Tech Explained: Bluetooth Exploits

Posted under Tech Explained on July 5th, 2026 by

If you are from India, you may have seen the e-rickshaw battery videos this week on how e-rickshaws are getting so called “hacked” & disabled and India govt banning the vendor apps allowing for Battery Management System access.

TBH its not even a hack. Its a safety feature to probably remote turn off BMS in case some over heating. Most vendors selling them in India didn’t put a firmware lock on those. When you white label and import without knowing anything about the product, this is bound happen.

This issue reminded me of a Bluetooth security case last year. At a security conference, ERNW researchers showed vulnerabilities in Airoha-based Bluetooth audio devices. These chips are used in many headphones and earbuds(even the high end ones like Sony).

A headphone is trusted by your phone because both devices store a cryptographic bond. In Bluetooth Classic, one part of that trust is the link key. Once your phone pairs with the headphone, it accepts that device again because the key matches.

The researchers found a vendor protocol exposed over Bluetooth. On affected devices, a nearby attacker could use that protocol without proper authentication. It could read flash, read or write RAM, and extract Bluetooth link keys. This affected most devices with Airoha chips. All an attacker needs is to be in the range within the device. Thats it.

Attacker can impersonate the headphone to the phone. From the phone’s PoV, the old trusted headset has returned. Once a device is accepted as a headset, it can route audio, touch call controls, interact with the microphone path, record audio, and trigger voice assistants. Since its an year old, I think the vulnerability is fixed.

If you build Bluetooth products, for the love of God, please keep the vendor SDK current. Pull the latest vendor firmware, enforce pairing and authentication on every GATT and RFCOMM path, remove unused services, restrict connection parameters, and test what a nearby untrusted phone can actually do. Please remember any maintenance interface exposed over Bluetooth is a public attack surface.

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Tech Explained: Data Center Liquid Cooling

Posted under Tech Explained, Technology on June 28th, 2026 by

There has been a lot of hue and cry around AI data centers. I think a good part of it is valid, because big ones can stress the local power grid and water systems. The energy side is harder to solve as every calculation needs electricity. The water side is more interesting, because water is often used to move heat. Let’s discuss the latest tech trying to reduce that.

From the basics, almost every watt entering a server becomes heat. A 100kW AI rack is close to a 100kW heater. If you remove heat using air, you need airflow, fans, cold aisles and chilled water. Traditional cooling often uses an open or semi-open evaporative path. Water takes heat from the chiller loop and some of it is intentionally evaporated in a cooling tower. This works because evaporation carries a lot of heat. Water demand can peak on hot days when cities and farms also need water.

In a closed-loop system, a water-glycol coolant flows through cold plates on the chips, picks up heat, goes to a coolant distribution unit, then to a dry cooler that works like a radiator. The same coolant keeps circulating. NVIDIA’s reference talks about 45°C coolant going in and roughly 55°C coming out. That higher temperature loop matters because warmer coolant creates a larger temperature difference with ambient air, improving heat transfer in dry coolers and reducing the need for water-intensive cooling towers.

Microsoft, Google and Meta have been pushing liquid cooling and higher temperature operation for the same reason. Recent lifecycle work suggests advanced cooling can cut total water use by roughly 31-52% versus traditional air cooling. An NVIDIA white paper says cooling-tower-based systems can use about 10 Million litres per MW-year, while warm liquid loops with dry coolers can bring that close to zero in good climates. So good from the local nature PoV.

I think this should be considered by every new data center being planned now. A site already built around air cooling or evaporative towers may carry that architecture for years, but new builds still have the chance to choose a lower-water heat path from day one. I hope India follows the newer tech.

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