- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
The reason the FCC is only allowing the sale of state approved routers in the US?
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“Oh my goodness, this is a nightmare” typed everyone into their government approved location recording devices that can show them cats and boobs.
Gimme cat boobs.
I am pretty sure you can find those on the MSG website!
wearing a smartwatch that constantly outputs an identifier.
It is easier to just give up and submit, I’ll grant you that.
Huh? No cats on mine , weird.
Sounds faulty
Ok now what router do I buy and what firmware do I flash to plug this into Home Assistant?
and how do you protect yourself against the neighbors devices, especially in a densely populated building
Faraday cage, it’s going to be a hassle to wiremesh your entire apartment, and you can forget using a mobile phone inside of it, but there are no outside signals getting in that way.
If I was a capitalist, knowing I am few and and my power only comes from the resources I own, resources stolen from the masses. I would use my stolen wealth to safe guard my own class interests against the masses. Hence we see surveillance capitalism.
From what I’ve read this is built into the required wifi router for Xfinity. I discovered this when I signed up for Xfinity fiber, had the fiber installed and setup and then cancelled it the same day, because of this and not being able to buy and run my own hardware, and needing to install an app on my phone to manage the router, and apparently not being able to choose my DNS. They required that I rent their hardware for an additional $15/mo. Oh well, at least fiber is in the house now, if anyone wants it in the future. I sure won’t be paying them to spy on me.
Fuck Comcast, still.
app to manage router
This shit was a pain in the ass and now learning about this makes me feel even more pissed off as a customer
Damn. Put a faraday cage around the router and plug in your own router to a LAN port.
Wrap it in aluminum foil.
Whilst this sounds a lot like a foil hat joke, that’s literally the easiest way to wrap something in a conductive material cage (i.e. a faraday cage).
If you don’t want it to look ridiculous, put it inside a box whose inside has been lined with aluminum foil.
Mind you, personally I too would just cancel that shit, but the option is there to carry on using it whilst blocking its radio emissions.
FWIW I was able to use my own router when I set up with Xfinity recently
This was fiber, if that makes a difference. I asked the install guy, he called his boss, because no one had asked him that before. He told me “no, it’s not allowed”. Also, I tried plugging the patch cable directly into my own wifi router and nothing.
Also, I tried plugging the patch cable directly into my own wifi router and nothing.
The router would need to be explicitly configured to connect to your account on the network, which would require certain information provided by the ISP, which it sounds like they weren’t going to provide.
All inferred from the response I got from the tech.
That’s because Xfinity offers motion sensing as a feature, which requires this tech in the router. Presumably it’s configurable and costs extra to turn on.
It’s a “costs extra feature” for the customer. But, they have access to it regardless of whether it’s “turned on”. It’s never turned off for them. And, if that puts me in tin-foil hat territory, so be it.
Comcast is why I have starlink
How is this better???
Product idea: clothing with jaged edges and radio absorbing plates.
Stealth Bomber Jacket.
WiFi jamming underpants.
Don’t give Musk the idea of the CyberShirt.
Necessary accessory called cyberBra for that real car hood look
Funnily enough, indoors, this would probably make you more visible as the only area with no reflections. Stealth works outdoors because the sky does not have a radar return.
My understanding is that this catches disruptions between devices and router. I don’t think this would work. I would say you should instead sell a “bracelet” with “ancient Himalayan Salt” embedded into the silicone to absorb and cancel the tracking. It would probably sell a ton! Obviously wouldn’t work but $!
Well you can’t stop it from knowing something is there. But you should be able to confuse it’s identification of a specific person.
Yeah probably but if you’re going to this much trouble to spy, you’re may as well put gait analysis on it.
I don’t know if it can actually see your gait. Might be that your legs are technically invisible to it. It’s just looking at how you uniquely disturb wifi signals. It maybe that your torso does most of that or something.
You can buy faraday bag cloth. It’s expensive.
Or just DIY using tinfoil
IIRC, when Meta bought out iRobot, it slipped out that they were using Roombas to collect the square footage and entire layout of your house to add to your data sets. So this doesn’t seem surprising at all. Good thing I configure my own router and firewall.
Very interesting concept. I was curious about how in the hell this could be done. This article explains the general method.
When an inert object like a person moves around between the router and stationary connected devices like computers and printers, it interferes with the signal. The pattern of interference plus math can be used to plot the movement of the object - and even measure subtle changes like hand gestures. Home security software from companies like Xfinity can already use this tech to send you an alert when something is moving around in your house, without needing additional hardware. Imagine an informercial where a guy holds up a handful of “clumsy motion sensors” with wires sticking out of them, and “confusing instructions”. Not if you just let your router do it!
As far as being a new and sinister means of surveillance, evil companies could already theoretically tap into anybody’s motion sensors or security cams. The difference with WiFi tracking is that you wouldn’t necessarily know it’s there.
That’s using CSI though. The article said the researches specifically did not utilize CSI.
But regarding CSI: I evaluated that as a small part of my Master’s thesis and it worked pretty OK for motion detection but not for classifying other activities, at least not on a SISO link. For more complex stuff you would need both a MIMO access point (router) and device (e.g. phone). Also, you need to constantly transmit messages to get up-to-date CSI, which is not great for power consumption as well as cluttering the communication channel. There are some other constraints, especially regarding noise. E.g. I managed to completely destroy the CSI spectrogram by turning on a microwave oven. There is 802.11bf in development, which is supposed to standardize this, because currently using CSI is pretty much a “hack”, as it is not intended for sensing. Once this is widely adopted, I would start being worried, but not right now.
This is from my thesis:
That is extremely cool, thank you.
It’s not too different from what I can tell. They seem to just exploit the fact that beamforming information (BFI) is transmitted back to the access point. BFI is ultimately not so different from CSI. What they exploit is that they can just listen in and intercept the BSI without access to the AP.
Interesting. I didn’t actually read into BFI details, thank you
The need for a constant signal to scan movement is a good point. Makes sense that nearby wifi devices can’t just be sitting there, they have to be actively transmitting to the router or there’s no signal for the target to interfere with. I must have gotten CSI and wifi scanning confused. Tbh I’m not even sure why CSI is in the article except for history, but I found the principle fascinating. In your research did you turn the intererence into anything like a heat map of a person standing in the room, or is it more of a signal fingerprint, like chromatography or spectrography?
My topic was fall detection (as in elderly people falling) specifically without using cameras or wearables. The idea was to take the CSI (basically what you see in the image) and just stuff it into some machine learning model to get a prediction as to whether someone fell in a given time frame, so I was trying to classify the signature of the falling “activity”. From my literature survey, this has been done successfully with CSI. But as with a lot of research, it typically lacked practicality. Much of my work was implementing the firmware, data recording, processing, and so on. I also had to record a ton of falls (ouch) and label them. I ended up throwing away the CSI approach though, because of the noise reasons I mentioned. That was simply a deal breaker. I went with FMCW radar instead (and it worked pretty good).
Fascinating project! Definitely sounds like at best it might detect that somebody probably fell down, but not that Old Man Jenkins is having a bowl of Lucky Charms instead of Raisin Bran and his blood pressure is a little high - which seems to be the conclusion people are jumping to here.
It definitely depends on the circumstances. With 60 GHz radar e.g. you get quite a good distance resolution and can detect e.g. breathing rate really well (from the torso movement during breathing) and things like how many people are in a room, etc. But its always very dependent on the environment, your settings, subjects, noise, whatever. That’s why I said its typically not practical. By using dedicated devices perhaps, and most of these kinds of news are about people who use dedicated devices, but that’s like putting a camera in your home. When you have to abuse an existing communication channel, probably not so realistic.
Wouldn’t a microwave causing significant interference also be a sign of a very faulty, potentially unsafe microwave? If it’s bathing your environment with microwaves, you’re cooking to some degree. I know a 2.4 GHz router is using microwaves too, but restricted to much lower power. I’d be very suspicious of an oven that’s leaking enough to interfere with my signals since you don’t know how strong the leaking microwaves are and they may in fact be harmful. I imagine someone standing in front of their microwave watching it operate, cooking their eyeballs as they wait.
to be fair, maybe. To pass FCC/CE regulation regarding EMC, it has to adhere to strict limits at 2.4 GHz (but I could also imagine for microwave ovens specifically that the allowed emissions are higher than for other devices, because 2.4 GHz is just the band it operates in. But idk, I didnt read the standard for those). But it does not mean that it may not radiate anything in that band.
Anyways, my observation was that it did interfere and the microwave was definitely closed. But also it was not 10m distance to the microwave, more like 2m, so relatively close. WiFi receivers are quite sensitive to be able to work with low received powers. So just a little emission is sufficient to interfere. You are probably not disturbing the communication itself, because OFDM is quite robust, but it certainly destroyed my use case (which operated on the whole CSI).
And there is definitely some stuff leaking, e.g. through radiated emissions on the wiring (the power line). But it is certainly not cooking anything. That’s also what the regulation makes sure of.
When an inert object like a person
Say waaaa?
inert meaning not a wifi device.
That’s cool and all but if true, why use an animated photo instead of a real life example?
I’m not sure what you think an “example” would look like. It’s not taking a photo of you, it’s measuring what’s distinctive about the way you personally mess up radio signals and how it differs from how other people mess them up. Internally it’s just a ton of numbers.
I assume they want to take those numbers and make a visual representation like a radar return or ultrasound image. Probably wouldn’t really look like anything but still it’d be pretty sick to impress your friends by looking at your 2nd screen filled with green matrix vertical scrolling shit and be like: “the cat wants out.”
a real life example? you mean like a photo of a person next to a router?
Pretty sure this is old news? It’s basically sonar, which The Dark Knight predicted in the film.
Edit: a word
Right? Im pretty sure this is a few years stale and already incorporated in some isps routers
https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion
https://www.originwirelessai.com/isps-can-do-more-with-wifi-sensing/
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sensing-tracking-movements/
The statement from the article was the unlike previously, they used current consumer equipment, and could uniquely identify a specific person. I believe previous versions could just identify that there was “A” person. I don’t know that all that is true, but it is what the article says, and my vague memories line up.
The first time I heard about this was in 2013 and, in 2019, I had a local government management class where wifi sensing in busy downtown areas and stadiums was discussed as a plus side to municipal wifi installations. In the latter case it was described as being available not too far in the future.
Sensing is officially going to be part of 6G, might not be deployed everywhere, but it’s going to be in the standard.
Sounds like the higher frequency 6G would have better resolution (potentially sub mm?) than Wifi 7’s ~5cm. Article about 6G ISAC.
Like a submarine.
The question with mandating US made routers may be either to protect citizens from foreign attacks - or to make sure every US router is a router with a government-approved backdoor.
On which option would you bet?
Why not both?
Because they ignored the first issue for long enough, so it is more or less a non-issue for the US government.
If you read the article ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3719027.3765062 ) they are testing this in an EXTREMELY controlled enviroment and directed subjects… I have my doubts that this could provide any insight on whether this is even feaseble for public surveillance, let alone effective…
I can tell you as someone who read the papers on very early deepfakes and AI video generation with amazement followed by dread, this is going to be feasible on a large scale in a short period of time. Researchers do stuff on an absolute shoestring budget usually, it’s incomparable to what large companies and governments have at their disposal. There are already consumer products that were able to become fairly precise motion sensors with just a firmware update. Next gen devices will be built with motion fingerprinting in mind, I can almost guarantee it.
Walk without rhythm and we won’t attract the
wormbig brother.I see you are also a member of the ministry. https://youtu.be/iV2ViNJFZC8
It gets more accurate with more access points, too. So corporate and education settings will be the easy places for this to get implemented.
those places would just use surveillance cameras
the devices can still record more accurate motion information for sale
Right. Privacy isn’t a concern in those spaces. Surveillance is typical.
It’s also only possible because the information they used (BFI) is unencrypted.
I would expect them having access to that anyway when they control the device, or when they are the manufacturer
If that data were encrypted it would at least reduce the number of people that has access to it.
It’s a start. It may take time to make it work for “everyday” use, but if it’s possible now, it can be done better in the future.
This technology has been publicly demonstrated about 3 years ago, but I imagine it has been done years and years back. It’s really nothing mind blowing, just the way waves work, workaround believe it or not is the tin foil your walls.
There is now a free home assistant plugin to implement it at home lol. Crazy shit. Imagine what’s possible with classified tech.
I’ve seen YouTube videos of people able to record the image of the the vibration of a potato chip bag through a window to recreate the audio from the room.
That’s pretty neat
Mass data mixed with machine learning pattern identification means what already exists will lead to broken as fuck capabilities for those who own everyone. Ie. Not us.
That’s it, I’m gonna start violently beating my meat at my router if this is what they’re going for.
Assert dominance
You get it.
and this is why you should flood your home with as many APs as possible. I have 17 APs running in my 1000sqft house.
can’t find shit if it’s too noisy.
What’s an AP?
Not much, what’s an AP with you?
Aaaaaaaaaaaay…
(P)
access point
They’re not all sending at the same time. Worst case they just block themselves and each other with their backoff logic and then none of them sends anything at all.
are you sure it works that way?
not sure, but I just keep buying them and installing them. at this point it’s more of a hobby than anything.
I won’t be satisfied until I feel like I’m living in a microwave.
Buy 17 magnetrons instead?
that won’t be enough for every room in my home.
I want even heating without any cold spots.
