Apple Releases iBeacon Specification | Hacker News Reader

Apple Releases iBeacon Specification

beekn.net

86 pointsuptown65 comments

We already know what Apple's iBeacon BLE advertising packet looks like without having to sign away your first-born to read the spec. Here it is:

  ff 4c 00 02 15  # Apple's fixed iBeacon advertising prefix
  <Your 16 byte iBeacon proximity uuid>
  00 00 # major 
  00 00 # minor 
  c5 # The 2's complement of the calibrated Tx Power

Anybody can build such a BLE device and market it as "Compatible with iPhone". The question is if Apple will try to to go full-asshole and claim copyright of that packet structure or something ridiculous like that.

Apple doesn't have to claim copyright.

They can simply make sure your iBeacon proximity uuid doesn't get registered with the OS if you aren't a certified vendor.

No uuid registration with the OS and people using your app will not get a background notification for your iBeacons.

This would leave app developers with only having the ability to detect beacons when their app is foreground, or during background processing time.

Note: There are no checks like this today. You can advertise any UUID you want, and have your app subscribe for notifications if the os detects the iBeacon in the background.

Unfortunately it's likely they will go "full asshole" as Apple is a controlled ecosystem.

If you don't tell us why you think it would be in their interest to do so, your comment is meaningless.

"... as Apple is a controlled ecosystem."

What does that mean? Where is this idea defined? How do we know this? What are the alternatives?

Good questions. I'm sorry though I don't have time to reply in depth. The opposite of controlled is managed IMHO.

The first two characters of the fixed prefix are "ÿL", most likely referencing YL Ventures [0], an investor in Upstream Commerce (a real-time intelligence startup).

[0] http://www.ylventures.com/

FF4C0002150 in Binary? 11111111010011000000000000000010000101010000

Number of 1s in that? 15

Number of spaces in the fixed iBeacon prefix? 5

15 / 5?

HL3 Confirmed.

That's what you sound like.

They can patent the specifics of the exchange, similar to how ActiveSync (the web services API that Exchange uses) is patented.

What stops someone from just spamming popular beacons? Or is there a full authenticated handshake?

I wish the media would stop calling BLE "iBeacon". It's like the media started calling WiFi "Airport". First of all, it gives the mistaken impression that Apple invented or controls BLE which is am industry spec. Secondly, one would have to fear that sooner or later, some proprietary extension makes iBeacons incompatible with BLE to lock them in to Apple devices. This seems more likely if consumers are trained to look for "iBeacon compatible" rather than "BLE compatible"

Just watch, take notes and learn how to do brand positioning.

I think you mean posturing.

I would suggest than that other industry participants need to come up with better popular names for technologies. Bluetooth is a total clusterfuck from that perspective.

FWIW I've never heard anybody use the term "Airport" when they meant "Wifi".

I didn't say people refer to Wifi as "Airport", I said calling BLE "iBeacon" is like calling Wifi "Airport". That is, calling an IEEE spec by a proprietary trademark.

Yes, BLE needs a better name. Still doesn't change the fact that the media almost completely ignore what iBeacon is. I see lots of articles that fail to even mention that it is BLE.

...but a better name for BLE isn't "Bluetooth Smart"

No one calls BLE "iBeacon". I challenge you to find a reference to an "iBeacon heart rate monitor" or "iBeacon smart watch"

iBeacon is just an application/profile/use for BLE, one of many.

As for AirPort vs. Wi-Fi, remember that Apple was the first to release consumer products with 802.11b (in July 1999), and there was no consumer-friendly brand name at the time (like what Wi-Fi became). 802.11b is not a consumer friendly name, so they used AirPort.

iBeacon is a standard on top of Bluetooth. It's like saying Airplay is pretty much WiFi but Apple is trying to market it as Airplay. Same as Google Cast protocol on top of WiFi or Spotify Connect on top of WiFi.

FireWire™ vs. i.LINK™ vs. IEEE-1394

It's like everybody calling any application "app" because Apple did so.

The media is not calling BLE iBeacon. iBeacon is an application of BLE, which is designed by Apple and is controlled by Apple because it it a feature of iOS.

Is iBeacon used for anything other than to push ads to your phone as soon as you enter a store?

That seems to be the current push, but off the top of my head I could see museums use them for exhibits, airports for communication back to the airline on where you are in the airport (ie, you should head to the gate now, or your gate has changed).

I think you can use it for indoor navigation were GPS is useless. However I am not sure of this.

In theory it'll be much more accurate for indoor navigation than GPS, as the accuracy level should be higher (as long as there's no RF interference etc etc).

I'm using an 'iBeacon' (raspberry pi) in a museum setting to nudge visitors entering a certain gallery: "if you'd like to take our Matisse audio tour…" They slide that notification and iOS opens our app directly to the audio tour.

Here's a much richer interactive tour: http://blog.estimote.com/post/77385955199/estimote-beacons-a...

With two or more beacons in range you can triangulate for an accuracy within centimeters. It's a key enabling technology for Augmented Reality. It's also how you're going to talk to ambient environmental controls and retrofit older buildings with situational awareness (thalience) that allows them to be responsive to the needs of humans passing through.

Do you have any examples of this? I was excited for this use but everything I can see suggests that it is highly inaccurate:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20332856/triangulate-exa...

This is why it's bleeding edge technology. At the moment it's not very good; and it won't be for some time. To get to something useful will probably take multiple iterations.

This is why it's so exciting. If you can build something useful with the current generation of technology; it will get better.

But you said:

"With two or more beacons in range you can triangulate for an accuracy within centimeters."

it appears that is objectively not true. In fact, the technology powering iBeacons does not seem to be capable of it. So, sure, in a few year's time, a beacon-like technology that may or may not be called iBeacons will allow for accurate positioning. So what?

I've seen a demo; it was finicky and had issues and didn't do orientation.

BLE is not ideal for accurate positioning, or RSSI for that matter. That said, it works for proximity, which should be sufficient for many applications.

iBeacon doesn't give you anything useful for triangulation. Sorry. A closer beacon can give you worse signal than the one which is far. That's the nature of Blutooth.

*>> A closer beacon can give you worse signal than the one which is far.

Well, the calibration helps quite a bit.

I'm not 100% on-board with the triangulation either.

But for proximity (with the calibration), I think it is repeatable to within inches.

It still depends on the environment. If you've got any kind of obstacles, those will affect the signal strength. If a metal shelf or the bag of water I call a body is between me and a beacon, it may think I'm further away than if my phone has a direct line of sight down an aisle to the beacon. Unless you can control for all that, it's not going to be very reliable at all.

Yes. For example a recent update to Automatic [1] included iBeacon support. It is supposed to make the connection between the phone and the Automatic it's self more reliable when you get into your car.

They've actually said they are the largest iBeacon deployment at the moment since they turned that feature on.

[1] http://www.automatic.com

Two-Factor auth?

At a recent hackaton, my team created an app for using iBeacon for employee tracking: http://tracktimeapp.com/

I want to see it used to provide an interactive map of a large store, with the ability to search for products and see where the relevant shelf is compared to your current location.

I don't know if anyone is doing this, but the technology seems accurate enough.

I did a trial project with the goal of walking around a lab having readings appear for each piece of equipment as you approach it. Proximity detection was terrible... as it is, I don't think it's useful for anything but very gross distance estimations. Walking into a store will likely work but even then, the distance between stores would have to be pretty significant (or else other stores are presumed to not operate the same beacons).

A lot of players (including Apple now it seems) trying to make money on top of a standard. there is no IP to be traded in Bluetooth LE itself.

Device suppliers are trying to lock purchasers into particular brands.

Apple presumable are offering the facility of automatic recognition and filtering of specific devices to fire and pass data to iOS apps.

What we (as developers) need is an open standard for encryption and recognition so that we can work with multiple suppliers to meet the needs of our end users.

The way it has turned out is sort of the other way around. Nearly the entire press corps refers to BLE beacons as "iBeacons", so there is some value to hardware manufacturers in being able to market their product under that name.

It's unfortunate though because Samsung will obviously never market a feature of iBeacons.

Can't tell if you're ironic, but they've just patented their own version of that called Flybell

I gave up trying to register as an iBeacon developer after Apple pushed me to a $49 Coface credit rating service.

You can't even SEE the specification without spending $49? Come on.

I'm assuming the credit check is so that you can have the privilege of paying Apple a royalty for every device you stamp "iBeacon" on.

If I'm understanding this correctly, it looks like a smart move by Apple that will suck for anyone who doesn't want an iDevice? Are they just trying to market BLE as iBeacon so consumers use it, even though it's clearly never going to be marketed under that name by any other OEM? They've essentially found a way to make companies pay to call their BLE iBeacon, paying for Apple to break the market and make everyone else think BLE is iOS only?

What I find interesting is that there has been very little talk about privacy concerns over iBeacon.

I wonder why that's the case?

What are the privacy concerns? as far as i know, it's a broadcast-only mechanism - your device doesn't respond to a beacon, if you don't want to broadcast anything don't set up an iBeacon.

This is exactly it: a beacon just announces itself and provides its ID. It's up to an app on the receiving device to listen for the beacons it cares about and react to them.

The beacon has no way of knowing which devices are listening or are in range of the beacon so there's no privacy issues I can think of.

Site is loading very slow for me, so here's the text: http://pastebin.com/2WisUL8z

This news sounds fake to me, based merely on a screenshot. This "iBeacon program" mention of this page is not new.

Is this NFC for Apple?

HOPEFULLY NFC beats this, but who knows.

NFC cannot do what iBeacons do, therefore it cannot beat iBeacon whatever that would mean.

Still waiting for the superior iBacon.

I'm waiting for iFrancisBacon, the photo-sharing app that turns your selfies into wall-sized nightmarish canvases of melting paint and distorted limbs.

Regardless of the fact that you, and I, realize that two separate teams are working on these things, it looks really bad (well, at least to me) to have your flagship OS vulnerable to an amazingly easy to exploit security hole for multiple days, widely and loudly publicized ...

And nothing comes out. Oh, except this, a specification for pushing ads on you based on your location.

Apple has had a working gotofail fix for OS X internally for days.

Disagree - down vote? Give me a good reason why it’s not bad PR to not hold off on posting about iBeacon and better ways to serve us ads while there’s a glaring hole your only comment on is “coming soon..."

If you missed it there is OS X update. You also probably missed a good book, check out „Mystical man month" by Fred Brooks.

I’m aware there’s an update, now. Who knew that earlier today?

You probably also missed the first sentence of my comment, “aware that there are multiple, different teams responsible for each”, and that my commentary was on the PR perception of making your first announcement of the day “Hey, better ways to serve you ads”, and specifically -not- “they could have pushed this out faster had they moved a documentation team to security”.

Your comment that you're aware here are multiple teams involved makes your own comment meaningless.

Gotofail is not even close to amazingly easy to exploit since it requires a MITM.

iBeacons are not a way to serve better ads, although if you are focused on ad serving, you might see them that way.

How difficult is this to follow?

Despite the fact that internally, there are different teams involved, it doesn’t lessen the PR perception that your priorities are in the wrong place when there’s radio silence on this critical security hole (and most reviews I’ve read seem to be of the opinion that this is a horrific hole), but yet you’re putting out press releases on a feature that holds little value beyond advertising.

It's not hard to follow - it's just that your dressing up your own negative opinion under the guise of 'the PR perception'. There is no objective thing that can be called 'the PR perception'.

Also I see you have chosen to repeat the falsehood iBeacon holds little value beyond advertising. That's just a statement about your lack of understanding of potential of the technology, but you say it as if it reflects poorly on Apple instead of you.

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