alt Hacker NewsTangential, sort of: in the early days of mobile phones for the masses, when there was no WiFi/3G in the underground, I will often enable Bluetooth in my phone, look for nearby devices and try to match names and looks.
That was before everyone had their "John's IPhone" or "Samsung A55" boring names everywhere and some of us cared to personalise our device's name.
Anyone else played this game?
Replies
Hah, I change my device name and wifi hotspot all the time...
"[Agency-acronym] Surveillance Van #43/44/etc.."
Yeah, but it stopped pretty soon stores figured out that they could flood you with advertisements over Bluetooth. In some places it was bad enough that I had to turn off Bluetooth.
Yep 100% did the same.
It was interesting to see what people named stuff as even back then I figured you could use that metadata for tracking devices...but even more interesting was looking at the Mac address to see the manufacturer and try and find some rare or cool device.
Did you ever try to communicate with them?
I do the reverse. I set my wifi hotspot or bluetooth to "MetPoliceUnit355" and I look for people making faces or looking around.
hmmmmm...
2006, sat in a job interview. Interviewer says he'll Bluetooth over a file to me - what's by phone's name?
2006, the year that Tool's 10,000 Days had been released, which I was enjoying and, being a bit of an Edge Lord, I'd named my device after a lyric from Vicarious - which, IIRC fit perfectly into the name space and made me very happy:
> ILikeToWatchThingsDie
Excellent. Still got the job though!