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I wouldn't have thought so, but until now I didn't even realise that there were Bluetooth devices with configurable names.

Maybe it's a local thing. I often see random kids roaming on the streets.

I first became aware of how insane things could be when a single mother was arrested for allowing her child to play at the park a couple of blocks from their home while she was working.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...


Madness.

"pretended" ... do they even care any more?


I often hear that about Facebook, but at least it has a "feeds" button that you can press to get the sources you actually subscribe to. The default "home" feed is useless.


They can still get insurance for flooding?


Yes with the help of US taxpayers.

https://www.floodsmart.gov/


Funny, I thought the USA was paranoid about this kind of socialism. I guess they are on the hook for some big and inevitable payouts.


USA loves socialism in most forms that benefit landowners


It's hard for me to even contemplate having "nothing to do." I haven't had paid work for many, many years, yet I don't feel like I have any spare time at all.


How does it work? Bluetooth?


I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes:

- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.

- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].

Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.

[0] https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsessio...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/

[3] https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps...


There's a comment below, "I just signed up and it’s super fast. Download the app, put in your name, allow Bluetooth. No email, no password, nothing."

I suppose getting special "NFC card" permissions when they already struggled to get the app in the store would have been a bit much.


Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devices, and Apple has a Nearby Interaction[1] which "use[s] the high-frequency capabilities of the UWB chip" but is restricted to Apple devices, so I guess it could be one of those rather than NFC.

[0] https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/overview

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction



There isn't much further to go down the slippery slope it seems, if he only did what he claims: attending a pro-Palestine / anti-genocide protest at a university for five minutes.


Is a takedown demand the worse thing that can happen?


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