Bluejacking

People are still asking me what Bluejacking is. Or just staring at me blankly when the subject comes up, despite all the recent media coverage. Obviously, if you’re not from around these parts, you’ve got an excuse – it’ll be coming to a phone near you soon.

So, here's the skinny.

Bluejacking, on one level, is 2004's equivalent to knocking on someone's door and running away, or any childlike prank. But it's kinda fun for adults too sometimes!

By way of background, Bluetooth is a way of sending data from one digital device to another via radio waves. When "Futurists" blather on about taking items out of your fridge, thus informing your grocer that you need more of said item, they're normally talking about using bluetooth.

It’s not going to happen, but that's another story. But the technology works fine.

Anyway, one practical use of Bluetooth is to say, send someone's contact details from one phone to another. And "innovators" (marketing speak for people who adopt technological innovations first) already do this kind of thing.

Then, back in April 2002, aJack (an IT guy based in Malaysia) wrote this post on Esato (a forum for errr.. enthusiastic Sony Ericsson users):

“I was in the bank today and was waiting for my number to be called as there was many people in the bank. Out of boredom, I did a Bluetooth discovery to see if there was any other Bluetooth device around. A name appeared on my screen "Nokia 7650" which obviously means some poor Nokia users has his Bluetooth switched on. I looked around and didn't see anybody around me using that brick... I mean Nokia 7650.

I then proceeded to create a new contact in my phone which had all it's fields empty except for the first name which I gladly filled with "Buy Ericsson!" and made my R520 send that business card to the Nokia 7650 and a guy a few feet away from me suddenly had his 7650 making obscene noises in the bank. He took out his 7650 and started looking at his phone (and looking lost at the same time)." aJack esato.com posting

And Bluejacking was born.

If you want to impress your mates, you can point out that etymologically speaking, Bluejack comes from Bluetooth and aJack, not hijack, as is popularly supposed.

Anyway, that's it in a nutshell. My personal best was to send "No smoking zone" to a large American gentleman at the next table is a restaurant. He promptly put out his cigar, causing much merriment at our table.

Second was “Bob Dylan Sucks” at a err….Bob Dylan gig. Duck and cover your phone!

"Your laces are undone" is always good for a laugh too.

Anyway. We thought it would be really, really cool (in a geeky kind of way) to do Bluejacking with images and invented TagTexts, you can download here According to TagText.

The idea is to find a character (Tag) that you want to be “you” and attach them to your Bluejacks. Your Tag can be hints as to who you are, or who you want to be :-)

Declaration. While TagText is probably the froodiest website on the planet I am bias :-)

The definitive Bluejacking site is here BluejackQ.com run by Jellie Ellie as 13 year old girl in Surrey, England.

Since Bluejacking, we have a variant with blatant sexual overtones, called “Toothing”. This involves searching for phones in your immediate area and suggesting getting together for wild, furtive sex orgies. Very popular on trains in the UK apparently.

You can call me quaint and old-fashioned but, I think I’d like to see someone before deciding on a close encounter of that kind. OK – I’m quaint and old fashioned.

Finally, Tom Hume reports here on a new phase:

My God.

Last night, I was "bluejacked" on the train...
...with what looked like amateur porn.

Note, gentle reader, that he was on a train - looking for good toothing if you ask me :-)

Where will it all end?

Comments

[Tom Hume]

It was a terrifying experience. And strangely invasive - I don't mind people messaging me, but sending (pretty grotty) porn is different. It wasn't even like I had a warning of what sort of content I was agreeing to receive - maybe there's something in there for the handset UI guys to think about.

Any ideas what the legal situation with this is (if any)? Specifically, the legal situation wrt beaming possibly offensive content to a complete strangers phone... is this covered by any existing laws?

Mind you, if the Register is anything to go by I should expect more of this stuff... the London to Brighton train is apparently a hot-spot for this stuff:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/19/blue_tooth/

Do you see Bluejacking being more than a fad, then? I can see that some elements of it might be interesting (anonymous contact for gamers; apps like CrowdSurfer or Jabberwocky) but do you think people will turn to Bluetooth for local messaging in any significant volume when it's just as easy to talk at that range?

Tom

P.S. I don't think you're quaint and old fashioned ;)

[Russell Buckley]

Actually, all joking apart, sending unsolicited porn is really rather nasty. It's about one step removed from stalking!

What's worse is the fact that you don't actually know who you're sending it to. So it could just as easily have been received by a 10 year old girl as a mature man of the world, like Tom :-)

Having said that, I think this was probably a school boy-type prank rather than anything sinister. When I hang around the BluejackQ forums, it's pretty apparent that young guys dodn't have a great sense of judgement.

I remember one guy that was sending messages to girls on the tube (having identified who they were first) saying "looking at you and touching myself". I pointed out that this was way over the bounds of good taste and potentially very frightening to receive.

He said he was just flirting and I said he was a potential rapist (as far as the girls were concerned). He then sheepishly saw the point.

But kids will always step over the mark. You see it all the time in the use of IM. I've said it before - a world where kids make the rules is going to be a brutal and insensitive one! So it's up to us adults who DO understand this world to educate them.

No idea what the law is currently. Though I'm pretty sure that I can tell you what it will be in the future :-)

But more to the point, for a law to be effective, you've got to be able to catch someone. Pretty difficult over Bluetooth isn't it? At least you know they're nearby, I s'pose.

Finally, yes I do think local messaging via Bluetooth is going to be big (and bigger when the range gets better).

Bluejacking might be a fad, but it's no where near reaching its potential adoption yet. It's still being discovered by Innovators and has no way reached mainstream yet. Plenty of life in the old dog yet.

But as far as local messaging is concerned I think we're at the beginning of one of those paradigm shift things. Messaging and file sharing are going to be huge.

This is bad news for content owners, unless DRM is sorted PDQ. And networks as they don't make any money from local stuff.

The scary thing here is that Bluetooth transactions can't be billed for - neither can they be tracked. So no one knows how much it's going on.

Anecdotally, it's happening though. And it's growing like Topsy.

Russell

[smstextaddict.co.uk]

While we like to see bluejacking taken to new limits and always ready to try new bluetooth programs at bluejackaddicts.com like mobiluck, we strongly discourage putting the victims of the bluejacks to discomfort in any kind of way.