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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

This seems annoying, especially as you don't get to control whether other people nearby have AirTags.

OTOH you could use it to detect stealthy fake AirTags? :D

There could be a DoS attack vector - presumably a BLE-enabled microcontroller could technically emulate an infinite number of AirTags and drain the battery even more if not cause more serious problems. I wonder how quickly this would be fixed if someone were to sprinkle a few such microcontrollers around Apple Stores or offices.

Someone already reversed the exact protocol and proof of concepted a arduino (or pi?) device that could happily use the network and would roll the keys regardless of whether it was in the owners vicinity, defeating the anti-tracking stuff.

Of course at that point you’ve probably spent more than regular gps stalkerware

You are possibly at risk of Apple detecting this and locking your account. But at some point, if the attacker is determined enough to build custom hardware like this, there is not a lot you can do. None of the competitors managed any better or even got close to the protections Apple provided.

At some point we need to put the burden on law enforcement. It's impossible to make abuse of technology impossible but we can criminalize misuse.

All wireless protocols can be fairly trivially DoS'ed, due to the nature of finite bandwidth and power limits.

However, do most wireless protocols cause listening devices to start using significantly more CPU and thus battery power? I'd expect DoS in most authenticated protocols to be impossible and essentially rejected at the hardware level (just like interference would be) with very minimal power impact.

I guess we need a new term for “power consumption” DoS

You can disable the Find My network, which is a separate option/setting from Find My for your specific device(s).

It's found under your iCloud Settings > Find My

The only major caveat to disabling it on your devices is it removes the ability for those devices to be located when they're turned off.

Apple should separate the settings for FindMy the device / FindMy other devices.

AFAIK they are separate already. They are separate toggles on the configuration screen.

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