YHK - yet another hacker news clone

If an unrecognized AirTag is following you, you'll get a notice.

I'm not constantly notified that my keys are with me. But if you stuck an AirTag in my backpack, my phone would tell me.

No, only if an airtag that's not theirs follows them for an amount of time

Yeah, I forget the wording but there’s a notification like “so-and-so’s AirTag is near you and they can see where you are.” My spouse put AirTags in our baby stuff and I get them whenever I’m using it.

You get a notification when an AirTag is following you for some time, but the AirTags owner is not near it. It's meant to detect someone slipping an AirTag on you without the false alarms from, say, taking a walk with a friend who has one in their backpack.

Not sure about on iPhone but Android definitely alerts you if an unknown airtag follows you while moving.

We have AirTags registered to my wife's account because I use Android. I have one in my work backpack, and every morning I get a notification that an unknown tracker is following me. I wish there was a way to silence the warning for that specific tag.

Yes, within about 30 minutes. They are basically useless for theft prevention as a result. Apple nerfed the functionality after someone used it for stalking. You'll notice there is no mention of theft prevention in the marketing materials anymore.

Apple even provide a handy Android app for locating them.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.trac...

The average person doesn't think about bikes of the ring ring variety costing 15k dollars.

I don’t know, the expensive bikes explained the need for the tool.

How is mentioning their valuable bikes a flex?

1. There are a million ways to die. But that's no execute for companies to make products that could potentially kill people - in dumb ways. 2. "Easy" is subjective - something easy for one may not be so easy for others. 3. This guy blocked their site in a custom ublock filter... Why? Who cares? That's not relevant to anything!? Why did this guy put that in there? Was this written by a 4th grader? 4. Yea, go read more AI slop, good idea.

Doesn't your phone still tell you that the AirTag has been following you?

What would be dumb is to not discontinue an unsafe product because there are more dangerous products out there.

You vastly overestimate the intelligence of most stalkers.

You're gonna vibe code a clone of hardware?

Also, even if it were software, what is virtue signaling about this? If they offer some software at any point, they should continue to offer that software to new users in perpetuity?

> pierces the AirTag’s speaker

> also disables an anti-stalking feature that audibly alerts people

It sounds like piercing the speaker is the thing that disables the audible alert and the intent was not to help stalkers.

It's likely a Wordpress page with a "read more" plugin/functionality that is as unworking as it has always been.

Feels oddly concerning and complicit that MacRumors would willingly say “yeah we knew it existed but we didn’t want to publicize it” to let them slip it into the market in the first place.

If only journalists wanted to try to do their job instead of regurgitating Bloomberg’s trash rumors.

The standards you walk past are the standards you accept, and MR must accept that stalking is cool.

I own one of these and wish I would have bought more. It's very handy for luggage and equipment that you don't want people alerted to an airtag. I use Elevation Labs Vault (10 year) and Capsule (5 year) products which are very high quality products. I stash the tag in a location on all of my recreational vehicles / trailers. I would have removed the speaker from the tags anyway, but this makes it a 30 second process. I'm sure someone will 3D scan the unit (it's very simple) and the pin can easily be machined. I think their pin design was bad as it gets jammed in the tag and there's no finger nub to twist and pull it out. Definitely an oversight in their design. Even if they have a patent on it working around it with a better design is trivial.

Theft?

It says right there in the blog post - bike theft prevention.

AirTags are less useful for that use-case right now since the bike thief will get notified of the existence of the tracker on the bike once they transport it, and are hence prompted to find and remove the tag.

I think the idea was to intentionally disable the speaker in an AirTag you own. The use-case that I think they were describing would be to make it more difficult for a thief to find the AirTag and remove it. Thus, you'd be able to track your stolen bike for longer (and have a better change of finding it).

Of course, this would also make it easier for someone to disable a speaker and track a person without their knowledge, making it more difficult for that person to find a stealthy AirTag.

I'm not surprised that someone didn't think this through. I am surprised at how many people this must have gotten by to make it into production. You'd think that with any AirTag related product, privacy would be more central to the planning.

> these clowns

Can you please edit out swipes from your HN comments and stick to posting thoughtfully? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> The outrage feels misplaced.

Agreed.

> The way to stop evil people abusing your global track-anything network is to not have a global track-anything network.

Or, to have a global track-anything network, and recognize this is the wrong level to try and solve the abuse problem.

> Apple PR must be on yellow alert right now feeling glad they’ve dodged a bullet.

Nah, they knew about this from the start - that's why they nerfed the whole design to the point it barely has any use case; otherwise they'd be buried with complaints and horror stories and media criticism, and the device would've never reached the market.

> leverage their ubiquity

We live in different worlds

> Apple PR must be on yellow alert right now feeling glad they’ve dodged a bullet

iPhones notify you when someone else's AirTag is following you.

>They could network their smart glasses and leverage their ubiquity to help people find lost pets — but strictly only lost pets, not people — but then Something Labs might ship a tool to make a person's face look pet-like enough to turn Find My Pet into Find My Ex.

This exists btw, from Ring: https://ring.com/ca/en/search-party

It's all from people not understanding the very trivial technology that is the hardware of an AirTag. Most tech is magic to most people. To be fair, fact that we use electric fields to bend a literal crystal, to make sound, is pretty damn magic. :)

Anyone that knows how a speaker works also knows how to silence an AirTag, without instructions required. Anyone that wants to silence an AirTag can just find one of the hundreds of videos on youtube [1], and spend some minutes carrying out the act.

The removal of this product will stop exactly zero people from silencing an AirTag, besides those that are probably doing it for legitimate purposes. For example, I silenced the one in my car, because I was tired of it constantly beeping anytime someone with a iPhone drove with me (including my family).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to++silence...

It's very well documented how to silence an Airtag, it doesn't take a drill.

I am sure you have heard the infamous Dropbox comment :)

AirTags are expensive at $30, which is about five hours of the legal take-home minimum wage of about $6/hour in the United States, after tax. The cheapest cordless drill you can find is about $20 and you run the risk of damaging the AirTag.

This device was $10 and meant to be foolproof. Instead of spending $20 + $30 for each "practice AirTag", you can spend $10 with certainty.

For those on the side of our economy with more access to resources, they might value their time enough that $10 is a trivial price to pay to silence multiple airtags more easily.

Yes. Magnets and duct tape are particularly dangerous combination, too, and even cheaper.

You'd probably get the notification pretty quickly though, assuming the installer didn't use whatever "silencing" tech this post is apologizing for. My wife usually leaves her purse in the car, and I get the "[Person's] AirTag is moving with you!" notification whenever I leave the house without her. I keep forgetting to trust it or whatever.

tile tracker, it's airtag, but doesn't do the stalking warnings if you sign an agreement

paint them so they look undesireable

Will police even assist to recover a stolen bike if you have managed to track it?

There’s no point in tracking them. Cops won’t help since the dollar amount is too small and there’s no documentation the bike is yours. You could try to steal it back or intimidate the thieves I suppose, but I personally would not take that approach.

Best solution is to buy a high quality bike lock or two, and don’t store it long term where people can’t see it.

This would work great if law enforcement was interested in recovering stolen goods.

Based on how many issues we have with police using Flock for their own personal issues, I think this may not be a great solution either.

Yeah because police and cop won't definitely abuse this.

If police want to stalk me, use their damn device, ask their friend at 3-letter departments for cool toys.

I have a couple of their devices. It's useful since the purpose isn't usually to recover bike through highly ritualized process that activates after community street bicycle repairman has performed eco-friendly recycling operation on bike. It is built for semi-rule-of-law cities like San Francisco where speed of action might yield desirable outcome like retrieval of bike. In such situation, one has short window to re-identify bike location before it is used for ecological protection activities.

What software? It's a pin you strike with a hammer to pierce the piezo speaker within.

> In retrospect though, this also has the side effect of aiding someone with bad intentions to track someone that wouldn’t get phone notifications.

This is stupid, they knew exactly what they were doing and now they pretend that it has never crossed their minds.

And I'm saying this as someone who has a muted AirTag for theft protection.

yes, but they would be able to take them down from stores

patent is already out, so that damage is done

it’s also a small damage, the issue is convenience and mass sale to consumers, it’s like disclosing meth recipes, if you want to figure it out it’s possible, but responsible companies try not to reproduce that massively

Or you can even just drive a pin into the speaker yourself given they've described exactly where it is.

Who would be uncouth enough to violate a patent?

There are plenty of GPS trackers which can be used for anti-theft purposes. AirTag isn't designed for that, largely because Apple doesn't want the bad PR.

Not really, it is just tracking your bike. Theoretically someone could have thrown the bike in a dumpster, which went in a trash truck and you aren't tracking any body.

Is it stalking if there is no ill intent? (No, trying to get your bike back is not ill intent)

Looks like pressure. The entire reason for that buzzer was anti-stalking, they knew that.