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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> With the app you can play a sound on AirTags and find it easily.

I wonder how it does that. Unauthenticated BLE characteristic? This would imply anyone could force an arbitrary AirTag to make a sound. Obvious application: force all AirTags nearby to keep making sounds.

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Why annoy people like this? My e-bike has Find My tracking built in to the firmware. As long as you don’t steal my bike you have no privacy concerns from me securing my bike. Even better I can track my bike down without involving the police, so the potential thief doesn’t even have to worry about being shot by some trigger happy cop.

Is “cop shoots bike thief” something you actually think is common enough to note?

This implies a concerning reality departure.

The police department is recommending people store their documents in an always-visible pouch to avoid getting shot.

https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/ooc/news-releases/Pages/dps-par...

This is a solution in the same way anti-homeless design is a solution

And they called the pouches "not reaching pouches". I wonder if they get the irony of "not reaching".

The sad reality is buried under so many layers of derangement, I can’t really understand what exactly they are trying to solve here

> deadly force encounters can be catastrophic for police officers

Oy vey.

At least where I live it is. I’ve personally witnessed two instances of excessive force and been a victim of excessive force myself.

And the last police shooting was ultimately about stolen property. They killed a father to be and a fetus over a suspected stolen car.

So no, I haven’t departed reality. But yes, not all police departments are like this (mine specifically has been under federal oversight for years).

> At least where I live it is

In the US? I wonder which part of the US (if I may ask)

> last police shooting .. killed a father ..

How sad that they did that. (If it got covered by any news, it'd be interesting (or is there a better word) to read)

I don't know if this is the case, but it seems to match:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/10/oakland-eri...

https://www.ktvu.com/news/attorney-for-brianna-colombo-confi...

I find the wording itself interesting. I guess it's a sort of class-tribalism that's developed to the point where it's so ingrained in some people's mindsets that they causally append bizarre comments like that to their sentences.

Broadcasting your bona fides far and wide is certainly en vogue in certain circles; anecdotally speaking, the incidence of people manifesting their vanilla pronouns is orders of magnitude higher than otherwise.

Seems it's on par with yelling go packers or similar at a crowded bar.

Great, now instead of getting shot by a cop you’ll get the crap kicked out of you instead.

In many areas of the US, that trigger happy cop will be the difference between you recovering your property and you being severely beaten when you show up in a rough neighborhood trying to get your bike back.

In my experience, the most an American cop is going to do to help you resolve a property crime is take a report. If they happen to find the item, you _may_ get it back.

However this is a required step for submitting to many consumer insurance programs

And probably the answer for why things are the way they are: most people likely just want the report for insurance payout, and not getting their used thing back.

> In many areas of the US, that trigger happy cop will be the difference between you recovering your propert

A cop's not going to get your bike back. They'll write a report and then throw it away when you leave.

In what area of the US do the police actually recover bikes?

If you show the police officer a live location of your stolen property moving on a map, that's usually enough to motivate them into action. I've seen two stolen phones recovered this way. If you tell them your bike is stolen and that's all the information you have, they rightly deduce that there's almost no chance of you getting it back.

There's tons of people who've posted about people telling cops exactly which house their stolen property is in (using Find My Phone/Whatever) and cops simply saying they can't/won't do anything.

This is what happens most of the time -- cops just don't care in the majority of cases.

That's why it's important to be friends with ex-Special Forces and ex-MMA fighters.

What if someone else is tracking your bike? Or backpack, or car, etc? GPS trackers exist so this doesn't eliminate that concern, but at least if someone tries tracking you with an AirTag you have an option to locate it.

> Why annoy people like this?

Does it matter? Someone is going to do it anyway. They might just think that it's funny that they can make all the tags in the subway car start making noise.

So maybe the question should be "why did Apple design it to allow this?".

Seems so, there’s a constant named AIR_TAG_SOUND_CHARACTERISTIC with this value: 7DFC9001-7D1C-4951-86AA-8D9728F8D66C

The small evil part of me wants to extract this part of the source and just bring my phone onto public transit for a while to see what happens.

You don’t AirDrop cat photos to people at mass gatherings?

Pre pandemic I would change my phone name to cta lemur and send lemur pics to people on the “L”. I’ve been on public transit twice since March 13th 2020 and there’s not enough people to get away with this anymore.

Isn't the default AirDrop setting to receive from people in your contact list only? (It was on my Mac and iPhone.)

Probably some people change the configuration to take AirDrops from everyone, but I'd expect that to be a small minority.

Unfortunately yes it is.

All of this reminds me of good old bluejacking, which was when we did the same thing using Bluetooth.

Funnily enough, I just found out BT Info (or SuperBluetoothHack) still exists and you can run the old .jar with J2ME Loader on Android. Or you can use the new apk. But of course it only works on the old phones.

Now I'm curious too - if you decide to do it, let me know :D

starts at line 93 of https://github.com/seemoo-lab/AirGuard/blob/main/app/src/mai...

Apple devices create an encrypted mesh network. So every Apple device nearby potentially can pass encrypted messages from either a "Find my iPhone" or "Find my AirTag" BT beacon. Eventually it finds a device that is connected to the internet and the packets are forwarded to the Apple Account bound to the Air Tag.

I think the encryption and tie to an Apple account prevent arbitrary people from doing that.

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