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Incredibly cool. I am constantly amazed by these efforts and the find my network is a really impressive thing. What’s stopped me from using anything like this e
by a12k 2y ago
Incredibly cool. I am constantly amazed by these efforts and the find my network is a really impressive thing. What’s stopped me from using anything like this ever is the fact that I’m confident that at some point Apple will either embrace this sort of piggybacking on the network and open it up more officially, or it will ban any Apple ID that has ever been associated with such things. Right now they know about this and are not commenting either way.
Hope in the future either Apple supports this more officially, or there is a way to use it with no direct link to my Apple ID or account. Until then, I am a spectator in these things.
- jcutrell 2y agoI think there is some positive effect potential for Apple to let this slide. The broader this network is, the more adoption it receives. P2P as a super-structure has always been a bigger than vendor problem; adoption by any means is likely an allowable tradeoff, especially since Apple doesn't have to do the work here. Eventually they will capitalize more on the mesh density, rather than crushing the adoption now.
- malmeloo 2y agoExcept that custom tags like these do not require an Apple device in order to use them, so the size of the network is not increased. They only increase the load on the network. FindMy is not a P2P/mesh network; all these tags do is broadcast keys which are picked up by iDevices, which then upload those reports to Apple.
- koolba 2y agoAre the keys not tied to known apple products? Or do you make them up when you first register a device? Trying to understand why apple doesn’t (or can’t?) already reject broadcast data from keys that are not apple products.
- prepend 2y agoI would guess because they don’t care. The marginal cost is zero and I think they would only bother if someone ddoses or it becomes an issue. Until then, more devices are probably positive for reducing potential pitchforking.
- malmeloo 2y agoTwo master secrets are randomly generated when pairing the AirTag for the first time, which are then saved to the iCloud keychain. Those secrets are then used to generate a new keypair every 15 minutes (at most), and the public key is broadcasted by the tag. Not only does Apple not know what the master secrets are in the first place (because they're stored in the keychain), but that's also an insane number of keys to compare against, with no real possibility to precompute them. And that's a big win in terms of privacy.
- malmeloo 2y agoThe process of requesting locations for a certain tag is not tied to any Apple Account. In the instructions in the README, when logging into macless haystack, you can just use a burner account.
- mmooss 2y agoHow is privacy protected? I wouldn't want everyone tracking my airtags.
- menzoic 2y ago>I wouldn't want everyone tracking my airtags. That’s kind of how the whole system works.
- mmooss 2y agoI thought it was designed to prevent unwanted people from tracking you. If I bought an airtag, you could track it? Without authentication or authorization?
- malmeloo 2y agoOnly if you have the private key belonging to the AirTag at the time of location capture. Anyone can download encrypted location reports for any AirTag found in the wild, but only the owner can decrypt them with the private key.