Angus Gratton, an embedded engineer, writes teardowns and reverse-engineering notes on cheap hardware, old peripherals, and an EV conversion.
HN links it for hardware teardowns and the Griffin iMate mystery. Commenters cite it on Android tablets and GPL compliance, and follow his EV series.
It's really anything branded as by "Apple" on Amazon.
Look at the reviews of the Apple Thunderbolt Cable [1] -- 40% are 1 star reviews and many mention the cable being fake.
Similar story on the Apple USB Ethernet adapter [2]. I bought one a few years back and it identified itself with Chinese lettering in System Preferences.
Ken Shirriff did an amazing teardown of fake Apple chargers [3] and found a number of safety hazards relating to high voltage isolation. Teardown of the USB Adapter [4] found it used a part that doesn't exist (label does not match any known package for that IC).
1: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Thunderbolt-Cable-2-0-White/dp/B00YHUBV6Q/#customerReviews
2: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-USB-Ethernet-Adapter-MC704LL/dp/B00W7W9FK0/#customerReviews
3: http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pricey.html
4: http://projectgus.com/2013/03/anatomy-of-a-cheap-usb-ethernet-adapter/
You don't need VMs or a fake Google or anything that complex. That said, I will grant that it might be harder to detect or easier than reversing the protocol itself. Even so, take a look at what HN user angusgr posted in another thread:
http://projectgus.com/2011/02/bing-google-finding-some-facts/
I'll save you some reading and point out that this is the important part, the exchange with Bing:
http://projectgus.com/files/googlebing/seaport-trace.txt
I bet I could duplicate that with a few lines of Perl. Then I could feed Bing whatever I want, no VMs or clicking or DNS/hosts files to worry about. You might have to harvest a valid identifier (such as the one linked there) or do some figuring out so that you submit this to the right Microsoft IP.
If I were working for Bing, I'd start looking at hardening this a little, before the SEO people figure it out.
Freescale i.MX6 is a really nice platform. Shame it hasn't gotten broader traction, I think because it is moderately more expensive than its competition.
Since May I've been using an imx6 based gk802 ($70 quad core "Android TV" stick) as a personal server (email, RSS, VPN, etc.) Has worked really nicely considering. (Blog post about installing debian on it: http://projectgus.com/2013/05/debian-installer-for-zealz-gk802-android-tv-quad-core-arm-minipc/ )
Somebody just last year finally worked out what that battery is doing and why the adapter doesn’t work after it dies: https://www.projectgus.com/2023/04/griffin-imate/#mystery-battery (discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35772131)
(TLDR: compatibility with Apple’s off-USB-spec keyboard power button, but the circuit they used accidentally injects noise which wreaks havoc on the data lines when it’s unpowered and left floating.)
If you're interested in this check out the previous posts:
Part 1 https://www.projectgus.com/2023/03/ev-conversion-one/
Part 2 https://www.projectgus.com/2023/03/ev-conversion-two/
Part 3 https://www.projectgus.com/2023/10/kona-can-decoding/
...and the follow-up posts:
Part 5 https://www.projectgus.com/2024/04/unremarkable/
Part 6 https://www.projectgus.com/2024/10/simplifying-bench-kona/
I spent a few minutes looking up whether a Mac could be booted from a Bluetooth keyboard but couldn't find any documentation of that. Back in the day some(?) Mac models could be booted by a USB keyboard, see https://www.projectgus.com/2023/04/griffin-imate/ for technical details.