Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

lagrangepoint.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 202 posts

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#141

Post by pasc1878 »

eliasdaler wrote: post #115

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 issue here is either regulators in other countries are slow or in the worst case Apple has not applied for approval.

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#142

Post by withinboredom »

jrockway wrote: post #112
subarctic wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever the theoretical analysis tells you, I've been able to reproduce a microwave interfering with a wifi signal with at least one microwave and router. I've had other times where it didn't have a noticeable effect though.

The key to happiness in WiFi is that all the stations have to "hear" each other, or the listen-before-talk algorithm can't work and you end up stepping on valid transmissions that you can't hear. This ruins it for the stations that are the targets of that transmission but can also hear the first station. This is why WiFi tends to degrade at longer ranges; with a topology like , both computers can hear the access poin…

You'll also see this in wireshark as retransmissions of packets. It's really great for discovering that a service you've written isn't filling packets and can only get 50-ish bps throughput due to head-of-line blocking and sending lots of tiny packets.

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#143

Post by shawa_a_a »

A commenter on Reddit [1] pointed out that you can access the hearing test feature directly by using a special URL:

    x-apple-health://HearingAppPlugin.healthplugin/HearingTest
I wonder if there’s a similar deep link to be found to enable Hearing Aid mode?

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AirpodsPro/comments/1gftyqo/is_the_...

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#144

Post by withinboredom »

gorbypark wrote: post #128
thel3l wrote: post #31

Hey! I'm Rithwik, one of the authors of the article, happy to answer questions etc!

I'm a bit perplexed about region handling, maybe you could shed some light on it. I have an iPhone from Canada, with a Canadian Apple account (Canadian CC/billing address, set location to Canada in App Store), but live in Spain for the last few years. I am still fully "Canadian" according to Apple. I don't get any of the 3rd party App Store stuff that's region locked to the EU, and have access to Apple Intelligence a…

You can login with a second account that is an EU account, my wife went this route. You get the best of both worlds.

I ended up transferring my account to an EU account (pro-tip, you may be on the phone with Apple support for 6+ hours if the automation fails). I still have access to both US-specific features (like Apple Cash in USD and the feature in this article) and EU-specific features (like the new app store stuff).

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#145

Post by udp »

ryanmccullagh wrote: post #125

I bought AirPods Pro this year and it has been disappointing compared to the first gen non pro I had previously. Somehow they fall out of my if i adjust my head down. Battery life is good though

I’ve found that aftermarket memory foam eartips work much better than the stock ones for keeping them in my ears.

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#146

Post by supersing »

Some Chinese users have discovered a more effective way to bypass geo-locking, even on iPhones (some Apple Health features require approval and can only be enabled on iPhone, not iPad).

TLDR, iPhones prioritize external GPS devices over internal ones. All you need is a "fake" lightning or USB-C external GPS device that tells your device where you want it to think it is.

Source: https://www.v2ex.com/t/1075937

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#147

Post by grahamj »

kristofferR wrote: post #32

Does anyone know what the Hearing Protection mode does? It's not available in Norway (or anywhere outside of NAmerica). I've used the AirPods Pro 2 as hearing protection for some stuff before, it works fine. Is it just due to the words ("Hearing Protection") which they are only allowed to use only in America or is it actually better than regular Pro 2 noise-cancelling?

I'm pretty sure all that's new is the hearing test app and marketing. AirPods already had these features.

From listening to it work HP sounds to me like multiband compression, in other words divide up the audible spectrum into multiple bands and apply compression on each one individually. Again it was already doing this though.

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#148

Post by grahamj »

jijji wrote: post #74
rkagerer wrote: post #73

Is the hearing aid feature unavailable if you use the AirPods with an Android?

I'm not a genius but it seems pretty trivial to take the input from a microphone and pipe it to the output of a speaker, the hardest part probably is the device drivers for the airpods (or any bluetooth ear buds for that matter). It looks like others have already done this in hardware [0] for $84.99 on amazon.com. There is also "Sound Amplifier" app for Apple iPhone [1] that amplifies the surrounding voice near the p…

It sounds like they also do multiband compression (hearing protection) and multiband transparency/cancelling mixing (adaptive mode) on top of applying EQ (audiogram support) and things like accelerometer and wideband tracking for spatial audio.

There's quite a bit of processing going on on-device.

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#149

Post by grahamj »

udp wrote: post #145
ryanmccullagh wrote: post #125

I bought AirPods Pro this year and it has been disappointing compared to the first gen non pro I had previously. Somehow they fall out of my if i adjust my head down. Battery life is good though

I’ve found that aftermarket memory foam eartips work much better than the stock ones for keeping them in my ears.

Yep. I'm kind of shocked Apple doesn't offer these as they must be a huge moneymaker.

Re: Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages

#150

Post by mkagenius »

thel3l wrote: post #139
notpushkin wrote: post #84

Certificate pinning should be pretty easy to solve in this particular case: just get a proxy/VPN! The Faraday cage shenanigans are pretty cool though.

That's exactly what we did in the end—used a commercial VPN and provided internet to the device over the USB cable. Could have probably used a Tailscale on a VPS somewhere too.

What he meant to say is, all your efforts were of no use, just use VPN in the ipad and the location will change.

But I suppose, in this case Apple is deliberately using the wifi signals, not relying on IP so "just use VPN" doesn't work.

Post reply on HN