PuKool is Kool indeed

One Saturday night in Vessel, a trendy San Francisco night club, Alex, a Silicon Valley geek, sat at the bar table next to a beautiful brunette and began an awkward conversation. First, it did not go well. The girl was apparently not impressed with Alex’s looks and body language – he had an unmistakable aura of a geek. But as the conversation progressed the ice began thawing. Alex praised The International, the movie the girl just seen and liked, and they appeared to like the same music and TV shows. Soon, they were dancing and eventually left the club together.

How come a classic geek pulled the trick? He had a secret weapon – his iPhone with a clandestine PuKool application. (PuKool – apparently meaning LookUp spelled backwards – is not available in AppStore and works only on jail-broken iPhones.) Here is how it works. You launch the app and it quickly finds all other iPhones in the room, and identifies their owners by name. You also see the photos and figure out who is who. After you zoom in on one person you can open his or her Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn profile. This is how Alex learned about Lindsey’s favorite music, actors, movies and pastimes. He hasn’t seen The International; he read the plot synopsis on IMDB. And he did not give a damn about half of her favorite groups – he just memorized their names. Geeks have good memory, don’t they? Then he was ready to seat next to her. And it worked…

It worked for Alex before in a totally different setting, at a Churchill Club event, a gathering of Silicon Valley executives, investors and entrepreneurs. With UpKool, Alex got the list of all attendees with iPhones in their pockets. Checking against Crunch Base he was able to find out that two high-profile venture capitalists with investments in startups complimentary to his own were in attendance. He found them in the crowd, made his elevator pitches and soon got the presentation meetings.

One may wonder how PuKool manages to find other iPhones and identify their wearers. Ever iPhone is WiFi-enabled, and WiFi protocol supports seldom used peer-to-peer mode, when the devices directly talk to each other, without an access point. This mode is not normally used by the unmodified iPhone, but UpKool re-enables it. Pretending it wants to establish a peer-to-peer network, UpKool gets the IP and MAC addresses of all WiFi devices in range.

The second step, from the device ID to the owner’s name, is shrouded in mystery. Apparently, the app’s creators managed to find a weakness in how either Apple’s AppStore or AT&T encodes the names of the users. Either the encryption was cracked or Apple did not encrypt the data at all – the UpKool’s distribution site doesn’t give any details. Neither is the address or telephone number of the company is listed, and no managers’ names are given. The domain name is registered by some Petr Kislodrischenko, and English on the site is not quite right, pointing to apparent Russian origin. Still, in the time of free apps, a growing number of users like Alex are paying $39.95 for the download, and they swear it’s worth every penny.