Comment by tagoregrtst
4 years ago
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.
Funny, when I first signed up it was a reference to a joke that a pizza with radius z and thickness a, its volume is pizza. It's only since then that I've read Snow Crash (a book I do think about quite often..) maybe I should retcon my etymology lol
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.
Wi-Fi Sensing works with 2.4/5/6 GHz which pass through walls, it is not specific to 60Ghz.
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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.