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

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

#91

Post by titzer »

farisjarrah wrote: post #69
noindiecred wrote: post #7

We will monitor pollution by (checks notes) dispersing a huge swarm of tiny robots, themselves made of heavy metals, that are infeasibly difficult to recover or recycle.

There is a video that demonstrates and explains the nano bots in the article and near the end of the video they stated that the bots are made out of biodegradable materials that will degrade with time/rain

Everything degrades over a long enough timescale, even plastics and metals. The question is what damage they do to ecosystems on their long cycle to be atomized and recycled.

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

#92

Post by dragontamer »

monocasa wrote: post #90
dragontamer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, oft…

The Bloomberg article doesn't talk about BMCs however. That's __me__ talking about BMCs.

I don't need the Bloomberg article distracting the discussion. Its clear that the Bloomberg article was just fully and completely useless. It contributed no useful, technical details to the discussion.

We're sitting here arguing about how Bloomberg might have written the article better. At some point, we just gotta realize that Bloomberg wasn't helpful at the discussion at all.

Which is fine: Bloomberg is primarily a trading / commodities / financial newspaper. To expect expertise in technical issues (better than typical Hacker News discussion) is probably expecting too much from that group of journalists. But lets not pretend that the article under discussion was useful to any of us here.

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

#93

Post by twofornone »

rthomas6 wrote: post #30
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…

Or just, you know, use a high frequency. There are tiny antennas. You can just power it via induction (like RFID) and you're set. It still couldn't transmit super far but I bet it would work.

The downside to high frequencies is that they generally experience much more severe attenuation, which limits their range in atmosphere. Now, if you could get these flying microchips to simply reflect (with encoded data) a high power input signal from a base station, you might be onto something...

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

#94

Post by monocasa »

dragontamer wrote: post #92
monocasa wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, oft…

The Bloomberg article doesn't talk about BMCs however. That's __me__ talking about BMCs. I don't need the Bloomberg article distracting the discussion. Its clear that the Bloomberg article was just fully and completely useless. It contributed no useful, technical details to the discussion. We're sitting here arguing about how Bloomberg might have written the article better. At some point, we just gotta realize that B…

> The Bloomberg article doesn't talk about BMCs however. That's __me__ talking about BMCs.

You are not the only one talking about BMCs. The entire discussion has centered on that since the beginning. I'm not sure how you thought that you invented that line of discussion.

> We're sitting here arguing about how Bloomberg might have written the article better. At some point, we just gotta realize that Bloomberg wasn't helpful at the discussion at all.

> Which is fine: Bloomberg is primarily a trading / commodities / financial newspaper. To expect expertise in technical issues (better than typical Hacker News discussion) is probably expecting too much from that group of journalists. But lets not pretend that the article under discussion was useful to any of us here.

People coming forward about a successful foreign state sponsored attack on AWS and Apple server infra is a pretty big story for HN, even if it doesn't have all the details you'd like.

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

#95

Post by dragontamer »

monocasa wrote: post #94
dragontamer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bloomberg article doesn't talk about BMCs however. That's __me__ talking about BMCs. I don't need the Bloomberg article distracting the discussion. Its clear that the Bloomberg article was just fully and completely useless. It contributed no useful, technical details to the discussion. We're sitting here arguing about how Bloomberg might have written the article better. At some point, we just gotta realize that B…

> The Bloomberg article doesn't talk about BMCs however. That's __me__ talking about BMCs. You are not the only one talking about BMCs. The entire discussion has centered on that since the beginning. I'm not sure how you thought that you invented that line of discussion. > We're sitting here arguing about how Bloomberg might have written the article better. At some point, we just gotta realize that Bloomberg wasn't h…

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/

Bloomberg's followup article (and probably the original article) doesn't seem to discuss BMCs at all.

I'm not saying that I invented the line of argument. I'm saying that Hacker News, the community, brought up BMCs. Its not a talking point of the Bloomberg article at all.

The fact remains: we're already in a fully tangential point compared to Bloomberg's "facts" (of which there are very few. Its largely just allegations and FUD).

--------

The most frustrating thing is that Bloomberg very well could be correct. But the articles they wrote are absolute crap on this subject.

> People coming forward about a successful foreign state sponsored attack on AWS and Apple server infra is a pretty big story for HN, even if it doesn't have all the details you'd like.

Without the details of how it happened or the mechanism, then it doesn't matter.

We exist in a zero-day world: there are attacks I will never understand in my lifetime, happening today. Welcome to modern computer security.

What's important is understanding as many of these attacks as possible, so that we can build the proper security mechanisms and policies to defend ourselves correctly. Without an action plan, the news is basically null and void. It doesn't matter if China hacks us per se, it could be Russia or Iran tomorrow. There's always state actors trying to do things.

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

#96

Post by monocasa »

tonmoy wrote: post #45
noindiecred wrote: post #7

We will monitor pollution by (checks notes) dispersing a huge swarm of tiny robots, themselves made of heavy metals, that are infeasibly difficult to recover or recycle.

Neither the researchers nor the media outlet said anything about pollution

FTA

> It's neither a bird nor a plane, but a winged microchip as small as a grain of sand that can be carried by the wind as it monitors such things as pollution levels or the spread of airborne diseases.

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

#97

Post by EarthLaunch »

farisjarrah wrote: post #69
noindiecred wrote: post #7

We will monitor pollution by (checks notes) dispersing a huge swarm of tiny robots, themselves made of heavy metals, that are infeasibly difficult to recover or recycle.

There is a video that demonstrates and explains the nano bots in the article and near the end of the video they stated that the bots are made out of biodegradable materials that will degrade with time/rain

No, it says "Some of the microfliers are built" with such a material.

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

#98

Post by ChrisLomont »

titzer wrote: post #86

> 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…

>The complete lack of awareness in this whole endeavor

How do you know what awareness these groups have? Even this tiny article demonstrated that they already make bio-degradable versions. The main person mentioned, John Rogers, has an ungodly number of publications and patents, including lots on biodegradability and related issues.

Or did you simply assume?

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

#99

Post by titzer »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #98
titzer wrote: post #86

> 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…

>The complete lack of awareness in this whole endeavor How do you know what awareness these groups have? Even this tiny article demonstrated that they already make bio-degradable versions. The main person mentioned, John Rogers, has an ungodly number of publications and patents, including lots on biodegradability and related issues. Or did you simply assume?

>> The complete lack of awareness in this whole endeavor

I'm sticking with my original assessment. Assuming you can just make a billion of anything and dump them into the environment is a totally different mindset than literally any conservationist philosophy[1]. I'm sure these things are biodegradable in the same sense that plastics are "recyclable". Microchips aren't made out of sawdust and sugar. Junk always has consequences.

[1] This philosophy motivates the "leave no trace" rule that hikers, climbers, conservationists, and nature lovers all follow. Don't throw anything into the ecosystem, not even "biodegradable" stuff like banana peels. Invasive parasites aside, just offering more foodstuff for anything doing the biodegrading disturbs the environment.

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

#100

Post by theshadowknows »

Wouldn’t it just be easier to dust food sources with tiny probes and then scavenge them from the sewers? That way they don’t need to fly and I’m sure you could build them in such a way that for specific foods no one would notice.
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