Uninvited voices

I slept for nearly nine hours and got up a lot later than usual for a Sunday. It's quite a while since I did this. The accumulated tiredness of the past couple of months of coping in a very different environment is now being compensated for, I think. It was lovely to return to St German's and celebrate Mass among friends again, twenty seven of us in church altogether. 

After the service over coffee, plans were being made for the coming Christmas Fayre. The Ministry Area is short of a priest now that NSM Ruth has been moved across the city. That's very tough for Stewart, the Ministry Area Leader to have to arrange cover for. Glad I'm still able to help him.

When I was getting in the car to drive home, my Blackberry emitted a short jingle, then a sultry female voice saying "I'm here." It happened again five minutes later when I was driving in traffic. It happened for the first time yesterday when we were out at Porthkerry. When I examined my phone on each occasion nothing was showing to indicate the origin of the disembodied voice. Hacked or not? Most un-nerving. 

After a delicious lunch of salmon with corn on the cob, plus Porthkerry blackberries and apple crumble for pudding, I thought I'd better investigate. Nothing showed up in the instant message or SMS apps, nor in WhatsApp, Instagram or Gmail. My phone is linked to the wristband step tracker I wear through a Bluetooth channel, could this be the source of the intrusion? Indeed it was. The Bluetooth settings had a single item in it - the link made two weeks ago when I used the chaplaincy's Bose loudspeaker to link to the funeral music playlist I'd prepared for the service I took. That speaker is two thousand miles away from here, but I think this must have established an open 'listening' channel able to sense any Bluetooth speaker that comes within range. 

Indeed, St German's also has a Bluetooth speaker. I recall deleting its registration from my phone's  menu in Spain, when I was setting up the Bose speaker to use there. Many people have Bose Bluetooth devices in their cars and homes. Come within range of any of them and you get the disembodied voice inviting you to pair up, whether or not you need or want to - unless you delete the registration of the device in your Bluetooth settings.

I find this very disturbing. Firstly the disembodied voice can be distracting just at the wrong moment if you're driving or working on something critical. Secondly, this open channel could be used by a hacker with know-how to access your phone without you knowing or agreeing and dump nasty stuff on your phone, or extract personal data from it. An old fashioned cable connection is far more secure!

Clare went out to meet with members of her meditation group for coffee. I walked to Llandaff Cathedral in time for Evensong advertised on its website at 3.30pm, but found out it was at four instead. I enjoyed half an hour's meditative quiet before the service, which was said with a few hymns this week. Canon Jan va de Leley officiated and we chatted briefly afterwards. I was delighted to discover that she'd been head of Religious Studies at Aiglon College in Switzerland, a place where I took services on locum duty in Montreux.

After supper, I binge watched a French mystery thriller series called 'The Chalet', about revenge in a sub-Alpine village. It contained a lot of flashback scenes, presented without distinction between past and present, and given that the cast of characters was quite big, figuring out older and younger selves made it complex to work out who is/was who. Nice scenery however. Then, an episode of 'The Capture', fast paced, and confusing, but deliberately so, as the storyline is about real time video faking, false flag operations and cyber warfare, in which the characters in the drama are being deceived and confused by the manipulation of all their communications channels, audio and video. This was so powerfully and convincingly done I felt completely caught up in it. A disturbing view of tomorrow, especially in the light of uninvited voices coming from my phone.