this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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So don’t go to China and if you do don’t send any important but unencrypted files via short-distance signal from one iPhone to another iPhone, gotcha.
AirDrop has been used in China by pro-democracy activists to spread their message relatively safely (as you can't get away with that using the internet). Apple has already made AirDrop useless for that purpose in a recent update, but I guess China is still working on cracking down on it.
You can still use airdrop to send shit to people about how much the CCP sucks. Airdropping to non-contacts still exists, but when you enable receiving from any rando, that door only remains open for 10 minutes, then you have to open it again.
I guess the question is, do Chinese people keep tapping “everyone for 10 minutes” multiple times in certain public places?
That's what I meant as it being useless now for that purpose. Unless there's designated dissent areas or times, that strategy just won't work any more (and if you have to be 'in the know' to enable it, you're not recruiting/convincing any new people).
I curious why China still cares about it. It seems like it would be hard for to spread info around on it now.
That said, if they still care about it, there must be some sort of use case that scares them.
Or they tasked a team with cracking it, they finally got a result and decided to announce it regardless, even if it is moot because the economic pressure on Apple worked.
Apple disabled AirDrop in the China region, then later globally, for people not in your contacts.
Correct, reviving files from everyone is now only open for 10 min. It was launched in China to appease the CCP, but in western nations where using airdrop to voice government dissent isn’t popular, it was released to stop people from airdropping dick pics on the subway.
😆 Imagine the analog version of this... Dudes leaving random dick polaroids...
I don’t have to imagine it. I’ve clocked in hours on BART. It’s just dudes whipping it out.
Thing is, the actual airdrop file transfer should be gated behind a 2048-bit RSA hash.
I’m curious to see what the security vulnerability is and how long it will remain open. China has been thirsting to find one for years.
I haven’t read anything about cracking the data itself though, just being able to identify the phone number of a sender. The infos they give is just too vague at this point.