“AI has turned every WiFi router into a camera that can work in the dark” | Hacker News Reader

“AI has turned every WiFi router into a camera that can work in the dark”

twitter.com

56 pointscaseysoftware25 comments

This was done before the "AI" hype. More interestingly you can look through walls as well: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/02/239959/using-wi-...

In 2016 there was an Atlantic article detailing all the different ways wifi could be used to spy on you.

> By analyzing the exact ways that a Wi-Fi signal is altered when a human moves through it, researchers can “see” what someone writes with their finger in the air, identify a particular person by the way that they walk, and even read a person’s lips with startling accuracy—in some cases even if a router isn’t in the same room as the person performing the actions.

I'm not surprised training models on this data made the process much easier.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/wi-fi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353605

Anyone else picturing this as like the Netflix version of Daredevil when they show you how he perceives the world through sound?

Every Wi-Fi router, or only routers it's trained on, deployed into rooms it's been trained on with camera footage?

Seems like you'd need to know the geometry of the room in advanced (either by reconstructing it in software or training like they did with a camera).

Or have a near-identical room to train on, and relatively thin walls in between, say, apartment units, to allow the signal through. This won't account for differences in furniture, but I'd imagine, over time, one could filter out and work around static objects.

America's cheap-as-hell apartments could cause even more problems beyond giving apartments a bad rap!

I remember something similar from years ago but this is more recent: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/technology-articles/...

> For their demonstration, the researchers used three $30 WiFi routers and three aligned receivers that bounce WiFI signals around the walls of a room. The system cancels out static objects and focuses on the signals reflected off moving objects, reconstructing the pose of a person in a radar-like image. This was shown to work even if there was a wall between the routers and the subjects.

A relevant (WIP) standard in this context could become 802.11bf „WiFi Sensing“ [1]. If plenty of common consumer devices will support it (maybe even some with an on-board camera), it may become hard to avoid.

[1] https://standards.ieee.org/beyond-standards/ieee-802-11bf-ai...

The new 802.11bf spec includes people and gesture detection. There are already a few home security companies that utilize wifi sensing to monitor occupancy.

https://thenextweb.com/news/wi-fi-sensing-ieee-802-11-bf-ana...

It's not a "camera", you need more than one WiFi device and you can't identify people. Still impressive and scary without the hyberbole.

gait is fingerprintable

Good point. Actually I thought a lot about this without any connection to tech. Because I noticed that we (I) am able to discern people from quite some distance and wondered if there's some evolutionary reason for this.

IFF is probably pretty useful.

Put a rock in your shoe.

I’ve been warning people about this shit for more than 10 years, ever since Apple bought WIFISlam and made it disappear... haven’t I? And believe me when I say that 5G give them an even clearer picture. We are being watched and listened to 24/7.

Dina Katabe at MIT is a leader in this area:

https://people.csail.mit.edu/dina/

She's been able to get heart rate, breathing rate, location, and lots more from WiFi signals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXy1byguvJY

The model only works if the furniture or the room is not modified much.

However, it's scary to think the implications.

Could we have a camera pointed through a telescope aimed at a window, have a radio receiver outside the said window, and train a model to predict human movements inside a room?

Drone with kali linux. Does some circling to detect it's own sig

I wanna Faraday'd House.

I have 4 routers to bounce signal well enough to use everywhere in a thick plaster(?) ~1000sqft apartment. Am I somewhat ok or do the multiple routers make it worse?

Where is the talk from?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB0_-qKbal4

https://youtu.be/cB0_-qKbal4?t=1188

Tweet doesn't link to a full talk or paper, neither conference nor speaker is named, method appears to be inspired by the science fiction in a Batman movie...

Is this even real at all?

There you go Havana syndrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com