“Not a fan of Google Glass’s ability to turn ordinary humans into invisibly recording surveillance cyborgs? Now you can create your own ‘glasshole-free zone,'” Andy Greenberg reports for Wired. “Berlin artist Julian Oliver has written a simple program called Glasshole.sh that detects any Glass device attempting to connect to a Wi-Fi network based on a unique character string that he says he’s found in the MAC addresses of Google’s augmented reality headsets”
“Install Oliver’s program on a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone mini-computer and plug it into a USB network antenna, and the gadget becomes a Google Glass detector, sniffing the local network for signs of Glass users,” Greenberg reports. “When it detects Glass, it uses the program Aircrack-NG to impersonate the network and send a ‘deauthorization’ command, cutting the headset’s Wi-Fi connection. It can also emit a beep to signal the Glass-wearer’s presence to anyone nearby.”
“‘To say ‘I don’t want to be filmed’ at a restaurant, at a party, or playing with your kids is perfectly OK. But how do you do that when you don’t even know if a device is recording?’ Oliver tells WIRED. “This steps up the game. It’s taking a jammer-like approach,'” Greenberg reports. “Oliver came up with the program after hearing that a fellow artist friend was disturbed by guests who showed up to his art exhibit wearing Glass. The device, after all, offered no way for the artist to know if the Glass-wearing visitors were photographing, recording, or even live-streaming his work.”
“Oliver warns, though, that the same Glass-ejecting technique could be used more aggressively: He plans to create another version of Glasshole.sh in the near future that’s designed to be a kind of roving Glass-disconnector, capable of knocking Glass off any network or even severing its link to the user’s phone,” Greenberg reports. “‘That moves it from a territorial statement to ‘you can all go to hell.’ It’s a very different position, politically,’ he says. For that version, Oliver says he plans to warn users that the program may be more legally ill-advised, and is only to be used ‘in extreme circumstances.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mmm, roving Glass-disconnector. Luckily for us, our ability to construe “extreme circumstances” is highly malleable. We’ll take 20 units, minimum, please.
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