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Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

annoying.technology

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Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#42
post #40

I was under the impression that having Bluetooth enabled at all was a security risk. Do people actually use Bluetooth?

This seems like a very out of touch question. Bluetooth is ubiquitous. Flagship smartphones can't even listen to headphones without bluetooth. Smartwatches use bluetooth. Hell, my herbal vaporizer has a BLE connection for setting the temperature and checking battery.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#44
post #4

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 w…

Have you considered blasting them with the most annoying music you can find until they fix it? Deny all culpability of course.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#45

It's an energy vampire.

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.

That reminds me of the guy who walked around with an absurd of phones on google maps to trick its traffic algorithm.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#46
post #34
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to believe these are a bad idea beyond lowering entry cost to GPS trackers. It seems like there's a bug going on here - otherwise everyone would have the same issue. This is something that can be fixed and isn't really related to these existing overall.

This isn't the only "bug" though. The use of it as a stalking device should be widely known already.

Any old phone can be used too, any number of it devices available online.

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#48
post #4

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 w…

1. I empathize with all your pain points

2. "forcing me to buy a USB headset." --> If it has a boom, everybody on the meeting, unknowingly, thanks you :)

Re: Apple AirTags draining battery of devices close by

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All wireless protocols can be fairly trivially DoS'ed, due to the nature of finite bandwidth and power limits.

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.

I guess we need a new term for “power consumption” DoS
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