I have no idea how this could be exploited withing the bitcoin world or even if there is any use of this. I thought I should simply share it. My instinct tells me this could be useful for semi offline blockchain synchronization like hopping from machines to machines until there is one online.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/19/apple-android-windows-fasetto-offline/This ‘impossible’ tech links Apple, Android, and Windows devices — even when they’re offline
Here’s how Fasetto explains it:
Smartphones, tablets, and laptops all have wireless chips that, theoretically, should enable them to communicate with each other without a router or some other networking device in the middle. But hardware vendors like Apple and Microsoft define how their devices are going to operate, so the reason they can’t communicate at that level is strictly a matter of software.
What Fasetto has done is strip back that software.
“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.”
So while PDQ doesn’t require existing connections, it uses the existing wireless chips to send data across short distances, which could be useful during power outages or natural disasters. That means you can’t have your iPhone in airplane mode while using PDQ, for example, because then it wouldn’t be able to tap into its wireless chips. 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 a separate matter.)
PDQ is nearly twice as fast as other methods of file sharing because of its lighter security layer, claimed Malpass. But that doesn’t mean PDQ is insecure, he stressed, explaining how every transaction uses a unique cipher that’s only ever used once. It’s also more difficult to intercept, because information doesn’t need to travel over a network or the Internet; information gets encrypted on one device and is sent directly to the other device, where it’s decrypted.
Fasetto is testing its app primarily on devices with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, because they’re the most common wireless technologies. If devices have both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, PDQ can break the transfer into components and use both wireless technologies for even faster file transfers (although Bluetooth is notoriously slow, so how much it will speed things up is questionable). Practically, this means you could send a 100 MB file to the person sitting next to you in under a minute, according to Fasetto.
“We’re doing something that’s completely allowed and completely available — just nobody’s done it yet,” said Christmas.
