This is why I never interested with technological advancement and innovations in the past decade. Sure a lot of it are technically cool, I maybe even want to play around or even tinker (if accessible) with some of them.
But not for them to constantly make me consume all of those things or for them to use it malicously to people.
Cool, now we can find all the invisible people living in our homes! /s
When I was researching security systems it took some doing to find one that didn’t require inside facing cameras and microphones.
You buy the head unit, and then you put the cameras wherever you want???
What are you talking about?
For example, ADT and SimpliSafe both advertised a base station kind if thing that had a camera and a microphone where if the alarm was set off, the monitoring agent could watch and tell an intruder that police were on the way. SimpliSafe had an option to remove that just run the regular base station. ADT and others weren’t so flexible.
This is yet another reason to own (or better yet, build your own) router.
To build a secure router from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
- Carl Sagan
Good read for those starting to ponder this line of thought.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
You have to go further.
If you don’t fab your chips yourself, you are letting the authoritarian regimes in.
There’s making a good effort, and there’s perfect acting as the enemy of good.
If you repurpose an old thin client, install an old enterprise NIC, and slap pfSense or opnSense on it, it’s gonna be a damn sight better in terms of corporate infiltration and co-opting of your infrastructure that whatever Comcast rents to you. That’s all I’m saying, and that’s how I run mine.
Nah, gotta grow and dope your own silicon to be sure
If you’re not fusing the silicon from pure hydrogen yourself, is it even worth it?
nahh guys youre still corporate-brainwashed sheep. try assembling the silicon atom by atom yourself and only then you will be free
@gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works @nebula42@lemmy.zip If a neighbor has this thing, it doesn’t matter if your router is yours, because theirs will still “infiltrate” (and see as well, as I’ll say below) your house as microwave-length (both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz) electromagnetic waves can and will trespass the walls separating the two…
…except if all your house structure, including walls and the floor and the roof, are layered with a metallic plate and/or a metallic mesh spaced exactly 12cm/x (the wavelength and its harmonics, such as 6cm (4.8GHz), 3cm(9.6GHz), etc) apart, but then it must not be electrically grounded, which then requires the plate/mesh to be something internally “glued” or bolted (with bolts made of non-conductive material) to the wall tiles and floor tiles rather than something buried inside concrete walls. Or, to summarize in two words, Faraday cage.
Why? Because the main problem with this technology is that it’s not restricted to wall boundaries. In fact, it’s used for some applications (military, police, etc., possibly even Google Streetview did this because they use wardriving to “improve geolocation services”) to literally “see through the walls”.
Or, to make this more ominous and menacing, “you can be seen in the dark”… And I mean this phrase in a literal sense, because the Wi-Fi transmitter acts like a lamp so a specialized array of Wi-Fi receivers can “see”…
So, actually, even your own router will end up being an involuntary lamp to your house for an external “Wi-Fi eye” (the aforementioned array of Wi-Fi receivers), except if you use other frequencies allowed for ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical radio ranges) such as 433MHz.
The solution is simpler yet still involving some complexities (such as math behind electromagnetic wavelength, harmonics, electrical conductivity, etc): Faraday cage all inside the house. Having no neighbors is also an interesting mitigation factor (although increasingly difficult as people are used to gather in neighborhoods, as well as the ongoing verticalization of cities).
As long as we’re carrying cellphones with us at all times, none of this is particularly damning in comparison.
Signal attenuation is crap compared to directional homing in on the transmitter in your pocket.
The technology works by measuring the interference provoked by obstacles, including (but not limited to) walking human bodies. As we walk within the range of two or more devices communicating with each other, our bodies momentarily alter the signal, reflecting and absorbing and diffracting the original 2.4GHz wave.
Now, say I live in a condo, sandwiched between two different neighbors (Alice and Bob), and both use this Xfinity thing: while Alice wander around her apartment while doing a VoIP call on her phone, Bob’s router is also broadcasting it’s SSID which is then received by Alice’s phone, even though Alice’s phone is connected to Alice’s router. The same goes for Bob’s phone, which will receive the Alice’s router SSID broadcast. And I, wandering around my own apartment, I’ll be between the invisible crossfire. I don’t even need to be carrying a phone, nor do I need to have a router. I just need to have at least two neighbors with routers and mobile devices sandwiching me between their radio signals.
Now, there are more sophisticated “WiFi vision” (used by military and police) which needs just a single Wi-Fi hotspot which will act as their “lamp”. The signal will bounce all around the place, and it’ll also pass through the walls, reaching the soldier’s equipment, which is composed of several small Wi-Fi receptors arranged in a grid (akin to “pixels” from a DSLR digital camera sensor).
Both can be mitigated with Faraday cages. Some kinds of chicken wire, used to make chicken coops, work beautifully and they use to be cheap (as strange as it may sound, a few-dollars thing can beat a thousand-dollars thing).
You are greatly exaggerating how the system works and what it can generate, and you’re conflating this service’s ability with that of professional espionage gear.
Alice’s router is reading the signal between Alice’s devices and her router. As part of the wifi protocol, the router can get precise recprical information about the signal strength of the devices connected to it. It’s not radar, it’s i know the thermostat is connected and has -10db singal, it’s at -11db now so there’s something in the way, we have movement. Say she has a wifi TV and a wifi on her cellphone, if she’s in between one of those devices or one of them moves closer, they can sense a change and movement. While they could try to listen to everything in the neighborhood, all they’d get is noise and fluctuations they’re not building a picture, move of a corkboard with thumbtacks and string, but they have no idea what direction any of the tacks are in just how hard it is to get to them.
Bobs router is reading his stuff and ignoring alice’s stuff. otherwise bob would get false positives.
Any radio emission in your house could be used like this with the right receivers.
They’re not getting any directionailty from this, the router has no idea what things are in what direction, just that there are changes in field strength. The condos below you or above you would also set it off if they were trying to just listen to everything.
You keep referring to it as a lamp. It’s less like a lamp and more like a speaker. the sound can carry through walls, but it’s muffled. The directionality is severely reduced even if you had fine tuned directional antennas to pinpoint it. It’s a little better than sound, but far closer to sound than light. The router is more like a mic. It’s in one static spot and is simply omnidirecional.
It’s only abile to see a table liket he following
MAC1:098324F3C40E89 -11.1 MAC2:19834F3C440E62 -12.9 MAC3:398321F3C40E28 -110.1 MAC4:4983423C440E15 -25.3 MAC5:598323F3C40E98 -16.8
if one of the numbers change and the rest don’t, that’s movement. They’re not building pictures out of this.
Now, let’s talk faraday cages.
at 2.4GHz, your hole size would have to be about 6mm maximum. better off a three or less (like a microwave door)
at 5G that would be 3mm max You’re going to want brass mesh or something.
Then if you wanted to block mains, that’s powerful enough that you could be detected through changes in the the magnetic b field, good luck blocking that.
Just have a jammer doing destructive interference problems solved
@DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world Jammers are against most (if not all) the telecommunication regulations around the world, including FCC regulations, because it can interfere with and disrupt important infrastructure (such as government, military, but also hospitals and aviation, etc). If one is caught using jammers, it can even lead to one’s arrest on most countries. Meanwhile, Faraday cages aren’t illegal (at least yet in this dystopian world we exist). Hence why I recommended a Faraday cage rather than destructive interference through jammers.
Just works like a lamp again, receiver doesn’t need to transmit
then you cant use your own wifi. Besides a jammer you need to use cable internet only.
Hot take:
Live far enough away from your neighbor for their wifi not to reach.
You need about an acre. Just live in the Boonies. Solve your network and physical security at the same time.
Live far enough away from your neighbor for their wifi not to reach.
Yeah, it’s an interesting mitigation for sure, but it’s becoming increasing impossible not to have neighbors, especially due to “verticalization” (i.e. corporations buy some old houses to demolish 'em and emerge a whole new condominium building; even “boonies” (TIL this word) are undergoing verticalization, as I’ll say below).
You need about an acre.
An acre is around 4000 meter squared, or a land whose size is ~63.6 meters on each directional axis. If we consider a circular 1 acre (because radio signals often propagate omnidirectionally), it’s a circle whose diameter is ~70 meters (inverse of pi radius squared). In rural areas where I lived, my phone could detect and even connect to hotspots 500 meters distant from where I was, roughly 7 to 10 times those distances.
We don’t notice this in urban places because there’s a saturation of Wi-Fi channels (especially 2.4GHz still in use), so our phones tend to pick up the closest, and the closest within urban places will be really close, whereas rural areas lack this saturation, allowing for hotspots really far away to be connectable.
Just live in the Boonies.
Brazil, the country I reside in, could be considered “boonies” (a rural country). Practically all Brazilian states, with few exceptions (Rio de Janeiro state, Distrito Federal the federal district, São Paulo state and Goiás), have more than 10% of rural density (as per 2010 IBGE statistics), yet Brazil is getting more and more condominium buildings. Even rural areas are getting significantly denser due to a significant phenomenon of urban exodus from capital cities to small farmsteads in smaller towns that started during the COVID-19 pandemics, something that ends up fomenting urbanization and verticalization of those towns.
Also, “boonies” countries like Brazil are getting increasingly reliant on state-of-the-art tech. So I bet there are routers capable of the same USian Xfinity thing in Brazil. As a sidenote, I already saw EVs in small rural cities I visited.
There are still plenty of real estate where there’s little to no neighborhood, but it’s getting increasingly expensive unfortunately, so people end up going where their pockets can afford, and it’s often places where there are more people.
As far as I’m aware, the same verticalization, real estate inflation and influx of high tech are happening in other rural countries as well.
This is why you run your AP’s with openwrt.
Well, I’m glad they have figured out how to block WiFi signals from leaving your house and detecting your neighbours if you live in an apartment or terrace…
This is another Pandora’s box moment I think. I kinda was enjoying walls still being somewhat effective privacy guards
I think there is actually some anti-wifi paint. Though I am pretty sure it would only work well if you also paint the floor and ceiling.
You’re thinking to small. You must get several extremely powerful emitters and simply jam up the wavelengths that wifi operates at for the entire block. Ideally you have them emit in a way that anyone trying to track your movement and position with it instead just get a dancing 3d model of some character.
Concealment isn’t enough, you must asset electromagnetic dominance over your neighborhood.
You also need a huge, rotating glas platter under the block, a lamp, a fan and a timer.
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
just use wire mesh wallpaper
like, leaded paint?
Graphite
Like this
I’ve been seeing research on this for a few years now, crazy it’s come this far. You can track the movement of people in a home pretty accurately using WiFi like a radar
Yep. It’s also possible to fingerprint people’s body signatures and reconstruct poses.
mfs made that forbidden tech from The Dark Knight real 😭
Add this to recreating sound from video of vibrations from objects like plants and potato chip bags
https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804
i proof-read a dissertation on that very subject 10 years ago. it was using Bluetooth Low-Energy but the principle was the same. works through walls as well.
Bluetooth is often used when tracking movement and wait times through queue lines in airports.
how much of this is because they got phones in they pockets
Not at all in this case since it works by watching how the signals bounce around in a space. I believe any large object could be tracked by this. You could then use the phone in their pocket to identify the large object
Particle man, particle man. Clocking your ass like only wifi waves can.
is it illegal? it’s not important. particle man.
Fucking prophetic. FYI it’s impossible to feel depressed while listening to Birdhouse in your Soul.
Big TMBG fan here, a friend of a friend runs a pretty cool TMBG blog if you’re interested https://www.kissmesonofblog.com/
Well I’ll be damned. The internet is not dead. Now we just need like an indexing service that helps us search and find all these amazing sites.
It is not perfect by any means, but I have found that https://search.marginalia.nu/ is quite good at finding real people. there are also other useful things for this purpose on marginalia, such as the website explorer and a utility for finding websites similar to the one you put in..
At the least, add it to the Wayback Machine / Internet Archive and then throw them a dollar or a hundred, whatever you can. Not only do we need (new) indexing that isn’t AI, but we need to make sure the best parts of the Internet don’t disappear
i didn’t know I was considered schizophrenic for being aware of how technology is a bus for surveillance
Non techie people are simply still below the “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” point, so that explains why imo. To them you are someone complaining about evil wizard conspiracies.
What are you on about? This is techies not getting that the tech they are researching is dystopian and dangerous.
The problem with paranoid-crazies is that sometimes there’s truth and sometimes its wild.
With how wild the world is its impossible to tell what’s what.
Recent research paper that I assume this is based off of: https://arxiv.org/html/2507.12869v1
By leveraging non-visual biometric features embedded in Wi-Fi CSI, this study offers a privacy-preserving and robust approach for Wi-Fi-based Re-ID, and it lays the foundation for future work in wireless biometric sensing.
how the fuck would this make it privacy preserving?? who are these lieing to, themselves, policymakers, or the general public?
D all of the above. Probably comes from a narrow conceptualization of privacy that ends at “do you know what my privates look like”, maybe stretching to “can you listen to me orgasm”. It wasn’t specifically the intent of the piece, but I remember when Last Week Tonight did a bit about data collection exposed by Snowden and demonstrated that Joe Public doesn’t conceptualize the loss of privacy well until it is placed in the context of “private parts”/peeping tom behavior, at least in the US context
Straight evil.
And even dumber to boot!
Okay, well I needed an excuse to hire an electrician and rewire sound outlets, but if they can install Ethernet ports and I don’t have to deal with anything like this shit I’ll be happier.
It’s not just your wifi, it’s any wifi. Best start building a Faraday cage.
Also, you can prevent your wifi from being used this way against you, get an open-source router
iwlwifi fan vs ath9k enjoyer
jammer is better
Just get some water-filled mannequins and motorize them so they randomly stumble around your house at all times.
