Apple seems ready to revolutionize the world of health with AirPods. and it is too juicy for users not to enjoy it regardless of where they live. It is now possible to perform hearing tests with AirPods and use them as headphones. Rithwik Jayasimha, an Indian user, decided to give AirPods Pro 2 to his hearing-impaired grandmother. And it went wrong… at least at first.
The ability to use these headphones as headphones is limited in the United States, so Jayasimha couldn’t get it to work right away. However, he came to his senses to bypass Apple servers and that they failed to recognize that their grandmother’s AirPods Pro were actually thousands of miles from American land.
This is how Apple detects where devices are located
The ability to use AirPods Pro 2 as headphones isn’t the first feature Apple has limited by location. Without going any further, we have the case of Apple Intelligence, already launched in the United States and with a trick to access it from USA and other countries. In this and other cases, it may be enough to change the device’s location or use a VPN, but that’s not the case with this AirPods feature.
As Rithwik Jayasimh reported on his blog: tried everything to have the headset function. He first changed the iPad’s time zone and region, but that didn’t change anything. He also attempted to hide the IP address of the iPads by connecting them to a VPN, so that the IP address was that of the United States. He also achieved nothing.
Apple’s servers are believed to use GPS triangulati on elements, such as the device ID or MAC address of other nearby devices. Therefore, no matter how hard they tried to fool the system, they eventually ended up detecting that they were actually in Bangalore, the Indian city where the protagonist lives and where of course the iPad and AirPods were still there.
In the end, a “Faraday cage” and a microwave circumvented the restriction
Maybe you don’t know the concept of what a Faraday cage is, but in short it is a case, bag, urn or any other “envelope” in which electronic devices are placed and that, under the effect of the electromagnetic field they cause, your documents, your communications are canceled.
Applied to this case, Jayasimh believed that by putting the iPad in a Faraday cage, he could prevent Apple’s servers from detecting the real location of this device and the AirPods Pro 2. And he did the same, but with one addition: a microwave.
And no, don’t think he put the iPad in the microwave. The protagonist of this story has enough technical knowledge to know that this would be a dangerous act. What he did was wrap the iPad in a box with silver paper and place it on the microwave. The idea was to turn on the microwave so that it would block the device’s communication signals that would let Apple know where it was.
With an arduous reconfiguration process by changing iPad settings by connecting it to a MacBook by cable, ended up enabling the headphone function on the AirPods Pro 2. We don’t know what experience his grandmother had, but the boy who created it gave several clues as to how it works, such as that this headset mode replaces the headset’s ambient mode and it transfers to n ‘any device to which the AirPods are connected without the need to configure such paraphernalia each time.
As reported in Wired, Apple could fix this vulnerability. While it is true that this is not about doing anything illegal, you are ultimately accessing a feature that Apple is not responsible for beyond the borders of the United States. Being also an element linked to health, the more sensitive it becomes.
Cover image | Daniel Romero on Unsplash
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