A Macbook Air, which is pretty much designed as a wifi-dependent network terminal, would be way down my list of hardware I would choose if I had to build an airgap lab environment.
Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
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Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's not, it just seems that way to the vast majority of us who haven't developed the proper intuition.
Of course, there is the GA evolved antenna. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#33This story made me realize: I haven't seen the phrase "tin-foil hat" used much in the past couple of years. Huh. Which reminded me of a quote: "For a while you wondered whether the fools were pretending to be fools as some kind of deception, or whether there was a real efficient service somewhere else. Later in my fiction, I invented one. But alas the reality was the mediocrity." — Le Carre
The NSA can see through tin now. You must upgrade to superconducting hats.
Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#34If the author of the article is here - I'd suggest turning to Louis Rossmann of YouTube fame:
https://www.rossmanngroup.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup
He has the equipment and skill to repair a logic board, and may have some valuable insights about failure modes of common chips on MacBooks.
Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
…something that didn't look too much like an antenna… The Raspberry Pi Zero W has a perfectly serviceable antenna which is simply a cavity formed between layers of copper and two tiny capacitors which look about like grains of salt. You can read more at https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/pi-zero-w-wireless-antenna... They are designed by some very clever Swedes. http://www.proant.se/en/news.htm That second page shows…
Antenna design is total black magic. Intuition is useless here.
Coming up with new fundamental antenna designs feels a bit black magicky to us lowly electronics people, but that's just because it's more applied physics than engineering. Here's an example of how new antenna pattern design is done: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#36This story made me realize: I haven't seen the phrase "tin-foil hat" used much in the past couple of years. Huh. Which reminded me of a quote: "For a while you wondered whether the fools were pretending to be fools as some kind of deception, or whether there was a real efficient service somewhere else. Later in my fiction, I invented one. But alas the reality was the mediocrity." — Le Carre
The NSA can see through tin now. You must upgrade to superconducting hats.
http://www.businessinsider.com/stewart-butterfield-epic-resi...
Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#37This story made me realize: I haven't seen the phrase "tin-foil hat" used much in the past couple of years. Huh. Which reminded me of a quote: "For a while you wondered whether the fools were pretending to be fools as some kind of deception, or whether there was a real efficient service somewhere else. Later in my fiction, I invented one. But alas the reality was the mediocrity." — Le Carre
Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#38Here is a link: https://www.apple-schematic.se/
Edit: And to look at the PCB files I recommend https://openboardview.org/
Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This article isn’t about proving that though Um the article kinda is: ... so we deemed this information reliable and immediately raised some critical questions: Is there a wireless chipset soldered onto the MacBook Air’s logic board that we didn’t know about? If so, is it not actually possible to properly air gap a MacBook Air? And their methodology is a bit flawed. This made me shudder: We took out the Air’s logic…
You're judging their methodology by what they chose not to do?
Re: Air Gapping a MacBook Air: The Great BCM15700A2 Mystery
#40If you really need an air gapped computer, wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense to build a desktop with some variety of ATX form factor motherboard that you can examine in detail to confirm that it has zero wireless functionality? A Macbook Air, which is pretty much designed as a wifi-dependent network terminal, would be way down my list of hardware I would choose if I had to build an airgap lab environment.