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Web Bluetooth Opens New Abusive Channels (dailydot.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, browsers are starting to ship Web Bluetooth API, soon to become a component of Web of Things. Web Bluetooth will allow to connect local user devices with remote web sites. While offering new development and innovation possibilities, it may also open a number of frightening security and privacy risks such as private data leaks, abuses and complexity. Web Bluetooth as currently defined by W3C may introduce unexpected data leaks such as location, and personally-identifiable data. "There are numerous examples of data processing methods possible of extracting insight previously seemingly hidden," said Steve Hegenderfer, director of Developer Programs at the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. "With Web Bluetooth, core security and privacy responsibility is delegated to the already powerful Web browser. Browsers should consider the types of information made available to websites and act accordingly in designing their data privacy layers." Is pairing kettles with web sites a good idea?
/s
The idea and the platform is a joke. The standardization guys must be drunk.
LUDDITE software is shitty and can't use wireless AppTooth devices correctly! Modern appy app apps using AppTooth via AppApps are appier!
Apps!
Who are the faggots who WANT this... on the consumer side of things, I mean.
Obviously every hacker, big company and burgeoningly totalitarian government does.
"Is pairing kettles with web sites a good idea?"
Why not? I remember fondly the first coffeepot camera on the web, even if it 'leaked' the location of the pot and the hands of those serving themselves.
Web Bluetooth as currently defined by W3C may introduce unexpected data leaks such as location, and personally-identifiable data
The leaks aren't unexpected, all new web technologies are being designed that way on purpose. When advertisers make up the standards body, this is what we get.
Bad. Facebook will suddenly have always-listening enabled to any paired bluetooth headsets.
Why, Why? People want their names written with urine on the wall so they invent useless new standards?
PAN is a perfectly adequate 3Mbps IP transport (actually level 2) between 7 Bluetooth devices and a host. You can run real network there.
.... why is it a good idea to come up w/ yet another wireless standard when we have existing ones? Like if my rice cooker needs to connect to the internet, why not just use a legacy 802.11a chipset to let it link up to the internet at slow speeds? Do the things on the internet of things need to be high bandwidth as well, if they are not delivering intensive data, such as video data?
Also, if Bluetooth needs to be enhanced, why not make it something that allows not just 1:1, but many:many connections? Like I have 2 tablets, either of which could connect to a Bluetooth speaker I have at home. Or 2 phones, either of which could connect to my car navigation system. Why not have it such that either of them could access the speaker if it's idle, and that it would only fail to connect - or request an interruption - if the resource in question is already being used?
It's a great idea for the compaines pushing it. (Otherwise they wouldn't be pushing it, would they?) The purpose of "IOT" should be obvious by now: spying. That's why they're throwing billions of dollars at it -- because they know that the spying will return that investment many times over. Spying is big business, and it's only going to get bigger.
wireless + internet. combine the two...
what do you get? hacks and botnets, of course, among other things...
let us add....
to the mix..
what could possibly go wrong?
everything
Let me get this straight, the purpose of the technology is so that a browser on a handheld device can interact with Bluetooth? Meh. Why have the mobile device act as a middleman? IoT is where we are going to go. This is a fad.
Only LUDDITES use LUDDITE Internet of Things. Modern app appers use Appernet of Apps!
Apps!
Wow. You really cannot underestimate the utter stupidity of the general public.
The whole networking of everything whether it needs it or not is bad enough (and, with the exception of a few things, pretty pointless--unless data mining and surveillance is your thing). Even where it makes sense, the privacy and security compromises makes the incredibly minuscule value add not worth it for any but the most exhibitionistic among us (and for them that might be the selling point, because beyond that there really isn't much point for most things).
We really should be referring to the so-called Web of Things (and every associated buzzword) as the "Web of Shit", as in "Web of Your Pricacy Don't Mean Shit to Us, and In fact we're going to sell your personal data and privacy for a profit after you've overpaid us for your Internet of Things . Thank you for Playing." How long until people are filmed by their TVs, and posted to porntube and sold for a profit? My guess, less than three years.
We're rapidly reaching the point where a baby rattle will be a governance device (spying on us for the alt-right, the government, the (soon-to-be-created?) alt-left, your boss, your school principle, your perverted neighbor, your abusive spouse, etc).
About the only tracking device I've ever wanted was a key chain for my house/car keys, but I'll take losing those every once in a while over the ubiquitous surveillance we're subjecting ourselves to otherwise.
Good luck with that on Linux at least.
The Bluez stack on Linux is a disaster. I had to wrestle with it for a recent project on the Raspberry PI and it was a monumental pain in the backside.
First of all, it absolutely requires D-BUS, so you need to add this monstrous dependency to your system. Want bluetooth inside your initrd? You're fucked (note that getting openssh - not that pale imitation dropbear - to work on initrd was relatively painless).
Secondly, currently distros are transitioning between bluez 4 and 5, and most documentation (read: people banging on until it works... because, fuck you, there is no documentation) pertains to version 4.
And finally, there are a bunch of stupid subtle things that take forever to get working that should be trivial (because, again, there's no documentation). For example, bluetoothctl can't change the name of your device, you need to edit some file somewhere for this (which means, it's not dynamic... except that sometimes you can change it with hciconfig and it "sticks", other times, it get overridden by something). Also, the relationship between the various hci*, bt*, bluez* utilities and bluetoothctl is not clear.
So, yeah, good luck with that.
Why the hell would I want to do this?
Seriously, what is the use case?
What can be better?
Now we have standards how to connect IoT bluetooth toilet seats to Facebook!
"I fondly remember [direct object]", not "I remember fondly [direct object]".
English is really starting to lose its elegance,
ITYM "English is starting to really lose its elegance," :p
Anyhow, to lose something, you have to have it in the first place. I would argue that English has a lot going for it, like a huge vocabulary and not being prescriptive, but elegant is not how I would describe it. A language where "I love you" and "I love sausages" only differ in the object can never be elegant.
Seriously, you thought we weren't going to illegally and unconstitutionally spy on you in your own country?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, I quite like the versatility of the English language, the way one can artistically change word order, and (sometimes) preserve the same meaning.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You're weird. Adverbs have very free order in English; you can grammatically stick them in most positions.
Will also allow sentence not having getted one subject?
At the bottom of the
English ALSO has a lot of what we'd now call "forward error correction". You have to REALLY mangle English to render it unintelligible (at least, to a native speaker), or even to significantly change its meaning.
Contrast that with Mandarin, where you could have a sentence where carelessly raising, then dropping, the pitch of some word in the middle of the sentence instead of simply dropping it could transform it from something a parent might say to their child into something that could be interpreted as crude, inflammatory sexual slang that would make guys in an American locker room cringe because it's *so* bad. Or Spanish, where nearly anything you say can be twisted into a sexual double-entendre *somewhere* in Latin America (this is apparently a huge problem faced by Spanish-language TV producers attempting to make content suitable for broadcast worldwide. Think about all the jokes regarding "Ms. Slocombe's pussy", and multiply them by a thousand...)
418 I'm a teapot (RFC 2324)
This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers. The RFC specifies this code should be returned by teapots requested to brew coffee.[49] This HTTP status is used as an easter egg in some websites, including Google.com.[50]
I was the intent all along!
This may be the time when open source swoops in and saves the day by creating tools which will interfere and ignore certain intrusive 'standards' foisted upon the unsuspecting general public.
I wonder if a device can be engineered to broadcast an interfering signal along the Bluetooth band and just kill the ability to function.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This will integrate seamlessly into the IoT botnet used to take down Dyn the other day!
Better known as 318230.
most. beautiful. language. ever.
French 2nd.
A language where "I love you" and "I love sausages" only differ in the object can never be elegant.
I hate to break this to you, but your example translates word-for-word (correctly) into a whole slew of languages.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Contrast that with Mandarin, where you could have a sentence where carelessly raising, then dropping, the pitch of some word in the middle of the sentence instead of simply dropping it could transform it from something a parent might say to their child into something that could be interpreted as crude, inflammatory sexual slang that would make guys in an American locker room cringe because it's *so* bad.
Not nearly as likely as it might seem. (To my relief, I might add.) For one thing, although each Chinese *character* represents a syllable, Chinese *words* are not necessarily monosyllables. While there are pairs that can be easily confused (e.g. mãi "buy" and mài "sell"), these tend not to be used in isolation for just that reason ("buy" is usually gòumãi, and "sell" is often shòumài). In addition, there's a lot of variation--even amongst Mandarin speakers, some words are spoken with different tones in different localities, so Mandarin speakers tend to have a very forgiving ear, just as most English speakers have no trouble recognising any of "ai", "ah", and "oi" as the first person singular pronoun that all English speakers write as "I".
(I'm using the tilde to represent the low tone, BTW, because fucking Slashdot won't let me fucking use anything with a fucking caron. Idiots.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's not the technology that's problematic, it's how you use it.
I certainly could find a good use for this, others will find nefarious uses for it, and still some others will find a way to implement this radically bad.
I am struggling to think of even one use case for this. Does anyone know of one?
The summary mentions something about a teapot. So, the teapot pairs with a phone, laptop, etc. through which it can connect to remote servers? First, why does a teapot need to connect to a remote server. Second, assuming your teapot absolutely, positively does need to connect to a remote server, wouldn't it be easier to just put a WiFi adapter on the teapot and skip the Bluetooth-in-the-middle silliness?