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taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-insect-populations-flourish-habitats-solar.html

Bumblebees buzz from flower to flower, stopping for a moment under a clear blue Minnesota sky. Birds chirp, and tall grasses blow in the breeze. This isn't a scene from a pristine nature preserve or national park. It is nestled between photovoltaic (PV) solar arrays on rehabilitated farmland.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory wanted to understand the ecological value of PV solar energy sites planted with native grasses and wildflowers. They examined how vegetation would establish and how insect communities would respond to the newly established habitat. The five-year field study published in Environmental Research Letters looked at two solar sites in southern Minnesota operated by Enel Green Power North America. Both sites were built on retired agricultural land.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Periodically, the door would open, the light would turn on, and a petite, dark-haired graduate student named Sarah Meiklejohn would enter the room and add to the growing piles of miscellaneous artifacts. Then Meiklejohn would walk back out the door, down the hall, up the stairs, and into an office she shared with other graduate students at the UC San Diego computer science department. One wall of the room was almost entirely glass, and it looked out onto the sunbaked vista of Sorrento Valley and the rolling hills beyond. But Meiklejohn’s desk faced away from that expanse. She was wholly focused on the screen of her laptop, where she was quickly becoming one of the strangest, most hyperactive Bitcoin users in the world.

Meiklejohn had personally purchased every one of the dozens of items in the bizarre, growing collection in the UCSD closet using bitcoin, buying each one almost at random from a different vendor who accepted the cryptocurrency. And between those ecommerce orders and trips to the storage room, she was performing practically every other task that a person could carry out with bitcoin, all at once, like a kind of cryptocurrency fanatic having a manic episode.

She moved money into and out of 10 different bitcoin wallet services and converted dollars to bitcoins on more than two dozen exchanges such as Bitstamp, Mt. Gox, and Coinbase. She wagered those coins on 13 different online gambling services, with names like Satoshi Dice and Bitcoin Kamikaze. She contributed her computer’s mining power to 11 different mining “pools,” groups that collected users’ computing power for mining bitcoins and then paid them a share of the profits. And, again and again, she moved bitcoins into and then out of accounts on the Silk Road, the first-ever dark-web drug market, without ever actually buying any drugs.

In all, Meiklejohn carried out 344 cryptocurrency transactions over the course of a few weeks. With each one, she carefully noted on a spreadsheet the amount, the Bitcoin address she had used for it, and then, after digging up the transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain and examining the public record of the payment, the address of the recipient or sender.

Meiklejohn’s hundreds of purchases, bets, and seemingly meaningless movements of money were not, in fact, signs of a psychotic break. Each was a tiny experiment, adding up to a study of a kind that had never been attempted before. After years of claims about Bitcoin’s anonymity—or lack thereof—made by its users, its developers, and even its creator, Meiklejohn was finally putting its privacy properties to the test.

All of her meticulous, manual transactions were time-consuming and tedious. But Meiklejohn had time to kill: As she was carrying them out and recording the results, her computer was simultaneously running queries on a massive database stored on a server that she and her fellow UCSD researchers had set up, algorithms that sometimes took as long as 12 hours to spit out results. The database represented the entire Bitcoin blockchain, the roughly 16 million transactions that had occurred across the entire Bitcoin economy since its creation four years earlier. For weeks on end, Meiklejohn combed through those transactions while simultaneously tagging the vendors, services, markets, and other recipients on the other end of her hundreds of test transactions.

When she had started that process of probing the Bitcoin ecosystem, Meiklejohn had seen her work almost as anthropology: What were people doing with bitcoin? How many of them were saving the cryptocurrency versus spending it? But as her initial findings began to unfold, she had started to develop a much more specific goal, one that ran exactly counter to crypto-anarchists’ idealized notion of bitcoin as the ultimate privacy-preserving currency of the dark web: She aimed to prove, beyond any doubt, that bitcoin transactions could very often be traced. Even when the people involved thought they were anonymous.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are covering a PNAS article on the prodigious quantities of nanoplastics in bottled water.

Plastics are now omnipresent in our daily lives. The existence of microplastics (1 µm to 5 mm in length) and possibly even nanoplastics (<1 μm) has recently raised health concerns. In particular, nanoplastics are believed to be more toxic since their smaller size renders them much more amenable, compared to microplastics, to enter the human body.

However, detecting nanoplastics imposes tremendous analytical challenges on both the nano-level sensitivity and the plastic-identifying specificity, leading to a knowledge gap in this mysterious nanoworld surrounding us.

To address these challenges, we developed a hyperspectral stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) imaging platform with an automated plastic identification algorithm that allows micro-nano plastic analysis at the single-particle level with high chemical specificity and throughput. We first validated the sensitivity enhancement of the narrow band of SRS to enable high-speed single nanoplastic detection below 100 nm.

We then devised a data-driven spectral matching algorithm to address spectral identification challenges imposed by sensitive narrow-band hyperspectral imaging and achieve robust determination of common plastic polymers. With the established technique, we studied the micro-nano plastics from bottled water as a model system.

We successfully detected and identified nanoplastics from major plastic types. Micro-nano plastics concentrations were estimated to be about 2.4 ± 1.3 × 10⁵ particles per liter of bottled water, about 90% of which are nanoplastics. This is orders of magnitude more than the microplastic abundance reported previously in bottled water. High-throughput single-particle counting revealed extraordinary particle heterogeneity and nonorthogonality between plastic composition and morphologies; the resulting multidimensional profiling sheds light on the science of nanoplastics.

Also at:
CNN: Bottled water contains thousands of nanoplastics so small they can invade the body's cells, study says
New York Post: Bottled water contains 100 times more plastic particles than previously thought: study
The Hill: Bottled water industry pushes back on new study warning of nanoplastics
Futurism: Bottled Water Industry Says Please Disregard This Horrifying Discovery About Our Product
CBC: When you drink bottled water, you're drinking lots and lots of nanoplastics
Futurism: Scientists Find Bottled Water Filled With Hundreds of Thousands of Microplastics
DW: Surrounded by microplastics: The risks and solutions
Gizmodo: Bottled Water Contains 100 Times More Plastic Particles Than Previously Thought
and many more, pointing back to the PNAS article.

PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-audible-human-species-convey-important.html

Most of us are familiar with yawn contagion, which is the act of spontaneous yawning when someone nearby yawns, often but not always audibly. For humans, yawning can emanate from fatigue or boredom, and either seeing or hearing someone else yawn may start a chain reaction.

Many animal species also yawn when they're tired, and yawn contagion is known to occur among various social animals including certain apes, monkeys, lemurs, pigs, wolves, domestic dogs, lions, spotted hyenas, and more. But other than humans, only one species—the gelada (Theropithecus gelada), a species of Old World monkey—is known to yawn audibly.

Earlier studies have explored yawn contagion within and between various species; for example, some work has shown that dogs will yawn in response to the sound of human yawns. But to date, there have been no known studies on intraspecific audibly-triggered yawn contagion in a non-human species.

Now a research team from France and Italy has specifically studied how the sound of gelada yawns affects their conspecifics. The team's work is published in Scientific Reports.

Geladas, also known as bleeding-heart monkeys, are endemic to Ethiopia. They live in multi-level societies that include units, teams, bands, and communities. Core units either include a single reproductive adult male with multiple adult females, their young, and at least one follower male; or only young adult and adolescent males no longer living within their birth units.

Similar to humans, geladas enjoy rich and complex vocal communication. According to the new study, "A similar evolutionary social landscape, with similar challenges (e.g., need of group coordination with subjects not always in visual contact), has indeed possibly led to the emergence of multimodal communication in both species."

Existing findings show that yawning geladas, mostly males, emit a loud vocal sound that does not arise solely from inhaling and exhaling. While the researchers behind this study knew that visually-based yawn contagion could affect geladas, they wanted to find out whether the sound of yawning without a visual cue would result in a similar effect.

Journal Reference:
Pedruzzi, L., Francesconi, M., Palagi, E. et al. The sound of yawns makes geladas yawn. Sci Rep 14, 361 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-49797-5

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

The Isotope Effect: Bigger Than Science Ever Imagined

Traditionally, scientists believed that isotopic effects in biochemical reactions were more or less proportional to the mass difference between isotopes. For instance, a 0.5% mass difference between normal and ultralight enzymes (molecules with depleted heavy isotopes ¹³C, ²H, ¹⁵N, and ¹⁸O) should yield a kinetic effect of no more than 1%. However, the study reveals that the effect can be 250-300% ... depending on temperature.

Does this mean heavy water has longer lasting, if less effective, hydration action?

Can we expect Olympic athletes to be setting new records after light-carbo loading? Once the rules are updated the testing results should be incontrovertible.

The drugs, oh the wildly expensive / exclusive drugs they will make...

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Indian billionaire and Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has doubled down on his comments that India’s youth should voluntarily work 70-hour weeks.

Murthy’s first call for very long working hours came in October 2023, when he called on the nation’s youth to work long hours out of a sense of duty to the nation. He suggested the young “work twelve-hour days for the next 20 years, 50 years whatever it is.“

In a new interview posted this week, India Today consulting editor Rajdeep Sardesai asked Murthy if he sticks by his 70-hour plan.

“Absolutely,” he answered. “I don’t think 70 is important, all that it means is that you are productive, work very hard like the Germans did after World War II, like Japanese did. We owe it to the poor people to work hard and make the quality of their life a little bit better.”

[...] Narayana Murthy said he doesn’t really have regrets over missing important events in his children’s lives as he “always believed quality was more important than quantity.” He detailed he would leave for the office at 06:00, return around 21:15, expect his kids to be ready at the gate on his arrival, whereupon all would jump in the car and grab dinner together.

“We used to have lots of fun during that time. That hour and a half, two hours were the most relaxing for the children,” said Murthy.

[...] The Infosys co-founder described his long hours at work as a “puny” effort compared to the accomplishments of India's historical leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, other heroes of India’s independence movement, and the nation’s early prime ministers.

“So we should not even make this a big deal," he commented. He added that Mahatma Gandhi hardly ever saw his children.

“All the extraordinary heroes, if I could do one millionth of what they did, I think our family would be happy, I would be happy,” the former exec said.

[...] And as we noted when we covered Murthy’s first remarks about 70-hour weeks, requiring employees to work such hours appears to be illegal under Indian law.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-amazing-incredible-superb-effect-high.html

Researchers from LUISS Guido Carli University have published a new study that examines whether and how subtle shifts in language arousal might shape consumer engagement and the way it affects perceptions of influencers' trustworthiness.

The study, published in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "How High-Arousal Language Shapes Micro Versus Macro Influencers' Impact" and is authored by Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, Francisco Villarroel Ordenes, Rumen Pozharliev, Matteo De Angelis, and Michele Costabile.

Companies increasingly turn to popular social media personalities to promote their brands, products, and services. The influencer marketing economy was valued at $21.1 billion in 2023, and more than 90% of brands enlist influencers with a small audience (micro) or with massive reach (macro) to connect with consumers and achieve a variety of marketing goals, from creating awareness to increasing sales.

Influencers have the potential to diffuse marketing messages and drive actions, but it is unclear why some of their posts get a lot of engagement while others do not. One possibility is that consumers are increasingly aware that influencers get paid to promote products, raising questions about their motives. Additionally, anecdotal evidence suggests that when influencers use high-arousal language (e.g., "it's totally amazing!"), it leads to questions about their trustworthiness, which in turn leads consumers to engage less with the content.

Consumers typically see micro influencers as regular people, so if they say something like "this shake is AMAZING!" consumers believe they really are excited about that shake and just want to share this discovery with their friends and followers. This belief in their sincerity increases consumers' trust in micro influencers.

However, macro influencers do not seem like regular people. Consumers know these influencers receive substantial sums to say positive things about products, so they judge their posts as an attempt to persuade, just like any other form of advertising. Believing that someone has manipulative intentions tends to decrease trust. Yet the negative effect of high arousal posts by macro influencers could be mitigated if their posts offer more informative (vs. commercial) content or if the messages are more balanced.

[...] This research underscores the importance of aligning social media posts and language arousal strategies depending on the type of influencer. For micro influencers, using high-arousal language authentically can enhance engagement, but macro influencers should focus more on informative content to maintain their trustworthiness.

Journal Reference:
Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo , et al., How High-Arousal Language Shapes Micro- Versus Macro-Influencers' Impact, Journal of Marketing, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429231207636

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Zero-Click Bluetooth Attacks Pose Serious Threat Across Major OSes:

Vulnerabilities have been discovered in Bluetooth technology that affect various operating systems. As Linux admins, infosec professionals, Internet security enthusiasts, and sysadmins, it is crucial to understand the implications of these vulnerabilities and the impact they may have on our work. Let's have a closer look at these flaws, how they work, their impact on Linux users, and how to mitigate your risk.

Researchers have discovered zero-click Bluetooth flaws that enable attackers to secretly pair with devices as keyboards and inject keystrokes without user interaction. The vulnerabilities affect Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, posing a serious threat to billions of devices worldwide. Bluetooth technologies power wireless keyboards, mice, game controllers, and other peripherals used by billions of devices around the globe, highlighting the widespread nature of these vulnerabilities and the potential for malicious actors to exploit them across various platforms.

The Linux Bluetooth implementation allows keyboards to initiate pairing without authentication or user confirmation (CVE-2023-45866). This means that an attacker could remotely pair as a Bluetooth keyboard and inject keystrokes without the user's knowledge.

The implications of these vulnerabilities are significant. They expose a potential attack vector that could compromise a wide range of devices. For Linux admins, it highlights the importance of keeping Bluetooth settings secure and applying the available patch in BlueZ.

Infosec professionals and sysadmins must be aware of the vulnerabilities within their respective operating systems and take necessary measures to mitigate the risks, such as promptly applying patches as they are released by their distribution(s). Additionally, it raises questions about the overall security of Bluetooth technology and the need for cryptographic authentication and consent for all pairing attempts.

See Also: BleedingTooth: Linux Bluetooth Zero-Click Remote Code Execution for more technical details.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Over a half-century ago, the U.S. banned commercial planes from flying at supersonic speeds over the nation.

The ban protected us from the thunderous, jolting shock waves created when a plane breaks the speed of sound (some 767 mph), events aptly called sonic booms. For those who haven't experienced such an atmospheric blast from the likes of a military craft, it's like the sound of an explosion, NASA explains.

Now, the space agency seeks to tame these booms. On Jan. 12, NASA revealed its much anticipated X-59 aircraft, a nearly 100-foot-long experimental craft that will zoom at 925 mph high above several U.S. communities. (The craft will fly at 55,000 feet; most commercial airliners fly at some 35,000 feet.) Rather than creating a thunderclap, engineers hope the specially-designed craft will produce "barely-audible" thump sounds, perhaps similar to closing a car door.

Ultimately, the aviation industry might one day use this aeronautics innovation to cut flight times across the U.S. or elsewhere in half — though big questions loom around the economic viability of supersonic flight. Still, imagine hopping from Los Angeles to New York City in just two and a half hours.

[...] The X-59 plane will start flying soon, but not immediately over U.S. communities. NASA will build up to those crucial testing flights.

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/energy/dirt-powered-fuel-cell/

A Northwestern University team has demonstrated a remarkable new way to generate electricity, with a paperback-sized device that nestles in soil and harvests power created as microbes break down dirt – for as long as there's carbon in the soil.

Microbial fuel cells, as they're called, have been around for more than 100 years. They work a little like a battery, with an anode, cathode and electrolyte – but rather than drawing electricity from chemical sources, they work with bacteria that naturally donate electrons to nearby conductors as they chow down on soil.

The issue thus far has been keeping them supplied with water and oxygen, while being buried in the dirt. "Although MFCs have existed as a concept for more than a century, their unreliable performance and low output power have stymied efforts to make practical use of them, especially in low-moisture conditions," said UNW alumnus and project lead Bill Yen.

So, the team set about creating several new designs targeted at giving the cells continual access to oxygen and water – and found success with a design shaped like a cartridge sitting vertically on a horizontal disc. The disc-shaped carbon felt anode lies horizontally at the bottom of the device, buried deep in the soil where it can capture electrons as microbes digest dirt.

The conductive metal cathode, meanwhile, sits vertically on top of the anode. The bottom part thus sits deep enough to have access to moisture from the deep soil, while the top sits flush with the surface. A fresh air gap runs down the whole length of the electrode, and a protective cap on top stops dirt and debris from falling in and cutting off the cathode's access to oxygen. Part of the cathode is also coated with a waterproofing material, so that when it floods, there's still a hydrophobic section of the cathode in touch with oxygen to keep the fuel cell running.

In testing, this design performed consistently across different soil moisture levels, from completely underwater to "somewhat dry," with just 41% water by volume in the soil. On average, it generated some 68 times more power than was required to operate its onboard moisture and touch detection systems, and transmit data via a tiny antenna to a nearby base station.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-rice-lines-africa-virus.html

Rice yellow mottle virus (RYMV) is responsible for high crop losses in Africa, particularly among small-scale farmers. A research team has now produced rice lines that are resistant to the disease by means of genome editing.

The rice varieties, the development of which the team describes in Plant Biotechnology Journal, are a preliminary step toward being able to generate resistant locally adapted elite varieties for small-scale food producers in Africa.

RYMV is an RNA virus spread by beetles and direct leaf-to-leaf contact. In Africa, where the majority of producers farm plots of land barely one hectare in size, between ten and one hundred percent of the rice harvests are regularly lost to this virus. This makes it a life-threatening problem for the poorest farmers.

There is no effective protection against the virus. "The only real protection is to develop rice varieties that possess a resistance gene against RYMV, which would make the plant invulnerable," says Dr. Yugander Arra, lead author of the study now published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

A research team from the Institute for Molecular Physiology at HHU (headed by Professor Dr. Wolf B. Frommer) and the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) in Montpellier, France, has developed such resistant rice lines.

Three resistance genes are currently known; mutations in just one gene, RYMV1, 2, and 3, are sufficient to achieve resistance. The resistant form rymv2 occurs in poor-yielding African rice (Oryza glaberrima) varieties. RYMV2, also known as CPR5.1, encodes an essential protein from the pores of the cell nucleus.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Before the ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI), humans imagined a world wherein machines would take over the most mundane and repetitive tasks. In this ideal world, things like cleaning or organizing would have been a thing of the past, and people could do less manual labor and more creative work. Unfortunately, this is not what is happening.

These days, AI is being used to fulfill the roles that many of us perceive to be particularly human activities, especially in the arts. In 2023, content behemoths like Netflix announced their plans to create increasingly more content with AI. Knowing this, it is unsurprising that AI was a core concern for performers, and the harvesting of their "digital likeness" to train them was one of the key issues raised during the SAG-AFTRA Strike in the same year.

With generative AI making several aspects of movie magic and photography obsolete, many photographers and videographers are struggling to protect their work and their livelihood. Thankfully, some of the largest camera companies are on their side. [...]

Before the age of generative AI, photographers, and videographers employed the use of watermarks to tag their work. When AI-generated content became more common, many groups called for transparency and sought to mandate watermarks which would show that these images were not created by humans.

Despite this, watermarks have never fully been able to keep bad actors at bay, even before AI, especially because of the existence of accessible technology that can easily remove them. In September 2023, a study claimed that watermarking AI content still has several issues, including how forging watermarks can lead to misattribution. Although, all hope is not lost yet.

JoeMerchant writes:

Scientists swapped out carbon for perovskite semiconductors to demonstrate the power of a future PeLED technology.

The ULTRA-LUX project, led by technology company Imec, has developed a new type of light-emitting diode (LED) – known as perovskite LEDs (PeLED) – that might one day consign OLED displays to history.

"This novel architecture of transport layers, transparent electrodes and perovskite as the semiconductor active material, can operate at electrical current densities tens of thousands of times higher (3 kA cm-2) than conventional OLEDs can,"

Sounds rough on battery life, to me.

Researchers with the ULTRA-LUX project, however, have wielded the potential of perovskite – a class of material with a specialized crystal structure – to serve as the semiconductor in LED-based displays. In doing so, they've created a display technology that can be up to 1000 times brighter than state-of-the-art OLEDs, according to research published in Nature.

This material, which is used in solar-powered cells, can withstand very high current densities, but hasn't been used in such a way as to emit light in a display. Using their architecture, Imec demonstrated the potential of PeLEDs in future displays, and the researchers now plan on building one.

[...]

It may well be a good few years, however, before we start to see displays on the market powered by this kind of display technology, given there's a fair amount of research and engineering still to be done.

Ah yes, the eternal dodge of breaking technology news...

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Unstaffed tills were supposed to revolutionise shopping. Now, both retailers and customers are bagging many self-checkout kiosks.

It's a common sight at many retail stores: a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk, doing their best to remain patient as a lone store worker attends to multiple malfunctioning machines. The frustration mounts while a dozen darkened, roped-off and cashier-less tills sit in the background.

For shoppers, self-checkout was supposed to provide convenience and speed. Retailers hoped it would usher in a new age of cost savings. Their thinking: why pay six employees when you could pay one to oversee customers at self-service registers, as they do their own labour of scanning and bagging for free?

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth.

[...] Many retail companies have invested millions – if not billions – of dollars in self-checkout technology, which Andrews says was first developed during the 1980s, and started appearing in stores in the 1990s. They're not exactly cheap to get into stores: some experts estimate a four-kiosk system can run six figures.

Despite the cost to install them, many retailers are reversing course on the tech. Target, for instance, is restricting the number of items self-checkout customers can purchase at one time. Walmart has removed some self-checkout kiosks in certain stores to deter theft. In the UK, supermarket chain Booths has also cut down on the number of self-service kiosks in its stores, as customers say they're slow and unreliable.

[...] Some retailers cite theft as a motivator for ditching the unstaffed tills. Customers may be more willing to simply swipe merchandise when using a self-service kiosk than they are when face-to-face with a human cashier. Some data shows retailers utilising self-checkout technology have loss rates more than twice the industry average.

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn't lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. [...]

[...] Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. However, years later, they're still queueing for tills; waiting for store-staff assistance with errors or age checks; and searching high and low for the PLU code of the Walla Walla Sweet Onions they're trying to purchase.

In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice, yet 67% of consumers have had the technology fail while trying to use it.

[...] For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there's one thing Andrews believes won't change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

Original Submission

Apple AirDrop Leaks User Data Like a Sieve. Chinese Authorities Say They're Scooping It Up.

upstart writes:

Chinese authorities are exploiting a weakness Apple has allowed to go unfixed for 5 years:

Chinese authorities recently said they're using an advanced encryption attack to de-anonymize users of AirDrop in an effort to crack down on citizens who use the Apple file-sharing feature to mass-distribute content that's illegal in that country.

[...] The scant details and the quality of Internet-based translations don't explicitly describe the technique. All the translations, however, have said it involves the use of what are known as rainbow tables to defeat the technical measures AirDrop uses to obfuscate users' phone numbers and email addresses.

[...] In 2021, researchers at Germany's Technical University of Darmstadt reported that they had devised practical ways to crack what Apple calls the identity hashes used to conceal identities while AirDrop determines if a nearby person is in the contacts of another. One of the researchers' attack methods relies on rainbow tables.

[...] Christian Weinert, one of the TU Darmstadt researchers who's now at Royal Holloway University in London, said in an email that Green is almost certainly correct.

"The attack clearly exploits the underlying issue that we pointed out in our paper and that we reported to Apple—namely the insecure use of hash functions for 'obfuscating' contact identifiers in the AirDrop protocol," he wrote. "Furthermore, the described use of rainbow tables for 'cracking' the hash values seems identical to what we described in a paper published at WiSec '21 (https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/893) where we demonstrate our attacks. Note that the screenshots in the Chinese blog post indicate that the forensic lab implemented their own tooling for this and also considers email addresses in addition to phone numbers."