bluetooth is a disaster, and it's paying my (figurative) bills right now. i love it!
one day, people will learn to secure all wireless connections before even putting them on the market. one day.
The assumption that they can be secured is an iffy one, IMHO. I'd make the argument that any time you're deliberately broadcasting your data, they're insecure. Period. No matter what fancy new encryption you employ, it can be broken if someone cares enough. Wire communications can be tapped too, of course, but you're much more likely to know that someone's attached a device to your patch cable...and they had to get past your physical security as well.
Wireless won't be reliably securable (even in the limited "my data aren't worth the trouble it would take to get them" sense) until quantum encryption becomes commonplace: at least you'll know if someone's intercepting your data.
Although, come to think of it, one could probably design a one-time-pad system that would work conveniently enough. You've got two devices that need to talk to each other...give one of them the ability to generate a random keystream x million characters long...set it up such that it can share the keystream with the other device, but only over a hard connection...synch it up once, and then consume the keystream character by character as the two devices communicate. Generate new noise whenever you run out of keystream, and resynch your communications.
Now that it's occurred to me, it seems so obvious I have to think someone's already done it.
Of course, if not, can I have the patent on the class of devices described in this post?
It amazes me how many people out there don't even bother to set up the encryption on their wireless internet connections. I can put my laptop in the car and drive around half the city without ever being without an available open connection, kinda sad. With that level of technical ignorance tools like this arent even necessary.
Anyone else notice that the pistol grip on that thing looks like it got pulled right off an ar15?
LOL try a college town... when my building's power was out because of hurricane isabel, most of the kids in my apt building ended up grabbing somebody's internet who was in the next apt building over. A bunch of us were ready to write the guy a thank you note for not encrypting his internet, but we figured we might need it again. I just thought it was funny as heck... since I think I later found out that the guy was a CS major.