Ich pack einfach mal den Mailverkehr hier rein. Dann kann das jeder
selber interpretieren. Beim Lesen ist mir aufgefallen, dass das mit dem
Pin Code auch irgendwie nur für PCs aber nicht für Mobile Devices gilt. oO
//edit-09:50: Mails reinkopieren scheint nicht so super zu funktionieren. Deshalb jetzt die Einzelmails nur als Text.
Sorry, ist ein bischen schwer zu lesen. Aber geht wohl nicht besser.
Meine Mail an den Support:
Hi,
I am a System Administrator for a trade school in germany with about 2300 students.
We are planning alongside with three other schools in our city to invest in the neccessary infrastructure to support BYOD management.
Right now I’m testing your airtame device and I’ve got a couple of questions about it.
While there is the neat feature to display a four digit number in order to connect to the airtame, it seems like this is not required for the smartphone app.
Beeing able to prevent anybody outside the classroom to ‚hijack‘ the screen is quite an important feature as you imagine.
Is it possible to have something like the pin code in the mobile apps as well?
It looks like I need to disconnect from the device before somebody else can connect.
Is it possible to overide the current session (when the pin code is known obviously). Intentionally hijacking kind of.
You advertise a cloud feature where I would have access to a control infrastructure.
I’m not very keen to have all my management software hostet in the cloud. Especially not Amazon.
Do you plan to provide a package I can run myself?
On your forums is a lot of buzz about being open source. I bought your device exactly for that reason.
Could you please give me your opinion on the topic. And what your current respectively next steps are.
Thanks for your time
All the best
Die Antwort des Supports:
Hi Ulf
Thanks for reaching out to us. It sounds like a really interesting case and an environment where Airtame could fit in really well.
I will do my very best to answer the questions you had regarding the Airtame device here:
- It is true that the Pin code feature is not yet added to the mobile applications. What will happen right now though is that if you enabled the Pin code on an Airtame device, you wont be able to connect to the screen via mobile devices. Essentially we are doing this to prevent people from hijacking, but we are of course working to integrate the Pin code in the mobile applications.
Actually the support for mobile devices is getting a full overhaul. I can’t give you many details on this at the moment, but we are expecting to launch something later this year to give a more complete experience on iOS and Android.
-
We don’t currently have any function to do an override. We are though considering making something like a moderation feature or a master password that would allow you to disconnect another user intentionally. Right now we are though going by the „First come, first serve“ approach, ensuring that people can do their presentations without being disturbed. The pin code ensures that only students in the room can connect, so our other educational users
-
It is true that we are hosting our cloud solution Amazon Web Services. That said the actual hosting is actually local in Germany and also we do encrypt all data going back and forth between your Airtame devices and the Cloud. At the moment we are not planning to make any options for hosting the cloud service locally, due to the extreme infrastructure workload that this would entail. We are confident that we can provide a secure and great cloud service with our current infrastructure.
You can read more about the security implications of using our cloud service here.
- I really appreciate that you have been following our company for a long while. Airtame is built upon a number of open source licenses and utilizing a lot of open source software. It is our intention to open more up in the future and to make both our software and hardware more accessible for third parties to integrate with. That said we have for the time being not allocated a lot of work to this due to the resource constraints that we are currently under. I know this is not a really clear answer, but unfortunately the best I can provide atm.
I hope this clarifies all your questions.
As said it sounds like there’s an exciting opportunity for us to work together and make your school wireless.
Do you have certain plans for how you want to proceed with that project from here?
If you want to see a bit more about educational institutions using Airtame I will recommend you to check out one of our latest blog posts + video from Hult International Business School
Looking forward to be hearing back from you.
Meine Antwort an den Support:
Hi Ulf
Thanks for reaching out to us. It sounds like a really interesting case and an environment where Airtame could fit in really well.
I will do my very best to answer the questions you had regarding the Airtame device here:
- It is true that the Pin code feature is not yet added to the mobile applications. What will happen right now though is that if you enabled the Pin code on an Airtame device, you wont be able to connect to the screen via mobile devices. Essentially we are doing this to prevent people from hijacking, but we are of course working to integrate the Pin code in the mobile applications.
Actually the support for mobile devices is getting a full overhaul. I can’t give you many details on this at the moment, but we are expecting to launch something later this year to give a more complete experience on iOS and Android.
We are right now in the evaluation phase. As much details as you can give me would be very helpful to see if the Airtame is a device worth investing in.
- We don’t currently have any function to do an override. We are though considering making something like a moderation feature or a master password that would allow you to disconnect another user intentionally. Right now we are though going by the „First come, first serve“ approach, ensuring that people can do their presentations without being disturbed. The pin code ensures that only students in the room can connect, so our other educational users
Here is the usecase we are expecting.
Lets say we have a airtame device in every classroom (about 60 rooms for my school)
Teacher with students comes into the classroom. Teacher uses the school wifi network to connect to the airtame.
At the end of class the teacher leaves the classroom. But forgets to disconnect from the airtame.
New people in the room can not use the airtame since the connection from the old device is still active.
- It is true that we are hosting our cloud solution Amazon Web Services. That said the actual hosting is actually local in Germany and also we do encrypt all data going back and forth between your Airtame devices and the Cloud.
Could you please give me more details about this. I don’t really understand how you can host „locally“ while at the same time use the S3 Cloud.
At the moment we are not planning to make any options for hosting the cloud service locally, due to the extreme infrastructure workload that this would entail. We are confident that we can provide a secure and great cloud service with our current infrastructure.
Now you’re saying no hosting locally. This is confusing.
You can read more about the security implications of using our cloud service here.
Thanks. I’ve done that. That is exactly why I’m asking all this questions.
For example in the link you provided it says under Cloud access:
User account information + passwords are stored on the server and are bcrypt-hashed for maximum security.
Ok. Fair enough.
But just a few lines under that it says:
WiFi passwords and devices settings passwords are not being exchanged for security reasons.
That is at least to my understanding contradictory to the first statement.
I would very much appreciate it if you could give me a bit more details of what is actually happening.
Und Antwort des Supports:
Hi again Ulf
I can definitely understand the confusion.
The difference is that the user account and password are the login details for our own Cloud service (Airtame.cloud). We of course store these to let you log in to the cloud. That said we do not store the passcode/login information for your local network in the Cloud. This is only stored on the Airtame devices themselves.
I hope that clarifies everything, otherwise don’t hesitate to reach out again.
Fazit:
Ab dem Zeitpunkt hatte ich keine Lust mehr, da ich den Eindruck hatte dass man mir lieber Buzzwords und Worthülsen um die Ohren wirft, als technische Detailfragen zu beantworten.
Linux-Support wäre toll und wünschenswert, was aber die Optionen schon wieder einschränkt, wenn man wirklich den ganzen Bildschirm spiegeln möchte.
