Comment by giantg2
4 years ago
I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. It seems this, like a lot of new tech these days, will end up offering little benefit while providing new malicious capabilities.
4 years ago
I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old. It seems this, like a lot of new tech these days, will end up offering little benefit while providing new malicious capabilities.
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 devices + custom firmware, i.e. any motivated attacker can already see through the walls of homes and businesses. The Wi-Fi 7 Sensing draft standard is proposing to make this available to everyone.
Perhaps we need a celebrity to help demo SENS transparency of their home walls, to help consumers and regulators understand the implications. That could motivate research investment in privacy controls.
More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901979
> 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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This is a great example of why people don’t have privacy. Ethernet cables exist, and wholly forgo these problems. But, they are less convenient. Consumers complain a lot about privacy, but do little to really demand it. Of course manufacturers deserve much of the blame here for actually implementing these things, but it doesn’t seem as if consumers are trying to steer them in the right direction at all.
Yep. I have ethernet cables throughout the house and use it for most stuff. I still have a wireless router for the phones though.
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.
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It's been the same throughout history. Invent a tool...use it to kill.
I wouldn't be as negative.
Frequently we create the tool in order to kill with it.
After that we also use to tool to create.
We're equally capable of good and evil and yes, we are frequently good, too.
It's not negative, it's true.
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...also the other way: a lot of inventions were used in the civil world just after being designed and developed in the military one.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones ..."
There is a difference between consumer benefits and maybe industrial benefits. Maybe it might make communication between sorting bots more accurate and quicker.
Doubtful. Beam forming would be more beneficial.