Comment by jagger27
4 years ago
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 backhaul between buildings. It's not just for spying on your cat.
I think it's important to remember that it's not magic, it's just radio waves. You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb. There are plenty of eyeballs, cameras, and lights all around you right now. Even worse, someone could be looking in your window with binoculars.
> It's not just for spying on your cat.
Can we stop downplaying privacy issues please?
Sure, can privacy advocates stop down playing what we lose because we value privacy though?
There needs to be a balance, location information will be very useful for a lot of things, but only if we have it fully implemented. I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me. (If I was at a big risk I'd have a button, but for the average young person the risk is non-zero but very small). I want my home automation stuff to figure out where they are and configure themselves. I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
I think we're all being a little maximalist here? I think it's fair to say this article's focus is on the tech, so it doesn't discuss the cool stuff (incredible VR experience, sci-fi like gesture apps) or the bad stuff (Google knows when you scratch your ass). I think it's reasonable to read an article that doesn't mention any usage restrictions, look at the track record of tech, and worry about the privacy implications.
The Verge includes a whole section on stuff you agree to when purchasing a new laptop when reviewing them. Maybe it's a good idea for us to start insisting on some level of privacy regulation on new tech. This is purely regulatory right, nothing preventing things like VR--just preventing FB from knowing everything you're doing while using their VR headset, and selling that information to others. Maybe that creates an economic constraint, but this seems like a choice consumers can make. For example Amazon sells 2 versions of every Kindle: ad supported and not.
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As a privacy nut I would be a lot more into this kind of tech if it didn't require connecting to the cloud.
> privacy advocates
Who on earth is actually not an advocate for privacy?
> I want things to sense when I fall and call for help for me.
There's no need to sacrifice privacy to achieve this. [0]
> I want my routers to suggest that I'd get better coverage by moving it.
This is really more an issue of proprietary software than a privacy concern, no?
> Yes there is privacy concerns and they need to be addressed, but don't lose the good with it.
Communications are by default expected to be private. Highly public and non-private communications are advertised as such since the use case is so specific and often times, nuanced. In almost all circumstances there is hardly any "good," at all without best-practices privacy protections included.
[0] https://mbientlab.com/store/
I'm fine for this as long as it is opt-IN
No, because your "balance" will land in the middle, which is to say that it will outright destroy a great deal of privacy.
Not trying to be provocative, but how is this any worse than existing cameras or motion sensors?
With cameras and motion sensors you more or less know how they'll be used and as a user you can choose to disable them (or at the very least block them if you can't disable them).
With this technology, it will be integrated into your router (and clients?), so turning those off will mean to turn off WiFi altogether. Added to that, I'll bet that most people wouldn't even begin to imagine that WiFi could be used for sensing people, and they'll continue using WiFi without being aware for the grave privacy implications.
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RF is far less hindered by stuff like walls.
Your next door neighbor’s wifi will know your every movement, and can probably image it too. End of privacy within closed doors.
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Do you have those at home?
Clearly you've not met my cat.
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 aluminum fibers embedded in. For those of us who don't want our sexy times recorded by our router.
EDIT: made wifi’s ability to see through walls explicit per _jal’s comment.
> drywall with aluminum fibers embedded
QuietRock has drywall that combines soundproofing with RF shielding (steel plate), but it's expensive and targeted at military use cases, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902926
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
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.
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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.
2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz have decent wall penetration, but 60GHz doesn't. It can bounce off walls to get around corners, so it doesn't necessarily need line of sight.
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> 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).
Along with plaster-and-lathe there was also plaster on a wire mesh. Old houses with these kind of plaster walls get terrible cell phone reception.
> You can "sense" with a lot more resolution if you use a camera and light bulb.
(Visible) Light has a frequency of around 400-790 THz, which explains why it has a inherently better resolution.
https://www.rtinsights.com/li-fi-a-new-wireless-alternative-...
> Li-Fi connections are broadcast over the air through a light-emitting diodes (LED) broadcaster and support rates up to 100Gbit/s ... Li-Fi can also serve to identify an object’s indoor position more accurately than Wi-Fi or GPS used today (less than 2cm and less than 3 degrees of orientation while it is providing real-time localization (less than 34ms). This accuracy is vital in multiple applications such as navigation In-Door Robots and Drones, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Gaming, among others ... it cannot go through walls, and thus a private local area network (LAN) can be created by lighting up a closed room ... Any organization that needs to keep information within the four walls, such as military bases and banks, can use the technology to keep data restricted to a single room.
There's potential for visible-light networking but the Li-Fi people in particular are complete garbage. They claim visible light travels faster than radio waves and say Li-Fi is a hundred times faster than wi-fi but their thousand dollar router can only do 100Mb/s. They also rip off the Wi-Fi Alliance logo.
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Yep!
So if I don’t want anyone taking a WiFi “photo” of me on the throne I should put up aluminum foil curtains?
Wear a tin foil hat. And take a photo of yourself anyways cause a guy on the throne with a tin foil hat on sounds hilarious
I think there is a subreddit for it.
Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrxWiU_v9Qs
Yes and no. So you have to have a cable again to every room (for the AP), because the wifi signal can't go thru walls?
I hope then you can dissable the lower frequencys, because now you have 5 or more APs in your appartement.
> What an absolutely ridiculously ignorant statement to make.
Why is that an ignorant statement? It's comparing to what one might consider the "gold standard" of spying, so it seems quite a relevant thing to consider if one is after an objective estimate of how much worse wifi sensing might be...
But do those cameras and lightbulbs come with a industry standard specification for occupancy sensing.
Occupancy sensing and other surveilence have no place in a wireless communications specification.
That isn't needed, anyone who cares to can figure that part out. Cameras are cheap enough to put them up and leave them, and you can figure occupancy in many ways. Breaking into your house to place hidden cameras would not be hard - I don't know anything about where you live or your house, but I can confidently say I could get in if I wanted to. (lock picks are not hard to get, and it only takes a few days of observation to figure out when you leave)