They said this hack was impossible

  You shouldn’t need to jailbreak your device to make PDQ work; 
  the app alone does the trick. (Whether Apple and other app 
  store operators will allow PDQ on their marketplaces is 
  separate matter.)

The author of this article, and more worryingly the developers running a Kickstarter campaign, seem to have an insufficient understanding of the technical criteria upon which Apple admits or rejects apps.

"...Even when they're offline!"

I was expecting some arcane optical-modem procedure where you point the receiving phone's camera at the sender's screen, which flashes a series of glyphs or something like a high-bandwidth QR code. That would've been cool. Instead it turns out that "even when they're offline" just means "we were lying about that part." Oh well.

I tend to think this is an impossible hack, or at least the article is grossly exaggerating things. From the sound of it, they somehow managed to get directly into the wifi and bluetooth chipsets, hijacked them to use [something?] to magically transfer data while they are disabled somehow below the TCP/IP level, within a sandbox...

I mean, assuming they actually did manage this, it wouldn't be portable either. It sounds like they'd have to implement their own driver, which would mean hardware dependence.. and then theirs the fact that they are apparently breaking out of the sandbox and getting direct hardware access, a major exploit..

I call BS

edit: Note, I know that wifi is capable of P2P/ad-hoc connections, and it's what bluetooth uses exclusively... The article seems to say that this app doesn't use that though and has these things disabled

Quote: “And then we’ve built a whole new layer on top of that that is standardized in our software — so an iPhone and a Windows Phone are going to know how to discover each other and communicate, because they’re using our standardized layer, as opposed to the incompatible standards that are out there today.”

Yes -- a whole new incompatible layer.

I cannot tell you how many times I've heard this exact pitch during my long career in this business. "Our method breaks through the morass of incompatible, adversarial protocols" ... by creating yet another incompatible, adversarial protocol that refuses to work with any existing ones.

The only difference between this and Microsoft's classic "Embrace, Extend and Engulf" strategy is that small companies can only create a new niche protocol, hopefully soon to be forgotten.

Zeroconf was more than good enough. UpNp was more than good enough. And so forth. But no one is willing to adopt anyone else's universal, flexible, foolproof communications protocol.

I would like to know who told them that it's physically impossible for software to turn a radio on, look for other radios nearby, pair, and then send data.

Because that's basically what radios (and the software that controls them) are designed to do.

I would like to know how they break out of sandbox and actually access physical radio on iOS without jailbreak. Because you know, it is not like Apple would like to patch that asap.

You should change the title - the content is interesting enough that you don't need the mystery, and many people who would otherwise be interested probably won't click.

Cool stuff though!

>The end goal for Fasetto, said Christmas, is taking back control of our technology.

So this will be FOSS, right?

I don't expect you to be able to do point to point GSM comms. That's "reasonable".

Further, while it disappoints me that you can't easily do point to point wifi between, for instance, iDevice and winphone, I'm not really surprised.

But I do not understand the bluetooth part. Granted, I have a very, very dumb phone so I'm not doing things like this at all, but I assumed that simple file transfer via bluetooth would work just fine between, say, iDevice and Android ... it's really troubling to learn that's crippleware.

I mean, that's the whole point of bluetooth.

> “We’ve gone right down to the hardware level and rewritten the transport layer, so we’re talking directly to the hardware chips on the device,” said Luke Malpass, Fasetto’s lead (and currently only) developer. “And then we’ve built a whole new layer on top of that that is standardized in our software — so an iPhone and a Windows Phone are going to know how to discover each other and communicate, because they’re using our standardized layer, as opposed to the incompatible standards that are out there today.”

At first it sounds like he's claiming that they created their own drivers for the wireless chips of seemingly every phone. Which is pretty much impossible (for them).

What's probably happening is they're enabling ad-hoc mode on the wifi chips, and enable bluetooth transport between any two devices nearby each other. Then their app deals with the addressing and routing of messages using some proprietary tunneling, with probably some kind of virtual network interface that talks to their app so they can communicate on multiple networks at once.

It's a neat idea that makes it easier to do networking between devices. But the title ("They said this hack was impossible") is incorrect. Ad-hoc wifi networks and bluetooth network transport works just fine with existing devices and no other software.

As usual, the idea with this piece and their website is to exaggerate as much as possible to drum up funding. If people figured out how boring this really is they might not get enough press.

This article is misleading in its description of the technology and its use of phrases such as "...their lack of cell, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC connections." They seem to confound lack of wide-area connections with a lack of local-area connections. It appears the authors simply have a protocol they have devised agnostic of a specific transport layer, and they are writing interfaces to every transport layer possible on the top three mobile platforms.

I highly advise anyone interested in this to instead read the information on the Kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fasetto/fasetto-sharing-...

I read Fasetto as Falsetto and figured they were using high-frequency audio to transmit data between phones. An app using that shouldn't have any issue getting approved (just needs speaker/mic), but I suppose the data rate would be pretty low.

It seems that it just tries whatever the device offers. From the kickstarter:

"If Bluetooth isn’t available it can use near field, if near field isn’t available it can use WiFi Direct, if WiFi Direct isn’t available it can use hotspot, and if that isn’t available it can use root sockets (TCP, UDP or any other supported protocol, using any port)."

I'm not sure what "root sockets" means, or how UDP is going to allow you to transmit without WiFi, NFC, or Bluetoth.

I mean, will this work after Apple patches their OS so you can't breakout of the application sandbox? This is pretty cool and all but it seems to me like a bug. Something they should report to Apple (or Google/Microsoft) get some sort of reward from a bug bounty program and be on their way.

I thought the app sandbox was designed to specifically prevent app makers from accessing the hardware in unauthorized ways. (I am guessing Android and Windows phones have similar ways of controlling access to the hardware). This seems like the exact use case that should be stopped.

I hate it when articles lack of technical details, or fail to disclose important information.

I find it interesting that their website announces that they're gonna be launching all of thei apps by January 2014, considering that their kickstarter hasn't ended, and that it's almost sure that Apple won't play along.

That said, I'm all up for a quicker way to share things with my friend's Android, so while the article is far from making me want to support this, I might give it a try once it's out.

A lot of smart people said something that was eventually done with software was "physically" impossible? Who were these smart people exactly?

I'm curious about the security layer. It sounds like a one-time pad kind of setup. If true, does that mean the devices involved have to be synched up in a different secured environment to share the encryption codes and the protocols on how they should be used?

Eventually it will offer phone calls and text messaging? So you can call people in the immediate vicinity?

Will Apple even permit this in their appstore? Sounds like the kind of thing they would not be happy about.

This doesn't seem so impossible, if device can work as a wi-fi hotspot, instead of forwarding Internet connection, it can just send a file to other device, unlike AirDrop, which needs a router to establish communication between devices. Or maybe I'm wrong...

When they said completely offline I was expecting all radios to be completely off.

The claim is that they are breaking out into kernel mode from the userland sandbox? Seems very implausible.

iPhones have (something very similar to) this baked-in as of iOS 7 in the form of AirDrop.

Uhm, ad-hoc?

Very interesting, so are they creating an adhoc connection from the device?

who are 'they'?