Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 109 posts

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#81

Post by akomtu »

e40 wrote: post #50
fabian2k wrote: post #22

Well, maybe dystopian SciFi turns out to be not as much fiction as we had hoped ;-). Ubiquitous surveillance together with artificial intelligence are probably one of the most powerful tools for authoritarian regimes you can imagine. They already have the physical power to hurt their opponents, now they also know exactly where they need to apply this power to keep themselves at the helm and quash any resistance befor…

Not only that, more fuel for the "microchips in vaccines"... ugh.

You don't need microchips. Just some metallic dust that dissolves into poison when radiated with proper frequency. That's cheap and enough for crowd control. Just trying to be pragmatic.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#82

Post by zokier »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #53
SavantIdiot wrote: post #24

These devices don't even have space for an antenna (limited by physical size). The power required by the sensors is dwarfed by RF transmit. The current challenges of powering a radio device with an MPU at this size are far too great for this to be useful. Unless there is a breakthrough in radio physics, drones need to be a certain size that is much larger than this. Unless they plan to release a billion of these, swe…

Doesn't that ring-like structure in the center look like an antenna? I suppose it could just be traces between the 'lobes' of the circuit on each wing. That said, it does seem like a tall order to pack in useful sensors and some way to transmit into tiny particles like these.

The ring is a NFC coil.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#83

Post by isoprophlex »

zokier wrote: post #79

Before jumping to conclusions, note that the microcontroller equipped flyer is reported to be about 5cm in diameter. Not exactly size of sand grain. From the article: > Mechanical simulation results and photograph of a 3D IoT macroflier with a circuit to measure fine dust pollution through the light dosimetry method. The weight of the IoT flier is 19.7mg (d≈5cm), with payload 198mg (Supplementary Fig.23

Amazing! Your comment renders a couple of  train emoji on my device!

Edit: screenshot https://ibb.co/sKw7tqt

I thought posting emoji wasnt possible on hn?! This one seems acceptable: 

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#84

Post by zokier »

isoprophlex wrote: post #83
zokier wrote: post #79

Before jumping to conclusions, note that the microcontroller equipped flyer is reported to be about 5cm in diameter. Not exactly size of sand grain. From the article: > Mechanical simulation results and photograph of a 3D IoT macroflier with a circuit to measure fine dust pollution through the light dosimetry method. The weight of the IoT flier is 19.7mg (d≈5cm), with payload 198mg (Supplementary Fig.23

Amazing! Your comment renders a couple of  train emoji on my device! Edit: screenshot https://ibb.co/sKw7tqt I thought posting emoji wasnt possible on hn?! This one seems acceptable: 

Fun. Apparently HN does not filter private area unicode, and nature.com reader for some reason includes those in copypaste...

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#85

Post by zokier »

zokier wrote: post #79

Before jumping to conclusions, note that the microcontroller equipped flyer is reported to be about 5cm in diameter. Not exactly size of sand grain. From the article: > Mechanical simulation results and photograph of a 3D IoT macroflier with a circuit to measure fine dust pollution through the light dosimetry method. The weight of the IoT flier is 19.7mg (d≈5cm), with payload 198mg (Supplementary Fig.23

Looking at the supplementary material, the "IoT macroflier" is pretty close to https://www.ti.com/tool/TIDM-RF430-TEMPSENSE with some wings stuck to it.. The scale is pretty similar too, that patch is about 35mm maybe. The sensor is different (photodiode vs temperature) but that doesn't really change the overall design much.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#86

Post by titzer »

> The scientists say they could potentially be used to monitor for contamination, surveil populations or even track diseases.

The complete lack of awareness in this whole endeavor is absolutely gobsmacking. They want to manufacture these things by the billions and then throw them into the wind with no plan to collect them and dispose of them afterwards (because that'd basically be impossible)? Uh, these things aren't monitoring for contamination, they are contamination.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#87

Post by isoprophlex »

zokier wrote: post #84
isoprophlex wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing! Your comment renders a couple of  train emoji on my device! Edit: screenshot https://ibb.co/sKw7tqt I thought posting emoji wasnt possible on hn?! This one seems acceptable: 

Fun. Apparently HN does not filter private area unicode, and nature.com reader for some reason includes those in copypaste...

If I search for that train in the emoji keyboard on my phone and post that, it doesn't stick... weird.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#89

Post by zokier »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #24

These devices don't even have space for an antenna (limited by physical size). The power required by the sensors is dwarfed by RF transmit. The current challenges of powering a radio device with an MPU at this size are far too great for this to be useful. Unless there is a breakthrough in radio physics, drones need to be a certain size that is much larger than this. Unless they plan to release a billion of these, swe…

The whole article is massively misleading. The team used same basic design at three different scales: micro, meso, and macro (their terminology). They are 0.4mm, 2mm, 40mm in diameter respectively. The "IoT flier" used the macro scale design; in 40mm you definitely can already fit all sorts of antenna, although power is still an issue. All the other, smaller fliers did not have any microchips in them.

So the title "Flying microchips size of sand grain" is just plain wrong here :(

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#90

Post by monocasa »

dragontamer wrote: post #80
mike_d wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are having difficulty drawing a distinction in your mind between the journalist who did the reporting on the story and the art department that had to come up with something that conveys "small chip" to an average reader without having actual photos. Most stories about COVID include inaccurate artistic renditions of the virus, but that does not discredit the reporting.

There's a big difference between a physical hardware attack (that is fully unspecified and fully FUD), and an actual threat to IT departments (ex: insecure BMC that needs to be isolated into its own VLAN). The minute you start thinking about "how do I protect my company's computers from this attack?" is the minute the Bloomberg article falls apart. Asking for further details just resulted in Bloomberg clamming up and…

Right, so a small chip sitting on the SPI bus for the flash would fit all of what you said and give attackers another capability: persistency in the face of replacing the flash itself. And yes, it'd probably be something small, like rewriting one of the keys stored in flash.

And BMC networks are extremely high value targets. Tons of exploits from running ancient code, and DMA access to the the rest of the system, often without even an IOMMU in the way.

Post reply on HN