New Scientist describes a terrifying new threat to the UK’s mobile phone owners: bluetooth-beaming billboards.
Ignoring adverts is about to get a lot tougher with the development of billboards and advertising posters that use Bluetooth to beam video ads direct to passing cellphones.
As people walk past the posters they receive a message on their phone asking them if they wish to accept the advert. If they do, they can receive movies, animations, music or still images further promoting the advertised product.
Describing the system, chief creative officer of Filter UK – the “brains” behind this wonderful wheeze – explains:
“It’s all about delivering high quality content, tailored for mobile usage.â€
Translation:
“Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam egg chips and spam.”
It’s yet another reason to make sure that if your phone uses Bluetooth, it isn’t set up as “discoverable”.
Comments
0 responses to “Forget mobile phone viruses. This is much, much worse”
Also that you change the defualt password from 0000. A lot of these things only work if people are lazy and don’t change it.
True.
I think I may have encountered one of these on Sunday although at the time I didn’t know what it was. While I was stopped at an intersection someone (I thought at the time) kept trying to send me something via Bluetooth, which I kept rejecting (obviously). Thought it was just one of these irritating wankers who thinks Bluejacking is clever. But it may have been an ad, because it was a very large item (quite a few kB).
> Thought it was just one of these irritating wankers who thinks Bluejacking is clever.
Thought you meant the ad agency ;)