WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house.
All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house.
At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.
But also, don't builders have to submit plans of homes to the local government when building them for approval?
Your government probably knows your floor plan (though, I don't think they tend to be publicly accessible). Either way though, neither of these methods are anywhere near enough to do what was shown off in those Wi-Fi tracking demos. Here's hoping the tech doesn't get a lot better or has a series of unexpected breakthroughs.
You’re not going from a floor plan to a precise location model. Just think about how different the WiFi environment would be if someone put their router next to their steel computer case versus someone setting it on a nice MDF cabinet with no wires nearby. Completely different RF environment and pathing.
And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.
Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.
Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?
Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.
I regret even engaging with the floor plan debate.
It doesn’t matter if they have a floor plan. That’s not enough information to characterize the RF environment of a house and how it responds to people moving through it.
A floor plan won’t tell you the position of all the WiFi devices, obstructions, and how the environment responds to moving those around. It won’t even tell you where the router is with any precision or if it’s next to a big chunk of metal like a computer case that’s blocking half the house and causing reflections.
It’s a red herring.
That seems like all you'd need anyway, skip the rest of this. Small autonomous drones with simultaneous location and mapping capability will absolutely revolutionize warfare (and firefighting, but I digress) whenever they stop being sci-fi.
The floor plan of every home is not on file, especially older homes.
Police aren’t accessing your floor plan and then accessing your router and combining these into a perfect model that maps people’s locations. Where in this supposed plan are the police deducing the location of your WiFi router in the house and constructing a model of all materials and objects in the house that impact the model?
This just isn’t how those research papers work. It’s not something the police are going to combine with a file from the planning office and magically have a map of you in your house like in a movie.
But let's be real, police constantly barge in to the wrong address, looking for people that have been gone for years, accomplishing not much more than shooting a beloved dog on a hair-brained last second witch hunt. It's not that they can't do it, it's that they have the attention span and executive planning facilities of a burnt out coke addict 3 hours post their latest scratch off ticket winnings.
Think through it: Does your floor plan contain info about the precise location of your WiFi devices and any obstructions between them? Even that isn’t enough to get a WiFi location model, but it’s not in there regardless.
They're gonna pay Anduril, Palantir, and a whole host of other business or consulting firms a ton of your money to do that.
The criticism that "it's technically too challenging for the police department therefore its sci-fi" is extremely silly given that the current article literally is about private companies that are building surveillance networks that they will then sell to the police.
Which makes the entire situation a lot worse.
Tech companies are doing stuff and giving police free for all access and use. Which is worse, because as stated, police are worthless. You think they consider the consequences or the rights of the people they use those tools on? Come on now.
This can be provided as a service, if it isn't already. Im sure something similar already exists.
If a cop serves a warrant and the wrong address and ends ups murdering a child, that cop will receive sympathy and paid time off.
Yes, the current administration is morally capable of destroying random ships to claim victories over "bad guys". But they always had that ability.
The difference with this administration is that they aren’t even pretending to follow the nominal controls or rules to wield that force.
There was a legal concept around the drone/missile/commando/aerial strikes to assassinate targeted individuals in the Middle East. The morality of that action was dubious at best, but what’s happening in the Caribbean doesn’t even meet that very low moral, ethical, or legal bar.
This administration, with their craven collaborators on the Supreme Court, is solely focused on asserting virtually unlimited executive power to a fairly obvious end.
but the other half of the wedding party they hit were not...
So yeah consider that the government is so dumb that one half of the government thinks the secular anti-jihadist militias supported by the other half of government are actually jihadists.
It's not a terrible assumption; if you study extremist circles for long enough you come across examples of people who completely flip sides because they were only ever in it for the extralegal opportunities. Of course, you can find similar chameleons in politics.
What the public does not understand though is that THEIR complicity and facilitation is not only integral, it is even necessary in a "democracy" where a psychological "consent" must be manufactured, not dissimilar to basic grooming tactics. And no, it's no coincidence that all the western leadership and institutions are effectively all various types of groomers, i.e., psychological manipulators and abusers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44416761
Signal processing is probably a general problem. This month we had news about transcribing speech from sound waves jiggling a regular computer mouse.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/mouse_microphone_secu...
Cons: use your imagination.
Highway patrol officers have a similar risk profile to construction workers. Mostly car accidents. Patrolmen in cities or towns get hurt in town or in altercations all of the time.
Court officers do not. Detectives largely do not. Police are more likely to get shot at, but way more likely to get hurt in a bunch of acute and long term ways. The nature of the stress that many police experience measurably shortens their lives.
The biggest issues with police with regard to officer and public safety are poor governance and macho culture. I live in New York so I’ll use them as an example. NY State Police are highway patrol focused - they wear grey and black uniforms and Stetson hats. NYPD Highway patrol units wear black leather jackets and cavalry breeches. It looks cool and has a certain elan — but officers would be safer in more functional dayglo attire.
In terms of governance, like many areas of American governance, checks and balances are weak. Example: Cozy relationships between various departments, prosecutors, and perhaps elected judges mean that many NY police avoid prosecution or and sanction for DWI.
My understanding is that the most predictive thing that harms you after traumatic events is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury
which can even come from situations where you want to help people but you can't so it also badly affects teachers, nurses and other people who come across people's dysfunction and suffering. It's worse to be made to feel that you violated your own values than it is to, say, get shot.
It’s part of the reason why an observant person can usually spot a cop or firefighter in plain clothes. They put on a facade as a coping mechanism that leaks into life.
Most problems at their root are a result of people not treating people like people. Many “advocates” for police are really just attracted to the perception of power, and see failures of accountability as a sign of strength. It’s the opposite.
Sure, but both construction worker and police officer are significantly more dangerous jobs than most of us here have sitting behind a desk.
Obviously it’s not a job where people are dying routinely, but suggesting death or serious injury are the only two risks of interacting with the public and responding to threatening or unstable situations is ignoring the reality. It’s a tough job. Much tougher than my time spent sitting at a desk.
I'm not convinced that being a cop is such a tough job. Most of it is sitting in your car waiting for speeders, or to warn traffic about road construction, or driving around looking for something unusual happening.
US courts have determined they don't even have a duty to risk their own lives to save civilians. Kinda the entire purpose of their job's existence, removed.
There's a lot of aggrandizement by and for cops; it's completely parallel to the worship of the military.
The tough parts of a job aren’t defined by the routine work. It’s the risks and edge cases. That’s like saying most of a construction worker’s job is measuring things and reading plans so it can’t be that tough.
It’s pretty obvious that a lot of commenters here have never known an actual police officer. They’re just choosing between two extreme archetypes that aren’t accurate: Either the heroic person risking their life on the daily to protect to the public, or the bumbling donut-eating cop who has been relegated to traffic duty only. Neither are true and comparing it that way is a false dichotomy.
The irony of us sitting at desks in our warm and comfortable offices while calling the job of someone who gets called to deal with troubling public situations “not tough” is ironic. I wouldn’t want to do that job and I bet you wouldn’t either.
Not only "not risk their lives", US courts have ruled they have no duty to act to prevent any crime in progress.
There are plenty of instances where you would be correct, such as the origin of police forces in the American South (which were initially slave patrols), but that doesn't mean you are correct in all instances.
I'm not sure what joy you derive from spreading misinformation, but you should probably reconsider it.
And to be clear, my "argument" is that the parent poster is objectively incorrect, which is accurate. I decided not to posit on why the parent poster made an objectively incorrect statement, though I am curious.
This is your statement: "just to make this explicit, protecting civilians has never been the purpose of modern police forces. they were developed to put down rebellions/catch slaves/protect rich people's property"
That statement is incorrect, no matter what your definition of "modern police force" is. That's it. It's not complicated, despite your attempts to deflect from the invalidity of that statement.
Thanks for confirming you knew exactly what you were doing as well. As I said at the start of this, I don't understand what you get out of intentionally making inaccurate statements, but I don't expect you to explain that.
You just made an inaccurate statement that supports your implied argument, because reality does not.
So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?
I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
It's not funny, it's accurate.
Spending seconds looking into the history of policing worldwide, or in the US, would back up my claim.
Had the parent poster bothered to post evidence backing up their comment, I probably would have made the effort to post citations refuting it.
> So saying something that is correct but not for all cases (which ones would those be) is now "spreading misinformation"?
When you say that something is correct in all cases, yes.
> I'm not sure what joy you derive from dismissing statements you already acknowledge have an element of veracity with some blanket label of "misinformation", but you should probably reconsider it.
Nice try, but there is no "element of veracity" to an absolute statement that is objectively false.
When you seem some guy screaming on the street corner a monthly depot injection of an antipsychotic drug would probably calm them down but overall the drugs are unpleasant [1] and have serious side effects, particularly sedation, weight gain, and high blood sugar [2] A "functional" system would probably be one that can get people like that a diagnosis and get them treatment against their will.
Kanye West is a good example. He has a bipolar diagnosis but now thinks he is fashionably autistic so he quit taking his meds and now he is shooting music videos of black people in blackface giving the Hitler salute after a whiney autotuned complaint that they won't let him see his kids after he posted something on Twitter [3]. For him responsibility is not "don't cosplay as a Nazi" but "face up to your condition and take your meds" and he won't want to cosplay as a Nazi and they might let him see his kids.
I've known quite a few people who are schizophrenia spectrum without a diagnosis: one of them lived at our house for a year and a half until she threatened my wife with a knife and she took her own life a year later, another one called us up five times in one day last week with a scrambled story about how she got bit by a dog, I sat down and listened to her for about 20 minutes in which she got lucid just a few times and I was able to piece together the place where it happened, that she's talked to the security guard and the EMT but not the police, that she did see a doctor and get a Tetanus shot though she wasn't sure if it was a Rottweiler or a Pit-bull.
The good news is that new drugs are here and more are under development:
[1] no diversion risk!
[2] last year my condition got worse and my doc put me on the minimum dose of seroquel before going to sleep which is 1/10 the dose they'd give to someone who is really psychotic. It was effective at getting me quality sleep and avoiding "paranoia against objects" in the morning but I gained 15 lbs and my A1C was borderline in my last bloodwork and my doc thinks I should get off it. Even the smallest dose is so sedating I can't believe anyone could take it during the day, my guess is that if I cut the pills in half the sleep promoting effect will still be strong enough.
[3] oddly not "X"
Along those lines, I think it's weird that in some cities, a cop who dies choking on a chicken bone on his day off in his own kitchen gets the same benefits and massive traffic-clogging live-streamed publicly-funded funeral with politicians and media spectacle as a cop who gets killed by a bad guy while on duty.
Removing that one step just for community policing would completely change police interactions. Community policing is not the place to inject warrant enforcement, it too completely changes the dynamics.
Which is easier, Wifi 7 in all homes or gun restrictions ?
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Visual_Augmentation... https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/anduril-to-take-over-microso...
Sci-fi writers understood both what technology could create in the future (and what would be desirable), and also understood how people abuse power and the tools available to them to stay in power (or gain more).
In other words: they predicted the future, more than they inspired it. IMO, that also makes their writing that much more interesting.
It has been somewhat shocking to see how relevant the writing is seen through a 21st century lenses. Whether it's how media works, how cliques of people function, etc.
It truly feels timeless in a way that I've found very surprising. It also very much supports notions that people don't change even if means and methods do.
Swapping grandma's casserole recipe for fighting mega-corps might be the big difference.
Yes, it's easier to captivate attention by evoking primal instincts - avoid predator, find food, reproduce, etc. These stories stick around in your head, the memetic survivors. They are easier to feed off.
But "Happy" doesn't mean a perfect utopia. The entire "classic" Star Trek is set in a utopian future, yet with plenty of space for intrigue. Usually a commentary on a contemporary problem, with a "happy ending" that's supposed to show us the road to a better solution, rather than a bland "forever after".
Even "First Contact" (a zombie/survival horror) is spun around the theme of "this is the history/future that we're saving".
i am totally a real person and use the nexus every day to improve my productivity -- it is a simple and intuitive tool.
Rich or poor, smart or dumb. We all are slaves to the mighty dollar.
AI/Surveillance are only gears in the machine.
And yet here we are complaining that our phones are over-listening to us and our cars no longer have knobs.
Now with the written word and how seemingly determinant people are in large numbers we are again super vulnerable.