Bad Smart Watch Authentication
sprocketfox.io
sprocketfox.io
We are talking about a device with no internet connection that can only be accessed by someone in the same proximity to yourself.
Perhaps don't buy this watch if you live in a crowded location and take public transport a lot. For everyone else, seems really unlikely that the people you interact with will have setup a malicious attack for your watch brand. I don't think wardriving smart watches is a thing.
I'd only suggest that if the watch supports putting a credit card on it that you rethink doing that.
I hear this a lot.
Yet those same people suddenly do care when their personal information (or that of their wife/girlfriend/child) ends up all over the internet.
Anonymous heart rate data simply isn't interesting to anyone. You won't find any dark net health statistics.
Another use case is using the watch to unlock other devices. That also seems security sensitive.
And some people may be uncomfortable about the health data that could be extracted from such a watch.
I'm not giving these watches a ringing endorsement. I wouldn't buy or wear one.
I'm just saying the authentication system isn't super dire.
"I can't access my todo list because azure is down"
We should go back to analog. We're wasting our time.
It's weird how much they still maintain a difference between a "fitness" watch and an "outdoors" watch and the supporting software.
It's the silly bifurcation between Garmin Connect and Garmin Explore software and online service worlds. It seems like an arbitrary accident of corporate history and leaky abstractions.
A great example would be when Benson Leung was testing USB-C cables on Amazon to see which were standards compliant.
They are also not experts, generally.
It's pretty frustrating that when you're shopping for a laptop, nobody can tell you it'll suspend properly under Linux. Or when you're shopping for a bike light nobody can tell you whether over the summer it'll self-discharge to the point it bricks itself due to cell imbalance. Or when you're shopping for a microsd card, nobody can tell you.... you get the picture.
But to produce honest reviews, I couldn't accept free review units, kickbacks or affiliate money. And people shopping for laptops and bike lights don't need a $$$-per-month subscription to my newsletter/channel/patreon, they just need a few yes-or-no answers.
And there's a huge amount of churn in products on sites like Amazon; you wouldn't just pay for 40 bike lights, review them all, and solve the problem forever. Different models and brands appear all the time.
And even then, just because when I reviewed that microsd card and found it had great performance, nothing stops the manufacturer substituting cheaper components later on, without changing the part number; it's not like there was a specification promising the performance I observed in my review.
https://swhs.home.xs4all.nl/fiets/tests/verlichting/index_en...
That said I’m a little curious if any kind of Gell-Mann effect is going on since he never reviews products that I already have extensive experience with. I’m wondering if anyone has watched any of his reviews and came away feeling like he did a really poor job.