171–180 of 202 posts
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We built it ourselves actually! The first prototype was just aluminium foil, tape and hope, but we wanted something more solid so we built one out of n°100 copper mesh and some 2020 aluminium extrusions!
You can use a microwave oven as a very cheap faraday cage. Just don't turn it on.
>modern devices position you within cities by using a combination of WiFi SSIDs + MAC addresses of routers and devices around you as well as GPS to triangulate your location. This was also the reason that our WiFi only iPad was able to display an accurate location in apps even though it had neither GPS nor cellular. can't wait for this to find its way into Tomahawk missiles as a fallback for the jammed GPS environmen…
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You might need to explain how a VPN solves the certificate pinning issue; the author is already modifying the phone's HTTP/S traffic via a proxied network connection, and a VPN doesn't (to my knowledge) allow you to forge valid HTTPS responses using the pinned server certificate.
Sorry, should have clarified: instead of faking the response, you can connect to Apple’s servers through a US proxy. They will see you have a US IP address and return the corresponding location code, all over properly signed HTTPS. There are a few caveats (e.g. using a residential or mobile proxy would look less suspicious, in case Apple looks out for datacenter IP ranges), but I think it should work.
It appears that the Hearing Aid feature is actually an equalizer preset that is pushed to the AirPods and will replace your transparency mode. Apple could've just not marketed these as "hearing aids" or used the medical terminology, as every other TWS with parametric EQ and transparency mode can do the same thing, and they wouldn't have the regulatory hawks going after them. They only lose the marketing edge, but per…
> They only lose the marketing edge This is a bigger deal than it may sound. Apple isn't operating in a vacuum, sony[0] and bose are also targeting the market and they'll also probably do their marketing push as they see fit. Apple only having a "kinda works as a hearing aid" is a sizeable disadvantage when the other brands will have posters in prominent places at sales points. Apple would still win on online sales a…
This is fantastic! We're building a walk-in-closet-sized Faraday cage at i3Detroit, though of course we're in the US so we won't need it for this specific hack, there's a zillion reasons it's fun to have one! Off the top of my head: The biggie is that we're right down the street from WOMC's transmitter, which is 135,000 watts EIRP. It gets into EVERYTHING and makes other RF measurements more difficult, so if you're t…
Shocked we made it this far in life without one! Itching to put devices inside and light the air inside up without worrying about licensing!
We actually ended up seeing a life size Faraday cage at Indian Institute of Science—felt good to see that the construction was similar to our approach
This showcases why free software is important. Geo-locking is a such hostile practice which makes zero sense here. If the software/firmware was free and open, you’d be able to patch out/disable the geo-lock. But it probably wouldn’t be there in the first place…
Yes it does make sense in the general case. In the approved countries a regulatory body has had to approve this as a medical aid. If medical aids etc did not have to be approved then things that actually hurt and kill people could be sold as medical aids. The issue here is that this case appears to be a non damaging aid and so it looks silly to ban it. But regulations have to work otherwise they are of no use. The is…
It's somewhat similar in spirit to the end-to-end encryption issue: government agencies can demand platforms hand over copies of users' messages if they have them, but they can't force platforms to have them, resulting in platforms going out of their way to not have copies of users' messages. If a platform went out of its way to not have control over the software its users run (this describes most non-Apple general computing platforms) then it can't be forced to regulate that software. If it does, it can.
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> I'm surprised there hasn't yet been any TWS advertised with open-source firmware Let me introduce you to the PineBuds Pro: https://pine64.com/product/pinebuds-pro-open-firmware-capabl...
>Excessive flashing Pinebuds can potentially brick the device. Jeez that's not great. Hard to develop on these devices when too many flashes kills them.
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Loved the article, thank you for sharing. How happy are the grandparents with the hearing aid functionality? Is it working well for them and how is the battery life?
It's all too early to tell, but we'll know after a week or so. The battery life thing is not seeming like a big problem, since the existing device needs batteries changed every few days or charged every night. As for the sound quality, a few of our grandparents have tried it, and while they say it sounds 'different', it's not necessarily bad. Grandma was actually quite content even with just the old EQ settings that…
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You might need to explain how a VPN solves the certificate pinning issue; the author is already modifying the phone's HTTP/S traffic via a proxied network connection, and a VPN doesn't (to my knowledge) allow you to forge valid HTTPS responses using the pinned server certificate.
You don't need to modify the HTTPS traffic. You get a VPS that is in the US, and set the device up so that when it requests the domain (gspe1-ssl.ls.apple.com) that the IP address returned is not an Apple IP address, but the VPS IP. The VPS simply forwards traffic on port 443 to gspe1-ssl.ls.apple.com.
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> They only lose the marketing edge This is a bigger deal than it may sound. Apple isn't operating in a vacuum, sony[0] and bose are also targeting the market and they'll also probably do their marketing push as they see fit. Apple only having a "kinda works as a hearing aid" is a sizeable disadvantage when the other brands will have posters in prominent places at sales points. Apple would still win on online sales a…
How do Sony or Bose have any kind of retail advantage? What stores that sell Sony and Bose don't also sell Apple stuff? Plus Apple has their own stores which make more money per square foot than just about any other retailer.
Sony funnily also has presence in many specialized and/or non tech shops (select goods shops etc.) where they could be only two or three earbuds. If Apple didn't get the certification, having a spot for Sony's or Bose's ones could have been a natural choice if the shop targeted that kind of demographic.