19 ms·

Ultrasonic Payments

181 points by ofou 4y ago

philjohn 4y ago
It's also how the newish Furby's interact with a phone or tablet app. And I believe how Cisco teleconfernce allow wireless configuration of a screen share.
zinekeller 4y ago
Interesting experiment, although it seems that most of Asia has settled on NFC (card emulation or token), QR, and 2D barcodes for offline (at least to customers) payments, which is more practical to deploy using existing infrastructure. I know Tez (aka Google Pay in India which was pushed in other countries) has implemented it, but Indians does Google Pay still have ultrasonic transfers?
- anunay03 4y ago
  Google Pay in India no longer has any of those features. Infact it has been completely reworked to support UPI payments [1]. And it has completely transformed how payments happen. paymets happen directly from bank account to bank account regardlessof what app you're using (Samsung Pay, PhonePe, GPay, your bank's app). You can use QR codes or simple username@bank to make payments. I am not aware of any payment systems that support the use of NFC, (NFC is not that commonplace for anything except cards, and I have had trouble setting up cards in google pay). One of the biggest benefits of QR based payments have been is it does not require any special hardware. Just a mobile and Internet (Which is very common and accessible here). And it has little to no transaction fees. So it has been quickly adopted by literally everyone. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    > I am not aware of any payment systems that support the use of NFC I basically lumped the whole of Asia into a melting pot, whoops. While you're correct that India's UPI doesn't have an NFC mode, other countries do (NETS of Singapore and various systems in Japan for example).
    - anunay03 4y ago
      Oh yea, I think I got the idea. The initial direction with apps like Tez too was trying to use NFC for payment. That just didn't catch on, which I'd probably pin on the fact that majority of population here uses low-mid range Smartphones which often skip over NFC support.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Tez did for a while support UPI and ultrasonic. It just used sound to transfer the UPI ID
- gkop 4y ago
  Pedantic, but I believe QR is a type of 2D barcode, but your comment implies the contrary. Am I wrong?
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    Ugh, I definitely meant 1D barcodes of course, but you get the point.
kretaceous 4y ago
Slightly tangent: Charlie Gerard's website is full of interesting experiments like this in the Computer-Human-Interaction space!, Recommended.
- veb 4y ago
  You weren't wrong! Reminds me a lot of Gwern's website (https://gwern.net/ https://gwern.net/)
veb 4y ago
This is such a cool experiment. Anything that involves sound like this is extremely interesting to me (I have a cochlear implant). Maybe I can hack it so I know when people are making payments :D
- anunay03 4y ago
  Awh, Can you give a idea of how much nuisance such devices can cause you daily? Also is there a way to prevent cochlear implants from detecting these frequencies? (like do only some cochlear implants do this or most of them do) I really wanna use tech like this sometimes in future, but I also wanna care about accessiblity.
  - sdrothrock 4y ago
    I also have a cochlear implant; it doesn't allow me to hear ultrasonic frequencies -- in fact, my hearing range is still a subset of "normal."
    - mercurywells 4y ago
      I have one as well, and I've noticed that area proximity detectors (in hallways used to detect presence/motion) do get picked up and come through as loud pops.
      - shepherdjerred 4y ago
        How loud? These are audible to me without an implant (unless some are audible and some are inaudible)
        jhugo 4y ago
        You might be hearing a relay, which is itself switched by the proximity sensor.
      - raindear 4y ago
        There are also electricity poles with a strong EM field that cause a humming sound.
pixel_tracing 4y ago
I think it’s cool but with payments you’ll have to address security considerations. How can you prevent someone from spoofing a transaction or spoofing audio for payments?
- jackson1442 4y ago
  This specific demo doesn't actually send payment data over audio, just a link to pay from. Post-payment would still go though signed stripe webhooks like a normal online payment. Seems like an interesting way to start a transaction without needing to buy any specialized equipment.
  - heretogetout 4y ago
    Like an audio QR code, I guess.
  - mikeiz404 4y ago
    You don’t need to read the payment data. I think a phishing/spoofing attempt may be possible by playing a louder or directional ultrasonic message to introduce an alternate payment url. Or you may be able to accomplish a denial of service via jamming. (If some one knows more, please step in and comment.) I’m guessing some of these could be issues with NFC too but from what I have skimmed online it seems both the tag and receiver would need to be modified to work at larger than normal distances of “1-5cm”[1]. Also much more power is needed to extend the range of NFC than sound since sound strength diminishes with the square of the distance and, from what I have skimmed, magnetic induction used by nearfield NFC diminishes with the cube of the distance [2][3]. 1: https://seritag.com/learn/using-nfc/nfc-tag-scan-distance-explained https://seritag.com/learn/using-nfc/nfc-tag-scan-distance-ex... 2: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/magnetic-field-strength-diminishes-proportional-to-inverse-cube-or-inverse-square.450414/ https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/magnetic-field-strengt... 3: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44037/why-is-near-field-communication-nfc-range-limited-to-about-20cm https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44037/why-is-nea...
- hapiri 4y ago
  Higher level protocol would establish handshake & encryption I imagine.
abetusk 4y ago
Ah, it looks like the repo linked in the article should actually be from their personal account, not their stripe account [0]. It also looks like one of the key components is the `quiet.js` library [1] which itself is an emscriptem port of `libquiet` [2]. [0] https://github.com/charliegerard/ultrasonic-payments https://github.com/charliegerard/ultrasonic-payments [1] https://github.com/quiet/quiet-js/ https://github.com/quiet/quiet-js/ [2] https://github.com/quiet/quiet https://github.com/quiet/quiet
tambourine_man 4y ago
I find it all fascinating, but at the same time, a bit sad that we must resort to such hacks in order to have an interoperable medium. It should be easy to send packages wirelessly across devices of different platforms in 2022.
kkarty 4y ago
will it cause issues with receiver when multiple senders try to send at the same time? Wont it cause chaos in the sound waves ?
- jayd16 4y ago
  Seems like you could just use algorithms used in other wireless communications.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  This is a problem with any kind of other radio spectrum emission -- the way they solve this is by multiplexing, in various ways. Here's a quick google intro: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/66562 https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/66562 Some packets may get lost, but thanks to checksums we can detect and try some other clear channels/methods/etc.
muglug 4y ago
Reminds me of Clinkle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinkle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinkle) which hoped to use sound to transmit payments.
- irjustin 4y ago
  Key difference, this one has demonstrated it working! Jokes aside, I'm sure Clinkle had something working in a demo form but obviously the problem is sound as a digital communication medium is terrible outside of specific use cases (air gap attacks?). Clinkle is up there in the who's who of blow ups.
  - keeganpoppen 4y ago
    re clinkle: i have definitely witnessed it working in person. not that that says anything in particular about clinkle. and yeah, knowing a lot of the people who worked there i definitely feel great delight and kinship with that particular blow up. and i worked at Color (Labs) for a bit, which, in terms of blow ups was like Clinkle before Clinkle, so i feel like i've had front row tickets to two of the best ones from that era! :)
  - Daegalus 4y ago
    we did have it. as a former Clinkle employee I can confirm we had infrasound payments in the app and backend support for it. (I was on backend)
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Also Chirp. I wrote an error correcting modem for them. Getting a simplex packet from A to B is the easy part. But any kind of bidirectional protocol (say for flow control) falls apart in an acoustic medium because duplex operations are thwarted by echo and phase. It's a long time since I played with the idea but I reckon you could do a lot more now with phones that have mic arrays and enough CPU power to do more serious DSP.
- Daegalus 4y ago
  as someone who worked at Clinkle (on backend) we did indeed have this early on. it was one of the demos used during my interviews to show me the app. The feature used infrasound instead of ultrasound like this article. unfortunately coffee grinders and such would mess with transmission. the sound engineer working on it also left shortly before I started so the feature never got fixed and eventually killed.
potiuper 4y ago
Guide dogs seem like a non-starter.
- abetusk 4y ago
  Is this actually a problem? The length of sound is most likely pretty short as it's sending a short spurt of data (like a link). The speaker on the phone is also not very powerful so this would be akin to having someone playing music on their phone (for a very short period of time).
jrmann100 4y ago
I'm reminded of Google Tone[0], which beamed URLs audibly to nearby browsers in an Airdrop-style experience. A neat trick, but ultimately useless given that most devices have less obtrusive ways of sharing data P2P. The ultrasonic aspect of this experiment makes the technology a lot more useful. Tone also came with the unfortunate side effect of Google software having constant access to your microphone. 0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-tone/nnckehldicaciogcbchegobnafnjkcne https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-tone/nnckeh...
- spike021 4y ago
  IIRC, Webex Teams used to do something like this if you walked into a conference room that had a Webex teleconference setup. I haven't used it in a few years, though.
  - mrud 4y ago
    Same thing with zoom rooms - https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/214629303-Direct-sharing-in-Zoom-Rooms https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/214629303-Direct-s...
- akelly 4y ago
  Google also used ultrasonic pairing/auth for Chromecast https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/26/5846726/chromecast-will-use-ultrasonic-sounds-to-connect-nearby-devices https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/26/5846726/chromecast-will-u...
- jjeaff 4y ago
  I disagree that there are better ways to transmit data p2p in most devices. Even the smoothest of setups for things like iot devices usually require a Bluetooth connection with a passcode or a connection to a lone wifi signal after which you need to switch back. Using sound would be a perfect way to setup iot speakers or really anything close by. Instead of having to activate Bluetooth pairing and find the sometimes strangely named device among the dozen or so devices that inevitably show up, ultrasound would be a great way to transmit the initial credentials.
jonathonlui 4y ago
This makes me think of of the Amazon Dash button which had a microphone [0] that would listen for ultrasound emitted from your phone to configure wifi credentials. [0] http://www.blog.jay-greco.com/wp/?p=116 http://www.blog.jay-greco.com/wp/?p=116
jlbbellefeuille 4y ago
LISNR is the leader in Ultrasonic Data Transfer, including payment data. https://LISNR.com https://LISNR.com *full disclosure I worked there 2019 - 2020
- pantulis 4y ago
  I came here to say that this is not exactly new and point to LISNR, although I was not exactly impressed by the payment use case the LISNR tech is pretty cool.
unsignedint 4y ago
LINE messenger uses similar technology for nearby contact discovery. Here's how it sounds.(Audio transposed to the audible range.) https://youtu.be/GM4KP-YxKvo https://youtu.be/GM4KP-YxKvo
est 4y ago
This is bad idea. A while ago Alipay had this ultrasonic payment method, I queued for a vending machine, opened Alipay in advance because I never used this "ultrasonic payment" feature before, then just when the guy before me pressed the button, my alipay accidentally payed for him. Luckily he and I wanted the drink of the same price, so he payed for mine instead. Using QR-code or NFC for payment won't mess up like this. And later Alipay completely canceled ultrasonic payment feature. I guess many people encountered the same problem. You can't control omnidirectional ultrasound broadcast. It's very insecure.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Same thing happened with GPay for India. Ultrasonic is too unreliable at the best of times
cottsak 4y ago
Couldn't get the demo to work (iphone/safari -> mac/brave; audio was playing and brave was recording).
aranibatta 4y ago
Crazy to see a Clinkle demo 8 years late
hapiri 4y ago
I have concerns about ultrasonic pollution if this is widely adopted.
eunos 4y ago
Almost a decade ago Alipay experimented with this https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/14/alipay-launches-sound-wave-mobile-payments-system-in-beijing-subway/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/14/alipay-launches-sound-wave... Seems going nowhere
dancsi 4y ago
This reminds me of how the student meal subsidies are implemented in Slovenia, and in my opinion it was quite unwieldy. You call a phone number and place your phone's earpiece on another device with a microphone. Then, some personal data is transmitted using (ultra?)sound. I remember it being quite unreliable, but that might be down to using the telephone network as the data carrier.
- tut-urut-utut 4y ago
  I remember back in the time, during the eighties, one of the radio stations broadcasted ZX-Spectrum games over the air. You would record that noise to a tape, and later you could load to your ZX and play. It worked remarkably good.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    Generally datasette formats were meant to work with the extremely lossy media of tape. Also, I'm not sure but telephone audio tends to be much more compressed compared to radio. That on top of the fact you are going from earpiece to mic with an air gap and the background noise, it's probably much much worse.
    - ale42 4y ago
      Regular telephone audio is usually filtered 0.3-3.4 kHz (this on analog phone lines). Digital phone lines use PCM with A-law (or µ-law in the US and some other places) logarithmic sample encoding, with 8 kHz sampling rate, getting more or less the same result of an analog phone line, possibly with less distortion. FM radio has much higher bandwidth, usually up to around 15 kHz and with better basses too.
- Aachen 4y ago
  > using (ultra?)sound Phone lines have (or at least had) narrow frequency ranges. I'm not an expert but I'd assume this is just normal sound like any old modem.
- moffkalast 4y ago
indiantinker 4y ago
Very cool idea! I once worked on something similar [1], but even more low-tech, for CHI student design contest[2](we won). The idea was to do it over an IVR call and without a necessity of smartphones. The users were older people in India who find it hard to use and trust payments. I would love to work on this. I feel, we need more projects in offline and digitally accessible payments. On one end we have Apple Pay later and the other hand we have cash. [1] http://rohitg.in/portfolio/works/paisa.html http://rohitg.in/portfolio/works/paisa.html [2] http://st.sigchi.org/publications/toc/chi-2017-ea.html http://st.sigchi.org/publications/toc/chi-2017-ea.html
noobermin 4y ago
I will say this is a cool project. However, the implementation of the idea in reality is even worse than NFC. While NFC is useful in many contexts, it then requires you to put a faraday cage around your card and manually turn on or off the NFC to not get your money stolen, and even then can be circumvented. Even further relaxing the distance constraints even makes it even easier to steal money. I'd imagine a lot of the engineering would go into making it safe (having some set up such that the US sounds vary to some degree...then may be even an authentication protocol..then...then...then... The moment I saw the headline, I was incredulous. The actual project implementation in the article is a rather cool hack, so props to the author. I dread the day someone actually picks this up, assuming someone does actually choose to.
- andi999 4y ago
  Cool technology, bad problem. I fully agree getting more distance is problematic. Not even in the sense of getting your data stolen, but also to allow pro active payment. I mean you want the customer to do an action (holding the card close to a device which shows the amount deducted) to conclusively agree to that payment. Not the cashier presses a button, and anybody too close pays for it.
  - jiveturkey 4y ago
    modem/phone couplers, anyone?
    - andi999 4y ago
      Phone carriers cut off the frequency spectrum.
      - jiveturkey 4y ago
        i'm just referring to the acoustic isolation from the mechanical coupler. obviously (?) the passband for telephone comms is far short of ultrasonic
efallen 4y ago
LISNR's been solving this problem for last 10 years. Have several patents in this space dealing with some of the noted challenges around transmitting secure data, increase data throughput, bi-directional support and etc. The LISNR SDK is used to process millions of transactions and growing. Made several announcements, working with and installed in several POS terminals and etc.

181 points by ofou 4y ago

It's also how the newish Furby's interact with a phone or tablet app. And I believe how Cisco teleconfernce allow wireless configuration of a screen share.

zinekeller 4y ago

Interesting experiment, although it seems that most of Asia has settled on NFC (card emulation or token), QR, and 2D barcodes for offline (at least to customers) payments, which is more practical to deploy using existing infrastructure. I know Tez (aka Google Pay in India which was pushed in other countries) has implemented it, but Indians does Google Pay still have ultrasonic transfers?

anunay03 4y ago
Google Pay in India no longer has any of those features. Infact it has been completely reworked to support UPI payments [1]. And it has completely transformed how payments happen. paymets happen directly from bank account to bank account regardlessof what app you're using (Samsung Pay, PhonePe, GPay, your bank's app). You can use QR codes or simple username@bank to make payments. I am not aware of any payment systems that support the use of NFC, (NFC is not that commonplace for anything except cards, and I have had trouble setting up cards in google pay). One of the biggest benefits of QR based payments have been is it does not require any special hardware. Just a mobile and Internet (Which is very common and accessible here). And it has little to no transaction fees. So it has been quickly adopted by literally everyone. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
- zinekeller 4y ago
  > I am not aware of any payment systems that support the use of NFC I basically lumped the whole of Asia into a melting pot, whoops. While you're correct that India's UPI doesn't have an NFC mode, other countries do (NETS of Singapore and various systems in Japan for example).
  - anunay03 4y ago
    Oh yea, I think I got the idea. The initial direction with apps like Tez too was trying to use NFC for payment. That just didn't catch on, which I'd probably pin on the fact that majority of population here uses low-mid range Smartphones which often skip over NFC support.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Tez did for a while support UPI and ultrasonic. It just used sound to transfer the UPI ID
gkop 4y ago
Pedantic, but I believe QR is a type of 2D barcode, but your comment implies the contrary. Am I wrong?
- zinekeller 4y ago
  Ugh, I definitely meant 1D barcodes of course, but you get the point.

kretaceous 4y ago

Slightly tangent: Charlie Gerard's website is full of interesting experiments like this in the Computer-Human-Interaction space!, Recommended.

veb 4y ago
You weren't wrong! Reminds me a lot of Gwern's website (https://gwern.net/ https://gwern.net/)

veb 4y ago

This is such a cool experiment. Anything that involves sound like this is extremely interesting to me (I have a cochlear implant). Maybe I can hack it so I know when people are making payments :D

anunay03 4y ago
Awh, Can you give a idea of how much nuisance such devices can cause you daily? Also is there a way to prevent cochlear implants from detecting these frequencies? (like do only some cochlear implants do this or most of them do) I really wanna use tech like this sometimes in future, but I also wanna care about accessiblity.
- sdrothrock 4y ago
  I also have a cochlear implant; it doesn't allow me to hear ultrasonic frequencies -- in fact, my hearing range is still a subset of "normal."
  - mercurywells 4y ago
    I have one as well, and I've noticed that area proximity detectors (in hallways used to detect presence/motion) do get picked up and come through as loud pops.
    - shepherdjerred 4y ago
      How loud? These are audible to me without an implant (unless some are audible and some are inaudible)
      - jhugo 4y ago
        You might be hearing a relay, which is itself switched by the proximity sensor.
    - raindear 4y ago
      There are also electricity poles with a strong EM field that cause a humming sound.

pixel_tracing 4y ago

I think it’s cool but with payments you’ll have to address security considerations. How can you prevent someone from spoofing a transaction or spoofing audio for payments?

jackson1442 4y ago
This specific demo doesn't actually send payment data over audio, just a link to pay from. Post-payment would still go though signed stripe webhooks like a normal online payment. Seems like an interesting way to start a transaction without needing to buy any specialized equipment.
- heretogetout 4y ago
  Like an audio QR code, I guess.
- mikeiz404 4y ago
  You don’t need to read the payment data. I think a phishing/spoofing attempt may be possible by playing a louder or directional ultrasonic message to introduce an alternate payment url. Or you may be able to accomplish a denial of service via jamming. (If some one knows more, please step in and comment.) I’m guessing some of these could be issues with NFC too but from what I have skimmed online it seems both the tag and receiver would need to be modified to work at larger than normal distances of “1-5cm”[1]. Also much more power is needed to extend the range of NFC than sound since sound strength diminishes with the square of the distance and, from what I have skimmed, magnetic induction used by nearfield NFC diminishes with the cube of the distance [2][3]. 1: https://seritag.com/learn/using-nfc/nfc-tag-scan-distance-explained https://seritag.com/learn/using-nfc/nfc-tag-scan-distance-ex... 2: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/magnetic-field-strength-diminishes-proportional-to-inverse-cube-or-inverse-square.450414/ https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/magnetic-field-strengt... 3: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44037/why-is-near-field-communication-nfc-range-limited-to-about-20cm https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/44037/why-is-nea...
hapiri 4y ago
Higher level protocol would establish handshake & encryption I imagine.

abetusk 4y ago

Ah, it looks like the repo linked in the article should actually be from their personal account, not their stripe account [0]. It also looks like one of the key components is the `quiet.js` library [1] which itself is an emscriptem port of `libquiet` [2]. [0] https://github.com/charliegerard/ultrasonic-payments https://github.com/charliegerard/ultrasonic-payments [1] https://github.com/quiet/quiet-js/ https://github.com/quiet/quiet-js/ [2] https://github.com/quiet/quiet https://github.com/quiet/quiet

tambourine_man 4y ago

I find it all fascinating, but at the same time, a bit sad that we must resort to such hacks in order to have an interoperable medium. It should be easy to send packages wirelessly across devices of different platforms in 2022.

kkarty 4y ago

will it cause issues with receiver when multiple senders try to send at the same time? Wont it cause chaos in the sound waves ?

jayd16 4y ago
Seems like you could just use algorithms used in other wireless communications.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
This is a problem with any kind of other radio spectrum emission -- the way they solve this is by multiplexing, in various ways. Here's a quick google intro: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/66562 https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/66562 Some packets may get lost, but thanks to checksums we can detect and try some other clear channels/methods/etc.

muglug 4y ago

Reminds me of Clinkle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinkle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinkle) which hoped to use sound to transmit payments.

irjustin 4y ago
Key difference, this one has demonstrated it working! Jokes aside, I'm sure Clinkle had something working in a demo form but obviously the problem is sound as a digital communication medium is terrible outside of specific use cases (air gap attacks?). Clinkle is up there in the who's who of blow ups.
- keeganpoppen 4y ago
  re clinkle: i have definitely witnessed it working in person. not that that says anything in particular about clinkle. and yeah, knowing a lot of the people who worked there i definitely feel great delight and kinship with that particular blow up. and i worked at Color (Labs) for a bit, which, in terms of blow ups was like Clinkle before Clinkle, so i feel like i've had front row tickets to two of the best ones from that era! :)
- Daegalus 4y ago
  we did have it. as a former Clinkle employee I can confirm we had infrasound payments in the app and backend support for it. (I was on backend)
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Also Chirp. I wrote an error correcting modem for them. Getting a simplex packet from A to B is the easy part. But any kind of bidirectional protocol (say for flow control) falls apart in an acoustic medium because duplex operations are thwarted by echo and phase. It's a long time since I played with the idea but I reckon you could do a lot more now with phones that have mic arrays and enough CPU power to do more serious DSP.
Daegalus 4y ago
as someone who worked at Clinkle (on backend) we did indeed have this early on. it was one of the demos used during my interviews to show me the app. The feature used infrasound instead of ultrasound like this article. unfortunately coffee grinders and such would mess with transmission. the sound engineer working on it also left shortly before I started so the feature never got fixed and eventually killed.

potiuper 4y ago

Guide dogs seem like a non-starter.

abetusk 4y ago
Is this actually a problem? The length of sound is most likely pretty short as it's sending a short spurt of data (like a link). The speaker on the phone is also not very powerful so this would be akin to having someone playing music on their phone (for a very short period of time).

jrmann100 4y ago

I'm reminded of Google Tone[0], which beamed URLs audibly to nearby browsers in an Airdrop-style experience. A neat trick, but ultimately useless given that most devices have less obtrusive ways of sharing data P2P. The ultrasonic aspect of this experiment makes the technology a lot more useful. Tone also came with the unfortunate side effect of Google software having constant access to your microphone. 0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-tone/nnckehldicaciogcbchegobnafnjkcne https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-tone/nnckeh...

spike021 4y ago
IIRC, Webex Teams used to do something like this if you walked into a conference room that had a Webex teleconference setup. I haven't used it in a few years, though.
- mrud 4y ago
  Same thing with zoom rooms - https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/214629303-Direct-sharing-in-Zoom-Rooms https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/214629303-Direct-s...
akelly 4y ago
Google also used ultrasonic pairing/auth for Chromecast https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/26/5846726/chromecast-will-use-ultrasonic-sounds-to-connect-nearby-devices https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/26/5846726/chromecast-will-u...
jjeaff 4y ago
I disagree that there are better ways to transmit data p2p in most devices. Even the smoothest of setups for things like iot devices usually require a Bluetooth connection with a passcode or a connection to a lone wifi signal after which you need to switch back. Using sound would be a perfect way to setup iot speakers or really anything close by. Instead of having to activate Bluetooth pairing and find the sometimes strangely named device among the dozen or so devices that inevitably show up, ultrasound would be a great way to transmit the initial credentials.

jonathonlui 4y ago

This makes me think of of the Amazon Dash button which had a microphone [0] that would listen for ultrasound emitted from your phone to configure wifi credentials. [0] http://www.blog.jay-greco.com/wp/?p=116 http://www.blog.jay-greco.com/wp/?p=116

jlbbellefeuille 4y ago

LISNR is the leader in Ultrasonic Data Transfer, including payment data. https://LISNR.com https://LISNR.com *full disclosure I worked there 2019 - 2020

pantulis 4y ago
I came here to say that this is not exactly new and point to LISNR, although I was not exactly impressed by the payment use case the LISNR tech is pretty cool.

unsignedint 4y ago

LINE messenger uses similar technology for nearby contact discovery. Here's how it sounds.(Audio transposed to the audible range.) https://youtu.be/GM4KP-YxKvo https://youtu.be/GM4KP-YxKvo

est 4y ago

This is bad idea. A while ago Alipay had this ultrasonic payment method, I queued for a vending machine, opened Alipay in advance because I never used this "ultrasonic payment" feature before, then just when the guy before me pressed the button, my alipay accidentally payed for him. Luckily he and I wanted the drink of the same price, so he payed for mine instead. Using QR-code or NFC for payment won't mess up like this. And later Alipay completely canceled ultrasonic payment feature. I guess many people encountered the same problem. You can't control omnidirectional ultrasound broadcast. It's very insecure.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cuteboy19 4y ago
Same thing happened with GPay for India. Ultrasonic is too unreliable at the best of times

cottsak 4y ago

Couldn't get the demo to work (iphone/safari -> mac/brave; audio was playing and brave was recording).

aranibatta 4y ago

Crazy to see a Clinkle demo 8 years late

hapiri 4y ago

I have concerns about ultrasonic pollution if this is widely adopted.

eunos 4y ago

Almost a decade ago Alipay experimented with this https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/14/alipay-launches-sound-wave-mobile-payments-system-in-beijing-subway/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/14/alipay-launches-sound-wave... Seems going nowhere

dancsi 4y ago

This reminds me of how the student meal subsidies are implemented in Slovenia, and in my opinion it was quite unwieldy. You call a phone number and place your phone's earpiece on another device with a microphone. Then, some personal data is transmitted using (ultra?)sound. I remember it being quite unreliable, but that might be down to using the telephone network as the data carrier.

tut-urut-utut 4y ago
I remember back in the time, during the eighties, one of the radio stations broadcasted ZX-Spectrum games over the air. You would record that noise to a tape, and later you could load to your ZX and play. It worked remarkably good.
- noobermin 4y ago
  Generally datasette formats were meant to work with the extremely lossy media of tape. Also, I'm not sure but telephone audio tends to be much more compressed compared to radio. That on top of the fact you are going from earpiece to mic with an air gap and the background noise, it's probably much much worse.
  - ale42 4y ago
    Regular telephone audio is usually filtered 0.3-3.4 kHz (this on analog phone lines). Digital phone lines use PCM with A-law (or µ-law in the US and some other places) logarithmic sample encoding, with 8 kHz sampling rate, getting more or less the same result of an analog phone line, possibly with less distortion. FM radio has much higher bandwidth, usually up to around 15 kHz and with better basses too.
Aachen 4y ago
> using (ultra?)sound Phone lines have (or at least had) narrow frequency ranges. I'm not an expert but I'd assume this is just normal sound like any old modem.
moffkalast 4y ago

indiantinker 4y ago

Very cool idea! I once worked on something similar [1], but even more low-tech, for CHI student design contest[2](we won). The idea was to do it over an IVR call and without a necessity of smartphones. The users were older people in India who find it hard to use and trust payments. I would love to work on this. I feel, we need more projects in offline and digitally accessible payments. On one end we have Apple Pay later and the other hand we have cash. [1] http://rohitg.in/portfolio/works/paisa.html http://rohitg.in/portfolio/works/paisa.html [2] http://st.sigchi.org/publications/toc/chi-2017-ea.html http://st.sigchi.org/publications/toc/chi-2017-ea.html

noobermin 4y ago

I will say this is a cool project. However, the implementation of the idea in reality is even worse than NFC. While NFC is useful in many contexts, it then requires you to put a faraday cage around your card and manually turn on or off the NFC to not get your money stolen, and even then can be circumvented. Even further relaxing the distance constraints even makes it even easier to steal money. I'd imagine a lot of the engineering would go into making it safe (having some set up such that the US sounds vary to some degree...then may be even an authentication protocol..then...then...then... The moment I saw the headline, I was incredulous. The actual project implementation in the article is a rather cool hack, so props to the author. I dread the day someone actually picks this up, assuming someone does actually choose to.

andi999 4y ago
Cool technology, bad problem. I fully agree getting more distance is problematic. Not even in the sense of getting your data stolen, but also to allow pro active payment. I mean you want the customer to do an action (holding the card close to a device which shows the amount deducted) to conclusively agree to that payment. Not the cashier presses a button, and anybody too close pays for it.
- jiveturkey 4y ago
  modem/phone couplers, anyone?
  - andi999 4y ago
    Phone carriers cut off the frequency spectrum.
    - jiveturkey 4y ago
      i'm just referring to the acoustic isolation from the mechanical coupler. obviously (?) the passband for telephone comms is far short of ultrasonic

efallen 4y ago

LISNR's been solving this problem for last 10 years. Have several patents in this space dealing with some of the noted challenges around transmitting secure data, increase data throughput, bi-directional support and etc. The LISNR SDK is used to process millions of transactions and growing. Made several announcements, working with and installed in several POS terminals and etc.