SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
When Google popped out Chrome 56 at the end of January it was keen to remind us it's making the web safer by flagging non-HTTPS sites. But Google made little effort to publicise another feature that's decidedly less friendly to privacy, because it lets websites connect to Bluetooth devices and harvest information from them through the browser.
[...Pete] LePage, in the video, says: "Until now, the ability to communicate with Bluetooth devices has been possible only for native apps. With Chrome 56, your Web app can communicate with nearby Bluetooth devices in a private and secure manner, using the Web Bluetooth API. "The Web Bluetooth API uses the GATT protocol, which enables your app to connect to devices such as light bulbs, toys, heart-rate monitors, LED displays and more, with just a few lines of JavaScript."
Let's start with LePage's security-and-privacy claims: what Google means is that the server-to-browser connection is over TLS, and users have to allow connection with a touch or a mouse click. To reiterate: as a user, you have to explicitly grant the remote web app access to your Bluetooth gadgets before anything happens. Then you select a device to pair with the webpage, and away you go. The webpage can filter for devices, so for example, a health site can ask to be paired with gadgets that have a heart rate sensor. A site can't see any device until it is paired.
Source:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/05/chrome_56_quietly_added_bluetooth_snitch_api/
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 07 2017, @03:18PM
I've been on the lookout for the next JRE since the late 1990's.
For a long time, for me, it has been the JRE.
What I want since the mid 1990's and was on a search for the Holy Grail:
* Platform portability without having to rewrite
* and the big one: portable GUI across platforms
* Access to all major platform features
* High level language, ideally with GC, Lambdas, maybe true closures, etc enabling very high level problem domains
The JRE pretty much fills the bill.
Now days one can look at Node.js and even Electron to build "native" GUI applications.
Back in about 2003 I was seriously thinking about OpenOffice.org as my "platform" for building things upon. Browsers were hopelessly inadequate and incompatible (but I had the vision of the potential). But OpenOffice.org really was cross platform and had a portable API and you could, to some extent built actual GUI applications in it with difficulty. And you could use several languages. But you had to deeply learn the API and push the capabilities to the absolute limit. Even then there were some limits to the custom dialog boxes and windows you could create. The amount of effort wasn't quite worth it. And it didn't have a very good deployment story.
I also considered XUL. FireFox is open source. It has a good deployment story. You could build a portable application with a native looking UI.
Now browsers seem to have finally become the portable substrate upon which real, powerful, and performant applications can be built.
I'm sure I haven't been the only one in this quest for the Holy Grail for building applications. It may not exist. But it seems like it should. So I continue the search for it. It now seems closer than ever. A way to build an application, that is cross platform and doesn't have to be rewritten. Is not tied to a monopolist platform.
I won't even bring up mobile device applications. Won't even mention it. No, nosiree.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.