Tracking People Using Bluetooth 65
damdam writes "A Dutch guy seems to have set up a small network of bluetooth scanners. He has all the information logged to a central database and you can search it over the web. On his website it says "Some of these matches were only minutes apart. Therefore I could even calculate the approximate speed of someone moving from one location to another.". There are also some interesting statistics on his site showing traffic volume in his hometown (based on bluetooth signals) and he even lists popularity of certain Nokia phones. It's interesting to see how much information an individual can gather using old equipment."
Or... (Score:4, Funny)
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Bluetooth Attacks (Score:5, Insightful)
Case in point - a local pub automatically sends a simple java-based football game to your phone (or attempts to) via bluetooth when you enter. Some people have set their bluetooth to accept automatically and wonder what has happened when they discover the application sitting there a few days later.
Mildly amusing at times, but it does highlight the security risks associated with a system that can rely on users thinking about security to work properly.
Re:Bluetooth Attacks (Score:5, Interesting)
Specifically, people would use bluetooth to discover other people with active devices (on trains or what have you), and send the message "toothing?" as an invitation to have sex in a nearby bathroom or similar. The media of course lapped it up, and for a while there was quite a bit of talking about what exactly you could and couldn't do over bluetooth on a standard phone.
Of course, it eventually turned out the whole "toothing" thing was a hoax. But it wouldn't surprise me if there were a lot of very confused people on trains around the UK for a while.
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I can remember changing a friend's device name to something highly inappropriate before jumping onto a Circle Line train... and despite his name we didn't get a single offer...!
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(The PIN isn't really 69, my phone prompts everytime a pairing is done).
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Or in other words, it's orgy time!
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Go for the Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
I won't comment on Apple's policy in doing so, and I'll leave you to figure out what kinds of social engineering and hacking exploits this opens the door to. I'm just sayin', that's all.
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I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that. I don't have a virgin test Mac to verify but I'm pretty sure that while bluetooth will be on by default if you have it (and I'm not even sure about that) you've got to hit some settings to make a Mac discoverable.
As for advertising that they're a Mac and the user name--the default system name of a Mac is something like "Bob's PowerMac" (where "Bob" was the name of the first user to set up the machine.) Easily changed
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Re:Bluetooth Attacks (Score:5, Interesting)
Males and Females are by law not allowed to mix in the same room (of a restaurant) so they use their Bluetooth for contact through the separations.
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Joking aside, in societies and countries where this free mixing is not thought of as problematic we see the lowest birth rates.
If you were thinking of things like STD in a liberal society, this is at least as prevalent in the countries with restrictions were the only option to have a sexual adventure generally is illegal prostitution.
And men in these societies do find the prostitutes!
A
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But as you said, STD is prevalent in both societies, as is prostitution. Proves nothing pro or anti.
Inbreeding is a culture issue, which has nothing to do with how women chose to cover up themselves in a society. Look at the Amish case.
So the only issue we are down to, is that you find it scandalous, obscene. Which is your personal feeling. Who knows, pr
He also tracks a lot more stuff at his house (Score:1, Informative)
From toilet flushes to how often the cat eats!!
External antenna (Score:1)
[0] http://www.wifisoft.org/trac/wcc-2007/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/IMG_0127_mod.jpg [wifisoft.org]
Cool (Score:5, Interesting)
The next step would be to scale the network up to cover an entire city or country. Perhaps he might like to consider using an RFID scanner in addition to the Bluetooth one, so that RFID chips being carried by people could also be used to identify them. Just in case the people decide they want some privacy. When RFID chips are widely used for stock control, it will be difficult to avoid buying things that contain them, and they can't be turned off. Robust identification could be provided by the "cloud" of RFID chips carried by each person.
It's amazing when you think of what is now technically possible, given a sufficiently large budget.
RFID powder... welcome big brother (Score:3, Informative)
When RFID chips are widely used for stock control, it will be difficult to avoid buying things that contain them, and they can't be turned off. Robust identification could be provided by the "cloud" of RFID chips carried by each person.
Did you know about RFID "powder" [tfot.info]? (it was discussed on /. [slashdot.org] earlier this year) In short, RFID so small it will stick to people's hair if sprayed on a crowd. In forensics, you can thus know who was in the crowd with simple RFID scanners. There's much more applications, of course. (shameless plug; selected RFID stories here [slashgeo.org])
Did we slashdot it already? (Score:2)
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'database.icepick.com' (4) in
Error connecting to mysql
Check the books; that's got to be some kind of record.
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I think you're right!
- RG>
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Make it 7.
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It's just plain irresponsible of the submitter not to use the Coral cache [nyud.net]...
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Re: the temperature in his toilet! (Score:1)
Everytime the doorbell is rang the computer will take a picture of the person ringing the doorbell. Since 20-Jun-1998 the doorbell has been rang 2815 times. An average ring lasted for 0.62 seconds.
Everytime the fridge is opened the computer will take a snapshot and record the date, time and duration of the fridgedoor opening. Since 12-Jul-1998 the fridge has been opened 47811 times. An average dooropening lasted for 31.87 seconds.
Check out how often his cat eats, and the temperature in his toilet! neat.
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Nah - Sometimes servers get Slashdotted before a single post makes it in.
And now that we have the Firehose, it wouldn't surprise me to start seeing the occasional story Slashdotted before even making it to the FP.
Cityware (Score:3, Informative)
As one of our projects on my course, we're looking at extending this to do without hotspots and be able to show you a list of who's around you right now, pulling their name and picture from facebook and alerting you if one of your friends is near by. We're also looking to be able to store where you've met people and display this using google maps.
Has following people become obsolete? (Score:5, Funny)
1. Follow them home from the grocery
2. Tail them from a car/taxi/bicycle
3. Hide out in the donut shop across from their work
4. Pretend to be a jogger/homeless bum in the park
5. Break into the house across the street and set up a stakeout
6. Hide in their backseat under a blanket
7. Put on camouflage and pretend you are a bird
8. Dress up in a gorilla suit
9. Paint yourself 'brick' colored
10. Mini submarines!?!?!?!?
This technology stuff is crap I tell you.
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12: PROFIT!
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Hey, who the hell are you ?
Hey, hey, we're the Monkeys
What are you doing ?
Some people say we monkey around
Are you following me ?
We're too busy singing to put anybody down
Also good for tracking on smaller scales (Score:3, Interesting)
like a horror story (Score:4, Interesting)
With the kind of electronic surveillance we have going on now, the technology available, it would be so easy to fuck with people. Nevermind the Orwell angle, which we're already well familiar with. Consider the "stalker cop" scenario, someone who is placed in a position of authority which he then abuses. A nut could stalk and terrorize someone without ever leaving the computer. There was a story about Perverted Justice that seemed too outlandish to be true but has not yet been debunked -- the PJ founder had a detractor that he wanted to get revenge against. He posed as a hot chick in chat and carried on an affair with the guy for months, up to and including the guy divorcing his wife and flying out to another state to meet his new lover. Then bang, the PJ guy lowers the boom. Ok, so one part of me says that the guy must have been a credulous boob but the other part of me says even so, the PJ guy sank hundreds of hours into this psycho revenge. That's a scary level of commitment.
I guess what I'm getting at is that all this technology is giving people ways to fuck with other people that haven't even yet been conceptualized. Planting kiddie porn on the soon-to-be-ex's computer and calling the cops is barely scratching the surface.
In other news (Score:1, Flamebait)
Roommate tracker (Score:5, Interesting)
I also played around with gathering some information and playing it via Festival on arrival, "welcome back so-and-so, you were away for 10 hours and 23 minutes. You have 143 new emails, 132 marked as spam." Could be expanded a lot with other functions; music presets, wake my computers, etc. Anyway, the system fell into disuse after the computer was moved and the cat ate the speaker wire. But it was pretty interesting to see how easy it was to use Bluetooth as a presence detector, with a few lines of shell script. The phones didn't even need to be set in Discoverable mode, once the mac addresses were gathered.
This kind of thing is a piece of cake for the various secretive agencies to do to you on a global level, and they don't even need Bluetooth...every cell phone is a little tracking device. Too bad that power is several orders of magnitude more difficult for the public to obtain, as it is a centralized service much like the government itself. Sure, you can track your kids' phones if you pay Sprint some extra cash...but the head of the NSA can see where everyone with your last name had lunch today, while you can't log in and make sure he didn't skip work and go to the golf course instead. This is just a small example of the ways we're gradually being tagged and tracked, and it's a good think to have people aware and thinking of it. The power may be in the right hands for the most part, but it can be misused so easily.
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Anyway, the system fell into disuse after the computer was moved and the cat ate the speaker wire.
Ha! A very interesting post, but this was by far my favorite sentence.
Ooooooh..... the cat's eaten it.
Has he?
She, sir.
Bluetooth would be better if ..... (Score:2)
I've tried quite a bit to get interactive BT stuff going. There seems to be no way to offer decent options to message recipients. We would like to be able to send them a menu from which they can choose "download image", "download video" or "download music" (or some other choice). All I've managed to work out is discover "client", send message. The client then gets somethign akin to "DrSkwid is trying to send you a message, accept y/n". On my Nokia N80 you can't even choose "rep
In Home Tracking (Score:1)
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Same thing but betterish? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://whereabouts.eecs.umich.edu/ [umich.edu]
Bluetooth hardware address (Score:2)
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Sexy vixen (Score:1)
http://www.bluetoothtracking.org/livedata.php [bluetoothtracking.org]
Evil.. (Score:1)
In all seriousness I think this looks like a fun project
Identifying broadcast names (Score:1)
Translation:
Rchl & you can kiss my ass
hmmm... (Score:1)
say 15% of the people on a large bridge have bluetooth on their phone (stretching it)
set bluetooth hotspots (or whatever they're called, doesn't matter) anywhere from 5-10 feet apart. see how long it takes the phone to go from spot to spot. put in a formula, and voila. on top of that, it could be used to catch speeders. and, if you know the ID of a criminal's bluetooth-enabled phone, you could see where they connect, when, and
Wonder what else can be easily scanned... (Score:2)
(friend of mine keeps his below the dash when he's not actually going through a tollgate)