[HN Gopher] Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
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Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by
Author : dewey
Score : 58 points
Date : 2022-03-10 21:16 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (annoying.technology)
(TXT) w3m dump (annoying.technology)
| pugworthy wrote:
| There are some battery draining tricks you can do with Bluetooth
| apps on a phone to drain the device batteries.
|
| Essentially if you did a ton of device queries to every BLE
| device visible, you could drain the batteries of every device in
| range. Transmission is probably a heavier battery drain so just
| making them talk to your phone creates drain.
|
| It's a single device example, but in a bar once I was showing a
| co-worker once how you could see and interrogate a lot of BLE
| devices. I pinged someone's Fitbit, and read that it only had 3%
| battery left. Then it vanished. I'm pretty sure in the process of
| asking it to give me the info, it drained the battery.
| Asan1 wrote:
| MilaM wrote:
| AFAIK you don't participate in the network when Find My is
| disabled. Not the best solution, but maybe feasible for devices
| that are only used at home.
| peppertree wrote:
| It's an energy vampire.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Does having more airtags around cause the battery to drain
| faster? It would be absolutely hilarious to walk around with a
| pocket full of airtags and be a legit iphone energy vampire.
| olliej wrote:
| 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
| barkerja wrote:
| 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.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Apple should separate the settings for FindMy the device /
| FindMy other devices.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| olliej wrote:
| 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
| londons_explore wrote:
| All wireless protocols can be fairly trivially DoS'ed, due to
| the nature of finite bandwidth and power limits.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| Curious, none of my devices seem to be suffering like this with
| my air tags all over the house.
|
| I even have some very rarely used devices where find my doesn't
| show that much usage.
|
| Is this tied to a setting or bug?
| barkerja wrote:
| I believe it was a bug that was resolved in one of the latest
| iOS 15 point releases.
| endisneigh wrote:
| don't air tags use the same tech as Find My phone? Whether or not
| you have an air tag or are near one, I'd expect the same
| reduction if that feature is on.
| kmfrk wrote:
| One possible explanation could be that the fallback for U1/UWB
| chips in devices without them sucks?
|
| iPhones >=11 have UWB, iPads don't afaict.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec1e6108efd/...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| An annoyance that is driving me away from the Apple ecosystem is
| the lack of choice when it comes to these new features - they are
| forced onto you with no way to disable them and sometimes
| radically modify the behavior of the device you purchased and may
| make it unsuitable for the original purpose you bought it for.
| I'm still using an iPhone and plan to get the new SE (and only
| because of Touch ID is back - Face ID was a dealbreaker) but for
| work I got myself a Thinkpad. Some things are worse, but at the
| very least I can be confident that once I do get a setup that
| works it'll likely stay working for years without breaking
| overnight because someone at Apple wanted to earn a promotion
| with a feature that's completely useless to me.
|
| In my case, the audio devices menu on Mac/iOS displays nearby
| AirPlay targets, including those not on the LAN. My neighbors got
| their misconfigured so it always pollutes my menus with no way to
| disable this even though I never use AirPlay and don't have any
| compatible hardware (nor intend to get any). Every time there's a
| risk of misclicking and accidentally broadcasting a meeting's
| audio or (if they have auth enabled) annoying the neighbor by
| waking up their Apple TV (or taking over whatever they've been
| watching), and yet I have to faff around with that menu
| constantly because of the next point:
|
| The AirPods auto-switching/roaming introduced in Big Sur made
| mine completely unusable due to some edge-case bug (even
| disabling the auto-switching doesn't make them as reliable as
| they used to be back when they were released, and it takes me 30
| seconds of connecting/disconnecting/switching between audio
| sources upon joining a meeting to actually get it working)
| forcing me to buy a USB headset. My AirPods are still OK for
| music on iPhone but became completely useless for meetings even
| though I bought a second pair just for that reason. - I just
| can't afford to waste 30 seconds of _every_ meeting gesturing
| like an idiot while screwing with my audio settings just to get
| people to finally hear me.
|
| The new "hide my email" feature in Safari now pollutes every
| email form field with a dropdown that I'll never use, and yet
| again no way to disable this.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| This is partially tongue an cheek, but have you considered
| playing instructions on how to properly setup security to your
| neighbors airplay speakers?
| TooKool4This wrote:
| The Find My network can be opted out of in the settings [1].
| And if I remember correctly, it asks you to opt in (but I might
| be remembering wrong)
|
| I have somewhat the opposite opinion though that there are way
| too many settings in iOS now and it does get difficult to dive
| through all the menus. Best thing I can recommend is to use the
| search in the settings.
|
| [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/725664/how-to-opt-out-of-apples-
| fi...
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