RE: Is your bluetooth safe?

["Alistair Watkins" <ukha@xxxxxxx>]

With great interest in Bluetooth, i see this as being a bit of a nightmare!
To me, it doesnt matter if some random skript kiddie (if a bit of software
was made and circulated) gould grab my phone book.. they couldn't do to
much with it.. what is more interesting, is that just his kind of headline
will put people off of explictly getting bluetooth... I do think its bad
of Nokia to have it enabled by default though.. if people dont want it, it
should be off!
The main problem is that someone could sit in, say, liverpool street
station, at rush hour and harvest thousands of phone numbers which could
then be used for spam.. the phones mentioned also store email addresses,
but i doubt that it would really be so useful for that.

As for the range, regularly on my train in the morning I can get 3 or 4
devices (not my own), and on friday night i found 15 when i was sitting in
my darkend corner (yes, i am sad enough to randomly scan... I like to try
and judge how many people are using it)

I am really interested as to how to get around the paring process, and I
expect this is a flaw in the implimentations of the Bluetooth stack by the
manufacturers, rather than a flaw in the spec... but it is very
interesting :)

always good to see bluetooth in the news!

ali


White, Peter said:


> Unless the hacker is sitting on my lap (which I'd probably notice),
this
> doesn't worry me too much, as the bluetooth range is nothing like the
> quoted
> distances!
>