That's not the NFC party most people are attending. For me the most common use of NFC is to automatically pair/turn on my headphones and my portable speaker.
Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
81–90 of 119 posts
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might be off-topic, but anyone know what other techs provide indoor distance tacking/localization other than BLE beacons? WIFI's accuracy is too low.
I worked at a consulting company about a decade ago that designed an indoor tracking system. It could track a device to within a meter, and that was no trivial undertaking. I always have a laugh when I see some startup making a child tracker/pet tracker using iBeacon. You need a large array of radios to track the beacons, you have to model the physics of the building's construction (absorption, Rayleigh scattering, e…
It's not all that hard with RFID and the right antenna. It's done extensively in facilities with expensive equipment like refineries.
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
One nice thing is bluetooth pairing. I bought a pair of Bose QC35 headphones recently. There is an NFC tag embedded in the headphones. I just had to tap my phone to the headphones and hit an "accept" button on my phone, and they were paired. Similarly a friend has a box plugged into their stereo that's essentially just an A2DP receiver with RCA outputs, and has NFC on it for pairing. I wanted to play some music on hi…
Do you just tap, or do you have to launch an app first? I only ask because the bluetooth pairing process is already pretty painless (I have QC35 and an iPhone).
You just tap if you have an Android phone with NFC. I purposely got a Bluetooth speaker with NFC to make pairing easy. Whether my girlfriend or I use it or most of our friends of we go to the park or bring it to a BBQ, it's much easier than the usual manual process required on iPhone.
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at a consulting company about a decade ago that designed an indoor tracking system. It could track a device to within a meter, and that was no trivial undertaking. I always have a laugh when I see some startup making a child tracker/pet tracker using iBeacon. You need a large array of radios to track the beacons, you have to model the physics of the building's construction (absorption, Rayleigh scattering, e…
It's not all that hard with RFID and the right antenna. It's done extensively in facilities with expensive equipment like refineries.
If you helped implement that system, I'd like to know more.
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#85Neat, but I've yet to see a single NFC use case that gets me anywhere near as excited as this author. Amiibo is a cool concept but obviously limited. I've used some writable tags for android settings changes and such years ago, but it just doesn't seem useful to me. Anyone know a killer use case I'm missing here?
It reminds me of the ridiculous excitement over iBeacons when Apple announced their proprietary NFC-like tech a few years ago. Virtually every iOS dev I know bought some cheap iBeacons thinking "wow this is so cool" and never ended up building anything useful. I wasn't immune either, as the abandoned iBeacon in my desk drawer attests to. There's undoubtedly great use cases for NFC on phones (payments, travel passes,…
I am using iBeacons so that my automation knows what room I am in my apartment. I plan on doing 3d positioning with them eventually.
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly there is no NFC token that supports 4096 bit RSA keys (I'm not even talking about EC keys). Fidesmo also has support for PGP/U2F over NFC.
That's okay. RSA-4096 is suitable for long term secrets, but we're talking about authentication: typically signing short challenges, or DH key shares, for immediate verification. The requirements for that application are much lighter.
How do you authenticate through NFC PGP on Android? Is that something specific to your company or is there a public app that you're using?
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Yubikey NEO is the only NFC device that ever got me excited. It'd be nice to be able to store all my TOTP tokens on the device instead of the phone. Also, signing/encrypting text with PGP from the yubikey.
Absolutely this. SMS 2FA has security flaws that are becoming ever more evident - U2F via NFC is a great way to authenticate on Android, and I'm looking forward to having it on iOS as well. Edit: Welp. Looking at the U2F NFC spec it looks like some exchange with the key needs to occur, so without transmit access we're boned.
> U2F via NFC is a great way to authenticate on Android
Unfortunately as far as I know only Yubikey NEO and Fidesmo card support it with Fidesmo being practically not usable. From https://www.fidesmo.com/nfc-u2f-android/ :
> Google’s own account security website, that on desktop allows you to register U2F devices, says that the feature is not compatible with the Chrome browser on Android. The account security site on GitHub seems to support the feature is a bit better. When pressing the button to add a token to the account it properly launches Google Authenticator to register the U2F device. When tapping the card and returning to the GitHub site however it doesn’t seem to have registered that anything has happened.
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the coolness requires a critical mass. The idea is usually being a standard, being Apple supported, or being included in Android provides that...in practice, that hasn't been true. I look enviously at other countries that have been using feature phones for banking and p2p banking. The video of a guy in China assembling his own iPhone shows QR codes at each booth used for payment. There's no reason Smart Phon…
Actually, interestingly, QR codes can be better for some payment scenarios than NFC. I live in China and I can go to my local corner shop, pick up a bottle from the fridge, and even if there's a queue at the register I can scan the code from a distance, pay and leave with a nod from the shop keeper. QR codes are also used for exchanging contact information... when I give a talk in China, I put my Wechat QR code at th…
Perhaps not coincidentally then, Apple is providing native support for QR codes in the Camera app in IOS 11.
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the coolness requires a critical mass. The idea is usually being a standard, being Apple supported, or being included in Android provides that...in practice, that hasn't been true. I look enviously at other countries that have been using feature phones for banking and p2p banking. The video of a guy in China assembling his own iPhone shows QR codes at each booth used for payment. There's no reason Smart Phon…
Actually, interestingly, QR codes can be better for some payment scenarios than NFC. I live in China and I can go to my local corner shop, pick up a bottle from the fridge, and even if there's a queue at the register I can scan the code from a distance, pay and leave with a nod from the shop keeper. QR codes are also used for exchanging contact information... when I give a talk in China, I put my Wechat QR code at th…
QR codes are cheaper, but NFC tags are more convenient. QR code are typically also all the same on a given label, where NFC can be programmed to have a unique id for each relatively simple.
Re: Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
#90Neat, but I've yet to see a single NFC use case that gets me anywhere near as excited as this author. Amiibo is a cool concept but obviously limited. I've used some writable tags for android settings changes and such years ago, but it just doesn't seem useful to me. Anyone know a killer use case I'm missing here?
It reminds me of the ridiculous excitement over iBeacons when Apple announced their proprietary NFC-like tech a few years ago. Virtually every iOS dev I know bought some cheap iBeacons thinking "wow this is so cool" and never ended up building anything useful. I wasn't immune either, as the abandoned iBeacon in my desk drawer attests to. There's undoubtedly great use cases for NFC on phones (payments, travel passes,…
I built an app for the world-leading led-manufacturer. They have underwater-lightbulbs and tag them with NFC for servicing and tracking. They seal the tag in with the led inside the casing.