BlueTooth vs. 802.11

Ernest N. Prabhakar (ernest@alumni.caltech.edu)
Sun, 07 Nov 1999 21:51:31 -0800


Okay, could someone fill me in on how all these puppies are related to each
other? What does FoRK think of AirPort?

-- Ernie P.

> At 09:41 AM 11/3/99 -0500, Mark_Day@lotus.com wrote:
>>I thought the deflation of Bluetooth hype was already starting in a pretty
>>serious way. Lots of hedging from member companies about how
>>big/expensive/power-hungry Bluetooth devices will be, no-one really
>>committing to shipping products, etc.
>
>>I also had the impression that Bluetooth only delivers a communication
>>channel, and has very naive notions of user authentication. I was
>>tangentially involved in some discussions about ad hoc conferencing that
>>envisioned pairwise manual authentication: i.e. for each pair of devices in
>>a conference, each user would be presented with a dialog box asking whether
>>it was OK to trust the other party. That also seems like something you'd
>>have to fix to do wearable e-commerce.
>
> There's certainly lots about link level authentication in the specs, but
> nothing (that I've found) about what that means up higher in the stack, nor
> any requirement to have link management access the UI. It appears as
> though applications are to assume that if they receive bits, that they're
> trusted bits, and if they send bits, they'll be trusted bits.
>
> I certainly have a strong interest in knowing
> which of Bluetooth, 802.11, or something else will reach critical mass first.
>
> MB
>

------------
Ernest Prabhakar <ernest@apple.com>
Darwin Product Manager, Apple Computer, Inc.