
Physical Web Experiments Without a BLE Beacon - Mstreib
A good read. Trying to learn what&#x27;s coming for Physical Web.<p>A question based on what you shared; is it possible to simply leverage proximity and &quot;free Wi-Fi&#x2F;Open Wi-Fi&quot; without a (for example) retailer&#x27;s permission? From a proximity point, say a shopping mall filled with retailers who likely already have Wi-Fi for production use.., to see their SSID in a way that it clearly identifies them?<p>With that info, then approach them to sell a Physical Web platform service with &#x27;no need for beacons&#x27;.., &quot;We will get you on Physical Web without beacons by leveraging your Wi-Fi, offering contextual content creation, analytics, etc.&quot;?<p>Everyone says FCC 47-15 means anyone can see and leverage Open Wi-Fi but in this potential application of it, I can&#x27;t see it.  New at this so don&#x27;t hit me too hard.  Thanks.
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sjenson
The architecture of the Physical Web is about not requiring a central server
for things to work. We want it to be distributed and federated, like the web.
Nothing we do requires a single central server. As you currently describe it,
your approach would likely involve such a server.

We _are_ experimenting with wifi through mDNS and wifi-direct (it's available
in early form in our Physical Web app for Android) With these, we embed the
URL into the wifi router itself, using it much like a bluetooth beacon. I
think this is getting to the spirit of what you'd like to do. The only issue
we're wrestling with is that this type of approach enables offline or
unreachable beacons which raises some security concerns. We're looking into
using a signed package format to fix that problem.

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brudgers
The link is missing because, the Hacker News |submit| page allows a user to
submit either:

    
    
      A link to a story
        or
      The contents of the text box
    

but not both and the |submit| link defaults to the text box when both elements
are present.

Good luck.

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NetOpWibby
Actual link to the article [https://unop.uk/physical-web-experiments-without-
a-ble-beaco...](https://unop.uk/physical-web-experiments-without-a-ble-beacon)

