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Comment by matthewfcarlson | Hacker News Reader

Or the reverse of that where it sends a random meme to anyone walking by.

Oh no, a thousand marketers just had the idea of automatically airdropping advertisements to passers-by. You could even structure it as a lottery-esque type of thing, only giving out good coupons or discounts to random individuals at random intervals, prompting people to loiter and wait for theirs.

Hah, make it give out cryptocoins, and take the idea of peasants waiting for royalty to make it rain money to the 21st century, where it all happens digitally/using a smartphone.

Did kings and emperors even do that in the old times?

The default is to only accept transfers from people that are in your address book.

If I understood their paper[1] correctly you can just use a popular phone number that a person walking by is likely to have in their contacts, like an emergency line number.

My mobile telco's SIM comes with a couple of contacts on it like their customer support line. I don't know anything about AirDrop, but I assume this will work.

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentat...

As far as I understand the protocol, you'd need a certificate signed by Apple in order to be able to masquerade as that contact in somebody's contact list, and Apple only signs these after phone number or email confirmation.

> We support contacts-only devices by using extracted AirDrop credentials (keys and certificates) from macOS via our keychain extractor.

This should make it clear that you can’t just claim any phone number or email address.

You joke, but Apple rolled out some BT-based beacon stuff that allows stores to do some user tracking at short range -- and it can be used to pop local notifications. I don't think stores have gone down the "you're here and we're going to advertise to you" route (since that'd be creepy as hell), but its more grist for the mill.

When I walked into the local Apple store circa 2019 I was greeted with a “welcome to Apple” notification from the Apple store app. It’s the only example I’ve seen of iBeacons being used that I personally know of.

Before the pandemic, one of my friends used to have a hobby of going to bars and conventions and AirDropping pictures of ducks to strangers who left their AirDrop turned on.

Was it really ducks, or was it an autocorrection?

They were ducks. Mallard, wood duck, those Chinese ducks with the fancy feathers, he had them all.

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