It’s bad enough that getting caught with porn in this Arab confederation can land you in the pokey. What’s worse: being hit by hackers who plant porn into your Bluetooth mobile phone and getting busted for it through no fault of your own. Or so someone wants you to believe.
A published report from a Middle Eastern/southwest Asian publication April 11 says the UAE—which does have strict laws and regulations against adult material, as many Arab and Islamic countries do—has decided that those sending porn images or text messages onto cell phones, especially those running Bluetooth technology, will have a date behind bars, according to unnamed police sources.
The apparent crackdown is said to have come thanks to what The Register calls “Blueja” pranks—people attempting to set up Bluetooth conversations and giving their phones rude names, with the recipients having no clue where the naughty messages originated. "Pick the wrong recipient, however," reported the publication, "and they could get excited . . . technically, you could be discovered."
But The Register added that Bluetooth porn hacks, or pranks, embedding porn images or messages without Bluetooth or other cell-phone users knowing those images or messages are there might be more myth than reality.
"[It] seems to be the most long-winded extrapolation of a set of ignorant assumptions into an implausible set of possible conclusions," the paper reported.
Citing an article from Khaleej Times, The Register said that "technology experts" disclosed that Bluetooth cell phones are vulnerable to hacking and that “Bluejaquing”or “Bluesnarfing” "require[es] an obsolete Nokia phone, and a special-purpose hacker PC, which is of no value whatever to anybody except the security expert who gained credibility by inventing it."
The story apparently began circulating widely around the Bluetooth world by a blueserker.com user identified as blue2girl, the user apparently having concluded from a simple technological discussion that one can "use Bluetooth to get peeps busted in the UAE."
But as The Register points out, cell-phone users visiting the UAE might have more practical issues to worry about.
“If you use a phone in the UAE or any other fundamentalist theocracy,” the paper warned, “If your phone has a camera, you may [perhaps inadvertently] take pictures of things you should not. Usually, that's someone else's wife or daughter when not fully covered.”
