Lock Your Mac with a Bluetooth Proximity Sensor | Hacker News Reader

Lock Your Mac with a Bluetooth Proximity Sensor

netputing.com

17 pointsfintler15 comments

> As a result your screen will be locked until you move back in range of your Mac. At that point it will unlock on its own. Almost magical!

That's asking for trouble. It's too easy to step away with something embarrassing or incriminating on your screen expecting to return alone, and end up returning to the computer with someone who should not see that screen.

Unlocking should require (at least optionally) something more than your mere presence, such as a PIN. Unlocking should then work this way:

• if the correct Bluetooth device is near, the PIN is necessary and sufficient,

• if the correct Bluetooth device is not near, unlocking requires something more complex than a simple PIN, such as the logged in user's password.

Not exactly the same, but in the same space: http://www.knocktounlock.com/

Been using this for awhile. Deactivated it because it's a huge security risk at border crossings.

Agreed. I just mentioned it as it's similar, but I won't recommended either. I don't recall leaving an unlocked terminal in the past 10+ years. It's habit that's very easy to develop and follow strictly (I do this at home even when I'm alone). At one point, I was even tracing the keyboard cable when coming back to unlock to make sure there isn't something in-between although it's not hard to hack your keyboard internally as well. Laptops robbed me of this habit, unfortunately.

Does anyone know of a simple script to get the signal strength of the bluetooth connection on OS X? I've been putting together pieces of this app functionality, but I'm stuck at a scriptable / command line bluetooth program.

Right now I'm using a bunch of launch daemons to disable the requirement for a password when I'm on a particular wifi network, but bluetooth would be handy.

I have no affiliation with the author of this thing -- I just found it today and started playing with it. It seems to work well after you mess with the sensitivity a bit.

This is a really cool idea. I looked online for alternatives since I have an android device, and while the best solution I found requires an additional device, it looks very polished.

Does anyone have experience with this?

https://atama.io/sesame2

Yes. It is terribly buggy. A guy I work with bought it and considers it a complete waste of money. I have personally seen the lock triggered while he was sitting right next to his computer talking to me.

Nice and also available elsewhere. Namely:

Token Lock - www.map-pin.com/tokenlock-home

Proximity - https://code.google.com/p/reduxcomputing-proximity/

The fact that it uses its own screensaver instead of the system one is enough of a reason not to use it. The only thing it should do is trigger the system screensaver to activate, all unlocking should be standard.

A few years ago I figured out how to make my Mac play a snippet of A-Team theme music when I would return to my desk. It lasted a very triumphant half day before I got tired of it.

Nice idea - but can't get it to work reliably. It locks when my phone's signal is weak despite being close to me.

Will this play nice with Handoff between iOS8 and OS X 10.10?

No Android support?

It detects my android (S5) and gets readings from it. Doesn't seem to lock the screen though...

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