.
Exactly. Low tech is the wave of the future.
In the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle, one of the most wired and tech neighborhoods, many of us no longer wear watches or carry cell phones, because they're a nuisance. We let loose the electronic leashes and savor the joy of life.
And then we go home and use our wireless laptops and high-speed cable/DSL/internet2 connections to surf the Net, or drop by a free wireless fair trade organic coffeeshop.
You can either be a slave of the Man, or you can opt out of the Man's rules.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yes, of course. This is why we develop more advanced technologies, such as radio, the television, the internet, and bluetooth. We just want more ads! Thanks a lot.
I wonder if, for some people, disabling their phone/device from being discovered via bluetooth will be a viable option? Maybe they need that enabled for something? Too bad there isn't a "DO NOT RECEIVE ADVERTISEMENTS" setting.
Thank God, bluetooth can be disabled.
--
Dreamhost superb hosting.
Kunowalls!!! Random sexy wallpapers.
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
Isn't it a little scary that soon all the crazy paranoid people--those who think people are beaming messages into little chips planted in their belongings--aren't going to be saying anything too far-fetched?
So I wonder if these ads cost you money each time you drive past one of the billboards
Last I heard, there's no charge for bluetooth datatransfer. Bluetooth is like wifi, not like SMS.
We let them use Hacker for Cracker, and we let them take Digital Rights Management for Digital Restriction Mechanisms. We control the names, folks, not them. A dog does not lay bioreclaimable fertilizer on the path, it shits on the sidewalk. "BlueCasting" sounds like a neat 21st century hip thing. "Spam" is a nasty annoyance that Russians get beat to death for. Give it the correct name.
Good catch there. Since techies control the lingo, we determine the playing field.
BlueSpamming it is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Don't let Paris Hilton anywhere near England!
So tell me, why would I ever want to own a phone with Bluetooth if they're doing this? They still make non-bluetooth phones and wired headsets? Right?
(I pick up 75 wireless access points on my 12 mile commute through what I thought was the countryside - so I can't imagine what this "bluecasting" will be like once it takes off in cities).
I can almost see the next step being advertisers pressuring phone makers to require always-on phones with always-on bluetooth so that they can't be "denied" the chance to spam your phone. You won't be able to switch the phone off, will only ever be able to switch to "silent mode" for a couple of hours at a time (like for going to a movie theater), and it'll automatically accept absolutely anything sent to it (and it'll simply keep the last 128MB [or however much storage the device has] of messages received). Just walking through the mall your phone will pick up 40 different advertising messages before you get to the store you wanted to go to - and when out driving, billboards and other cars will all repeatedly spam you.
And worst of all, they'll advertise this as being a "feature" of the phone ("get always-on bluecast so you're not left out! all the cool kids have it.. and you want to be cool.. don't you?") - and people will still buy it.
Couldn't get why only Billboards will send these bluetooth messages? It can be anything - a tree, a transport truck, a building, a shop - they are all going to torture you with these advertisements till you disable bluetooth or upgrade to "premium" service offered by well, your friendly wireless carrier!
Explore your creative side
billboards beam you
17,000 people got conned into downloading spam. How many of them do you think will do it next time? How long before there are laws against this sort of thing? CAN-BLAM?
So, if accessing an available Wifi access point is illegal, per the recent cases in Florida and the UK, wouldn't accessing my phone also be illegal access of a computer (since a mobile phone is technically a computer these days), and wouldn't someone be able to sue these BlueSpammers for unauthorized access?
FTA - "The posters detected 87,000 Bluetooth phones over a two week period, of which about 17% were willing to download the clip, says Scott."
First 17% is more like 14,790. I couldn't find a reference to the 17,000 number. (Perhaps its somewhere on the corporate web site link.) But even ignoring this point I'd still question the "willing" statement. Does that mean people intentionlly enabled access to their cell phones. Or is it more like 17% of blue tooth cell phonesare left unsecured by their owners?
Sort of like claiming 40% of PCs are "willing" to be zombies for spam.
Back in 2001, I worked on something very similar to this as part of my senior project. I think somebody owes me money.
Life is life . . . everything else is just a stupid T-shirt slogan.
I will not read Bluetooth Spam
I will not read it, Sam I am.
I will not read it in the tube,
I will not read it even if it shows me a boob
I will not read it in my car
I will not read it in a bar
I do not like Bluetooth spam
I do not like it, Sam I am.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Nah, just curious. The first time they do this, 17,000 people will accept the "blue-vert". Of those 17,000, the next time, only 7,000 people will accept. The third time, 700.
Eventually the new technology will penetrate the common consciousness and people will just start ignoring it, since it is, after all, thoroughly useless and annoying. The only thing it has going for it is its novelty. Once that's dried up, "blue-vertising" will go away and die.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
In the rest of the civilized world, receiving an SMS costs you nothing either. It amazes me that that US operators can get away with squeezing the customer for money to receive unsolicited SMS messages.
You do find so many people who leave their bluetooth on and it can't be by accident - they go to the trouble of naming their access point. Just sit on the bus or train and there will be a few around. The problem is the battery hit and the paranoia - people are reluctant to accept anything incase its a 'virus'. Just start sending out goatse with some big company names printed over it as your very own brand of 'advertising' - i have a feeling that might catch on a bit more.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I wonder if a virus could be passed this way and if it could then you could have infected at least 17,000 people via blue tooth.
SPUE is a better contraction for SPAM and Bluetooth...
Now go ehway or I shall tauntu a second timeh!
Yea, I'm shocked that so many people were interested in ColdPlay, too /duck
In order to be detected, every single one of those 87k phones had their bluetooth enabled. 14k is the number who answered "Ok, send me the clip", I assume... a pretty high number. This has marketing dweebs wetting themselves, I'm sure.
Honestly.
Is it possible to go anywhere or do anything these days without being advertised at? Seems you just can't get away from it anymore.
In any case, if I'm standing on a train platform looking at a billboard, I can just read the damn billboard. What is the point of sending me a message to tell me about what's on the billboard?
You must be new hear. Hmm, how about slashdot bluecasting TFA to someone as soon as they click on the summary, thus forcing everyone to RTFA before they post stupid comments?
exactly,
first it's:
'Oh wow video!', 'I didn't know my phone did video..', 'Neat!'
then it quickly becomes:
'oh sod off'
(may read 'IMHO' wherever omitted from above text)
BUT...someone slap the marketing flunky who came up with "podcasting" because the content is actually pulled by clients (like RSS).
okay, we'll just call it podpulling from now on then..
(may read 'IMHO' wherever omitted from above text)
It's not illegal to be using the phone as long as you're not holding it. So, if you just pressed a button on your dash mounted phone to accept the bluetooth ad then it wouldn't be illegal. Of course, if you were reading the ad instead of paying attention to the road and ran over someone then you would be in trouble for driving carelessly.
Yes, and you don't browse the world wide web or read email or go outside by any highways or in any cities, or read the back pages of certain books. Advertising is... persistent.
Just like email-vertising died the same way.
Oh, wait...
sort of like that 50's tele-vision advertizing.
what a fad that turned out to be.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Somehow, I can see these "bill boards" getting vandalized, and having the xmiter removed or the message changed to a more usefull message, Kill Your Television!
Anyway, personally I find that BlueSpew has the right ring for this crap.
find an old pda and have it 'bluecast' porn.
Sit it next to a real coke bluecaster, and then half the time that people choose to "Accept connection from Coke?" they'll get the porn.
Bluetooth doesn't have a whole lot of authentication other than the name that the other node chooses.
It wont take many calls to a large companies complaint department about them dispatching porn before this whole dumb idea will go away.
You do realize that billboards are NOT only on highways but on city streets, right? Where pedestrians see them.
Is it me, or is Blue Tooth (or BlueTooth, or whatever) becoming the Windows of wireless protocols? I don't have any blue tooth devices, but all I ever read about blue tooth is how it is used as a virus vector, and now a spam vector.
It sounds more like airvertising than 'bluecasting'.
just wait till the day these ads scan your retina and mistakenly call you "Mr. Yamamoto".
Coderz 4 Life
The big 2 cell phone providers are Rogers and Bell (there's others but they're a lot smaller). Neither of them have a cellphone that has bluetooth yet. BTW the Treo 650 and Blackberry devices do have bluetooth but they're just glorified PDAs with cell phone capability that costs an arm and a leg.
I could buy a phone from the US and get it hacked, but why should I lose a warranty and pay a couple hundred dollars when I should be able to get one for FREE or close to it ($99 at most).
How long has bluetooth been an option on cell phones in the US and Europe and yet I still can't get one here.
All I want it is so that I can receive calls on my BT headset and use Sailling Clicker to control my iBook.
To make matters worse
Futureshop (owned by BestBuy), advertised a BT headset right beside the non-BT cell phones instead of in the computer section of the weekly flier.
After that one I thought you'd be here all week.
Bluetooth ads beamed from billboards... in space!
Actually like Ethernet cards and the like, Bluetooth Adapters too have an unqiue 48bit MAC which can be used to trace people. I don't really know a hell of
a lot about Bluetooth and its protocols but I can
imagine that a device that sends a connection request might get a reply back of the like "I got your request to connect to application X, now hold on while I signal the user and ask her if it is okay". In this case the advertiser gets the MAC even though the user does not authorize the connectino.
I'm sick of marketers encroaching into my personal space with their advertising. Putting ads on racecars or on the sides of their buildings is one thing, but when my email box is filled with spam, my fax machine is printing out pages I don't want, and my phone is receiving ads I don't want they're going too far.
Do we really need ads coming at us from everywhere? Is nothing sacred anymore? Now we also have to put up with advertising on billboards?!
I love the "Furthermore, there is no risk of downloading viruses or other malware to the phone, says O'Regan: "We don't send applications or executable code.""
Riiiight.
I find the whole notion of this distasteful. Billboards are bad enough. This is adding spam to them. I don't use Bluetooth now (see no real benefit from it really) and if enabling Bluetooth is going to subject me to spam, no thanks . . .
But, considering in 2000 the hot marketing gimmick was to mount Palm Pilot's around metropolitan areas (at least Manhattan had them) and have people point their Palm at it to sync up an ad . . . and that lasted like a month . . .
I'd be willing provided it's a two way thing and I could first beam the senders my terms and conditions, including the charges for using my phone as their electronic billboard.
AT&ROFLMAO
Another reason to refuse to have a cell phone. Beside the irritating rining when you're doing something (driving, having a conversation, reading, having sex), people seem to think that cell phones MUST be answered, and ALWAYS pick up.
I don't need to be constantly "in touch." You can email me and I'll see it later on.
is that 17,000 people then went looking for a way to turn the @#$%^*()! Bluetooth pop-up cr@p off...
Oh well, what the hell...
Quite a few years ago, I was riding in the car with my buddy Mike and his wife. We were going out to the movies and we weren't quite sure where the cinema was. Off in the distance, we saw a giant electronic sign flashing my buddy's name "Michael". Sure enough, it was the movie theatre. We thought it was very odd, until we realized the sign was just referring to the John Travolta angel movie, which was playing at the theatre.
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
It's also illegal to place billboards/advertising by the side of major roads. I'm not sure exactly of the level, but motorways, and trunk routes are definitely not allowed to have them.
Farmers have got around that to some extent by parking trucks in their fields close to the road with advertisements on them but they are few and far between and some distance from the road. To be honest with the speeds we drive it can't have anything much more than "Buy Food" on it otherwise we can't read it in time.
Most roadside advertising is for pedestrians or is placed in railway stations, airports and the like where many people will be just sitting around.
Off-topic, and very slightly tongue-in-cheek:
:-)
Although telcos, in the US and elsewhere, suck royal dick 24/7, having the recipient pay for incoming calls turns out to have advantages, rooted in the fact that it liberates you from the real telco {mono|oligo}poly: The PSTN numbering cartel.
Consider something like UMA, only turned inside-out: Instead of making your mobile number your "public" number, you use your SIP/IAX endpoint for that instead. Since a lot of your customers/friends/colleagues etc still use the PSTN, you give it a nice PSTN proxy through a VoIP operator that supports this.
When you're out of the house/office your SIP endpoint is forwarded to your mobile number. You can do that for zero incremental cost - to the original caller - in the US because you'll be paying the termination fees through your incoming airtime.
Add the advent of WiFi-capable mobiles and the proliferation of free hotspots in the places you're likely to use your mobile (home-work-starbucks-mall) and you have a very juicy, extremely low barrier-to-entry lever over the mobile operators.
In the rest of the world this would not be possible because the initiator of the mobile leg of the call (your asterisk box/subscription service) will have to pay the high (captive market, fun fun fun!) termination fees the mobile operator charges. This is where not paying for incoming airtime works against you: Cost is not the only problem here; the major problem is that this makes you have to buy [or subscribe to someone who buys] into the PSTN numbering cartel in order to get a number with a high enough termination "cushion" to cover the cost. The barrier to entry has been somewhat safely defended...
Of course, in the US and elsewhere, the operators are going to do everything they can to stop all this from happening. Some of it may even be meaningful, like offering decent UMA rates (don't hold your breath, this sounds too much like competition). When WiFi mobiles get introduced in the US I expect to get a laugh from their T&Cs and general brain-dead-ness when they try to both sell and cripple WiFi at the same time
If the bluetooth device is a PDA they can do the virtual equivalent of what the Germans do: The ticket here already contains a pre-filled in Bank Transfer form. Just fill in your own account details, theirs is there already, so is the amount.
With a PDA with a browser this might just be viable.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
So, if accessing an available Wifi access point is illegal, per the recent cases in Florida and the UK, wouldn't accessing my phone also be illegal access of a computer (since a mobile phone is technically a computer these days), and wouldn't someone be able to sue these BlueSpammers for unauthorized access?
No, because as the article states, you need to accept before this stuff is actually transmitted to you.
So which phones can do bluetooth messaging? My SonyEricsson phone cannot do messaging via bluetooth. Is there a new BT messaging standard or do certain brands have their own BT messaging implementation?
There is no sig.
In the UK, billboards are everywhere in your usual metropolis. On the A13 into London (one the the most used commuter roads), there are billboards all the way along it. The A13 is most definately a 'highway', even though most of the time, traffic is crawling along it at 20mph.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
You obviously haven't been premium rate reverse charge SMS spammed. Sign up to sms.ac and see how long that lasts. As a bonus, you can give them your hotmail password so they can spam all your friends pretending to be you recommending their "services".
Unless of course it's actually good content. Then of the 17000 7000 will each tell 5 friends, who next time they pass a "blue-vert" will accept it - thus next time 42,000 will accept, the third time 103,765 will accept, and so on until world domination is achieved.
this is really news, I just waited about two years to see something like this. I actually wrote a small app. that does something like this about 1.5 years ago http://www.mulliner.org/bluetooth/#bjod.
There is a report here detailing the gender mix of bluetooth users and which devices they are carrying around with them. The survey was taken in central London using a passive collector but I'd assume the ratios are the same the world over. N.
This reminds me about all of the buzz about targeting peoples cellphones that had GPS turned on. "Turn left here for great eat's at Identity Theft Cafe"
Fortunately, that has seemed to fade away. UNfortunately, Bluetooth ads are much easier, unless it comes to the US and they want to target Verizon customers, since Verizon sells "Bluetooth" phones with their balls chopped off.
Imagine being somewhere like a casino (where you can bet they already or will soon will use face recognition on everyone). Cameras could be positioned in certain places to automatically recognise a person and change all the machines and signs within the proximity to be more appealing.
Hell, I bet a system could pitch different ads depending on whether a man, women, or kids were walking past based on their smell. For extra sophistication it could even detect BO & perfume as giveaways of the person's wealth and status.
The only one I've seen so far is a video screen billboard within London Charring Cross station. Occasionally you would see a section of text saying something like "Enable bluetooth to get ....". Can't remember what it was advertising.
;-)
Anyhow, if you were driving by that billboard you would get arrested, but only for driving throught the center of a rail station
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
The "OFF" switch - why The Matrix will never be true.
--
But I'm Conroy's plant!
--
Had this happen to me in the Virgin Atlantic lounge in Heathrow just a week ago - it tried to come into my powerbook, and I had to keep declining an asp or some kind of media file 'push'. (don't remember exactly what it was)
Kind of cool, but there was definitely no way I was going to accept it.
embedded in software that was stolen from me and distributed as open source.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
The same people who actually buy things advertised in spam, I suppose.
Is spoofing a MAC address for bluetooth any less trivial than it is for Ethernet?
^o^
Yeah, you're right. Rogers does have the Motorola V551 and the Sony Ericsson T637 both of which have bluetooth capability. Last time I checked Rogers webiste was almost half a year ago and the didn't have any real cell phones w/ BT (not incl. Treo 650 and Blackberry). I have checked the Bell website and store flyers around once a month since I got a Bell 3-year contract a couple months back and Bell doesn't have any yet.
On the off-chance that you have Bluetooth on and your device is discoverable [presumably because you want to receive random stuff from ther people] and you are asked if you want to receive a BlueCast and you respond "no" we opt you out.
Since the content we send out if kinda neat - like free Coldplay clips which you'd normally pay £3.00 for - we've not had any complaints to date. The key here is that based on proximity and the time of day we're able to deliver valued-added content that people actually want... which I would say is a far cry from spam.
That said, it's great to see such a lively discussion about what were doing and you can be sure we take such comments [both good and bad] to the table to see how we can improve the service.
In the future, as phones provide better Bluetooth functionality, we'll transition to a system where the user "pulls" content from the billboards and can choose from a selection of content which suits them.