JulianSchrader.de

Quicky: Access Control Using Your Phone

For the past two weeks I’ve used Airlock to automagically lock my Mac Pro’s and MacBook Pro’s screens as soon as I and my iPhone are not in the room anymore.

It’s a nice way of ensuring that nobody will read what’s on your screen or does stupid things using your Facebook or XMPP accounts—at the office as well as at home or on the road. A few years ago, before the iPhone, I remember I used something called “BluePhone Elite” to do the same.

Unfortunately the shortcomings of this method remain the same: While these tools always know when your phone is not found via Bluetooth and lock your screen accordingly, every now and then the lookup fails and you’re facing a locked screen after sitting down (which requires that you enter your password to disable the tool temporarily—it re-enables automatically a few seconds later, as soon as it found your phone).

I’ll keep using Airlock for now—let’s see whether it behaves. If it bugs me too much, I’ll have to make a decision against security. That’s not desirable.