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I thought devices would start remembering the base station MAC addresses to avoid hijacking The use of multiple APs with the same SSID is a feature, not a bug. It enables roaming between them.
Creating rogue APs is criminal-adjacent, unethical behavior because it denies and interferes with a network. It could even be criminalized in some jurisdictions.
I wonder how cheap and low power we could make tracking beacons if we didn't actually have to send any data and could accept some privacy risk. Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, or even just a simple presence signal. You'd put it on everything you own that's portable and easy to lose. When you want to find it you just search for signals. Maybe it could have an NFC silencing feature. Pe…
> Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, Well, then you could only ever track 255 different tags :) AirTags are already pretty minimal. Their battery lasts about a year, and I imagine an open source equivalent should be possible to build for under $5. This is purely guesstimated based on the fact that I have a couple of Bluetooth LE thermometer/hygrometers that cost me about $3 a piece that…
You'd have to do some guesswork though to figure out what's going on but it would be better than nothing, and you might be able to get the size down below what CR2032 allows.
This reminds me of the kind of hack I came up with, almost 20 years back. I used to work in Bangalore, and now and then, we would have a power outage in the evening that lasts for a few hours. I was single and used to live alone. I did not want to go home from the office and find myself without power. So how do I find out there is power at home? During those days, there were no IOT devices so checking them is that's…
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Not to nitpick but I think you mean trilaterate ;)
If we're being nitpicky it was probably neither – multilateration requires taking multiple measurements, drawing circles/lines of equal signal strength (or timing advance) and then intersecting these. If you just want to home in on a transmitter, there's a much simpler algorithm: Try walking into various directions and keep heading into the one that makes the signal strength nunber go up :) Not sure if there's a name…
Ha, last winter I lost my phone while snowboarding in the last 300-500m before mountain base. I noticed because I was listening to music with my airpods when I got to the bottom the music had gone silent. Thankfully I had my Apple watch with me, so I immediately got off the board and start running uphill while incessantly spamming the "ping my phone" button. At some point I saw in the watch screen it briefly connecte…
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Creating rogue APs is criminal-adjacent, unethical behavior because it denies and interferes with a network. It could even be criminalized in some jurisdictions.
Tell that to Xfinity.
The were the only ISP in a certain suburban wooded area. During planned power outages they would go out after ~16 hours because they failed to engineer survivability (choice of electrical circuits and backup power) as the cell phone networks, municipal water, and other critical services did.
I remembered my old home's wifi SSID and password, so created a hotspot on my phone with the same SSID and password, and the Fire-stick got connected. All went good after that.
Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear?
Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife looked at Google Earth, identified the likely turnout and high-tailed it. She found it about five minutes after stopping at that turnout.
There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped. It amazed me that we got a little piece of our property back through operation of planetary-scale infrastructure.