Tangential, 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?

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herghost 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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!

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jjkaczor 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hah, I change my device name and wifi hotspot all the time...

"[Agency-acronym] Surveillance Van #43/44/etc.."

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oarla 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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patja 6 hours ago | parent [-]

How did this play out? Were the ads from an app from the store that you had installed? Or did they spam you over SMS because they associated your bluetooth info with an account you have with the store, or contact info they bought from a third party?

	▲	edent 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Neither. They used to discover your device and then send a Bluetooth push. "Would you like to receive a file from …" It was usually an image, movie, or audio file.
	▲	dylan604 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Were the ads from an app from the store that you had installed? This is my main concern over installing apps in general but specifically store apps. I've noticed that grocery stores are moving past existing loyalty cards and want you to use their apps for exclusively available digital coupons. The prices I'm seeing are very compelling and are on top of existing loyalty card discounts, and I could see lots of people using the app because of it. The assumed amount of abuse keeps me from lemminging my way through the store.

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tonetegeatinst 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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styfle 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did you ever try to communicate with them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluejacking

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mytailorisrich 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I do the reverse. I set my wifi hotspot or bluetooth to "MetPoliceUnit355" and I look for people making faces or looking around.