Skip to main content

My Shoes Have Bluetooth and I Must Scream: UnderArmor's Hovr and MapMyRun

 Other potential titles included "Walking With the Enemy" and "Internet of Shoestrings".

I'm not against the concept of the Internet of Things - IoT - but the severe lack of security installed on a commercial level, the lack of education for end users, and the growing reliance on technology in our world.

The people who are best at their job have hobbies away from the machine. Some of mine include exercise, running, walking - I go through sneakers quick and hard.

So I got some cool shoes - Under Armor HOVR

 

Under Armour HOVR shoes in black, yellow, orange, and white

They're not on the site but here they are. I got them from an outlet mall, could be discontinued.

 

I didn't realize until I got home that they had the Bluetooth insignia both within them and on the box.

 

 

Under Armour Map My Run App Sticker


 Turns out, there's an app for the shoes, because they have Bluetooth components in the heel.


Shoes.

 

Have Bluetooth.

 

In the heel.

 

Under Armour Bluetooth chip in the sole of a shoe

Right there! 


Imagine yourself as a "closed" ad-hoc network -  Using short-range connectivity to track your performance makes sense. Your phone, your shoes. Is this network working together to build a profile about you to use for advertising new products to? Of course.

 

The setup involves tapping and moving the right shoe, "to reset the connection". I downloaded and gave permissions on my iPhone - The one without a SIM card. The location can still be tracked, due to connectivity to my local Wi-Fi, but I toggled "approximate location" over "precise".


It took time for my phone to connect. At first, I thought my shoes were simply the kind of footwear we have been wearing for hundreds of years - Bluetooth-free. But no, after a moment, they were found and connected.

Under Armour...app?

"Hang on, we're updating your shoes with the latest features." Is something this app told me.

 

 Shoes may be the one object within the Internet of Things that will keep working if the connection dies.

The app offers "real-time coaching" - "Grab your favorite headphones" - Theirs have the UA logo prominently placed - "and follow the audio cues [...] bringing you closer to your running goals."

If other people would enjoy that, good for them.

Apple's latest non tracking feature is handy when it comes to some of these permissions - When could apps track my activity across other companies apps and websites?

As this phone does not leave my house, I decide to test the app by...putting on my shoes and getting on my balance board for several minutes.

 

What a time to be alive. 

 

 
 

While calories were counted - Somehow - it doesn't count actual distance wobbled on a board, which my Fitbit Versa can do. 

 
 
 
 
Under Armour App



There's a simple dashboard to keep track of weekly activity. If I can export that data, it may be interesting to play with in Tableau.

 

There's a social media feed where people share their exercise accomplishments.  


Under Armour App


I'm grateful my shoes don't connect to my Wi-Fi network, but who knows - Maybe it's only a matter of time until it joins Amazon Sidewalk as a node, flashing my location to other devices in my neighborhood.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an intruder, but it is a step. There are no devices associated with this new server; In an earlier lab (not shown), I attached them to 'H

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory

Building, Breaking, and Building A CRM with Retool

 I like no- or low-code solutions to things. I've often wanted to simply push a button or move some GUI around and have the code implement itself.  I've thought about building something that's like a customer relationship management (CRM) system for keeping up with my network better than my little spreadsheet where I click links and then go like something. The general idea in this CRM Development is:  To have a GUI to add people to a NRM (Network Relationship Management).       Attach it to a database (MySQL is what I went with eventually using Amazon Relational Database service, but you can use PostGRES, and probably others).     Make sure components are connected to each other in the retool interface. This video is a good start. Watching the tutorial video, heard some SQL commands and went 'Oh no 😳" before going "Wait I know basic SQL", which is good, because you'll see.  When you get set up, there's a plethora of resources you can use -- Incl