Looks very promising but Telcos and social networking giants might have something to say about users being able to connect and share among themselves bypassing their hubs
Bottom line is we need the LAN equivalent for mobile devices and this looks like a step in the right direction. Still to doesn't address the issues of curation and security very well but that might be up to developers. If the game you're playing is Wifi Aware then you can have secure and relevant social interactions curated by your game developer.
If widely adopted, Wifi Aware could redefine social networking and finally enable the now infamous "elastic social networks". A dynamic collection of these elastic networks could be thought of as a "civic network" or a new paradigm in social networking that allow us to share and connect with people nearby to discover placer, crowd-shop, get better POVs on stadiums, take 3D photos and videos, share files in conferences and classrooms, become citizen reporters and profoundly change interactions in every naturally occurring group of people. Quoting one of my essays (The Case For A Global Civic Network, http://www.jordhy.com/the-case-for-a-civic-network):
----
What Facebook is to a club, this next property needs to be to the “open society”. An open collaboration place that is less intimate than your social network of choice, but still manages to embed intelligence, security and structure into our daily interactions. If you think of society and civility as the protocols that make us productive offline, then the idea of a civic network emerges as the tools that will make us productive as a “hive” or significant group of people. Indeed, this is a big idea, but one that could change our world for the better and have a disruptive impact for generations to come.
----
While I'm skeptical, I think that Wifi Aware is a huge step into such a vision and, if widely adopted, could create new possibilities for developers and users.
And I thought monitoring WiFi devices was pretty easy with current probe management frames. With this it will be even easier to follow unique set of apps walk around since all of this have to be sent in clear.
Then for exploiting we just need one vulnerable application and then magnify a signal and BAM! We get to crash (or takeover) whole neighborhood worth of devices in one smooth swipe.
I just don't see anyway to make this secure. Then again people are constantly using open public WiFi connections and sending sensitive information over them.
Yes, but I am reminded of what people in 1990 would think of "In 20 years, all your software [1] will be randomly downloaded from the internet and run on your computer. That software will store files on your computer, access the low-level language of your graphics card, connect to other computers, and run calculations in the background."
Seems impossibly insecure, right? Yes, it has risks, but we all accept them.
The good news is that people will finally be able to communicate to each other without the intervention of (several) giant megacorps.
Undoubtedly enabling new and richer methods to tailor services perfectly for your needs by using unique and personally identifiable (just one database away) device identification.
Such a great idea but I can't help being super anxious about what it will be really used for. :(
