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These Guys Hacked AirPods to Give Their Grandmas Hearing Aids
- Rithwik Jayasimha and two friends, Arnav Bansal and Rithvik Vibhu, built a rudimentary, signal-blocking Faraday cage on top of a microwave with aluminum foil to bypass Apple’s location restrictions and enable their hearing aids in Bangalore.
- Apple released hearing aid features in AirPods Pro 2 earbuds but it is not available in India where Jayasimha and his family live.
- The researchers designed a less ingenious, but simpler and more reliable Faraday cage to make their manipulation more practical.
- The trio demonstrated that they could bypass Apple’s geographic restrictions with a set of AirPods Pro 2 connected to a 10th generation Wi-Fi-only iPad.
- They discovered that it would be possible for Apple to close the loophole they discovered fairly easily, but they haven’t heard from the company.
- Apple offers the hearing aid features in more than 100 countries, but it has great promise as a tool for making hearing aid tech more accessible.
- Big Tech companies’ power and people’s rights have become an issue, with increasing hacking into the products people buy.
- The researchers believe that it is likely Apple’s hearing aid features will officially come to the country in the coming months, but they plan in the meantime to help the dozens of people they say have reached out to them about their own headphones.
- The team has a mix of hardware and software skills and detailed their hack as part of a technology collective to help grandmas in India use their AirPods as hearing aids.
- The researchers first looked at ways iOS establishes where a device is in the world and found there are different checks, including region settings, Apple Store region and associated IP address location.
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