What airtags need is a theft mode, where anyone carrying the airtag is not alerted, but the location can be retrieved by an approved local authority after being voluntarily surrendered by the owner.

This also requires authorities that would care about this sort of case.

Wouldn't even be hard for Apple to implement, they already do this for airlines.

The challenge is how you prevent such features being abused by like stalkers

Whitelisting law enforcement so when the owner of the air tag declares it stolen nobody other than a whitelisted law enforcement org could view its location and when they did that creates an audit log?

^ exactly.

And since the user has the original key, it'd have to be voluntary surrender. After you turn your key in, you lose access.

The best part is the whole thing could be reviewable and added to a public immutable ledger, encrypted, to make the whole process, transition, and access transparent for courts later. Wouldn't it be great if more investigations happened that way?

And if you don't trust law enforcement, thats your prerogative, no need to use the feature.

What happens when law enforcement members are the stalkers?

They have access to guns, stingrays and flock cameras. They tap every email, message and phone call you make. You wouldn't even know if you are subject to warrantless surveillance as it might be illegal to tell you under the patriot act.

I'm pretty sure being able to access an Airtag that was put into stolen mode by the owner is the least of your concern. I'm not even sure what failure mode you are worried about because you didn't elaborate.

Please don't think I'm trying to be all high and mighty because I live in the UK and am surveilled even worse than you are (although at least our police are very rarely armed).

I concur, but you don't have to use that feature if you don't trust LE.

It would be nice if this could tie in to actively altering enforcement when it's turned on, maybe even require sharing with authorities for it to be enabled: the stalker would have to collaborate with police in order to stalk the victim.

It blows my mind one can buy _ton_s of gold.

> FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED

Learned something new today. I knew what FOR UPDATE did, but somehow I've never RTFM'd hard enough to know about the SKIP LOCKED directive. Thats pretty cool.

Yes, SKIP LOCKED is great. In practice you nearly always want LIMIT, which the article did not mention. Be careful if your selection spans multiple tables: only the relations you explicitly lock are protected (see SELECT … FOR UPDATE OF t1, t2). ORDER BY matters because it controls fairness and retry behaviour. Also watch ANALYZE: autoanalyze only runs once the dead to live tuple threshold is crossed, and on large or append heavy tables with lots of old rows this can lag, leading to poor plans and bad SKIP LOCKED performance. Finally, think about deletion and lifecycle: deleting on success, scheduled cleanup (consider pg_cron), or partitioning old data all help keep it efficient.

I can see how that'd be extremely useful with LIMIT, especially with XA. Take a stride, complete it, or put it back for someone else.

Something I've still not mastered is how to prevent lock escalation into table-locks, which could torpedo all of this.

only learned about SKIP LOCKED because ChatGPT suggested it to solve some concurrency problem I had. Great tool to learn such things.

Great tool that wrote the blog post in the OP also, so it's quite versatile.

Actually having the opposite problem, I'm getting 50+ emails that SHOULD be marked as spam.

srv records would be awesome, as always, but we forgo those for some still unknown reason.

> A Republican attempt to cut off federal funding tied to vehicle “kill switch” enforcement failed in the House this week, leaving intact a law directing the Department of Transportation to develop mandatory impaired-driving prevention systems in new vehicles.

Apparently on the basis that it makes no sense to have a law mandating something and then another law prohibiting any money being spent on that thing.

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-172/iss...

The US Government has quickly realized the utility of monopolies and no longer goes after them.

The new guys on my team do not check it. They already had problems checking their work, AI is just amplifying the actual human problem.

There's a ton of Claude spam on HN ramping up at the end of 2025 and into the new year. There's a huge push by them to be seen as the LLM for techies. Won't be surprised to see a future marketing campaign about "chatgpt is for homework, claude is for science"

It's about controls. Being self sufficient is the greatest threat to a authoritarian government, which mirrors the states attempting to pass such legislation.