An Indian enthusiast bought Apple AirPods Pro 2 for his hearing-impaired grandmother to use as a hearing aid. He discovered that this feature is blocked in India.
Ritwik Jayasimha decided not to give up and together with Lagrange Point enthusiasts created a Faraday cage and a microwave jammer to spoof the headset’s location and unlock the feature. Hearing aids in India cost around $600 to $9500, making them unaffordable for most. The AirPods Pro 2 costs only $300, making the headphones a great substitute.
To use this feature, you need to be in an eligible region, have a device running iOS, iPadOS 18.1 or later, and make sure that AirPods Pro 2 uses firmware 7B19 or later. The enthusiast had everything but the proper location, and he decided to fake it.However, despite changing the IP address and language of the iPad used to configure the headphones, the device still knew it was in India.
The experimenters mentioned that the iPad uses the SSIDs and MAC addresses of routers around it to determine its location. Even if the iPad had no cellular service and GPS was turned off, it could still pinpoint the region. So the team decided to place the iPad and the ESP32 board, which switches between a hundred Wi-Fi SSIDs from California, in a makeshift Faraday cage in the form of a cardboard box wrapped in aluminum foil. The contraption. was placed on a microwave oven running at full power to block any Wi-Fi and cellular signals in the immediate vicinity.
On the MacBook, a script was run that instructed the iPad to reboot and turn on the Wi-Fi antenna five minutes later. However, the first few attempts failed — the equipment had to be reconfigured and several restarts had to be made. After about three hours of work, the Mac console reported that the iPad was showing a location in the United States. The experimenters took the iPad out of the insulated box, connected the AirPods to the device, and the hearing aid setup process appeared on the screen.
After the proof of concept, the group repeated the process a few more times and built a more stable Faraday cage. The group offered an unlocking service for hearing aids so that anyone in the Bengaluru city area could use the feature.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
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