Italy Quake Rescuers Ask Locals to Unlock their Wi-Fi | Hacker News Reader

Italy Quake Rescuers Ask Locals to Unlock their Wi-Fi

bbc.com

172 pointsyitchelle130 comments

It would make much more sense if the mobile phone operators offered free mobile data access.

It is messy to make changes to router settings to most users.

But then everybody would use that (like people living in tents now) and would probably overload the network. The landline internet connections have a higher capacity totally.

I can't talk about Italy but this does not hold true to deployments in Austria. In particular first responders would be able to get more reliable internet via LTE than local wifi. First of all because LTE can do per device QoS, secondly because LTE antennas have better backhaul connections than most homes would have access to.

ISPs here do not upgrade customers automatically unless they pay which means many users stay on very slow internet for a long time.

Or we cannot get better access. I'm in Melbourne suburbs and can only get shocking ADSL1.

I love NZ ;). I'm on 200/200mbit fibre and I heard a rumor my city is going to be come a giga-city soon. Bring on 1gbps internet at home!

I always wonder why the home needs such high bandwidth. What are using all that bandwidth for?

For me it's about being able to ignore the lack of QoS. My wife is streaming an HD movie, our 3 iDevices start downloading some new update that just came out, I'm on Skype and doing research, it's all completely seamless, everything blows ahead at full speed.

Oh I see, even if the link quality is crap. You have the high enough bandwidth to recover.

Also my bet is that the LTE network still doesn't have the capacity of the 3G network, that's why people are being migrated slowly

But still undersubscribed, that's why you get a better connection (beyond the tech advancements)

While in most big cities there's a good LTE coverage, in that area no major provider has an LTE network at all.

I don't know about Italy but in many places 3G has better speeds than landlines - in Australia, my parents live rurally and can choose between 3G, 56K, or satellite

> I can't talk about Italy

Then (most respectfully) don't :) That area in central Italy is mountainous, not particularly significant from an industrial perspective, and hence poorly covered by wireless data networks, whereas ADSL is pretty ubiquitous.

Austria is far more mountainous than Italy. But what doesn't add up is that only the bigger cities there have proper LTE coverage, the small towns only G3 or G2. But even G3 would be better than the WiFi on broken 2Mb copper cables in the earth.

But the point is that G3 will saturate and cannot be used at the same time as you talk, so any additional connection is welcome.

Yes, but my point was that with an earth quake (>6 richter) the copper earth lines will likely be more broken than slow G3 air lines.

Nope, not in Italy. Here with 3G you can barely load google on mobile (at least, that is my case). If I don't see an H+ on my phone I don't even bother to try going online.

But the whole point of this is to remove some load from the mobile network, which is probably overloaded.

Keep in mind that area isn't covered by LTE yet, and probably hasn't a robust mobile network like in the big cities.

As far as I understood there were serious issues with telcos.

The earthquake affected the infrastructure, and being a mountain area it's hard to get close enough to fix it.

There's a tradeoff between sending helicopters to save people vs repairing the telco infra.

I think shortwave (and a strong group of local hams ahead of time) is a possibly better approach

The hams in my area are routinely involved with disasters big and small. They've responded quickly in disasters with volunteer patrols and stations. They routinely help out at events like marathons, fairs, and more. When a fire took down a place's cell towers, they were there to facilitate communication. When the 911 call system went offline, they were around the city to help out (i.e., could place direct emergency calls for folks)

That'd be great for a subset of the reasons you might need actual data connectivity. Not sure you can download maps and whatnot over ham...

Ehhh, I'm gonna have to disagree on the HF bit. Ham modes haven't kept up with the times: there needs to be a good and flexible HF packet system in place to enable scale. PACTORIII is proprietary garbage and Winlink seems to be just for email? And neither is very widespread anyway.

Short range, "walkie-talkie" stuff is fine but when you move up to the regional level, it's going to be a super bottleneck. Unfortunately, the majority of hams seem to be content to just do contesting using SSB or CW. There needs to be a huge, directed push to innovate here.

VHF or UHF to your local internet-connected repeater tower would work fine. It doesn't need to be HF.

Towers can have battery backup, and even in a wide-scale disaster, chances are one of them would maintain an internet connection.

HAMs are great but imagine if everyone had a shortwave transmitter after a disaster - if 4G networks can't handle the traffic, amateur radio would be pure noise. Getting wifi and mobile data working means everyone has a shot at communicating

If you could funnel local traffic into more sparsely distributed HF packet-based transceivers, it might not be too bad. You wouldn't be relaying general Internet traffic, just disaster related info. Think 1990's web form for family contacts and medical status.

We haven't had the need to use local HAM's in our emergency response system. I wonder though, are they trained on the incident command system(ICS)?

In the US at least there is ARES/RACES, and many cities/areas have some kind of liaison, periodic net checkins or drills, lightweight training, etc., so that hams can work effectively with the local incident response.

>It is messy to make changes to router settings to most users.

Well, I'm sure for the sake of victims of a natural disaster, it might be prudent to wade through that mess if there's a chance it'll help. Who knows, the users might learn a thing or two.

I don't see why mobile phone operators couldn't offer free mobile data access in addition to this measure.

Not to mention not secure.

The rescuers in Italy are asking people to remain completely silent once in a while to try to communicate with trapped victims. I wondered if in a similar manner it would be technically possible to detect signal from phones that belong to trapped victims, if all not trapped people were asked to turn off their mobile phones.

Most of the phones have likely ran out of battery. Also, there is a big chance that there are phones without victims. Not a good way to find people.

I don't think that false positives disqualify such approach.

You can easily combine techniques. Send rescue dogs and handlers wherever phone signals are traced.

Having worked for companies trying to detect mobile phones this would be about as useful as guessing. Triangulating a signal (if you could even get one from under 2 tons of rubble) is not an easy task in the real world, especially one that would need to be accurate to within 1m or so.

That's probably what they are doing. These people are not dummies that need to be lectured by some hacker news guys.

It would be a waste of resources to rescue an ownerless phone.

Which is why you'd correlate with lists of known missing and known not-missing people before digging in.

Missing people won't lose their phone in a disaster?

It is a waste of resources for rescuers to sit doing nothing because they ignore leads.

False dichotomy. You can do other things besides chasing a very high false positive-rate indicator and sitting still doing nothing.

Use your imagination. No one is suggesting rescuers dig for ownerless phones. They would be just another signal used to determine where trapped people might be.

>Most of the phones have likely ran out of battery

I would suspect that a notable number of phones are still on. As long as you don't turn the screen on and don't use any battery-draining apps, modern smartphones can easily have a battery life of a week or longer (even outside airplane mode).

Using that big screen, the quad-core CPU and the high speed internet are the battery drains, all of those are mostly in low-power mode while the phone is just in your pocket.

If the issue is no cell coverage due to earthquake damage, and the victims do not enable airplane mode, those phones would likely die within a day searching for a signal; irregardless of the screen being off.

It's one of many ways they are probably trying to find people. Seems worth a shot to me.

Not if it's so massively inefficient that the number of false positives mean that you waste time chasing air.

Massively inefficient meaning that 100x phones are not paired with people? That seems unlikely.

If people were at home when the quake struck it doesn't seem unlikely to me that only 1 in 100 would be in the immediate vicinity of their phone. (Maybe 1 in 100 is a strech, but 1 in 20?)

Who carries their phone in their pocket at home?

Smart phones.

I miss the time when I needed to charge my phone once per two weeks (I used it infrequently).

In Switzerland, the REGA (a rescue aircraft operator) does this for finding avalanche victims. A helicopter circles above the area, where the avalanche came to a stop. Amongst other techniques do they search for radio signals, such as those of special avalanche rescue devices and those of mobile phones.

Maybe events like this can trigger politics to review the very laws by which they force us to lock down wi-fi networks in the first place.

What do you mean?

In Italy, there are laws making wifi network operators responsible for the actions of people joining their networks. At one point, public network operators (cafes etc) were required by law to record the ID card of anyone requesting access. This provision was eventually dropped, but I think the overall concept of network owners' responsibility is still there.

I think there's EU-wide push for not allowing free public wifi. Heard about it in at least two other countries. Not sure if any law was passed though.

Interesting. Wasn't there an actual EU ruling encouraging nations to create free public Wi-Fi networks?

Luxembourg has a city-wide free wifi.

Many cities have, but free doesn't mean anonymous. You need to qualify (usually by residing in that city) and apply for an account with a personal username and password.

I think tourists would need WiFi more than residents.

    > You need to qualify (usually by residing in that city)
    > and apply for an account with a personal username and
    > password.

I've never seen that as a tourist. Accept terms maybe; perhaps even some survey-type details, but never an actual login.

Malta for example has incredible coverage - it's everywhere, even small towns. Just accept terms and give nationality, age, gender.

Italy spearheaded this approach because of content piracy, under the pretense of organized-crime prevention. It was eventually seen as holding back tourism and economy, so it was dropped; but by then, the seed was planted (European law-enforcement agencies co-ordinate a lot, in this day and age) and found roots elsewhere in the wake of terrorist events. I don't think there is an explicit EU directive yet, though.

Sad that preventing piracy is considered more important than easy access to free information.

Whole city of Cardiff has free WiFi coverage in many places. Every bus, every tourist attraction, most bus stops, galleries etc.

Yeah, it's common, I guess open would be a better word than free.

It's open and free. You just need to register your MAC.

In my city in Germany all newer bus models have WiFi. Just join the network, agree to the terms and conditions (which consist of 5 short paragraphs) and you are set. No need for an ID.

I had a more cynical thought: maybe events like this will trigger security-state politicians to require backdoor access put into all wifi routers (which are then open for NSA/FBI/ect).

Guest network anyone?

A distinct SSID, WPA2 password and subnet dispatches with most of the personal risk.

What about FON ? My provider did automatically setup an account for me when I got registered with them (opt in).

That was my first thought as well. Simply removing your WiFi password can have unintended consequences, especially for people with little technical skills.

Not really. You'd still be liable for any misuse happening from external users. Or if not liable, you'd at least have an uphill battle to fight in order to prove that it wasn't you that did the thing that got you into trouble.

Additionally, depending on your ISP, you might violate the TOS by providing a public WiFi. If you live in a place without real choice of ISP, that would be bad if they then cancel your account.

This is true, but if guest networks were the norm then individually you'd be less likely to be exploited by criminals, because of the greater spread, and the issues surrounding them would be better appreciated by the authorities and law makers.

ISPs should be getting onboard with providing public access points. Why wouldn't they welcome me using my home as a basepoint for their public service?

A big porportion of Dutch routers is actually creates a secondary independent network that provides free internet access to users of the same provider, across the country.

Same in Serbia with Serbian BroadBand (SBB) UniFi.

Comcast[0] does this in the US. It's opt out as I understand.

[0]http://www.extremetech.com/computing/184263-comcast-turns-50...

BT in the UK does this. As far as I know pretty much all BT wifi routers are part of a FON network unless you change the configuration.

Because when your home gives free access, sharing the connection (and cost) with your neighbors becomes easier.

Yes, it's possible now already, but now we're all afraid the others may abuse our connection.

Abuse how??

> Or if not liable, you'd at least have an uphill battle to fight in order to prove that it wasn't you that did the thing that got you into trouble.

If everyone had guest networks, I doubt this kind of thing would even make it to court.

Doesn't mean you won't get police showing up with a warrant and taking everything electronic to check for child porn because someone on your IP was distributing it.

> you'd at least have an uphill battle to fight in order to prove that it wasn't you that did the thing that got you into trouble.

Aren't you innocent until proven guilty? Simply saying "I have a guest network" surely constitutes reasonable doubt, in the absence of any other evidence against you.

> Aren't you innocent until proven guilty? Simply saying "I have a guest network" surely constitutes reasonable doubt, in the absence of any other evidence against you.

You'd still face an average of 6 years of legal wrangling and attendant expenses.

Sadly, the way Justice System is working nowadays is that majority of cases end with a plea due to overwhelming pressure from the prosecutors.

So, theoretically one could ride the reasonable-doubt-train all the way to court but at that point, the prosecutor would stack any charge possible leaving the jury to deliberate on all them. Modern day juries still most likely are not computer savvy so, merely stating "IP Address" would most likely be enough to convict. It is also needs to be added that if the charges are severe enough, even though every defendant is innocent until proven guilty, in reality it is the opposite way around if the said crime is vehemently disliked by all.

Do they use juries for these matters in Italy?

No.

No, you are still liable as the operator of any public network you provide. In Germany they tried to create better legal protection for public wifi providers, but it is still not clear that you are completely off the hook.

In France at least they made "insufficiently securing your home network" an offense. So you could argue that you have a guest network (or were hacked) but you would still not be in the clear.

That is insane. Think about real world parallels:

- Leaving a window open, or a door unlocked, thereby allowing someone to enter through it, and while on your premise conducts a crime. Is this crime your fault for not sufficiently securing your home?

- Someone enters your yard because the gate wasn't locked and sells some pirated movies or drugs. Again, is it your fault because you didn't sufficiently secure your 6 foot fence from intruders?

Yes, you absolutely can be liable if your contributory negligence enables someone to commit a crime or get hurt. This is decades or centuries old law.

It genuinely saddens me that providing an open Wifi guest network for my guest's convenience is considered 'negligence'.

Interestingly where I leave a major Canadian ISP provides unsecured wifi networks across the city. To get access all you need to do is register your ethernet address to your account. As we know it is trivial to spoof an ethernet address. So, I suppose this ISP could be liable as well? Oh, wait--they are just the pipe. So, why is the consumer treated different? Sigh.

Of course. It will cost a mere $300k in legal fees and 6 months in court to prove yourself so.

An earthquake puts everything deep into force majeure. Contracts are basically out the window. Only the most heartless of judges would allow a case to move beyond the simple assertion that what happened was due to the quake.

If rescuers ask people to open their wifi, they can open their wifi. In such situations those same rescuers are free to bash down doors, raid pharmacies for needed supplies, cut into water pipes to 'steal' water, commender heavy equipment and generally do anything they reasonably feel will keep people alive. Just remember to lock the router back up once the emergency is over.

I'm guffawing at how benignly naive your characterisation of the Italian legal system is.

> You'd still be liable for any misuse happening from external users.

I think he meant risk to the network itself or to attached resources. I don't think anyone in the area is currently thinking about torrents.

Isn't this clearly FUD.

Of course if someone from your IP address is committing crimes and the authorities start an investigation they'll start looking into you and your family, you might be inconvenienced as the investigation goes on (e.g. have to park farther from your house because of that annoying white van that always seems to be parked in front). But, IP address is not sufficient evidence to take you to civil court nor charge you with a crime (at least in North American courts).

Regardless, has there ever been a single case where someone was committing a crime by connecting to an open wifi network?

They can seize your gear for a year while they decide whether to charge you and you petition to get it back.

That sounds rather draconian. Is the American justice system really this bad?

I'm aware of the Kim dotcom case that was arguably supporting piracy and the operator knew he was skirting laws. So, I understand (but don't agree) with how the justice system is making an example of him by taking away the servers.

But, does the justice system really pull the nuclear option (take your property and keep it for years) when upon investigation all evidence points elsewhere?

well... yeah.

I'm not sure how often it happens, but it definitely happens. You'll be lucky to EVER get it back.

Why Wifi does not support opportunistic encryption on open networks? This seems to be a poor design choice.

Because it'd be little more than window dressing. Hijacking the initial connection is too easy on an open LAN.

It would still be useful to thwart passive eavesdropping.

I generally keep my Network locked down but i would enable a guest network for a situation like this.

Although ideally it would be nice if every router had a button to enable/disable something like that in case of emergency.

It would make it a lot easier for average people to do it and it wouldn't expose them to too much of a security risk.

There would be a sizeable portion of devices that do not support a second ssid or a second network. Also if you have more than one access point, the underlying switched network would have to support 802.1q vlans to separate the two networks, a sci-fi in home network switching.

Guest access approach adheres to best practices, but isn't as simple or as ubiquitous.

This quake happened at 4AM. Most people probably had phones on bedstand or charging stations rather on person.

I suspect most people knew where their neighbors were at this time which may have aided searches. Pretty much didnt need to bother with any public buildings.

P.S. I was in the 4AM 1994 Los Angeles quake. Night quakes have a little different psychology than day quakes.

I wonder how this works, given that is illegal to share your internet connection with others in IT.

Lots of things are illegal in Italy, and elsewhere, that are nonetheless common done.

Here's the tweet https://mobile.twitter.com/crocerossa/status/768387275654885...

which is also confusing about the how to "reset" the router, not sure if some models might go back to factory settings holding the reset for 10 secs...

It's time we start looking at Internet mesh networking more seriously.

Mesh networking wasn't exactly a raging success last time around and not much has changed since then.

"Hey Siri" ... "Enable my emergency beacon"

Of course, phones and watches don't have that feature yet but an open (low-power) broadcast standard could help save lives.

Finding people who are lost in the woods would be much easier.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/hiker-pavlina-pizova-survi...

http://www.wlox.com/story/32833377/woman-found-after-being-l...

I wonder if devices implemented a communication protocol based on UWB we could leverage it for rescue operations. Along with other advantages, it has a much greater ability to penetrate physical barriers [0].

[0] http://www.thetrackit.com/library/UWB%20Defin.pdf

It would be awesome if in case of emergency, WIFI AP could build up a cognitive network to assist rescuers. We can even think of phones workings a relays to an available Internet connexion.

This article is quite poor; this is probably something barely re worded from a need provider (like Reuters). Can anyone find an article with more depth to corroborate this?

Edit: it looks like it isn't anything to do with the rescue effort in itself; the Italian red Cross is asking to open private wifi in order to allow people to communicate. I naively thought it would have to be something with exploiting wifi in a novelty manner, but no.

Quite disappointed.

You can read my article at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/08/should-you-open-your-wifi-d...

And my interview with Wired at http://www.wired.co.uk/article/italian-red-cross-earthquake-...

The risk is low - but I still think it is dangerous advice.

Right, 270+ people dead and counting and you are disappointed. I don't know, maybe a bit of reality check sometimes?

What are you going on about? This is HN, not your classic news bulletin board. If I wanted to have succinct news reports from a general news outlet, I would go to one. Feel free to do the same.

Wow, this is HN and what? Your comment is still completely out of touch with reality, there are lots of Italians reading HN, some might have lost their friends or family members and look, people are even downvoting my parent comment. Is this really the place you want HN to be? You want to change the world but you can't see things from another perspective? Or show some understanding and compassion? It's not just you, but the whole thread here is terrible, it's like if you had another 9/11 and I spent my time commenting on why mobile reception is so bad there in the area of the disaster.

To rephrase what touristtam said, HN is a place where stories about shootings, terrorist attacks, catastrophic events and other current news get flagged regularly. Just like celebrity and sport news. Plenty of news outlets already report about the earthquake. This article is about the technical aspect of enabling wifi and I see people discussion wifi and cell coverage, privacy and legal aspects of opening networks, thermal imagining systems. I don't see people disrespecting the victims or families. The event itself and the human stories/tragedies behind that - and sorry that might be hard to swallow - isn't discussion-worthy to a lot of people on HN.

I understand this might well be a very emotional time for you (and others), due to the current events, but please be a little be impartial as the quality of the article that has been posted. like I have said before this board isn't your regular news outlet, and pushing for more article like this one is only detrimental to the quality of the board as a whole. This is more appropriate for FB and other social media.

As for the personal attack, you will find that it isn't the best approach to convince the other parties in an argument.

> people are even downvoting my parent comment

Perhaps it's because you were trying to shut down discussion on the technical/communication aspects of this disaster for no reason other than it was a tragedy?

> it's like if you had another 9/11 and I spent my time commenting on why mobile reception is so bad there in the area of the disaster.

That would be an entirely appropriate topic of discussion.

It's not a competition. People can discuss different things.

And as usual, X incident pales in comparison to the constant death toll from car crashes, so perhaps worry about that instead.

Whole towns got destroyed, all I am saying is let's just be mindful of this and the tragedy of this fact during the discussion. As you said, people can discuss different things, which is why I think it's ok bringing this up, it's always up to you to make up your mind of course

I find your attitude nearly offensive. Association to tragedy does not excuse a lapse in quality. The attempt to make an emotional connection to allow such an excuse is hamfisted manipulation at best and has no place here.

Having read here about tracking people's key presses through walls using WiFi signals I was expecting something related to that. However, probably you'd want all WiFi off for that to avoid mixing up signals.

Writing on a keyboard, the typical occupation of buried earthquake survivors. Who wouldn't think of doing it to be noticed and rescued?

@rescuers - hey, am trapped #rescueme #buriedalive

???

Was more thinking of using the technique to detect people moving small amounts - the referenced story spoke of detecting breathing rate and heartbeat using "wifi" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12357447.

Heat source scanners like they show it in movies does really exist? Will be really helpful in these scenarios if they do really exists.

They exist. I can't tell how deep they can detect heat and if it's enough for body heat. http://thermalvisionresearch.co.uk/thermal-camera-products/t...

Wouldn't peer-to-peer apps like FireChat [1] also help?

[1]: https://www.opengarden.com/firechat.html (Currently throwing an invalid certificate error)

You might need at least a user every 70m (210ft) for FireChat to work properly; not feasible in these circumstances.

During such catastrophes setting up a temporary airMAX as an open access point would be a more speedy and reliable solution; only need one telephone line to operate, the teams don't have to waste time installing other apps, and the antenna's wifi coverage is greater than a cheap router's.

They should rather use a solution like one of Google's WI-FI blimp and fly them hover the affected areas.

maybe all routers should have an emergency login

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