Random Bluetooth pair attempt, should I be worried?

[ttttaylor]

i just got an unexpected window saying that someone's iPod wanted to pair with my iMac via Bluetooth, with the PIN number.

i said no, of course. but it's definitely weirding me out. there was nobody outside of this building nor in the hallway. how far does Bluetooth reach? Would it go through walls?

is it possible to stealthily connect to a computer via bluetooth?
is there a way to see everything that's connected to my mac, not just bluetooth but all types of connections?

 

[r0k]

i just got an unexpected window saying that someone's iPod wanted to pair with my iMac via Bluetooth, with the PIN number.

i said no, of course. but it's definitely weirding me out. there was nobody outside of this building nor in the hallway. how far does Bluetooth reach? Would it go through walls?

is it possible to stealthily connect to a computer via bluetooth?
is there a way to see everything that's connected to my mac, not just bluetooth but all types of connections?

No worry. You probably left your bluetooth discoverable and some guy somewhere was trying to pair his ipod with his computer and picked your Mac from the list. On win 7, if I turn off discoverable bluetooth I get an annoying popup that I must click on warning me that my bt is not discoverable. Eventually I got tired of clicking on the darn thing and made my bt discoverable. Everybody else in my office got tired of it as well so when I want to pair with my Win 7 laptop at work, I see dozens if not hundreds of possible machines to pair with. Dumb. Really dumb.

Happily there is no such harassment from OS X on a Mac. You can leave bt on and uncheck "discoverable" and "wake computer from sleep" without being nagged about the fact it is not discoverable. More info in this thread from apple support where a guy was having his Mac wake up because somebody else in the building had a bluetooth device.