Airtag Imystery

[iomegaman]

I think it means you're supposed to go back to church.

Can you add cameras? They are great at deterrence. Add object/motion detection to your NVR, and triggers can be sent over your network, which means SMS texts to your cell.

I'm sure you might have meant that in jest...

Oddly enough I was a worship pastor for 20 years, am the son of a preacher and was heavily involved in all things church until about 10 years ago when I ran afoul of my best friend and pastor who was not being ethical about the church finances...I caught him in several bold faced lies and he basically excommunicated me from the church where I had served and relationships for 20+ years...

I became "persona non grata" and all my relationships were told to not even talk to me...can't have the truth getting out there...it was then that I became familiar with Rene Girards scapegoat mechanism in conflict and realized it was best to move on to the wilderness where I belonged...since then my theology has greatly morphed into something much closer to science and no longer needing the certainty of dogma and religion to prop up my ego/identity/culture...


I could go back to church but to what purpose? They certainly don't need me rocking their boats and I no longer take comfort in weakening anyones belief system...relationships there are based on holiness codes which never have worked in spite of the New Testament telling us to avoid them at all costs...the current model of church has about as much in common with the early churches ecclesiology as cell phone carrier services have in common with carrier pigeons...we are worlds apart in the same world.

I find the economic model of modern churches disgusting...its wrong on so many levels and in direct violation of what the text they claim to follow instructs.
As a church going college kid I would always hear complaints from my peers that "Its just about the money" and I would often wonder how people could believe it that way...50 years later I realize its pretty much the truth...you can commit adultery, be a felon, hell in some case molest children but don't you EVER touch/talk about the money unless you're the pastor... that will end you in church faster than any other thing.

 

[crazydoc]

Sorry - this immediately comes to mind.

 

[sodderboy]

The tag technology needs to evolve a bit yet. I won't be putting one on my catalytic converter any time soon. Thats what is getting ripped in my hood.

I've come to the conclusion that the problem with religion/church is with the people, not the belief system/institutions. 30% do 100% of the day-to-day, and fiefdoms abound at all levels. Unfortunately, you cannot escape to the "purity of science" for redemption, because that is a discipline corrupted with more false prophets than religions have been.
[four sham "scientists" and "science is settled" shams list and condemnations removed]
All four are yucking it up in Doofus this week on someone else's dime getting their posteriors lathered. So scientific!
Mike

 

[iomegaman]

I Agree Mike...on pretty much all that you posted, except I would lower the % of people actually doing the "day-to-day" to something more realistic.

Science does have its Popes/Eunuchs/Bishops/Soothsayers/Preachers and everyone is slave to the current monetary Baal whomever it might be...carbon footprints aside.

I did call Apple tech and befuddled them...they agreed with Matadors brilliant suggestion to enable GPS on the Pastors phone while he drives...they also suggested its possible that if HE at one time had an Airtag that my Airtag might have gotten flummoxed to his account somehow, so the next time it's convenient I will pay him a visit and ask for a little nod to the fickle tech-god in the "Air"...


Oddly enough the Apostle Paul once made a comment about no longer walking in accordance to the "Prince of the Power of the Air"(Eph.2:2)...but thats an unfortunate translation because the word is actually "aiona" which is closer to "age" or epoch...all I can say is "Look at all that air" ...

All beliefs are temporary...best to hold them lightly.

 

[iomegaman]

So for the third time, tonite I drove the route to the Pastors house and back again...and the mystery is forcing my obsessive nature to eliminate everything but the truth...or perhaps the "tooth" (in this case which would be blue).

After I got back home (with no hits while using my U1 equipped iphone while using GPS) I went to the church again and there was a group of parishioners leaving....as soon as I pulled into the now empty parking lot I got a notice on my phone that my bike was seen nearby (actually at the church again)...and tried to connect to no avail...as I left I got a notice that my bike had been left behind...at the church...whats odd is I don't think the pastor was there...his van and car were at his house, I'm not 100% sure about his presence there though.

This is leading me to suspect that the airtag may indeed be inside the building somewhere...I have not had the opportunity to actually go inside and search with much effort...probably the bike is not there...maybe the thief removed the airtag and threw it nearby and some usher or someone actually tossed it into a bin inside the building because it was wrapped up in bike tape and if said absconder took it off and tossed nearby and some church goer was cleaning up it might be in waste bin...

Nothing else is making sense...the tag never moves and never fully connects from outside the building but always shows the exact same address...if the pastors phone was making connection on his drive why wouldn't my drive produce similar results?

If the pastors phone is sending a faux airtag beacon why would it not show from a different location, such as his home? If he has an airtag that is being misidentified as my tag why only one singular location?

Hopefully tomorrow I can go inside the church they have youth services tomorrow evening....I shall try.

 

[iomegaman]

A lesson in trusting the technology...after posting the last message I decided I needed a higher perspective for my "line of sight"...so I took a 6' ladder and drove back to the church popped up on the roof that faces the street to see if my "find my" app could engage with more than a "move around cannot connect" message...immediately the screen went green and gave me arrows to the precise location...it was gummy from the bike tape and has been out on a roof during major rain storms here (go figure) but all in all the tech is pretty damn amazing.

 

[groselicain]

I've come to the conclusion that the problem with religion/church is with the people, not the belief system/institutions...

I started to respond yesterday but stopped short and decided to let it sit for a while. The main thrust of what I wanted to say was something I heard years ago—Christendom and Christianity should not be conflated. Christendom is made up entirely of inherently sinful people born of abject sin while Christianity is the perfection we merely hope to imitate as a reflection of our salvation. @iomegaman, you and I seem to have a fair bit in common when it comes to our past employment. This thread obviously isn't the place to get into it, but I'd love to compare our experiences sometime!

Anyway, I hate that the bike seems to have been separated from the Airtag, but I'm thankful Matador pointed you in the right direction and that you tracked down that Airtag. Really interesting stuff for sure!

 

[boji]

I decided I needed a higher perspective for my "line of sight"

Glad you found the tag.

 

[Tubetec]

Interesting journey /life story Iomega ,

Its a pity you didnt take more care disguising and hiding the the id tag ,
Inside the sponge foam in the saddle or glued under a plastic mudguard with the apple logo defaced .
Maybe place the tracker inside the end of the handlebar grip if it fits .

Ive heard stories about people tracking their stolen mobile phone to an address and then they phone the cops , for what ever political reason the cops wouldnt get involved . There may be a temptation to simply take your bike back if you manage to locate it but the risks of confronting a bunch of crack or meth heads face to face isnt worth it . Maybe a word with local police about how best to use the tracking in a way that enables them to build a case might be a plan , then again a charge of bike theft wont keep junkie locked up for long and treating addiction with a prison sentence is totally ineffective in any case .

 

[iomegaman]

Interesting journey /life story Iomega ,

Its a pity you didnt take more care disguising and hiding the the id tag ,
Inside the sponge foam in the saddle or glued under a plastic mudguard with the apple logo defaced .
Maybe place the tracker inside the end of the handlebar grip if it fits .

Ive heard stories about people tracking their stolen mobile phone to an address and then they phone the cops , for what ever political reason the cops wouldnt get involved . There may be a temptation to simply take your bike back if you manage to locate it but the risks of confronting a bunch of crack or meth heads face to face isnt worth it . Maybe a word with local police about how best to use the tracking in a way that enables them to build a case might be a plan , then again a charge of bike theft wont keep junkie locked up for long and treating addiction with a prison sentence is totally ineffective in any case .

Yea I decided I made a mistake the first day the bike was stolen...there were actually 2 addresses the bike was seen at, the very first address was a house diagonally behind the church...that "ping" came the night of the daytime theft around 10:30 pm and said the bike was seen at that house at 5:30...so a bit of a delay in reporting and I went to my phone app to see if there was a way to locate it...when it would not connect I set the device to "lost" in the app...which apparently is a time based trigger that makes the tag start emitting a beep... I think the tag would have remained "unfound" if I did not force it to start singing its location...

Some users take the tags apart and remove the small speaker for just this reason...but unfortunately nefarious actors do this as well because in "lost mode"ANY apple device owner can click "identify found item" and it will connect to any phone number or email address you have included for "lost mode"


Basically Apple is trying to circumvent stalking because you CAN get an alert on an iDevice if the tag stays with you for 3 days and is not associated with your AppleID....

I did not know that the tag would beep once I set it to lost mode and thats when it started showing up on the roof of the church...I basically told the the thief I was looking for my bike.

There has actually been a sort of bike-thief-ring in this part of town where they show up with a trailer and bolt cutters and steal as many bikes in a raid as they can.


Capitalism and its cottage industries...

I once worked for a company that hired convicts on their pre-release work program here in Tucson...one fellow helping me install fixtures was notorious for robbing convenience stores...I asked him why that particular modus of operation?

His response was interesting...he said "Have you ever been in there to buy a loaf of bread? Its 10x the cost in a regular store...they are robbing people everyday so I feel justified in returning the favor"

At first I thought that was a ridiculous answer but later I realized (this was nearly 30 years ago) that some people are sort of forced to support that convenience store model due to poverty and location etc...homeless kids or others who cannot completely participate in our culture and land in the safety net...this guy saw himself as being on their side...

Everyone justifies their financial model somehow.

 

[cyrano]

iPhones are never really off, unless you remove the battery or run it till it's dead.

BTW, the plan to scan all your pictures for (child) porn is going ahead:

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/
I couldn't find this page I read earlier today on the iphone via Google, or in the history. Had to use the Macbook. Could be me, of course.

 

[living sounds]

BTW, the plan to scan all your pictures for (child) porn is going ahead:

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/

This is still very much an open question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34392391

 

[cyrano]

This isn't an open question if there's a daemon running in the background that's activated every time you select a picture in the finder...

I checked this behaviour immediately upon reading the article. It's sending something (encrypted) to Apple and the size closely matches the size of the pic you selected. It's easy to test if you would like to verify it yourself and have access to a Ventura Mac.

The question what it's checking isn't even relevant, as this daemon isn't checking non-picture files.

Besides, if you read Apple's statement carefully, they're not saying they're abandoning their plan, just they're not doing it immediately. They had me too. I wasn't paying attention and read it as "plan cancelled".

I've worked for Apple on several projects for years. They're the most cunning *******s I ever encountered. Microsoft are amateurs compared to Apple when it comes to communication with the outside world.

 

[pucho812]

When we had a studio break in at one place during the pandemic, of the few things, a couple of iPads were taken. We got to use find my device. It worked whenever the iPad was on but the thief didn’t have it on long enough to actually be of any use.
We would see it pop on for a few minutes across Hollywood but never long enough to get to the spot and get it. They even renamed one “not a stoley”. Wasn’t much we could do here.

 

[cyrano]

There's this story about some gal who lost her iphone in the Hamptons.

It only showed up after a few weeks, in NY, in some big apartment block. Of course, you can't tell which apartment exactly, so police refused to raid the entire building.

Then it went dead again to show up a few months later in Yemen. The girl started getting pictures and video in her icloud account she didn't know about. A bit disturbing since there were AK47s everywhere. One series showed a wedding, again a dozen AK47s resting on the wall and half a dozen men walking around with AK47s.

Police had no interest in the pics and suggested NSA or CIA.

Fortunately, she knew a professor of Arabic at NYU and decided to show the stuff to him. He explained that it was standard operating procedure in Yemen to have some guards at a party. No need to show these to CIA or NSA, as these weren't terrorists, just guards to prevent robbery.

 

[iomegaman]

Reminds me of what the NT says about having "ears to hear"...seems you don't need eyes to know where something is at these days...just some sort of hearing...


Apple claims something in the neighborhood of a billion devices are currently part of the "find my" network....

It has me thinking...the best place to find lost things (say a bike) would be to look where Apple says it is NOT...which is a smaller window of space these days.

 

[living sounds]

This isn't an open question if there's a daemon running in the background that's activated every time you select a picture in the finder...

I checked this behaviour immediately upon reading the article. It's sending something (encrypted) to Apple and the size closely matches the size of the pic you selected. It's easy to test if you would like to verify it yourself and have access to a Ventura Mac.

The question what it's checking isn't even relevant, as this daemon isn't checking non-picture files.

Besides, if you read Apple's statement carefully, they're not saying they're abandoning their plan, just they're not doing it immediately. They had me too. I wasn't paying attention and read it as "plan cancelled".

I've worked for Apple on several projects for years. They're the most cunning *******s I ever encountered. Microsoft are amateurs compared to Apple when it comes to communication with the outside world.

Don't think so.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/tests-confirm-macos-finder-isnt-scanning-for-csam-images
https://eclecticlight.co/2023/01/18/is-apple-checking-images-we-view-in-the-finder/

 

[cyrano]

I've seen those. And of course, I can only imagine what Apple is using that calculated hash for.

I believe they don't need to upload the images from your Mac, as they already have them in your icloud account in most cases. You do sync data don't you?

What I'm nearly certain about, is that Apple will never sell these data to others.

What I'm not so certain about, is Apple's relation to US law enforcement. There was a lot to do about law enforcement being unable to crack Apple's encryption, at a time when Pegasus was already available (not commercially, but to some).

So maybe the FBI couldn't crack Apple's encryption, but other 3-letter agencies were already using Pegasus to exfiltrate data from iphones, not needing to know any keys, as the data was unencrypted on the target's phone.

Pegasus very first incarnation was developed by the NSA. The product developers ended up in Saudi-Arabia first, working for the SA security forces. From there they transferred to FSO in Israel.

As stated in Jeffrey Paul's article he doesn't have an icloud account. So no syncing goin' on, so there's no need for these hashes. That's a bit dubious, cause he needs an Apple account for system upgrades.

That's Macos standard behavior since icloud started. It does a lot of stuff in the background the user has no control over. You can't simply switch it off. I tried doing that (because some of these processes interfered with audio) and the background processes were pretty persistent. Even if you not only disabled the plist, but also deleted the daemon from cache and disk, any system update restored and activated it immediately. And even a simple restart of the Mac re-enabled them if you didn't thoroughly deleted them from disk. That kind of persistence should have a reason, I think.

A lot of that stuff is just Apple collecting data about your machine and how you use it. It's anomyzed so they don't need you to specifically allow it and the question if you want these data to be sent, will pop up from time to time. There's also a switch for it in System prefs.

But it's encrypted in it's entirety. And it's cached. If you're not connected to the net, it's stored on disk until you reconnect.

Who knows what Apple is doing exactly?

An interesting experiment is putting the startup disk into another Mac. It confuses the hell out of your Apple account, but not so much your icloud syncing. That continues. The reason is, some keys are not on your disk, but in the SMC (System management controller, compare with Intel's ME). And that SMC is still in the other machine.

Apple and Intel have put so much effort and money into these that it would amaze me if they haven't been recruited by at least one of the 3-letter agencies.

If you keep up with this kind of stuff, it's clear that some court cases have already shown that law enforcement has been using this kind of infiltration for years.

Our local law enforcement recently scored big time by cracking a phone app that was sold to people who needed to keep their info secret. Mostly criminals. The obtained data was only effective because law enforcement kept it secret until they were ready to move forward with arrests.

I can imagine anyone who has peeking tool wants to keep it a secret at all cost.