The reason the FCC is only allowing the sale of state approved routers in the US?
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.
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.
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.
Christoffer Nolan predicted this!
I clearly need watch more Batman.
Nothing new for infosec people…
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
“Oh my goodness, this is a nightmare” typed everyone into their government approved location recording devices that can show them cats and boobs.
wearing a smartwatch that constantly outputs an identifier.
It is easier to just give up and submit, I’ll grant you that.
Gimme cat boobs.
I am pretty sure you can find those on the MSG website!
Huh? No cats on mine , weird.
Sounds faulty
My meta-quest 3s is constantly scanning my home floor plan and I’m sure it’s getting shipped off to “Big Surveillance”.
Arguably that’s a bit difference because to do that you have to explicitly do it (room setup) and you view the result (visual preview with semi-transparent triangles over your place). You can also read the ToS and I believe in some case specify if you allow the information to be sent back to the Meta. I’m not saying it’s OK, only that it’s explicit and it’s part of the “normal” usage of the device.
I also know that someone once demonstrated that you can do this with just a phone camera and it’s gyo and get pretty good results. That was back in 2016 before VR was much of a thing.
I guess these days you could just do it with a camera and generate a Splat from it.
A VR headset is basically a phone with lenses, so yes. That’s why cardboard and free promotional gifts of lenses snapping on phones work.
My point though isn’t about the technical abilities but rather about the social expectations. If you buy a device that does something intrusive but you know that in order to deliver the main value it will do that, it’s OK. It’s part of the social contract. If somehow though a device is intrusive but it’s not expected, either because it was thought to be impossible to do or unrelated to it’s original purpose or both, then it’s a big problem, a breach of the social contract.
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.
So…back to wired?
You being wired doesn’t stop WiFi seeing you.
It will in my own home when there is no wifi.
I suspect it applies to 5G phone signals too (because they are in a similar frequency) so you need to live where there are no nearby 5G masts and all your visitors must use Faraday bags.
So it’s now impossible to prevent them from watching me in my own home without making massive sacrifices and costs?
Sure as well is awkward for a mobile phone.
Maybe short distance low power milimeterwave can work. It won’t penetrate through walls.
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 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…
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 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 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.
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.
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.
“This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later – for example by public authorities or companies.”
Later…
Inexpensive or older routers either don’t store history at all or keep it for a short time.
Newer models can store more information for more extended periods.
https://www.thetechwire.com/how-long-does-a-router-store-history/
We used to recommend people to run the newest stuff possible, but we came to a point that maybe it’s better for us to keep with older tech for a good while
Die shrinks effect long term durability. We passed that point around 10-14nm
Or go to more civilized countries for vacation to get not backdoored hardware.
Do you think every country has its own router hardware manufacturer and commodity chip manufacturer? 😂
The 2 giants that make 95% of consumer routers around the world and the few companies that design the chips for them are both in heavy surveillance states.
does not matter if the factory software just uploads the info because you wouldn’t know anyway
From what I’ve just read, the tech doesn’t seem ready to identify people yet. It can supposedly detect hand gestures, but facial recognition I seriously doubt. But that’s probably just a matter of improving the tech. See this article for more info.
From OPs linked article…
In tests involving 197 participants, the researchers said the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy. The recognition remained effective regardless of viewing angle or how the participants walked.
I can totally believe when it tracks a person it can tell when the same person walks by again later. But matching people with their actual identities would require a database of wifi scan data that simply doesn’t exist yet.
that’s a load bearing “yet”
Well in theory every tech possibility is a “yet”, but the way I read this it seems like a person or object’s interference pattern is particular to the local signal environment - not like a fingerprint a different system could recognize at the airport.
that’s a trivial problem to solve. combine this with a camera for facial recognition in a public space. then you’ve got wifi signature combined with the photo/video for facial recognition. then presumably you can use the WiFi signature anywhere else, even without the camera and be able to identify people.
I was wondering about that. The article didn’t say anything about being able to identify the same person walking past a different router. And I can’t imagine the study didn’t try. So I assume it doesn’t work.
That’s connection history. CSI motion detection software storing information it collects would be entirely independent of that. How much it saves and for how long would depend on the size of the router’s memory.
