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link: Chromecast Now Lets Your Guests Take Over Your TV Without Needing Your WiFi Password
Back in June, Google announced a rather nifty new feature coming to Chromecast: your friends and house guests would soon be able to connect to your Chromecast without being on your WiFi network, thanks to the clever use of magic ultrasonic sounds.
after a few months of silence, that feature launches.
One bummer of a caveat, though: it’ll only work if your friend’s phone is running Android, for now. Why? It all comes down to that age-old problem: iOS apps aren’t allowed to do certain things required to make it work, so they’re rolling with it on Android until that changes.
Guest mode is off by default. Flip it on, and your Chromecast will start displaying a PIN on its idle screen. Meanwhile, your TV will start emitting ultrasonic sounds, inaudible to the human ear*, which Chromecast-enabled apps on your phone will be listening for. When the two find each other, everything falls into place and the pairing is made.
[* No word yet on if non-human ears (i.e. dogs) can hear it. If your dog starts whining whenever your Chromecast is on, you should probably turn guest mode back off.]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday December 19 2014, @08:27AM
without being on your WiFi network
When the two find each other, everything falls into place and the pairing is made.
It's not clear from summary or article - how does the phone then control the Chromecast? Via the internet through the phone's mobile data connection?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @02:42PM
Your friend downloads and installs an app, and the phone uses its mobile connection to contact your wifi hotspot, which is read by Google's streetview car, which then transmits the data via satellite link back to Google's data centers, which is intercepted by the NSA's prism infrastructure to be stored in a massive data warehouse which is being monitored by countless trained spy monkeys, which then report your command encoded in the data to their superiors which seek authorization from the POTUS to launch an airstrike on a big magic button which when hit by a 10,000 lb bomb fragments into a million projectiles flying in all directions, one of which flies in through the window and hits the appropriate control button on the TV.
(Score: 2) by TK on Friday December 19 2014, @02:42PM
The chromecast website is blocked at work, so I can't get more details from the site. Judging by the promo video, I doubt there will be much info there anyway.
There isn't a lot of data transfer from device to device. Really just the url of a video at most (what is that, 1kb?). I imagine that wouldn't be too much of a problem over mobile data. Some latency issues, sure, but supposedly the inconvenience is worth the convenience.
Unless there's a microphone on the chromecast itself, then you could pass data between devices via speaker.
I don't see why this needs to be ultrasonic. Why not play some notes that are distorted to identify the device ID? You can go with some well known old school sound byte [youtube.com] for nostalgia cred. That seems to play well the 20-something crowd.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum