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The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

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Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#181

Post by _jal »

tagoregrtst wrote: post #176
jagger27 wrote: post #40

I'm surprised that there's not a single comment here about 802.11ay which is also 60GHz. Each channel on that standard can do something like 40Gbps, which is nuts. From Wikipedia[0]: > The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s. Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless back…

I cant see through walls with a lightbulb. I can with wifi. This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection). Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al. Here’s a business idea - drywall with alumi…

To put a slightly finer point on it, I can't see through your walls with my lightbulb, but I probably can see through your walls with my router.

Your creepy neighbor in the apartment next door is getting a new toy.

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#182

Post by pizza »

tagoregrtst wrote: post #176
jagger27 wrote: post #40

I'm surprised that there's not a single comment here about 802.11ay which is also 60GHz. Each channel on that standard can do something like 40Gbps, which is nuts. From Wikipedia[0]: > The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s. Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless back…

I cant see through walls with a lightbulb. I can with wifi. This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection). Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al. Here’s a business idea - drywall with alumi…

Another idea in the opposite direction: somebody should build a $20 firewall/tappable ethernet cable with some kind of builtin eBPF support + a universe of community packages.

The community would then share privacy-enhancing I/O profiles for every kind of device. If years later e.g. my adversarial lightbulb pivots to brokering kompromat SIGINT, I want to filter that out, and I want not to be the first one to write a filter like that..

Does it change the internal state of the lightbulb’s logic? No.. but hopefully it would even be able to simulate the state loop of the lightbulb well enough to guess what to filter out.

Of course there may also come a time when somebody starts to sell $20, 60 ghz-spectrum-only-visible “human activity fakers” to disrupt the collection of such data. Maybe with a “Honey, I’m home!” package being the most popular, lol

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#183

Post by kadoban »

bb611 wrote: post #179
bluGill wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> During the interview the candidates heart rate increased during questions on their reasons for leaving the last position That discussion is illegal under current laws. (you cannot use a lie detector in interviews) Well at least in the US, check your local laws.

Authorities aren't restricted from using a lie detector in the US, just from using the results in court. They're frequently used to pressure suspects in criminal cases during questioning, knowing the results are inadmissable.

Gp seemed to be talking about job interviews. What cops can ask and what a potential employer can ask aren't the same.

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#184

Post by javajosh »

qwertox wrote: post #109
minetest2048 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing a Hackaday post that uses FFT/spectogram to infer IoT things such as boiling kettle without cameras. Is this related?

No, it's not related. I'm trying to get notified when my noodle water has started boiling, but even with an humidity sensor in the kitchen it's pretty hard to tell when it's about to boil, so that the heat can be lowered before it splashes around. And the FFT in the kitchen is somewhat broken so I can't use it, there may be a lot of noise in the mains or something like that. In any case I've planned to replace the se…

The evidence I use to determine when water is about to boil is my ears. I hear a staccato creaky sound that accelerates just before water boils, that is very distinct and easily picked up by microphone. (Curiously, I've never seriously asked what makes this sound, physically.) How do rice cookers do it?

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#185

Post by 1MachineElf »

pizza wrote: post #182
tagoregrtst wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant see through walls with a lightbulb. I can with wifi. This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection). Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al. Here’s a business idea - drywall with alumi…

Another idea in the opposite direction: somebody should build a $20 firewall/tappable ethernet cable with some kind of builtin eBPF support + a universe of community packages. The community would then share privacy-enhancing I/O profiles for every kind of device. If years later e.g. my adversarial lightbulb pivots to brokering kompromat SIGINT, I want to filter that out, and I want not to be the first one to write a…

When I read this comment and the username that wrote it, I can't help but wonder if it's a reference to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#186

Post by judge2020 »

transpute wrote: post #157
Ginden wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With this technology, it will be integrated into your router (and clients?), so turning those off will mean to turn off WiFi altogether. It's rather unreasonable to think that you won't be able to turn off band on router. Especially given fact that 60Ghz is heavily shielded by _doors_, so any usable router would require fallback 2.4/5/6 Ghz connectivity.

802.11bf Wi-Fi 7 Sensing works with all frequencies, 2.4 and up. Even if Neighbor 2 turns off their router, Neighbor 1 could passively use the radio waves from Neighbor 3's router to surveil reflections from Neighbor 2, including keyboard typing, heartrate/breathing, location and physical activity. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27123493

The problem with this neighbor-spying fear is that "complex math using data from radio waves to sense stuff" is already possible and readily available by anyone willing to study and put in the world of building it, wifi 7 isn't suddenly enabling that part of rf analysis or mathematics.

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#187

Post by judge2020 »

giantg2 wrote: post #168
ksec wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I see 802.1bf ( Sensing ), along with 802.11be ( WiFi 7 ) could be used together in setting up consumer mesh WiFi Network. Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers. Edit: Turns out there are other comments below mentioning this.

"Home Wireless Networking is still pretty much an unsolved problem for average consumers." What do you mean? Most consumers have a wireless router, and that works for their needs.

If you live in anything other than an apartment, your wifi connection drops considerably once a few walls and a floor are in the way. Mesh networks solve this by repeating the signal halfway to your hard-to-reach devices, although it must be done in an intelligent way if you want seamless band switching and its performance might be greatly improved with wifi 7's sensing capabilities.

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#188

Post by kingcharles »

zeepzeep wrote: post #110
jagger27 wrote: post #40

I'm surprised that there's not a single comment here about 802.11ay which is also 60GHz. Each channel on that standard can do something like 40Gbps, which is nuts. From Wikipedia[0]: > The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s. Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless back…

> It's not just for spying on your cat. Can we stop downplaying privacy issues please?

Clearly you've not met my cat.

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#189

Post by bigbillheck »

tagoregrtst wrote: post #176
jagger27 wrote: post #40

I'm surprised that there's not a single comment here about 802.11ay which is also 60GHz. Each channel on that standard can do something like 40Gbps, which is nuts. From Wikipedia[0]: > The link-rate per stream is 44 Gbit/s, with four streams this goes up to 176 Gbit/s. Yes, it can't penetrate walls, but is huge for point to point communication. Think VR headset bandwidth, file transfers between devices, wireless back…

I cant see through walls with a lightbulb. I can with wifi. This standard makes my wifi router into an internet connected, closed source blob, light bulb and camera that is impossible to obscure (without killing my internet connection). Sure, I can wire my whole house for ethernet. And, while I’m behind the drywall, I might as well rip off all the drywall put a layer of Al. Here’s a business idea - drywall with alumi…

> drywall with aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.

The ancients had a solution for this (brick walls).

Re: The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication (2021)

#190

Post by judge2020 »

transpute wrote: post #161
JohnWhigham wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very scary shit. We could soon have no privacy at all in our own homes because of other people's WiFi networks. If the output is strong enough, all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places.

> all you have to do is connect to/crack someone's WiFi and use it to get a layout of all their neighbor's places. It's much worse: neither crack nor connection is required. The technology is entirely passive, it only uses reflections from Wi-Fi radios, same as radar. No connection to the router is required, hence the acronym DFWS (Device-Free Wireless Sensing). To be clear, this can be done today with $20 ESP32 WiFi…

> The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.

As your sentence before this says, it already is available to everyone. The only thing wifi 7 opens up is someone with less technical know-how being able to flash openwrt and install some program that extracts and/or visualizes the sensing data, but $20 ESP32's isn't much of a cost to someone looking to use radio wave sensing maliciously right now.

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