Bluetooth connects devices that are close to each other, but your phone’s Bluetooth driver can’t tell the difference between a device that is touching the phone and a device that is ten feet away. So in order to establish a Bluetooth connection between two devices, they need to go through a mutual authentication handshake before anything else happens. You wouldn’t want some stranger on the bus to accidentally get a message on his phone saying hristov wants to send you $100, right?
I think there are some folks at the MIT Media Lab who were experimenting with using touch as a way to establish relationships between devices (e.g., you touch a light-switch panel to a lamp, then stick it anywhere on the wall, and that switch will control the lamp it was bound to), but obviously current cellphone technology doesn’t support that.
The alternative to mutual authentication is to have a trusted third party, and that’s what the Bump server provides. Using the server to create the illusion that information has passed from phone to phone by osmosis is, IMHO, a neat hack.
I think there are some folks at the MIT Media Lab who were experimenting with using touch as a way to establish relationships between devices (e.g., you touch a light-switch panel to a lamp, then stick it anywhere on the wall, and that switch will control the lamp it was bound to), but obviously current cellphone technology doesn’t support that.
The alternative to mutual authentication is to have a trusted third party, and that’s what the Bump server provides. Using the server to create the illusion that information has passed from phone to phone by osmosis is, IMHO, a neat hack.