
They said this hack was impossible - EGreg
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/19/apple-android-windows-fasetto-offline/
======
mortenjorck

      You shouldn’t need to jailbreak your device to make PDQ work; 
      the app alone does the trick. (Whether Apple and other app 
      store operators will allow PDQ on their marketplaces is 
      separate matter.)
    

The author of this article, and more worryingly the developers running a
Kickstarter campaign, seem to have an insufficient understanding of the
technical criteria upon which Apple admits or rejects apps.

~~~
marvvelous
It's still cool for android and windows mobile though. It implies that the
transfer speed is much faster than the existing options on those platforms.

~~~
potatolicious
"1GB in 10 seconds" is 819Mbps. This is snake oil territory. Even if they put
the pedal to the metal on every single radio in the device simultaneously you
can't push data that fast.

~~~
Anderkent
The numbers I see in the article are 100mb in under a minute. Where did you
get your quote?

~~~
adrianpike
That's from their Kickstarter page.

------
PhasmaFelis
"...Even when they're offline!"

I was expecting some arcane optical-modem procedure where you point the
receiving phone's camera at the sender's screen, which flashes a series of
glyphs or something like a high-bandwidth QR code. That would've been cool.
Instead it turns out that "even when they're offline" just means "we were
lying about that part." Oh well.

~~~
Anderkent
Huh, it was pretty obvious to me that it meant 'not connected to the
internet'.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Hmm. "Offline" is a bit more nebulous with a cellphone, since you can
reasonably expect it to send and receive data (calls, text messages, GPS) even
when there's no active Internet connection. From the article's breathless
language, it really sounded like they were trying to say "not sending or
receiving any radio signals," only then it turned out that they weren't.

------
earlz
I tend to think this is an impossible hack, or at least the article is grossly
exaggerating things. From the sound of it, they somehow managed to get
directly into the wifi and bluetooth chipsets, hijacked them to use
[something?] to magically transfer data while they are disabled somehow below
the TCP/IP level, within a sandbox...

I mean, assuming they actually did manage this, it wouldn't be portable
either. It sounds like they'd have to implement their own driver, which would
mean hardware dependence.. and then theirs the fact that they are apparently
breaking out of the sandbox and getting direct hardware access, a major
exploit..

I call BS

edit: Note, I know that wifi is capable of P2P/ad-hoc connections, and it's
what bluetooth uses exclusively... The article seems to say that this app
doesn't use that though and has these things disabled

~~~
freehunter
The implication in the article is that it turns on the Bluetooth or WiFi chip
and sends the data. The radios are off to begin with, but the software turns
them on.

~~~
thevdude
The article states they they have to be powered up, so airplane mode is still
a no-go.

~~~
nwh
WiFi works in Airplane mode on iOS.

------
lutusp
Quote: “And then we’ve built a whole new layer on top of that that is
standardized in our software — so an iPhone and a Windows Phone are going to
know how to discover each other and communicate, because they’re using our
standardized layer, as opposed to the incompatible standards that are out
there today.”

Yes -- a whole new _incompatible_ layer.

I cannot tell you how many times I've heard this exact pitch during my long
career in this business. "Our method breaks through the morass of
incompatible, adversarial protocols" ... by creating yet another incompatible,
adversarial protocol that refuses to work with any existing ones.

The only difference between this and Microsoft's classic "Embrace, Extend and
Engulf" strategy is that small companies can only create a new niche protocol,
hopefully soon to be forgotten.

Zeroconf was more than good enough. UpNp was more than good enough. And so
forth. But no one is willing to adopt anyone else's universal, flexible,
foolproof communications protocol.

~~~
iLoch
[http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png)

------
freehunter
I would like to know who told them that it's physically impossible for
software to turn a radio on, look for other radios nearby, pair, and then send
data.

Because that's basically what radios (and the software that controls them) are
designed to do.

~~~
wmf
It impossible for an _app_ to do this, because sandboxing doesn't allow it.

~~~
freehunter
Hence the debate about whether or not Apple or Microsoft will allow this into
their app stores. Interestingly enough, this uncertainty is not mentioned in
the Risks section of their Kickstarter page. They're promising software that
could very likely never be allowed to be used by the majority of the people
funding it.

------
TrainedMonkey
I would like to know how they break out of sandbox and actually access
physical radio on iOS without jailbreak. Because you know, it is not like
Apple would like to patch that asap.

------
Bsharp
You should change the title - the content is interesting enough that you don't
need the mystery, and many people who would otherwise be interested probably
won't click.

Cool stuff though!

~~~
mikeash
No, I think the BS title is the perfect lead-in for this sort of BS article,
which provides _no_ details and makes completely ludicrous claims e.g. being
able to directly talk to cell radio hardware from an iPhone app sandbox.

~~~
leephillips
It was made pretty clear that the app is using the WiFi and bluetooth radios,
not the cell radio.

~~~
function_seven
Still very improbable that this app has direct, hardware-level access to these
chips. Or--if it does--that the sandboxes won't be patched to fix the hole
this app is using.

You may as well invest in a Kickstarter for a free energy machine.

------
oftenwrong
>The end goal for Fasetto, said Christmas, is taking back control of our
technology.

So this will be FOSS, right?

~~~
iambateman
It sounds like they took the layer written by the big bad boys and added
in...their own...layer.

Errr...

------
rsync
I don't expect you to be able to do point to point GSM comms. That's
"reasonable".

Further, while it disappoints me that you can't easily do point to point wifi
between, for instance, iDevice and winphone, I'm not really surprised.

But I do not understand the bluetooth part. Granted, I have a very, very dumb
phone so I'm not doing things like this at all, but I _assumed_ that simple
file transfer via bluetooth would work just fine between, say, iDevice and
Android ... it's really troubling to learn that's crippleware.

I mean, that's _the whole point_ of bluetooth.

~~~
tedunangst
If one of your phones has tethering enabled, you can turn on the hotspot and
have the other phone connect to it. This should work even if there's no cell
phone reception. Is that easy?

------
peterwwillis
> “We’ve gone right down to the hardware level and rewritten the transport
> layer, so we’re talking directly to the hardware chips on the device,” said
> Luke Malpass, Fasetto’s lead (and currently only) developer. “And then we’ve
> built a whole new layer on top of that that is standardized in our software
> — so an iPhone and a Windows Phone are going to know how to discover each
> other and communicate, because they’re using our standardized layer, as
> opposed to the incompatible standards that are out there today.”

At first it sounds like he's claiming that they created their own drivers for
the wireless chips of seemingly every phone. Which is pretty much impossible
(for them).

What's probably happening is they're enabling ad-hoc mode on the wifi chips,
and enable bluetooth transport between any two devices nearby each other. Then
their app deals with the addressing and routing of messages using some
proprietary tunneling, with probably some kind of virtual network interface
that talks to their app so they can communicate on multiple networks at once.

It's a neat idea that makes it easier to do networking between devices. But
the title ("They said this hack was impossible") is incorrect. Ad-hoc wifi
networks and bluetooth network transport works just fine with existing devices
and no other software.

As usual, the idea with this piece and their website is to exaggerate as much
as possible to drum up funding. If people figured out how boring this really
is they might not get enough press.

------
Lutin
This article is misleading in its description of the technology and its use of
phrases such as "...their lack of cell, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC
connections." They seem to confound lack of wide-area connections with a lack
of local-area connections. It appears the authors simply have a protocol they
have devised agnostic of a specific transport layer, and they are writing
interfaces to every transport layer possible on the top three mobile
platforms.

I highly advise anyone interested in this to instead read the information on
the Kickstarter page: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fasetto/fasetto-
sharing-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fasetto/fasetto-sharing-
files-instantly-anywhere-online-or)

------
MichaelGG
I read Fasetto as Falsetto and figured they were using high-frequency audio to
transmit data between phones. An app using that shouldn't have any issue
getting approved (just needs speaker/mic), but I suppose the data rate would
be pretty low.

It seems that it just tries whatever the device offers. From the kickstarter:

"If Bluetooth isn’t available it can use near field, if near field isn’t
available it can use WiFi Direct, if WiFi Direct isn’t available it can use
hotspot, and if that isn’t available it can use root sockets (TCP, UDP or any
other supported protocol, using any port)."

I'm not sure what "root sockets" means, or how UDP is going to allow you to
transmit without WiFi, NFC, or Bluetoth.

~~~
bentcorner
Has anyone written an app to transfer data through the headphone jack for P2P
data sharing?

Along the lines of "I don't have network and I want to share with someone else
on a different platform and don't (or can't) use bluetooth/wifi".

Narrow population, but it would be a fun project to learn about sending data
over an audio medium.

Get it working well and you might even be able to send data over a set of
headphones/mic, although your data throughput would likely be slow as
molasses.

~~~
revdinosaur
TinCan[1] does that, at least with text. There was a discussion here a few
months ago about using AFSK to control external hardware that spurred me to
hack together a script that allows this (output only) on iOS Safari[2] and I
use it to control some Arduino projects.

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hubski.com...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hubski.com.kvh.tincan)

[2] [http://sixteenmillimeter.github.io/Javascript-FSK-Serial-
Gen...](http://sixteenmillimeter.github.io/Javascript-FSK-Serial-Generator-
for-Mobile-Safari/)

------
skizm
I mean, will this work after Apple patches their OS so you can't breakout of
the application sandbox? This is pretty cool and all but it seems to me like a
bug. Something they should report to Apple (or Google/Microsoft) get some sort
of reward from a bug bounty program and be on their way.

I thought the app sandbox was designed to specifically prevent app makers from
accessing the hardware in unauthorized ways. (I am guessing Android and
Windows phones have similar ways of controlling access to the hardware). This
seems like the exact use case that should be stopped.

~~~
potatolicious
Indeed. "iPhone app I downloaded running custom drivers on my network
hardware" is exactly the sort of non-evil thing the sandbox is supposed to
stop.

There is simply no way what they're doing is kosher with Apple, nor should it
be. For a sandboxed application to run custom drivers on my hardware defies
any notion of security.

Jailbroken phones where people have acknowledged the risk of running things
outside the sandbox? Sure. Great.

------
Bhel
I hate it when articles lack of technical details, or fail to disclose
important information.

I find it interesting that their website announces that they're gonna be
launching all of thei apps by January 2014, considering that their kickstarter
hasn't ended, and that it's almost sure that Apple won't play along.

That said, I'm all up for a quicker way to share things with my friend's
Android, so while the article is far from making me want to support this, I
might give it a try once it's out.

------
talmand
A lot of smart people said something that was eventually done with software
was "physically" impossible? Who were these smart people exactly?

I'm curious about the security layer. It sounds like a one-time pad kind of
setup. If true, does that mean the devices involved have to be synched up in a
different secured environment to share the encryption codes and the protocols
on how they should be used?

Eventually it will offer phone calls and text messaging? So you can call
people in the immediate vicinity?

------
Amadou
Will Apple even permit this in their appstore? Sounds like the kind of thing
they would not be happy about.

------
ust
This doesn't seem so impossible, if device can work as a wi-fi hotspot,
instead of forwarding Internet connection, it can just send a file to other
device, unlike AirDrop, which needs a router to establish communication
between devices. Or maybe I'm wrong...

------
ericcumbee
When they said completely offline I was expecting all radios to be completely
off.

------
phyalow
The claim is that they are breaking out into kernel mode from the userland
sandbox? Seems very implausible.

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evan_
iPhones have (something very similar to) this baked-in as of iOS 7 in the form
of AirDrop.

~~~
pedalpete
I'm pretty sure AirDrop needs either a WiFi or Cellular connection, as the
article states, this needs neither.

Also, AirDrop doesn't share with Android and Windows Phones.

~~~
evan_
> I'm pretty sure AirDrop needs either a WiFi or Cellular connection, as the
> article states, this needs neither.

No, AirDrop does not require wifi or cellular. It uses Bluetooth LTE to scan
for nearby phones and then establishes an ad-hoc wifi connection.

You can't use it if you have wifi turned off (or airport mode turned on), but
it works whether you're connected to a network or not.

> Also, AirDrop doesn't share with Android and Windows Phones.

And as of November 19 2013, this does not either.

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seba_dos1
Uhm, ad-hoc?

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dhrona
Very interesting, so are they creating an adhoc connection from the device?

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wnevets
who are 'they'?

~~~
vezzy-fnord
You can always tell an article is going to be subpar by its use of weasel
words in the title.

