A Chinese tech company has been able to crack the encryption around Apple’s Airdrop wireless file sharing function to identify people who used the feature to send “inappropriate information” in the Beijing subway, according to the city’s Justice Bureau.
AirDrop has been used in China by pro-democracy activists to spread their message relatively safely (as you can’t get away with that using the internet). Apple has already made AirDrop useless for that purpose in a recent update, but I guess China is still working on cracking down on it.
You can still use airdrop to send shit to people about how much the CCP sucks. Airdropping to non-contacts still exists, but when you enable receiving from any rando, that door only remains open for 10 minutes, then you have to open it again.
I guess the question is, do Chinese people keep tapping “everyone for 10 minutes” multiple times in certain public places?
That’s what I meant as it being useless now for that purpose. Unless there’s designated dissent areas or times, that strategy just won’t work any more (and if you have to be ‘in the know’ to enable it, you’re not recruiting/convincing any new people).
I curious why China still cares about it. It seems like it would be hard for to spread info around on it now.
That said, if they still care about it, there must be some sort of use case that scares them.
Or they tasked a team with cracking it, they finally got a result and decided to announce it regardless, even if it is moot because the economic pressure on Apple worked.