Many iPad and iPhone users lament the absence of proper wired connection options for their devices. No wired-speed LAN connectivity; no USB; no HDMI; no Firewire; no Thunderbolt.
But Chinese smugglers have rigged up their very own wired connectivity system for iDevices.
They used a crossbow, some bicycle parts, high-strength fishing wire and a narrow gap where the Hong Kong SAR and the People’s Republic of China proper (PRC) meet.
The wired cross-border connection wasn’t used to transmit data between the iDevices and other computers.
Instead, it was used to whizz the devices themselves across the border under cover of darkness, and – of course – without declaring them to Customs and Excise on either side of the border.
Sha Tua Kok, in the North East of Hong Kong, is still comparatively rural, at least compared with the other side of the frontier, where high-rise apartments crowd right up to the border.
According to reports, the smugglers shot a fishing wire from a high-rise apartment right at the very edge of Shenzhen to a low-rise house just across the stream marking the border.
They then rigged up a hand-operated pulley system to convey the smuggled goods across the 300m gap from the Hong Kong side.
Even though Hong Kong is technically part of PRC, the former British dependency’s status as a Special Administrative Region means that it retains its own legislature, judiciary, currency and, most importantly for smugglers, its own economy with its own system of taxation and excise. (Hong Kong drivers even keep to the left, not to the right as on the mainland.)
That can mean lucrative profits for those who don’t move their imports through official channels.
MICgadget has uploaded a news video in which the cops show off the smuggler’s iPhone connectivity kit and the cross-border path taken by the smuggled goods:
