Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

I work in a capacity that reviews, tests, and develops proofs of concepts for new tech. We purchased 3 glasses when they came on the market. Our review:

1. pathetic battery life. You're going to have at most 6 hours of life. And that's with the GG radios off (and functionality at a nil).

2. You can't turn it off. it goes into a screen-off non-standby that still chews through battery. So when you think that youre conserving it for later... nope.

3. "Glass Overheating, shutting down". This showed up in the latter firmwares. Never fixed. It ruins the idea of recording video for lengths of time. I was trying to record a renaissance dance. Didnt work.

4. Forces a facebook style timeline. Horrible interface.

5. Has no use without wifi and bt on. The device is an Android... yet is completely dunb without data connections. Why werent there functionality built in that didnt need 24/7 internet access?

6. In order to use with a cell phone, you have to: turn on bt and pair, turn on WiFi tethering on the phone, allow data to tunnel through BT, and pair every connection from glass to phone. This, of course, eats battery. So, it was left at home, with the home WiFi, beating the purpose of with a cell.

7. Screen was offcenter and annoying. Itwas placed so you had to look up right to see it. Not to mention, it was askew on the face. That means recording video had an annoying 7deg tilt... unless you held your head like a dog.

8. $1500 . For "Google Quality". Not to mention, no support unless you count other people who wasted $1500 or more for the similar experience.

And, they took out one of the neatest features: facial recognition. Because of "privacy", yet the device consistently chatters to home base.

Yeah. Its a turd.

And one last story regarding the Glass.

Google engineers came to us for a public demonstration. Now, our network has a secure component (WPA2-enterprise) and a non-secure component. However to use either, you need to register the MAC address with our system. Simple. No.

For a company that made Android, and focuses oh so much on security, they dont support WPA2-enterprise. Just doesn't work. So, we were relegated to the unencrypted network. Except, we needed the MAC addresses.

So, how do you get a MAC address on a Glass? You go in to settings and.... Just kidding! You don't get to see what the MAC address is on a Glass. You have to associate it to a AP and then look in the configs to see what MAC it has.

So... Google Engineers gave us a list of their GG mac addresses. Except, they got it wrong. But of course, they gave us this list 30 minutes before the demo.

Eventually, our network didn't work with GG. They ended up buying Aircards from some cell vendor.

That's what I call "Google Quality". No support. Worse than Alpha, except you paid retail 'production quality' for it. Google

Project Tango is also another turd, in the similar light of the GG. Except the 3d driver crashes regularly (every 3-10 minutes of use).

This is obviously an issue with Google Glass, but MAC address filtering is a waste of time. It offers absolutely no protection against a determined adversary. It is a perfect example of security theater.

You're assuming that it is the only defense. It isn't.

We look at security as one would look at an onion.

It makes you cry when you chop it wrong?

Brittle outer layers?

OP is right though. As far as the onion is concerned you better add more characters to the security pass-phrase, also make sure WPS is disabled on all routers etc.

Once someone has determined to break in, even minimally sophisticated they will spoof the mac address. It is good that you want to add extra security, but even as your story shows it just creates confusion, and make using the system harder.

Those decisions come the people in the glass room in the security office. Not much I can do to change global security policy.

I understand, it was more of a comment in general, or maybe the glass room people would stop by and read too ;-)

Do you also never use Padlock or Combination Lock or basic door lock because they also offer "no protection against a determined adversary" ?

Using MAC address filtering on unsecured WiFi is literally like locking your door and then hanging the key on a nice hook outside the door, where anyone can grab it.

The larger point is that if a device is going to work with multiple unknown future security systems (theater or not) it needs to be convenient to do so.

Expecting me to change my security to suit your needs is the height of hubris, when your device is not a necessity.

Nobody is expecting you to change anything. He agrees: your story highlights a problem with GG.

But mac filtering is a pet peeve for many of us. It is worth mentioning, as often as necessary: it's bollocks. Don't do it. Let everyone know that it's useless.

Read that post as if prefaced with: "On a tangent: ..."

Please remember that with, say, a macbook, one can easily monitor traffic between your access points and authorized clients of your wireless network.

From that, is simple to extract the mac address of an authorized client, configure your macbook wireless card with that mac address and join your unencrypted network.

This is why mac filtering is useless on wifi networks.

Why do people need to manually give you their MAC address for a non-secure network? Any "bad actor" could just sniff and copy an approved MAC address, so it does nothing for security. And while it's possible to look up the MAC address on some devices, it's not simple on any of them. This seems more like your shortcoming, not Google's.

Well, for one it would stop employees accidentally connecting to the 'public' wifi and generating support calls when applications which relied on being on the secure/internal network failed to work. Or from devices automatically switching over to the public wifi when they had connection issues with the secured network.

Anyone clever enough to spoof their MAC address is clever enough to not generate a support call in these cases.

>And, they took out one of the neatest features: facial recognition.

Care to clarify who "they" is here? Last I heard, the local governments were going to pass legislation banning this feature. Google was more or less strong-armed by the state.

Yeah, its fun to give an overly-negative review of 1st gen dev platforms, but the reality is that a lot of whats happened with glass was more or less planned to happen. It was a test platform and part of google's largest wearables initiative. Glass may not even pan out, especially considering what MS is doing right now with AR, but it helped laid the groundwork for making wearables socially acceptable and helped make tech reviwers understand that wearables are going to be big. Glass opened the door for my Moto360. The Moto360 is opening the door for a million other things. I see Glass like owning a Vic-20; a largely unimpressive computer. The Macintosh was released a short three years later. Lets not piss on early adopters and test platforms too much. Glass was never going to be a consumer product.

>$1500

Then don't buy into the program. Its not a consumer product its a test/dev platform. It blows my mind people think they were paying for some hot new product. No, you were paying to be part of a dev program.

Also "google quality" is pleasant enough. I paid next to nothing, compared to other smartphones, for my N4 and N5. Those are fine phones.

You're also still paying for them with your data.

We also tested glass in the same capacity. I'd like to add one of our most important UX findings:

9. It gave ~10% of users a headache after approximately 10 minues of use.

At least we learned that User experience isn't all about pressing buttons.

> Yeah. Its a turd.

I bet that would've been a valid verdict for the first search engine way back then too, compared to all the neatly organized catalogs. Or the first android compared to the iphone.

Personally I'm still amazed that something like Glass is not only possible but can fit in a $1500 budget.

> $1500 . For "Google Quality".

Establishing that pricepoint is a monumental achievement by my account. It's well withing the grasp of us mere mortals and the way hardware prices tend to evolve will fit comfortably in any "why not try it" budget within just a few short years.

Novelty stuff like this usually costs one or two orders of magnitude more..

The "privacy" issue was not there to cover the privacy of the person with glass but the people around him.

I can totally understand that. Even if I know that there will be (are) ways around but as long as not everybody can do it, it's something.

You forgot one:

9. You look like an idiot.

It's the same thing as the smart watches. Suddenly everybody had one but now they become a joke. As well as the people who wear them to work.

They should throw in some more money and time and go for implants.

Unfortunately, most watch wearables are in the same class of "It's a watch that can display texts, emails, and has an accelerometer". Not to mention, they also have glaring holes in the BT communication, where they are easy to decrypt OTA.

One wearable I do like for the innovation is Thalmic's MYO. Before they opened up Raw data to the sensor array, it was pretty much a doorstop. After what I did, they came to their senses. http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free-...

There's a few other wearables in the class of "first of a kind". Those are the ones I'm interested in. Well, that and computer vision, ML, IoT, distributable computing, and other areas.

Maybe I'm revealing my lack of fashion sense but I picked up a smart watch and the only time anyone's noticed it, they thought it looked pretty neat. Picked up a Moto 360 on sale for $175 a month ago and so far I've enjoyed it. Is it a must-have game-changing productivity device? Oh hell no. But considering how many watches you can buy for easily $250 or a lot more, I didn't think $175 was terrible for a novelty/luxury item.

If only for the fact that I can change the face to look like any style of watch or display info in an appealing way, it's been cool. The notifications and voice commands are more like added extras IMO.

I just figure that if I can buy a Timex for $175, a Moto360 for $175 isn't the worst luxury gadget I could buy. The traditional watch has the benefit of years-long battery life whereas mine gets put on a dock when I go to sleep. But mine is also a "Fitbit" and I can put any number of faces on it or spend 30 minutes in Photoshop designing my own. As a gadget lover and hobbyist graphic designer, I'll take changeable faces with neat ways of displaying weather and fitness info even if it means I can't wear it on a multi-day camping trip due to battery life.

Most of those people who (still) have one of those, never wore a watch before.

> 8. $1500 . For "Google Quality".

I'm truly wondering whether you mean that Google usually makes high quality, or that they usually screw stuff up. I'm assuming the latter, because it's what I agree with (anyone ever used Maps or, say, Android <5?) but maybe I'm just weird that way.

Absolutely not. With Google, you're guaranteed quite a few things.

1. Lack of updates. Nexus 7 issue.

2. No support. Or read as "Community driven support" as in go to a forum and beg.

3. Beta = not even alpha.

4. Expected to pay retail production price for buggy crap.

5. Have to complain on HN or twitter to get any sort of response.

6. Every device chatters to home base constantly.

7. Updates end up downgrading features.

8. No safe fail-over when services halt (mailbox death with merge tool).

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