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233 points bahaaador | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.418s | source

Hi HN! I built Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay, a tool that lets Bluetooth devices (like keyboards and mice) connect to USB-only hosts using a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

Why? My friend needed a way to use his Bluetooth mouse and keyboard on a PC with Bluetooth disabled due to policy restrictions. This tool acts as a bridge, relaying Bluetooth input over USB. It also lets you use Bluetooth peripherals with older devices that only support USB input.

Tech: Written in Go, optimized for Raspberry Pi Zero W.

I love HN’s community and often lurk here—I’m hoping this project is useful or at least sparks some interesting discussions. Feedback and contributions are welcome!

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ChrisMarshallNY ◴[] No.42126707[source]
> This project was born out of a desire to help a friend who couldn't use his favorite Bluetooth mouse and keyboard due to Bluetooth being disabled on his work laptop.

Protip: If their company's IT section is like the one at my old company, they are quite unlikely to like this solution, either.

But it's very clever. Kudos.

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a1o ◴[] No.42126875[source]
IT departments that are too restrictive will soon find that people have a parallel world executing in Excel sheets and using some external messaging app to keep the company operations running despite IT efforts to ensure it doesn't - I mean to ensure it is "secure"...
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Arcanum-XIII ◴[] No.42127031[source]
My CTO is quite adamant that he hates shadow IT. Especially those with mac, full of... well software used by those artsy employees. Or with strange software not validated by the IT.

Well.

Other departments ask for equipment, but only hear no back. Management product like Monday? No. Dedicated solution for jobs they don't understand? Hell no!

It's tough to be part of this. I know security is hard. Budget limit stuff. But we can, and should do better.

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1. atoav ◴[] No.42127889[source]
As someone who has worked in IT support: The problem is that people using that shadow IT will come running when they produce real tangible damage, because they lose data or some totally ridculous workflow stops working and you now have to reverse engineer some undocumented database format to extract at least the most urgent data. I am not a fan of IT GESTAPO, and everything should be measured, butbif I learned one thing it is that people will do the dumbest, riskiest shit if left tontheir own devices.

Also: if you work with certain customer data a good way to not only loose your job, but a ton of money would be to e.g. put that data into your shadow IT that might be running on some servers somewhere. E.g. people constantly asked us to use Zoom "because it is free and works", but we were in the public sector and a contract with them that guaruantueed the privacy of our clients would have costed a significant fraction of our yearly IT budget — and we are required by law to have such a contract.

When you then ask those people if they want to part with that money suddenly nobody is so adamant anymore.

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2. ChrisMarshallNY ◴[] No.42128298[source]
This is true. I suspect that a lot of these massive breaches, was because some less-technical person loaded the customer data onto an unsecured AWS instance, while they were running measurements on it.