I think they burried the lede here. Conversations with Siri are probably pretty generic but being able to evesdrop on keyboard dictation is pretty severe. I know people that use dictation for the majority of their text messages and email.
Yeah, I'm one of them. The iOS keyboard has slowly become so bad that it's easier to dictate instead, and my partner does the same while driving via CarPlay. This is horrible to read about.
> Even worse, this particular exploit would also allow the app to request DoAP audio on-demand, bypassing the need to wait for the user to talk to Siri or use dictation.
Simple kill switches would be nice to see but I doubt Apple would ever implement something like that.
I agree with your take!!
If you scroll to the "Full TCC Bypass on macOS" portion, you can see that this bug allows folks to turn on an Airpod and direct that audio to a macOS device. This could enable what is known as a Tempest Attack[0,1]
>BTLEServerAgent did not have any entitlement checks or TCC prompts in place for its com.apple.BTLEAudioController.xpc service, so any process on the system could connect to it, send requests, and receive audio frames from AirPods. This exploit would only work on macOS, because the more restricted sandbox of iOS prevents apps from accessing most global mach services directly.
Stuff like that are why I hate Bluetooth in general, and I'm on the fence if either my laptop OR phone will be Apple products when I replace them.
(They seem to cater to people who replace their devices every year and camp out outside the Apple store for new Apple stuff like nerds rather than the folks who didn't want to spend every weekend messing with kernel drivers and thus adopted what I will continue to refer to as "shiny BSD" even though they long since changed the name from OSX to macOS.)
-- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)#Public_rese... [1] http://m6rqq6kocsyugo2laitup5nn32bwm3lh677chuodjfmggczoafzw[...
Basically whenever I just want to get my thoughts out and I'll be the only person reading it, so I don't worry about typos because I can always figure out what I meant.
It's a godsend in terms of speed. I type fast but my brain still goes faster. But I definitely speak faster than I can think.
It only works privately in an office or at home though, obviously. Not helpful on the subway.