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Comment by bonzoesc | Hacker News Reader

I should get some with my URL set to tel:27673855# . I'm sure there's a case to be made for NFC, but I'm not totally sold on the value of invisible things that cause phones and other electronics to do things.

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One of the primary features of NFC is the requirement that you be near (within inches of) the NFC tag in order for it to work. One useful application I've seen for this is a custom NFC tag someone placed in a homemade docking station to activate their phone's dock mode. Another was used in a homemade Gameklip[0]-type device to activate bluetooth and connect with the controller.

[0] http://thegameklip.com/

And what happens when they're hidden in a perfectly ordinary desk blotter in a hotel room in Silicon Valley?

You've got the first act to a corporate espionage story.

Blackberry famously solved this problem with magnets (in the holster which activated holster/sleep mode)

i feel NFC holds a lot of promise in these types of applications; in that it seems like an ideal technology for developing 'trigger' cases, where you could set any number of actions based on NFC pairing..

Nokia showed off that very thing you described with their Lumia 920; where placing it on one of their NFC wireless charging docks automatically launches a predefined app (presumably some sort of dock mode, but you can set whatever you want). likewise, with one of their wireless speakers they showed NFC pairing used to rapidly connect (via Bluetooth) and start playing music without having to mess with anything on the phone [1]; i thought that was pretty neat..

[1] can't find the actual video of them demoing it, but this is it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4zx2xy6VjE&feature=playe...

Yep, I use a tag by my front door to turn on 3G and Bluetooth on my phone before I leave. It's great. The phone (Galaxy S3) needs to be turned on & unlocked and the centre of the back needs to be within about an inch of the tag to activate. It seems like a decent security tradeoff.

I use an application that detects where I am and turns things off and on as required. Much better than waving your phone at a sticker.

Care to share which app?

Tasker https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....

Thanks - It's not the same as http://www.taskerapp.com/, is it?

> I'm not totally sold on the value of invisible things that cause phones and other electronics to do things.

I'm not either and with good reason:

"Black Hat speaker shows how NFC can be used for malicious attacks"

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/strategy/item/28552-black-hat...

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