I'm sure some have seen the discussion around a new rule against the promotion of various substances in this community. This will be the summary based on data collected at this snapshot in time.
Post score (upvotes/downvotes): 33/19 (Note that hexbear users cannot downvote)
Number of users who left comments (including me): 21
Number of comments: 51 = 19 (left by me) + 32 (others)
The following is a crude categorization of the 32 comments left by others, each category begins with the name and a 4-tuple of (number of unique users, number of comments, total comment upvotes, maximum upvotes obtained by a single comment). If the same user left multiple comments that are categorized the same, only the comment with the highest upvote will be counted when tallying upvotes, the rest are excluded.
- Agree (2 users, 4 comments, 7 upvotes total, 4 upvotes max): Comments that agree without giving an explanation, 2 comments excluded from upvotes total.
- Agree because history (2 users, 2 comments, 16 upvotes total, 11 upvotes max) : Comments that agree and mention China's history.
- Agree because history but questionable (2 users, 2 comments, 20 upvotes total, 14 upvotes max) : Comments that agree because of China's history, but raised questions
- Disagree (2 users, 2 comments, 16 upvotes total, 9 upvotes max)
- Medical (4 users, 7 comments, 29 upvotes total, 8 upvotes max) : Comments that mention medical properties of certain substances, or their normal use in certain cultures.
- Abstain (1 user, 1 comment, 7 upvotes total, 7 upvotes max)
- Others: Discuss rule (4 users, 7 comments), Joke (5 users, 5 comments), Off-topic (1 user, 2 comments)
The data show that most people agree to the rule partially due to China's history, but also question the necessity of having this rule and it's phrasing. Some people raised valid points about the medical properties of certain substances, and discussed changes to the rule to accommodate those points. Disagreements were seen mostly in downvotes or questions about the rule, only a few users left comments explicitly opposing the rule.
Overall I would conclude that there isn't a strong consensus to keep this new rule, especially not in its original phrasing, and modifications to the rule have not been thoroughly discussed. There has also not been any evidence to an urgent need for the rule. Thus the rule will be deleted from the community rules in the spirit of democratic centralism.
The Bloomberg article cited (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-09/china-says-cracked-apple-s-airdrop-to-identify-message-sources or https://archive.is/XnvO8) once again doesn't mention the relevant institute by name, but here's the Chinese article from Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice: 2024-01-08 司法鉴定：司法鉴定揭开“隔空投送”匿名传输的神秘面纱 https://sfj.beijing.gov.cn/sfj/sfdt/ywdt82/flfw93/436331732/index.html
This paragraph reveals how they found out the AirDrop sender's email and phone number:
Basically the sender's phone number and email addresses were stored as hash values, but the hashes were just partial values. The judicial appraisal institute "北京网神洞鉴" created rainbow tables (precomputed table for caching the outputs of a cryptographic hash function, usually for cracking password hashes) to bruteforce the information.
As Chinese mobile numbers follow certain formats (11 digits, starts with 1, known list of prefixes etc.) it is probably very easy to generate a rainbow table for this. Though the article doesn't mention if the phone numbers and email had separate hash values so this is just one way to do it.
From Apple's "AirDrop security" page we can see that this matches up: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/airdrop-security-sec2261183f4/web
This article is about the AirDrop receiver finding out the sender's information, but doesn't mention if the reverse is possible. But if we look at the same AirDrop security page, it is probable that in AirDrop "Everyone mode" an attacker could find out the information of Apple devices around them:
For people using Apple devices or even other brands, especially in the US, take caution as this is a finding one Chinese local government published, who knows how many vectors of attack the US intelligence agencies is aware of.