iPhone remains findable after power off • Hacker News Board

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#281

Post by gnicholas » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:50 AM UTC

meatmanek wrote: post #265

gnicholas wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet that a lot of owners of newer iPhones don't even know how to turn them off. It used to just require holding down the sleep/power button and then swiping across the screen. On newer iPhones, you have to (in order): hold down one of the volume buttons, then hold down the sleep/power button, then swipe across the screen. I honestly didn't know this until I just googled it. Apparently what I've been doing (vo…

You just hold either of the volume buttons + the lock/unlock button for a few seconds. Order doesn't matter. It definitely was simpler/more discoverable back before they got rid of the home button, since the lock/unlock button wasn't pulling double duty as the Siri launcher. "Hold the button longer to shut down harder" is how computers have worked since forever.

Interesting — I wonder why my google search turned up such specific instructions. Looks like there are a number of ways to shut down. I've learned two new ones from this thread!

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#282

Post by stefandesu » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:50 AM UTC

todd3834 wrote: post #22

This article has me wondering if I’ve ever turned my phone off besides restarting it or the battery died. I’m sure I have but I bet it is very uncommon. That being said, if it were off and lost, this feature would be amazing. Apple is very transparent about it and also allows you to disable it as far as I remember. The OP has a follow up tweet that iOS 15 made their phone hot during charging. Kind of feels like they…

Last time I truly turned off my phone was at a 10 day meditation retreat in 2019.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#283

Post by raverbashing » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:50 AM UTC

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #276

raverbashing wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real, VSCode is one of the "champions" of this. Yes, I'm sure the new Golang extension is very cool or that I need to setup this other module but for now I'm just worried about what I need to do

VSCode opens a page of content in an editor tab next to what you are doing. That’s pretty much as unobtrusive as it gets. You can just close it and move on. It’s just there if you want to and is a nice way to signal that it did indeed update as everything is pretty much automatic. Also it’s very easy to reopen later which was the OP complaint against popups. Now that I think about it, VSCode is pretty much best in cl…

Yes but I'm talking about the bottom right pop-ups

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#284

Post by avianlyric » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

fy20 wrote: post #211

avianlyric wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For transit passes It’s interesting, here in the U.K. you have a legal obligation to present a valid ticket upon demand for any train you travel on. Failure to do so for any reason (including my phone died, or I dropped the ticket) is a criminal offence (and I mean criminal , not civil) punishable by a prison sentence. Some ticket conductors at the end of a long shift hearing endless excuses about why someone doesn…

Meh this sounds like scare mongering. If someone is tired at the end of a long shift, what do you think they are going to want to do more? a) spend 15 minutes writing up a ticket, and possibly waiting for the police to arrive before handing you over to them b) take you to the back office and let you sit for 5 minutes while your phone charges Nobody is going to send you to prison for the first offence of not having a…

> spend 15 minutes writing up a ticket, and possibly waiting for the police to arrive before handing you over to them

> take you to the back office and let you sit for 5 minutes while your phone charges

Your on a train. There’s no back office, and neither of you are going anywhere in a hurry while it’s moving. They just ask the police to meet them at the next station and hand you over.

> Nobody is going to send you to prison for the first offence of not having a ticket

Prison sentence, probably not, £200 fine and a criminal record, not unlikely. I certainly know people who have found themselves on the wrong side of a TfL ticket conductor, and then found themselves in front of a judge. Train ticket enforcement is a surprisingly disproportionate part of British law.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#285

Post by avianlyric » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 7:36 AM UTC

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #223

avianlyric wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For transit passes It’s interesting, here in the U.K. you have a legal obligation to present a valid ticket upon demand for any train you travel on. Failure to do so for any reason (including my phone died, or I dropped the ticket) is a criminal offence (and I mean criminal , not civil) punishable by a prison sentence. Some ticket conductors at the end of a long shift hearing endless excuses about why someone doesn…

Wait... is this currently a thing? Does the transit pass keep working after the phone is off? If that's the case then it must really just be keeping a single unique identifier available and broadcasting it. Also the easy fix for such an issue is to just poweroff the phone when it has ~5% of the phone power left which most phones already do. Instead of broadcasting its location, transit ID all the time it could just d…

Yeah, the phone hand off the express transit cards crypto keys to the NFC chip used for Apple Pay. Allowing the chip to authorise transactions without the CPU getting involved.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#286

Post by kgarten » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 8:12 AM UTC

SilverRed wrote: post #218

kgarten wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, aggree with you on the hardware. yet, what's new for me is the combination of not caring about security, scanning on your phone (not in the cloud) and implementing a world wide localization network. the road to hell is plastered with good intentions ...

>scanning on your phone (not in the cloud) The scanning only touches photos which are stored on iCloud. Yes it does it on your phone but the reality is the same on iCloud or Google Photos. Both Apple and Google can push out changes live to every phone without warning, so what they may do in the future doesn't really matter. Only what they claim to be doing now. This is actually a more privacy friendly approach becaus…

again the scanning is implemented on the phone. That's what matters for me. I have some code on my device that works as snitch against me. That might just be a feeling and irrational, yet I really don't want that.

I know how it works. I don't use google photos. I don't WANT to use icloud ... Maybe I'm just too stupid, yet I enabled iCloud several times by accident due to updates/new devices. That won't happen with my grapheneOS nexus5 :)

If you care about privacy and security, you need to leave iOS as quickly as you can ... 2 days ago: https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5gan4/apple-still-investiga...

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#287

Post by GekkePrutser » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

I manage mobile devices and Macs for work.. And I really love this.

I was having a discussion yesterday about a stolen MacBook Pro. We sent a wipe command and security was concerned that the command never arrived. I explained that it's extremely unlikely to ever arrive because it means the thief is either pretty dumb (connecting the device to a wired ethernet which gives him no benefit while it's locked) or extremely smart (managing to crack the password) but incredibly dumb at the same time (connecting to WiFi after logging in). Because we disable the guest login which Apple uses as "bait" for lost Macs.

Also, all of this applies only if the Mac was sleeping at boot time, otherwise FileVault blocks it from even booting up at all. Meaning no comms to us in any scenario.

However, this AirTag functionality would be amazing for Mac. We could send a wipe command to it even when it's off. The thief could obviously block it with a metal-lined bag but it would move the scenario to something where the thief actively has to do something to make the wipe work, to something where they actively have to do something to prevent the wipe from working.

So, as an enterprise device manager I love this.

However I'm a big privacy advocate as well, and in that scope it's pretty terrible, obviously. However, if it can be switched off (and ideally defaults to off) I'm fine with it.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#288

Post by GekkePrutser » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 9:19 AM UTC

wyattpeak wrote: post #184

lolsal wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made a decision before you had all the information, but you're so busy you don't want to reconsider your decision after learning new information?

This sounds an awful lot like defences of hundred page EULAs: "So you made a decision not to read it...". No, it was intentionally designed in a way which discourages reading. In the case of this warning, it's possible that it was unintentionally designed in a way which discourages reading, but regardless the fault lies, at least in part, with the design.

I think it's two-fold. Part of EULAs are just discouragement. But part of it is that the legal community doesn't do "simple and clear". Due to the weaselish twisting of words in lawsuits everything has to be airtightly formulated and that causes a bunch of legal terms and extremely explicit descriptions which basically makes legal documents unreadable for normal people.

Which also benefits the legal community by keeping them in a job, obviously. "Get it checked by legal/my lawyer" rather than just reading what you're signing up to is definitely a thing. I wish the legal system was more focused on clarity and common sense rather than the hard letter of the law.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#289

Post by GekkePrutser » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #166

rurp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm baffled by all of the comments saying that this is great as an anti-theft feature. I don't know where people live that that's the case, but I sure as heck have never known police in the US to give a damn about $1000 property crimes. They don't care about $20000 home robberies and car thefts, even with strong video or other evidence. I can't imagine they're going to start chasing down criminals to get a used…

I was visiting a friend in Switzerland a few years ago, and her bag got stolen right off the back of her chair while we were in a restaurant. (The guy was quick and sneaky; by the time I ran out to the street, he was gone.) The restaurant manager called the police, and over the next 15 minutes we learned that the thief went on to try to rob the wrong person at another restaurant a couple blocks away. The intended vic…

Your experience is not a pan-european thing by the way. Get your bag/wallet robbed in Barcelona and the police will just roll their eyes at you and give you a report for your insurance.

Re: iPhone remains findable after power off

#290

Post by fastball » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 9:25 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #39

It's NOT an iOS 15 feature. I have an iPhone without a SIM card that I use as a test device and it happen that yesterday I left it in my backpack, together with an AirTag in the car. Shortly after I walked off, I got the AirTag notification as expected(the left behind notification). What I did not expect though, was to see the test iPhone also having an up to date location in the Find My app. That iPhone has no netwo…

Your "test iPhone" was not turned off, it just didn't have a network connection (because it has no SIM card). And yes, that has been a feature for a while – iPhones without an internet connection can still be pinged via the Find My Network. The setting you see is about being "offline", not "power off", which are different things in this context.

The new feature is iPhones being able to be pinged while the power is off. This is indeed an iOS 15 only feature, and also an iPhone 11+ feature, so it is certainly not available on your iPhone 7 running iOS 14.