On August 21, information about the sunken Chinese nuclear submarine 093 Shang surfaced on the Internet. The accident occurred on board during a mission in the Yellow Sea. According to British intelligence, the Chinese submarine fell into its own trap intended for British and American ships. As a result of the incident, 55 people died. Cause of death: failure of oxygen systems. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said it had found no evidence of an accident. China also denied reports of the accident.

It is obvious that China did not intend to advertise the accident, and information about the disaster is classified. However, a leak occurred. And now it turns out where it comes from.

The British newspaper Daily Mail reported that British military intelligence MI6 could track down the sunken military submarine by tapping an Apple smartwatch belonging to one of the PLA officers.

During the investigation, the Chinese military allegedly discovered that British intelligence was spying on the submarine through remote access to an Apple gadget. The information was received from Chinese oppositionists, who had copies of documents of the Communist Party of China, which talk about Western intervention. The British tabloid claims that the revelation of espionage by the British intelligence service caused a big scandal in the leadership of the PRC.

Apple does have the ability to track at least the geolocation of its gadgets. As well as access other data, especially those stored in cloud services. Apple specialists can also remotely install any software on their gadgets, including spyware and malware, under the guise of updates without the owner’s knowledge. Which, however, can be done by manufacturers of Chinese smartphones and other electronic devices.

  • railsdev@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    You’re not wrong and I’m not disagreeing, but AirTags are basically just Bluetooth trackers that emit a signal picked up by Apple devices. They don’t contain cellular or GPS so I don’t think this is a fair comparison.

    • Boring@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      They send BT signal to any apple device and the device uses their GPS/data to forward the location to the find my network.

      • railsdev@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Exactly. But an Apple Watch can have a cellular/WiFi connection so it’s not dependent on having other Apple devices around to update its coordinates on iCloud.

        • Boring@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Fair point. But GPS signal from a submarine is almost impossible considering GPS needs LOS.

          LTE has a range about 10miles and 5G is also LOS. So its brings it down to unlikely that an Apple watch could connect to cellular.

          Considering this is underwater and radio waves attenuate very quickly in the water, this is very unlikely to produce any valuable tracking as a majority of the packets would get dropped if any make it to the cellular tower at all.

          Only real way someone could track this submarine via cellular would be if they used a cell site simulator and downgraded the signal to 2g, which would be possible with Chinese cellular providers… But this would require already knowing where the submarine is and/or having stingrays all over the ocean.

          • railsdev@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Yeah that’s why I was saying I don’t necessarily disagree, I just don’t think an AirTag’s tracking (in)ability is fair to compare with that of a full-fledged cellular device.