One Security Problem, And This Reporter Says No More

Overhype

from the ah,-there-it-is dept

It’s not entirely clear why reporters hate Bluetooth so damn much. The technology obviously isn’t perfect — but they seemed to declare it dead on arrival a few years back, and even though it’s been growing like gangbusters, they feel the need to keep stomping on it and declaring it dead, dead, dead every chance they get. Just a couple weeks ago, we pointed out how fast Bluetooth was growing these days, but predicted that someone would declare it dead fairly shortly. That didn’t take long at all. An eWeek reporter is declaring the technology dead because of a security hole that was found earlier this week. The reasoning in the article is simply classic. The guy doesn’t use Bluetooth at all because he tried it once and couldn’t get it to work. He doesn’t look at the actual numbers on Bluetooth adoption. He just announces that because there’s this one security problem, he was right and the technology is crap and he was right to never use it. I’m assuming, then, that he doesn’t use a computer either. Just about every platform out there has had some sort of security problems. And, just with Bluetooth, the early versions probably weren’t very robust. Yet we don’t see him writing columns about how he swore off Windows 1.0 because it wasn’t robust, and the latest security flaw in XP proves him right. He must not use WiFi either. There are tons of security problems with that too, and clearly, he was right in assuming it wasn’t “up to the job.” I’m surprised he uses any technology at all… Bluetooth has plenty of problems, but this security hole isn’t exactly the death knell for the technology.