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Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

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Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#231
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> true 0 would mean the battery couldn't ever charge again what?

Due to how battery designed. A actually fully discharged battery can't be charged normally.(the power control chip on the battery need a bit power to function normally) Typically this can't happen because your phone will shutdown before that. But if you used up the battery and not charge for a long time (1 months or so). This can happen because batteries discharge themselves slightly even not being used.

Why can't the power control chip also get power from the charging power? That wouldn't be particularly hard to do.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is centralized and is an obvious target for surveillance so I would not even remotely rely on it.

And most devices have backdoored CPUs too (Intel ME) I wonder what the next Crypto AG (CIA front) will be

I guess "Intel" is a sufficiently ironic name.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is centralized and is an obvious target for surveillance so I would not even remotely rely on it.

And most devices have backdoored CPUs too (Intel ME) I wonder what the next Crypto AG (CIA front) will be

> I wonder what the next Crypto AG (CIA front) will be

NSA: VPN and "secure" webmail providers

CIA: They don't need fronts anymore, they have CISCO, Juniper, Netgear, etc.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#234
post #172
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't happen w/o legislation.

Non removable battery and minimum percentage of phones sold with gps were promoted by governments (from old HN posts if I recall correctly). Actually there is no technical need for most phones not to have non removable batteries.

Isn't the argument that non removable batteries enable water resistance? Or am I missing something?

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#235

The article is wrong about AOP being on while the phone is off. AOP is on while the phone is in standby . It powers down when you shut down the phone. Its job is to save battery by doing things like the Hey Siri and sensors processing without powering up the main cores at all. It does not stay on when the system is shut down. The part about the Bluetooth chipset staying on is correct. Think about it, why would they n…

Upvoting you, as you are totally right. The AOP is a standby feature, not while powered off. And why would it, the BluetoothLE chips available for years already have this wake-up functionality drawing very little power.

I own a Bose BT Speaker and a FiiO BTR5 - both can be "off" (using their power-off buttons) but will still suddenly turn on when I explicitly connect to them through my laptop or phone. They are in this BT LE listening state 24/7. All Apple did, is basically enable this mode now on the existing chips which are BT-LE capable for several iPhone generations. Once woken up using BT-LE, the AOP takes over to reply to FindMy-like beacons (and enable other iPhones to trigger the wake-up beacons when locating other phones).

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'listen for music' feature on pixel phones is optional and off by default.

What is the use case that feature? I get an active "what is this song".

It demoes well at I/O.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is centralized and is an obvious target for surveillance so I would not even remotely rely on it.

Gee, thanks for contributing to the conversation and providing a useful alternative. The only semi-popular better option I can think of is Matrix, but getting people on Signal is already hard enough and using Matrix on a mobile device is (last I checked) far from ideal. Security is a gradient, not an all-or-nothing. Signal is vastly better than almost every other electronic communication method.

Once its compromised there is no gradient anymore and you never know when things are compromised because three letter agencies will anyway not tell you.

Re: Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off

#240
It's always fascinating to see how complex modern hardware actually is. Dozens of small processors with their own operating systems communicating with each other. I have a lot of respect for the engineers that they actually managed to build a decide so small yet so complex.
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