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Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

I have to admit that when you actually look at the details this is a rather perplexing change. Ditto for reading the comments here.

Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change? If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually. When this setting is disabled, this becomes far harder.

I'm of the opinion that this change is good and actually increases security across the board, including for the people who are using it to exchange information during protests since it disables a vector for tracking devices.

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> Is Apple being Pro-CCP with this change?

I don't think Apple is Pro-CCP, Apple is Pro-Being-Able-To-Do-Business-In-China, which means doing whatever the CCP tells you to do, even if it means compromising your ethics.

At the risk of being an Apple apologist, their manufacturing is effectively held hostage by China. Yes Apple is taking the "make more profit" choice, but the alternative is pretty devastating to the company. Long term, Apple needs to diversify their manufacturing footprint.

(Note that I still think Apple would adhere to the CCP's requests/laws just to be able to sell in China. China would ban Apple products if they believed Apple was not cooperative.)

All tech companies that rely upon China for manufacturing are in this situation -- not just Apple.

Agreed to a point. Smaller companies can more easily get enough manufacturing capacity elsewhere, but larger companies are trapped by finding that capacity, technical ability, and hitting the price points they need at scale.

They’re already diversifying their manufacturing to Vietnam, India and Malaysia because random draconian zero-Covid lockdowns have been very disruptive to their supply chain, not out of any high principle.

The protesters should use these little gizmos instead:

https://www.sandisk.com/goto/connect

Basically micro web servers with MicroSD cards for storage, a battery and WiFi AP with 2h battery life and in the form factor of a chunky flash drive. You can power them off a power bank for more airtime.

> compromising your ethics

My more cynical view is that there are no ethics to compromise. The ethic is make money. Any appearance of ethics is there as a marketing gimmick.

Apple is a publicly traded company. It's beholden to the ethics of its shareholders.

> compromising your ethics

Is disabling a feature for all citizens within a geographical region "compromising your ethics" I would argue not. Different countries have different laws, including what kind of radio spectrum a phone is able to use. These have to be respected. As distasteful as it is, "respecting" the laws of an autocratic country.

Now if Apple was handing over geolocation information for apple users on bulk to the CCP, or compiling lists of "likely" dissidents or <insert-minority-group> then I think we are at least knee-deep in unethical waters. But they'll probably be some people out there who say Apple-the-company is completely ethical unless they themselves are the ones pulling the trigger. I kind of disagree on this outlook, but legally again they might be right. (If you take your ethical/moral bases on that of current law.)

>If you open airdrop to everyone, your device can be tracked and identified individually.

That can already be done using cell towers (especially with 5G) and GPS enabled state-supervised apps like WeChat, etc. So that's not a good reason.

If only iPhones had a way to turn off its cellular radio, some kind of “airplane mode” or something

Why should we possibly believe that any software switches actually fully disable anything? If there isn't a hardware killswitch, there is no reasonable expectation that the cellular radio is actually disabled...

There are trustworthy sources claiming that the NSA still tracks devices that are completely "powered off".

No reason to believe that the CCP doesn't have that ability as well.

I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm just pointing out that there is a tangible benefit to end-user privacy that is enabled by this change inasmuch as the features are advertised to work and inasmuch as I personally have investigated how they operate.

Certainly the CCP has other means to surveil their dissidents, and at a certain level of paranoia, leaving the cell phone behind might be a good idea. However that is a completely separate topic that does not deserve to be convoluted with this discussion.

It seems in the fervor to lambast Apple, very few people seem to be fully considering that the original feature is extremely problematic. People will often enable 'Everyone' when they need to exchange a file with someone, but forget to change it back. If you need any more evidence that this is so, I invite you to go into a public space and scan for Airdrop targets.

It's pretty easy to test this with a meter. I don't get any emf with my Samsung or my MacBook when I'm in those modes.

Hardware killswitches are security theatre, if you can’t trust the software layer to that degree than you are just lost behind saving.

Strong disagree - defense in depth is a thing.

I once had my phone, which I had turned off, loudly ring during a moment of silence I was attending. It was extremely embarrassing, and until I replaced that phone whenever I was in a similar situation where it was critical to be quiet, I removed the battery. It wasn't that I didn't trust the phone or it's software, but mistakes and accidents happen, and for some critical situations it's better to be safe than sorry.

Same thing applies to phones with hardware switches.

No. You can inspect the hardware. If you can verify that the switch disables the radio, you don't have to worry about software do you?

... unless there is some other way to exfiltrate data, such as:

1. alternative antennae, chipsets?

2. some kind of filtering + buffer + delayed send

3. something else...?

Whatever the case, such techniques are not free of cost and increase the chance of exfil detection. So, killswitches provide a later of protection. Therefore, the claim that killswitches are of _no_ use is not adequately argued above.

> hardware. If you can verify that the switch disables the radio, you don't have to worry about software do you?

Until the next time you turn radio on, when it could just send out anything, anywhere if the software stack is untrusted, so we are back at square one.

I'm aware. You apparently did not notice my point #2 above:

> 2. some kind of filtering + buffer + delayed send

Resources (compute, storage) are needed for filtering, buffering, sending. However, these actions are not "free": (1) they increase the chance of detection later; (2) they require electrical power; (3) they require additional design and testing for the device using them. Isn't raising the cost of breaching security the basic idea?

So my point stands: A hardware kill switch serves as a security layer. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it is not (in general) simply security theater (your point above).

I do recall reading something about the cellular/radio chip is separate from the rest phones hardware.

It can still communicate with towers even when phone is off. The phone can’t control that behavior.

> It can still communicate with towers even when phone is off. The phone can’t control that behavior.

It cannot and does not. Please do not perpetuate this ridiculous fantasy.

Doesn't "airplane mode" disable "airdrop" as well?

Airdrop uses a combination of bluetooth and wifi and does work with Airplane mode enabled.

Which can be tracked… Likely all the way via satellite.

Assuming the MAC randomization does not work as advertised and airplane mode does not actually disable the cellular and satellite modems as advertised, and airdrop's identity hashes are not as secure as advertised, or the attacker can fingerprint your specific radio and trilaterate its location via satellite, then sure, it can be tracked. Boy, do I feel stupid.

If on the other hand you want to enjoy having your phone broadcast your name and picture to everyone just because you forgot to change that setting back after the last time you AirDropped a video to your coworker, then by all means, Apple has done you a disservice.

if people started doing it in mass it would be pretty strong and obvious signal in and of itself due to the manual and intentional nature of the action

Why is it being rolled out in China first?

Because China told them to after protests last month or so. This did not just happen in the last two days.

This is arguably a good setting too, as there are plenty of stories of people in other parts of the world who AirDrop lewd/violent/disgusting pictures to anyone around with their phone set to “allow anyone”. It’s happened on planes, for example.

But this is a tool people figured out they could use for a different purpose: spreading info during protests. So now it’s caught up in politics.

For all the “evil Apple”, they’ve been better than others. But they are a total hostage. The vast majority of the stuff is in China. Piss off the CCP and the company practically dies overnight.

Yes, they should have fixed that long ago. But here we are.

Also, anyone who rides public transportation in a major metropolitan area has probably experienced perverts airdropping them pornography, and this would fix that issue.

I have not experienced this in my 10 years on the subway.

I am not sure if you are a man or a woman. Try changing the name of your iPhone to something like "Heather's iPhone" and then turn on AirDrop to "Everyone" on your subway rides. I am sure your experience will be vastly different.

Are you just guessing or do you actually have a reason to believe this?

Commuting in NYC on Subway.

My wife's phone is actually "Heather's iPhone" and it happened any time she accidentally left "Everyone" after e.g. a conference.

While she's more amused than offended, she thinks it's a good idea this promiscuous mode will now turn itself back off if she forgets.

Do you think your wife could handle one extra option that is not the default where some users could change the 10 minutes to 1 or more hours? Or is that too many options for the average users?

She's got no problem with settings, but it's preferable if it remembers for you to turn it back off.

What Apple does for a lot of things (see Focus, or DND) is "until I leave this place" (or event if in a calendared event) and "until tomorrow", those make more sense to me than a particular time frame.

So in this case where someone has for some special event to enable this feature they can get a few options. I was asking because Apple and GNOME fanboys claim that the average user is incapable to choose for themselves.

But honestly in this case they needed to release it globally, then designers would be happy they removed a feature, Apple could continue selling the idea that they respect human rights and privacy.

Sure, in any particular case, users could handle multiple options. But if you add multiple options in every similar ambiguous case, your phone suddenly becomes an Android or worse. And those who want that can already use Android; as someone who prefers the minimalistic design of Apple, I sure don't want options to multiply and spread in the UI, even if it occasionally means working around some limitation.

I don't believe this, a good designer can handle the task of showing all important options in a intuitive way and hide some of the stuff in an Advanced section.

There simply isnt a need to "Set the feature" for any kind of event. It's not like you can turn this on, put your phone in your pocket and then have people send unsolicited files to your phone all day long. Airdrop only works when your phone is unlocked and in use. You already have to interact with it to receive something, and you can put a shortcut button in control center for it. Making the privacy-preserving setting the default is the right call. Whether or not China had anything to do with it is honestly irrelevant.

> Making the privacy-preserving setting the default is the right call. Whether or not China had anything to do with it is honestly irrelevant.

One of us is wrong, here, my understanding is not that Apple changed a default , but Apple removed/wiped the default option . You claim that you can change the default back to what it was before ?

AirDrop harassment is a thing and sometimes arrested in Japan, shame. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20190821/p2a/00m/0na/00...

Do you ride public transportation in a major metropolitan area? This is not a thing I've ever even heard of happening (I'm sure someone has done it) in the real world

It happens enough that the UK government want to outlaw it. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cyberflashing-to-become-a...

> The practice typically involves offenders sending an unsolicited sexual image to people via social media or dating apps, but can also be over data sharing services such as Bluetooth and Airdrop.

I'd wager the majority of cases they refer to being via social media and dating apps given the language.

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