Hacker News Reader

Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

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.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ay

View on HN

> It's not just for spying on your cat.

Can we stop downplaying privacy issues please?

Not trying to be provocative, but how is this any worse than existing cameras or motion sensors?

Do you have those at home?

RF is far less hindered by stuff like walls.

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.

There's no reason to assume any of that.

> With this technology, it will be integrated into your router (and clients?), so turning those off will mean to turn off WiFi altogether.

It's rather unreasonable to think that you won't be able to turn off band on router. Especially given fact that 60Ghz is heavily shielded by _doors_, so any usable router would require fallback 2.4/5/6 Ghz connectivity.

802.11bf Wi-Fi 7 Sensing works with all frequencies, 2.4 and up.

Even if Neighbor 2 turns off their router, Neighbor 1 could passively use the radio waves from Neighbor 3's router to surveil reflections from Neighbor 2, including keyboard typing, heartrate/breathing, location and physical activity.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27123493

The problem with this neighbor-spying fear is that "complex math using data from radio waves to sense stuff" is already possible and readily available by anyone willing to study and put in the world of building it, wifi 7 isn't suddenly enabling that part of rf analysis or mathematics.

> wifi 7 isn't suddenly enabling that part of rf analysis or mathematics

It makes it suddenly ubiquitous when all new WiFi devices use the new standard.

Removing the PhD-level knowledge requirement from this particular mode of being an asshole doesn't sound like much of an improvement

yes, but the real threat with this is not that it makes something possible that is already possible, but it makes the barrier to use that tech a LOT lower.

Wrapping my house in tin foil is sounding a lot less conspiracy theorist now! Actually my house is going to be stuccoed - I wonder if they are using a metal mesh that I can ground. Hmm...

Your next door neighbor’s wifi will know your every movement, and can probably image it too. End of privacy within closed doors.

This is hyperbole. 60GHz cannot penetrate walls and closed doors. 2.4GHz and 5GHz lack the resolution to image you, especially if your adversary only has control of one AP. There are already tons of side channel attacks with existing WiFi and Bluetooth that reveal when someone is in the area. Your neighbour could already be tracking your devices, for all you know.

Here are 400 research papers on Wi-Fi sensing with 2.4/5Ghz, https://dhalperi.github.io/linux-80211n-csitool/#external

Thank you! Also, I can lid the device in a drawer. It’s greatly different than tracking exactly what I’m doing in any room. Also, consider flats next to each other.

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.

It's starting to feel like the #1 go-forward privacy law needs to be a mandatory opt-in choice requirement, with a viable refuse option.

It can be asked once at the device level, but regulated information needs to be specified at the highest level (e.g. "location information about an individual"), and then the concrete technical implementation left unspecified.

"Does it, or does it not?" is more important than "How?" Because legislation specifying "How?" will always lag technology by decades.

(But then again, this probably should have been done in the mid-90s, once it was apparent which way cookies were going)

Right yeah, or something less like "pay $40 to opt out" either before or after purchase, and more like "earn $0.002/day by selling your usage data". I guess the overall worth of the data is lowered by there being less of it, but whatever.

No, because your "balance" will land in the middle, which is to say that it will outright destroy a great deal of privacy.

> 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/

As a privacy nut I would be a lot more into this kind of tech if it didn't require connecting to the cloud.

I'm fine for this as long as it is opt-IN

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://www.quietrock.com/sites/default/files/QuietRock_530R.... Aluminum radiant barrier can be layered with standard drywall.

There is conductive carbon paint for RF shielding, e.g. http://www.emfrf.com/shielding-of-electric-fields-in-a-resid... & https://www.zokazola.com/emf_reduction.html

Other materials: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902926

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.

Yes, and? 5 and 6 GHz already struggle with thick walls (like those found between units in apartment buildings). Presence detection is one thing, but you can't see what I'm having for lunch through several walls with a single 2.4 GHz AP.

500 terahertz = 600 nm (visible light)

60 gigahertz = 5 mm

6 gigahertz = 50 mm

5 gigahertz = 60 mm

2.4 gigahertz = 125 mm

“Yes and”

- Unless 2.4 and 5 GHz are taken off the standard, my router will see me through the walls.

- At 60 GHz, if I have wifi, my router can see me

- To make our concerns clear to you, even at 125 mm resolution, you can tell if I like my wife to drill my bottom with a strap on. Or you can tell if I piously say my prayers at night (something that is increasingly political). Or if the immigrant next door spanks his kids. Or if his 15 year old daughter is “exploring” her body.

And for what benefit exactly?

So an ad agency can track me and know Im struggling with my diet, hovering over the fridge door?

> Or if the immigrant next door spanks his kids.

Plenty of non-immigrants (won't even dignify that with a label like Americans, because immigrants can become Americans too) spank their kids or hit their wives etc....

I think your fears are real, but I also think it's important to be careful with your examples :)

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

> 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.

Yep!

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.

That's disappointing, sounds like they need competition.

Oh, I have been dreaming about LiFi for some time, if what you're saying it's true, that's... disappointing. Do you have any sources about the current state of (real-world) LiFi ?

Literally their website.

Who specifically is "their"?

https://lifi.co/lifi-vs-wifi/

It does not address the issues outlined by parent at all

Which Li-fi people? AFAICT there are several groups, and li-fi.co (which I'll assume you're talking about) is less advertising for one specific group, and more advocating for the technology as a whole.

> They claim visible light travels faster than radio waves

I wasn't able to find it on the lifi website but seems like some poor copywriter got something wrong

> their thousand dollar router can only do 100Mb/s

Who's they? In any case, since lifi.co is advocating Li-Fi as a whole so it makes sense they talk about theoretical speeds, whereas a specific router from some manufacturer might not be able to reach those speeds, considering how new the technology is

In the end, I imagine Li-Fi doesn't have much of a future outside of niche markets because it has to compete with wifi which is everywhere (and it can't supplant wifi because e.g. it doesn't work in your pocket)

https://lifi.co/lifi-vs-wifi/

Another big advantage of LiFi is that the usage of light allows LiFi connections to occur almost instantaneously because light travels at extremely fast speeds. This results in faster transmission of data and faster internet connections – about 100 times faster than speeds achievable by WiFi.

https://lifi.co/lifi-products/lifimax/

$1098 Guaranteed fast data transfer with 100 Mbps download & 100 Mbps upload.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com