Can’t imagine when I’ll ever need this, but I love it.
Great work Bahador.
Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
41–50 of 119 posts
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, I had thought about this as well but came to the conclusion that from the company's perspective, this is no different than connecting a random keyboard bought from Amazon, what do you think? Another thought around this is that I don't even think there's anything intrinsically insecure about BT as an attack vector but most likely some old policy based on security issues that existe…
In my experience, the IT section didn't trust anything they didn't approve, themselves. They certainly wouldn't allow us to buy any random device from Amazon. It sucked. Big time, but they had the clout.
In my experience, I just never asked for permission when I was going to work around an annoying policy. I think while the company IT department will not love you, as long as you don't show up in one of their dashboards, it's pretty unlikely they will care. For years. Even if someone does bug you, I doubt it will amount to much other than being forced to adhere to the policy. As long as you ensure it doesn't look too much like you did it on purpose. (I would at least recommend a nice case for the device and picking innocuous USB IDs. Might be able to make it seem like a reasonable looking product, like a normal wireless keyboard receiver.)
Remote work at startups has largely removed my need for this kind of behavior. Now I'm mostly just mad that I can't always run Linux at work anymore.
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#43A potential use case for this is using BT-only peripherals, like Apple Magic Trackpad/keyboard, with KVM/USB switches.
Would this work? I’d buy one. I currently have to use Synergy to share peripherals between two MacBooks.
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#44> This project was born out of a desire to help a friend who couldn't use his favorite Bluetooth mouse and keyboard due to Bluetooth being disabled on his work laptop. Protip: If their company's IT section is like the one at my old company, they are quite unlikely to like this solution, either. But it's very clever. Kudos.
IT departments that are too restrictive will soon find that people have a parallel world executing in Excel sheets and using some external messaging app to keep the company operations running despite IT efforts to ensure it doesn't - I mean to ensure it is "secure"...
My CTO is quite adamant that he hates shadow IT. Especially those with mac, full of... well software used by those artsy employees. Or with strange software not validated by the IT.
Well.
Other departments ask for equipment, but only hear no back. Management product like Monday? No. Dedicated solution for jobs they don't understand? Hell no!
It's tough to be part of this. I know security is hard. Budget limit stuff. But we can, and should do better.
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#45> This project was born out of a desire to help a friend who couldn't use his favorite Bluetooth mouse and keyboard due to Bluetooth being disabled on his work laptop. Protip: If their company's IT section is like the one at my old company, they are quite unlikely to like this solution, either. But it's very clever. Kudos.
IT departments that are too restrictive will soon find that people have a parallel world executing in Excel sheets and using some external messaging app to keep the company operations running despite IT efforts to ensure it doesn't - I mean to ensure it is "secure"...
> "to keep the company operations running despite IT efforts to ensure it doesn't"
Love this!
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, the IT section didn't trust anything they didn't approve, themselves. They certainly wouldn't allow us to buy any random device from Amazon. It sucked. Big time, but they had the clout.
In my experience, I just never asked for permission when I was going to work around an annoying policy. I think while the company IT department will not love you, as long as you don't show up in one of their dashboards, it's pretty unlikely they will care. For years. Even if someone does bug you, I doubt it will amount to much other than being forced to adhere to the policy. As long as you ensure it doesn't look too…
> In my experience, I just never asked for permission when I was going to work around an annoying policy.
Same here, though I've never been in a significantly restrictive place with no authority (in current long-term DayJob I have some involvement in decisions wrt what restrictions are appropriate, and what exceptions to them are appropriate).
If someone is in a truly restrictive environment, they should take care. A deliberate breach of policy could be a job terminating excuse, or at least further justification, if someone wants them out of the way for any other reason, and in such circumstances a workaround and a breach will be seen in the same light.
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#47Ooh, one thing that can be very useful for this is sending USB wakeup packets. I have an HTPC under my TV and game controllers (PS4, Xbox) at my coffee table and there is no way to wake up the PC with those over Bluetooth so I have to keep it on and idling at all times, wasting electricity.
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#48Cool stuff! Actually that tempts me to start a new rabbit hole research: could we do BT -> Internet -> BT. I would have so many uses to that.
> could we do BT -> Internet -> BT
Quite probably, though there might be protocol latency issues that you need to be careful of and they might limit the effective range (lookup the “We can't send mail more than 500 miles” tale for a related issue!).
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#49> This project was born out of a desire to help a friend who couldn't use his favorite Bluetooth mouse and keyboard due to Bluetooth being disabled on his work laptop. Protip: If their company's IT section is like the one at my old company, they are quite unlikely to like this solution, either. But it's very clever. Kudos.
IT departments that are too restrictive will soon find that people have a parallel world executing in Excel sheets and using some external messaging app to keep the company operations running despite IT efforts to ensure it doesn't - I mean to ensure it is "secure"...
There's a name for this: Shadow IT
Re: Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, I had thought about this as well but came to the conclusion that from the company's perspective, this is no different than connecting a random keyboard bought from Amazon, what do you think? Another thought around this is that I don't even think there's anything intrinsically insecure about BT as an attack vector but most likely some old policy based on security issues that existe…
In my experience, the IT section didn't trust anything they didn't approve, themselves. They certainly wouldn't allow us to buy any random device from Amazon. It sucked. Big time, but they had the clout.
The irony of it is that these types love to then support software and hardware that is full of vulnerabilities. "Oh, our management software/SSL-VPN has just been pwned for the sixth time in two years? Well at least the vendor has a fix and the security team can deal with the problem!" or "well our infrastructure is so poorly managed that a single Bluetooth device could, in fact, take over the whole company!"