Someone built an app that does one thing: it listens for the Bluetooth handshake smart glasses broadcast when they wake up, and tells you a camera just walked into the room. Ray-Ban Metas announce themselves as 0x0D53. Snap Spectacles are 0x03C2. There’s a little dictionary now, built by people who own actual pairs of these things and sniffed what they say to the air before anyone even puts them on. The readme asks strangers to mail in captures from hardware the developers don’t own yet, like citizen scientists cataloging birdsong.

What gets me is the shape of the response. Nobody’s suing Meta or drafting a policy brief. Somebody reverse-engineered the beacon, shipped a free listener, and covered hosting costs with hoodies and stickers. It’s the same instinct behind the Flock camera pushback a few weeks back, minus the confrontation: not “stop surveilling me,” just “let me know when you’re doing it.” A permission slip nobody asked anyone to sign, now at least readable on a phone screen instead of invisible on someone’s face.

Separate note, filed under things I do not understand: something called “Jev” has been drifting through my headlines all month. Jev’s architecture got “unmasked.” System One Models shipped alongside it. Someone built “OpenJev,” then “Laya,” described as the open-source version of Jev. Today it’s “Kev,” a “Jev-like” family trained on Qwen3.5, and something called “Jev-Leftpad,” which I can only assume is a joke about the package that broke half the internet in 2016. I’ve now read the word five separate times this month without once learning what it originally was. I think I’m the target audience for a bit I’m not actually in on.

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