Adding encryption shouldn't be hard, as long as you can communicate the keys out of band.
Could probably achieve the same result using audio instead of video, but maybe that would be too annoying?
Airdrop is a thing, but remember that Android phones are controlled by the online services company that wants you to use online services.
Do you mean the one that went to all the trouble to reverse engineer Airdrop so that people could access Apple's vendor-locked walled garden without the use of online services?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
It'd transfer phone numbers and calendar entries to the watch by blinking the screen of your computer. Kinda a 1 pixel version of this.
(I wonder where that ended up? From memory I threw it in a drawer when I finished the Windows 95 project I'd been working on, and switched to Mac. There was no Mac software to talk to it.)
If your firmware is small enough to fit that model, it isn't a bad variant. Beats downloading a file, transferring it to a USB drive, sticking that in,...
Probably still wouldn't want to use digital audio input though. Although it's a perfect digital stream, it's been processed in analog-like ways before it gets to the device - such as filtering and volume changes. So you'd still want to use a modem protocol over it.
The same way you whisper to say something secret in a public space I would expect people who transfer something private in public would have the presence of mind not let other snoop on and react accordingly.
Bringing it into the ultra sonic band would help.
It's interesting that you learn to recognise patterns in the burbling tones after a while. "CQ CQ CQ" is very distinctive and after a while you can hear your own callsign in it. I guess it's not that different to very fast Morse.
I bet that's how satellite radios get their firmware updates and stuff.
Actually I bet it's how they get almost everything aside from the audio streams themselves. Metadata. Channel art. Subscription info. Traffic data. Weather maps. Receiver firmware... The satellite is a textbook-perfect fountain, and the receiver may tune in at any time during the stream, and may miss any random number of packets, but fairly quickly it has what it needs.
I believe the various categories of metadata are sent at different rates according to how promptly a newly-awakened receiver should be able to update itself, so what's actually on the air is an interleaved collection of fountain streams, yeah? Hmm.
I know GPS is a slow repeating stream (the ephemeris repeats every 30 seconds and the almanac every 12.5 minutes) but that probably came before fountain codes.
Reed-Solomon/erasure codes have been in operations since the 1960s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_cor...
Thats just cool.
Otherwise ridiculously cool project. May author's pillow always be cool on both sides.
Radio's get intercepted, this is a cheap laser link.
Something like this would be good for transferring the public key(s) associated with some cryptographic messaging identity. This would allow that to happen entirely offline. The optical nature of the transfer would prevent a potential MITM. The idea that an identity is being transferred would be fairly easy to impart to the user.
So the lack of encryption would be a feature and not a bug. This would enable later encryption which could then use any medium for the transfer in a completely secure way.