The members of the group, who have a combination of hardware and software skills and first detailed his hack as part of a tech collective called Lagrange Point, they say a couple dozen people have contacted them asking for help with their AirPods. “We have a lot of interest from people in India who have these AirPods or whose grandparents need them and haven’t been able to use them,” Jayasimha says. Others have documented the same problem in social media posts.
The researchers showed they could bypass Apple’s geographic restrictions with a set of AirPods Pro 2 connected to a Wi-Fi-only 10th-generation iPad. They point out that it would also be possible to solve the problem on an iPhone or iPad connected to a mobile operator, but it would be more complicated.
To find the solution, the researchers first looked at the different ways iOS establishes where a device is located in the world. For Wi-Fi only devices, there are a few checks. The server looks at which Apple Store region the device is connected to, as well as the time zone, language, and region the device is set to. Additionally, the operating system sends a simple web request to an Apple web service that then responds with the country code the device appears to be in based on the location associated with its IP address.
The researchers first attempted to manually change the iPad’s time zone and regional settings, but it was ultimately unclear whether this affected their ability to hide the iPad’s true location. When masking the iPad’s IP address to make it appear to be connected in the United States didn’t work, the researchers evaluated other metrics the device could be using to establish its geographic location. It turns out that iOS also looks at Wi-Fi “service set identifiers,” or SSIDs, which help devices connect to the right Wi-Fi network when there are a lot of network signals in the air, like in a building. apartments or in a cafe. .
The operating system also uses GPS triangulation and identifying “MAC addresses” of nearby devices, including routers, to establish a device’s location. In other words, even if a person in Bengaluru uses a proxy to make it appear that their iPad has a US IP address, all nearby routers and devices are associated with IP addresses located in India that reveal the real location.