Hey, I heard about how utility pole inspecting helicopters are able to tell the good/rotten state of wooden telephone poles by the reverb pattern of sound waves coming off the poles from the rotors -- it seems to me the whole field of non-invasive sensing (and using existing/ambient emission sources) is getting pretty impressive.
I can’t tell if this ever became a reality; I know of more modern approaches attempting to use thermal and multi spectral imaging to achieve the same goal.
nashashmi · 1h ago
What kind of helicopter of what size are we talking about here that can actually get close to a utility pole with wires going across?
gerdesj · 1h ago
I live near a helicopter factory and when the spinning towers are in use, you hear all sorts of auditory patterns as you move around the town. When they are test flying - similar and the Police have one and there is an air ambulance too. My Dad's other staff car in the '80s was a Gazelle and in the '70s he whizzed around in a Sioux. I've seen and heard a lot of helos!
I have absolutely no doubt that with some funky signal processing you can do all sorts of things.
trenchpilgrim · 54m ago
Look up "Helicopter tree trimming" and prepare to be amazed.
fsckboy · 34m ago
also look up "helicopter high voltage wire"
trhway · 1h ago
I think you can do it from a distance, just need to have directed microphone (or use laser “microphone”)
shitpostbot · 1h ago
That makes sense. It's probably less "doing crazy convolution calculations on how sampled ambient noise changes as the helicopter gets close to a pole", and more "rotten wood vibrates slower"
gregoryl · 13m ago
FYI, you've been hellbanned for seemingly 6 years.
Probably the account name triggering a spam filter?
Email hn@ycombinator.com, they may be willing to unban you, so other people can see your posts.
freedomben · 6h ago
Can't help but think of the Star Trek TOS episode where Kirk is accused of murder and they find the "murder victim" in the ship by identifying and isolating heart beats until they discover he must still be aboard. It's been almost 60 years since the episode came out, but still sorry if that's a spoiler
wrs · 4h ago
Classic Star Trek (speaking as a fan). They can scan an entire planet to find a lost crew member, but can’t tell how many people are on their own ship. And they have universal audio surveillance on the ship but still have to use wall intercoms.
varenc · 1h ago
There's a single DS9 episode[0] where they reveal that the Captain can actually spy on everyone on the ship at once. Like tap into a video feed and listen to conversations. But then we never see this happen again.
My headcannon for this is that even though it's technically possible, it's so unethical they just choose to never do it.
"Humans are ethical and behave morally" is a core idea behind every Star Trek episode featuring the Enterprise. Its relentless optimism is almost innocent in nature...
DS9 is great because it showed us the darker side of the federation. They can afford to be like this because they've got Space CIA committing atrocities behind the scenes since day one.
vkou · 1h ago
The mirror universe captain of the Enterprise-C uses that exact functionality, in conjunction with a disintegration beam to quietly disappear problem crew members.
Cthulhu_ · 3h ago
The Star Trek series require a lot of suspension of disbelief, especially since in the years after it came out real life technology surpassed the stuff depicted in there. Like, in TNG people walking around with glorified e-readers but having to go to the big computer or to ask Alexa things instead of just tapping on their screens.
At least they got OLED style touch screens, and for a while it looked like everything would go that way but at least in cars some are going back to physical buttons.
eurleif · 2h ago
One thing that I feel actually became more believable with new technology is the plot device where only one character can perform a certain task, but then all they really do is tell the computer to do it. For example, in Voyager, they make a big deal about how Harry Kim is the only one who's able to make complex holograms. That originally seemed unrealistic; but now, with the amount of work some people put into prompt engineering for LLMs, it actually seems kind of plausible.
lo_zamoyski · 1h ago
> At least they got OLED style touch screens, and for a while it looked like everything would go that way but at least in cars some are going back to physical buttons.
On that note, physical buttons are tactile and easier to navigate while driving and thus safer. You don't have to take your eyes off the road and worry about a fussy touchscreen registering your tap. You just feel around for the control and manipulate it.
The appeal of a touchscreen is that you can change the interface. It can assume a wide range of control panels, which, in a car, isn't always useful. For functions you need immediately, you can't beat a fixed physical widget.
Now, what would be interesting is a surface whose physical texture and physical controls could be dynamically changed and reconfigured. So, a flat surface becomes a series of buttons, and then maybe a rotating knob in the next. Perhaps tactile holograms. I don't think something like this could beat physical controls for reliable and lasting function either, however.
We could many centuries from now have "warp drive" but GRAVITY PLATING is completely implausible
Yet it makes every episode of each ST series watchable so we just accept "the future"
deepsun · 3h ago
My phone can hear me and answer whenever I talk to it, but I still prefer to push a button first (kinda intercom), or even just type :)
No comments yet
vkou · 1h ago
Oh, it gets worse. Either Kirk or Spock should have hung for that episode - not for the thing Kirk was on trial for, but for leaving the entire ship unmanned, and for allowing that guy to terminally sabotage it, all to do some theatrics for the judge and jury. That is a criminal level of negligence - surely it was in violation of some minimal crewing requirement for a vessel of that size.
I also have to wonder what the 'dead' guy's plan was after Kirk would get convicted for his death. Presumably he'd need to climb out of whatever rathole he was hiding in for breakfast, and I'd presume someone on the ship would notice that the dead guy is alive, and that the conviction should be overturned.
---
Truly, the level of and attention to security on the Enterprise-C was shameful. In "The Conscience of a King" (an excellent episode), one of the traveling actors manages to - not only steal a weapon - presumably from the armory - but also rig it to explode and plant it in the Captain's quarters.
Starfleet in that era should have seriously formed an independent, no-bullshit, no-nonsense commission to ask the relevant enlisted and commissioned officers pressing questions, like 'Did you, or did you not leave the hatch coaming on Deck C open, thus allowing an enemy agent access to the arms locker? Are you in collusion with enemy agents?'
mrexroad · 27m ago
Maybe it’s just a Boomer thing? (Sorry, couldn’t resist the BSG / trek crossover joke).
You took away my ability to make a cheesy "spoilers!" comment, which is arguably worse than having spoiled the episode (thanks, btw).
TowerTall · 5h ago
Everyone’s heart is different. Like the iris or fingerprint, our unique cardiac signature can be used as a way to tell us apart. It can already be done from a distance using lasers [1].
> Researchers.. developed.. a biometric identifier for people based on the way the human body interferes with Wi-Fi signal propagation.. CSI in the context of Wi-Fi devices refers to information about the amplitude and phase of electromagnetic transmissions.. interact with the human body in a way that results in person-specific distortions.. processed by a deep neural network, the result is a unique data signature.. [for] signal-based Re-ID systems
nashashmi · 1h ago
Tracking people walking through malls. Or even better: tracking everyone in the sidewalk of a NYC street after they commit a crime and where they end up at.
palata · 1h ago
Don't we have phones for that?
pempem · 1h ago
Ah yes, tracking everyone. The one system that only leads to good outcomes.
lemonberry · 1h ago
Well, we know that tracking "everyone" would only lead to tracking a subset of everyone. A subset with a lot less money and power than those in charge of the tracking. Much like the guard or observer in the panopticon.
pizzly · 54m ago
Seeing that it works for a ESP32 chip I would say that its very likely to work on a smartphones's wifi chip though the article didn't say. Many people carry phones with them everywhere and all the time. You could build a very impressive profile of a person. It could be used to see when they get excited, scared, angry, etc at depending on what they view on the phone, the phone call they received, where they physically located on the earth, who they are around (by looking at identities of other phones near them) and properly other things as well I have not thought of.
er0k · 4h ago
This is nothing new. Wifi signals have been used to detect objects, people and animals, gait analysis[1], read keystrokes[2], monitor breathing and heart rates[3], "hear" conversations[4], etc for at least a decade now.
Have you gotten any of these to work? A few years ago I was tasked with investigating these kinds of techniques for a client (it was something cool and benign but I can’t say what due to NDA) and the big papers people are referring to when they mention this all had either huge asterisks or huge methodological flaws.
IshKebab · 2h ago
In my experience aallll of these fancy "we can measure things that sound impossible" papers come with the asterisk "in perfect lab conditions".
> “The signal is very sensitive to the environment, so we have to select the right filters to remove all the unnecessary noise,” Bhatia said.
AKA "it barely works and we had to filter the signal to the gills to get anything at all".
It's a really impressive tech demo but the article is selling it as if this might actually work in the real world and it clearly won't.
ACCount37 · 2h ago
Getting it to sort-of-work is fairly easy. Getting it to work well on off-the-shelf hardware without a precisely controlled environment is hell.
For practical applications right now, you'd want a dedicated radar unit at 24GHz or so, probably with two separate reception paths too.
Eventually, we might get usable radar functionality in default Wi-Fi chips with 5GHz/6GHz Wi-Fi and MIMO - but it's not there yet.
LPisGood · 3h ago
Indeed, this same principle has been shown to work with sound waves and not just RF waves. There was a paper a few years back that used car speakers and the microphone to be able to detect the number of people in the car for the purpose of detecting children or pets left in hot vehicles.
umvi · 2h ago
Generally I think this is called "tomography" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomographic_reconstruction) i.e. the reconstruction of higher dimensional data from lower dimensional data. Your brain can do it automatically in a lot of cases. For example if you see the shadow of a rotating cube on the wall, your brain can reconstruct 3d information about the cube even though you only have access to a 2d projection
transpute · 3h ago
[edit: publicly announced] commercial deployment into homes and offices is new.
macawfish · 3h ago
Or is it?
onlypassingthru · 5h ago
No clunky wearables? No chest strap on the treadmill? Heart rate and respiration? Monitors everyone in the house simultaneously 24/7 on a cheap rpi? I hope this doesn't take years to come to market because this seems incredibly useful.
transpute · 4h ago
There are positive sci-fi use cases, but ONLY IF the data and automation are entirely under control of the human subjects, e.g. self-hosted home server, local GPUs, local LLM, offline voice recognition, private 3D imaging of home and human, etc.
bluGill · 21m ago
I don't want the data under my control - I want it under my doctors control. Except if it decects a coming heart attack or such, then notify every emt.
fragmede · 4h ago
Comcast renting out wifi hardware to all of their customers,
and already bringing that technology to the masses should be concerning to you then.
transpute · 4h ago
Sensing is (sadly) already part of Wi-Fi 7. If you have a recent Intel, AMD or Qualcomm device from the past few years, it's likely physically capable of detecting human presence and/or activity (e.g. breathing rate, keystrokes, hand gestures). It can also be done with $20 ESP32 devices + OSS firmware. The open questions are on custody and legal usage of CSI measurements, not their existence.
wlesieutre · 3h ago
But think of how much money they can make by selling your health data to insurance companies!
throwway120385 · 3h ago
Yet another tool for our surveillance capitalism overlords to figure out when people are having sex.
lo_zamoyski · 1h ago
Alexa: "I sounds like you're having sex. Would you like me to play Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in D minor on Spotify and schedule a breakfast delivery through GrubHub?"
captainkrtek · 5h ago
Could also see the value of this for caregiving. I caretake for my grandmother, and even something as simple as keeping airtags on her keys has been a challenge. It would be impossible for her to consistently wear some wearable health device / life alert / etc. passive health monitoring that’s not intrusive would be amazing.
snet0 · 1h ago
I've not followed any evolutions in this area, but there's a cool paper from 2014 about using WiFi channel state information to detect 87%(!) of falls in an experimental condition[1]. It's been a while since I read the paper, and I no longer have access, so caveats aplenty, but it's one of those things that pops into my head sometimes and I wonder if it's seen any real-world deployment.
Not an expert, but I suspect for many there are warning signs that someone may die in their sleep (or exercising, or ???) long before the heart finally quits. This seems like a great way to monitor for that.
boznz · 4h ago
when I'm old and going to die, "in my sleep" would be top of the list of ways I would want to go, (during sex is likely not going to be an option)
onlypassingthru · 3h ago
May we all be so lucky but "old" is relative in this case. An acquaintance did just that... in his 50's :/
lotsofpulp · 2h ago
If it’s during sex, would you want your sex partner to also die at the same time? Seems like it would be a troubling experience for the other person.
makestuff · 2h ago
Seems like it would be really useful in a hospital setting as well. Instead of having to wear the heart rate monitors, etc. during recovery or a stress test it could be wireless.
FridayoLeary · 4h ago
I feel this technology would creep people out so much that anyone in the wifi space would be actively hostile towards these things. Maybe they'll lock it behind patents? I doubt governments would want this to become common knowledge either.
transpute · 4h ago
It has been IEEE standardized and shipping commercially for several years.
Whole-home gesture recognition sounds really cool! Has anyone actually got this running?
throw0101d · 5h ago
802.11bf is working on sensing applications:
> With recent advancements, the wireless local area network (WLAN) or wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology has been successfully utilized to realize sensing functionalities such as detection, localization, and recognition. However, the WLANs standards are developed mainly for the purpose of communication, and thus may not be able to meet the stringent requirements for emerging sensing applications. To resolve this issue, a new Task Group (TG), namely IEEE 802.11bf, has been established by the IEEE 802.11 working group, with the objective of creating a new amendment to the WLAN standard to meet advanced sensing requirements while minimizing the effect on communications. […]
> In recent years, Wi-Fi has been shown to be a viable technology to enable a wide range of sensing applications, and Wi-Fi sensing has become an active area of research and development. Due to the significant and growing interest in Wi-Fi sensing, Task Group IEEE 802.11bf was formed to develop an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard that will enhance its ability to support Wi-Fi sensing and applications such as user presence detection, environment monitoring in smart buildings, and remote wellness monitoring. In this paper, we identify and describe the main definitions and features of the IEEE 802.11bf amendment as defined in its first draft. Our focus is on the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) sensing procedure, which supports bistatic and multistatic Wi-Fi sensing in license-exempt frequency bands below 7 GHz (specifically, 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz). We also present an overview of basic sensing principles, and provide a detailed discussion of features defined in the IEEE 802.11bf amendment that enhance client-based Wi-Fi sensing.
(See also perhaps IEEE 802.11bi, Enhanced Data Privacy.)
elric · 3h ago
It's galling that this press blurb only focuses on happy (supposed) health monitoring benefits, and fails to address the privacy concerns in the slightest.
This can be abused in so many ways, like watching how people's heart rates change then watching an add, or browsing a selection of goods in the shop, and making viscerally targeted advertising. Or burglars detecting whether people are at home.
Soon we won't just have to worry about unpatched wifi routers being parts of botnes, we'll have to worry about them tracking our locations and excitement levels and selling them off to whoever.
yieldcrv · 3h ago
new and more efficient markets
andrepd · 2h ago
I was just in another thread with someone claiming that without pervasive ads things would be worse than Soviet Russia (sic). I don't doubt ad+tech giants will get their hands on any source of data they can.
bee_rider · 5h ago
I guess it is good to be aware of what’s possible. But all this stuff about using WiFi to measure things about people—it’s a bit creepy, right? I mean, to state the obvious, we (as a society) have got a bunch of poorly patched or corporate controlled WiFi routers attached to the network. What a surveillance catastrophe waiting to happen.
I mean, heart rate? Do we have a giant network that can tell where everybody is and whether they are having a strong emotional response to anything?
transpute · 5h ago
> we (as a society) have got a bunch of poorly patched or corporate controlled WiFi routers
Mobile phone spyware can attack poorly patched or corporate controlled WiFi radio basebands, for 3D imaging of human user behavior.
I do it using MMWave sensor, 60Ghz one. Want to have more of them but installation is a pain as these need to be mounted on ceiling so WiFi based sensor would be awesome!
cweagans · 5h ago
Do you have a writeup about this somewhere? I'd love to know more.
You can buy them on Aliexpress for $5. YouTube and a cursory google search will give you many many options to choose from for examples and tutorials.
NoiseBert69 · 2h ago
There are a lot of radar modules out there in the wild.
But not all of them are good for doing stuff like this.
You need full raw I/Q and DAC access to sweep the frequency.
mhuffman · 4h ago
Tell more about your setup!
NoiseBert69 · 2h ago
Infineon 60GHz IoT FMCW radar modules have all datasheets published. That's super rare for Infineon - usually they are the worst NDA-hell on earth.
Chinese vendors sell uC+Radar-Module units on Aliexpress for around ~20-30€. They Infineon-based boards are super easy to spot by looking at the Antenna-on-Chip layout.
You can cut off their head (microcontroller) and directly attach your favorite uC onto the SPI bus to talk to them. Or use the existing one.. not overly complicated to reverse engineer the schematic.
Example: MicRadar RA60ATR2
jijijijij · 4h ago
I wonder, if this would work with bluetooth, too. Would be nice to hack e.g. the new, cheaper version Pebble watch to measure heart-rate this way. I mean, possibly this could even be superimposed on the regular BT-connection signals. I presume open firmware would enable these sort of things.
wetwater · 4h ago
Its a good effort but very pedestrian and a very low hanging fruit. Its just another academia paper that will be published.
I think soon it will be time to seriously consider eliminating use of Wifi in some private places and going back to speed and reliability of copper wires. WiFi is like basically illuminating an area in light that can pass through walls.
toast0 · 4h ago
If speed and reliability is needed, or desirable, you've already been doing this. My TV boxes have always been wired, because wifi is silly for (relatively) high bandwidth at fixed locations, given that wires in the wall have either been there or reasonable to add.
Some places, adding wires is expensive and given that wifi has improved over the years, it might not be worth the cost of adding wires.
munchler · 2h ago
I think it's safe to say that most smart TVs are wireless and will stay that way. Personally, I have no problem streaming 4K content to my TV over my wifi. Adding wires where they're not needed is what's silly.
teeray · 5h ago
New polygraph just dropped.
RandomBacon · 4h ago
I'm guessing with a polygraph: the obvious, cumbersome equipment is to make the subject uncomfortable and aware of the measuring, to make them more likely to break, or have a harder time controlling their body.
jcmontx · 5h ago
Bros at UCSC must be getting some good grants from the US military. I can already imagine the next gen of public-wifi driven drone strikes
It's an excellent time to buy your own device for wifi broadcasting and disable any ISP provided broadcasting (or maybe put it in a faraday cage?) - it's relatively simple to set up with off the shelf components though less technically minded people may struggle with it. There's still a pretty robust market of options and the devices have gotten pretty feature rich with things like mesh networking support being pretty standard.
bookofjoe · 4h ago
>though less technically minded people may struggle with it
This is the funniest thing I've read so far today. BOTN
munk-a · 4h ago
I more meant - you might need to help elderly relatively set it up. There are plenty of wifi routers you can order that basically just plug in out of the box - the bigger issue is educating people that they need the tech and then making sure they can handle the cable connections. I tend to work with some very non-technically minded people so my bar is so so low.
bookofjoe · 3h ago
Oh! I wish you lived near Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live. I am a 77-year-old retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist. My technical aptitude is SO low that I dare not exchange my obsolete 10-year-old Comcast WiFi router for the current model that I can "basically just plug in out of the box," even though it's billed as being at least 5x faster than mine, because I don't believe their constant emails that the new one they'll send me is simple to set up. Far more likely than not I'll end up with NO WiFi and have to pay for a technician to come and do it.
immibis · 5h ago
I guess that means Germany did nothing wrong (when it banned public WiFi).
barbazoo · 5h ago
Isn't it the other way around? Germany actually has it made easier to operate a public wifi by limiting the liability on the side of the wifi provider with their mid 2010s legislation.
immibis · 1h ago
Famously it was illegal to operate public wifi in Germany until 2017.
with this level of accuracy and that sword missile with no warhead they can drone strike you in a cafe with disturbing the other patrons
cyanydeez · 5h ago
Guys, they can just ask social media Corp A where you are. They don't need no fancy tech here.
dmbche · 4h ago
Not even, your SIM in constantly pinging multiple towers and triangulating you
cyanydeez · 4h ago
slight quibble: That triangulates your phone. Social media (unless you're letting LLMs talk for your) is triangulating _you_.
dmbche · 4h ago
I'm not certain of the distinction nor that the platforms are triangulating me and not my phone. Especially if you don't directly provide information about what you're doing.
And that 99% or social media users have their phone on them at all times.
cyanydeez · 2h ago
If you're trying to targe tsomeone with a deadly strike, just knowing their phone is in a location is not comparable to knowing they just posted something on social media.
Sure, you can attribute a good chance of success to the movement of the phone equating a strike on the person, but it's still _just a phone_ that you're triangulating.
dmbche · 25m ago
I find it unlikely that people a government would want to kill by drone strike would be posting about their wherabouts on social media and at the same time obfuscating their location by having their phone move without them (by someone ok with being hit by a drone strike?).
Or we're speaking about striking civilians posting on social media - where I'm not sure drone strikes are very cost effective or pertinent.
My understanding is that drone strikes aren't a thing done because you just got a hit on social media of a precise location, but more of a somewhat long investigation into the activity and identity of the target, their habits and movements (both to confirm their value and maximise sucess) - and then a calculated drone strike that both maximizes sucess and minimizes collateral.
Of course Israel does not do this and is more into the "paint a bullseye around the victim" kind of doctrine, but that's outside the scope of this discussion.
MomsAVoxell · 2h ago
Find your target by heartbeat. Fly to heartbeat. End heartbeat.
Wake me up when it can find me in the crowd.
musbemus · 2h ago
Someone point this at Trump and report back
wedn3sday · 4h ago
Thanks, now I need to build a faraday cage around my chest to stop the CIA from polygraphing me at range.
pax · 3h ago
I searched directly for Faraday through the comments. Waiting forward for the apparel company that builds this.
And we've been laughing all this time at tinfoil hat types..
just-working · 5h ago
surveillance state intensifies
hollerith · 5h ago
WiFi equipment can see your heart beating, but don't worry, it cannot possibly have any harmful effects on human physiology.
ch4s3 · 5h ago
A sonogram can see your heart beating too, but no one thinks sonograms are dangerous(because they are not).
elric · 3h ago
Ultrasound can be used to blast tumours or break kidney stones. And according to Wikipedia there seems to be a really weird correlation between having an ultrasound and being lefthanded. But that sounds almost too ridiculous to be true.
transpute · 5h ago
Unsolicited remote sonograms are stopped by walls, floors, ceilings and doors, unlike wireless radio networks.
ch4s3 · 2h ago
A concrete wall stops wifi pretty well.
transpute · 2h ago
How thick a concrete wall is needed to stop wifi? Or does the concrete wall contain fine wire mesh?
bookofjoe · 4h ago
For now
pessimizer · 4h ago
Sound can certainly be dangerous to you.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
So can water. That doesn't make it inherently dangerous in all amounts.
elric · 3h ago
As far as we know, it really doesn't, at least not at the energy levels used in practice. Blasting 2.4GHz at the same energy levels as a microwave oven would cook your flesh if you were sufficiently close to the emitter. But that doesn't happen.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
I have a superficial radial artery. You can take my pulse just by looking at the shadow on my wrist moving in the right lighting. Does this have "harmful effects" on my physiology?
I can’t tell if this ever became a reality; I know of more modern approaches attempting to use thermal and multi spectral imaging to achieve the same goal.
I have absolutely no doubt that with some funky signal processing you can do all sorts of things.
Email hn@ycombinator.com, they may be willing to unban you, so other people can see your posts.
My headcannon for this is that even though it's technically possible, it's so unethical they just choose to never do it.
[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Valiant_(episode)#:~:te...
DS9 is great because it showed us the darker side of the federation. They can afford to be like this because they've got Space CIA committing atrocities behind the scenes since day one.
At least they got OLED style touch screens, and for a while it looked like everything would go that way but at least in cars some are going back to physical buttons.
On that note, physical buttons are tactile and easier to navigate while driving and thus safer. You don't have to take your eyes off the road and worry about a fussy touchscreen registering your tap. You just feel around for the control and manipulate it.
The appeal of a touchscreen is that you can change the interface. It can assume a wide range of control panels, which, in a car, isn't always useful. For functions you need immediately, you can't beat a fixed physical widget.
Now, what would be interesting is a surface whose physical texture and physical controls could be dynamically changed and reconfigured. So, a flat surface becomes a series of buttons, and then maybe a rotating knob in the next. Perhaps tactile holograms. I don't think something like this could beat physical controls for reliable and lasting function either, however.
(2023)
https://www.engadget.com/2015-09-23-geltouch.html
(2015)
We could many centuries from now have "warp drive" but GRAVITY PLATING is completely implausible
Yet it makes every episode of each ST series watchable so we just accept "the future"
No comments yet
I also have to wonder what the 'dead' guy's plan was after Kirk would get convicted for his death. Presumably he'd need to climb out of whatever rathole he was hiding in for breakfast, and I'd presume someone on the ship would notice that the dead guy is alive, and that the conviction should be overturned.
---
Truly, the level of and attention to security on the Enterprise-C was shameful. In "The Conscience of a King" (an excellent episode), one of the traveling actors manages to - not only steal a weapon - presumably from the armory - but also rig it to explode and plant it in the Captain's quarters.
Starfleet in that era should have seriously formed an independent, no-bullshit, no-nonsense commission to ask the relevant enlisted and commissioned officers pressing questions, like 'Did you, or did you not leave the hatch coaming on Deck C open, thus allowing an enemy agent access to the arms locker? Are you in collusion with enemy agents?'
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/27/238884/the-penta...
> Researchers.. developed.. a biometric identifier for people based on the way the human body interferes with Wi-Fi signal propagation.. CSI in the context of Wi-Fi devices refers to information about the amplitude and phase of electromagnetic transmissions.. interact with the human body in a way that results in person-specific distortions.. processed by a deep neural network, the result is a unique data signature.. [for] signal-based Re-ID systems
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353605
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/wi-fi...
https://archive.is/XnHUV
1: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7457075
2: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2789168.2790109
3: https://archive.is/mFSDq
4: https://archive.is/sNVcM
> “The signal is very sensitive to the environment, so we have to select the right filters to remove all the unnecessary noise,” Bhatia said.
AKA "it barely works and we had to filter the signal to the gills to get anything at all".
It's a really impressive tech demo but the article is selling it as if this might actually work in the real world and it clearly won't.
For practical applications right now, you'd want a dedicated radar unit at 24GHz or so, probably with two separate reception paths too.
Eventually, we might get usable radar functionality in default Wi-Fi chips with 5GHz/6GHz Wi-Fi and MIMO - but it's not there yet.
[1] - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6847948
Linksys Aware (-2024): https://www.google.com/search?q=Linksys+Aware
From this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45129817 :
> 802.11bf
802.11bf: https://www.google.com/search?q=802.11bf
"Whole-home gesture recognition using wireless signals" (2013) https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2500423.2500436 .. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1386163076039493879...
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38246722 re: a stylus with accelerometer with many degrees of freedom and inertial measurement:
> /? wireless gesture recognition RSSI:
> /? wireless gesture recognition RSSI site:github.com
> Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing: https://github.com/Marsrocky/Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing
> 3D Scanning > Technology, Applications [...]
> With recent advancements, the wireless local area network (WLAN) or wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology has been successfully utilized to realize sensing functionalities such as detection, localization, and recognition. However, the WLANs standards are developed mainly for the purpose of communication, and thus may not be able to meet the stringent requirements for emerging sensing applications. To resolve this issue, a new Task Group (TG), namely IEEE 802.11bf, has been established by the IEEE 802.11 working group, with the objective of creating a new amendment to the WLAN standard to meet advanced sensing requirements while minimizing the effect on communications. […]
* https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10547188
> In recent years, Wi-Fi has been shown to be a viable technology to enable a wide range of sensing applications, and Wi-Fi sensing has become an active area of research and development. Due to the significant and growing interest in Wi-Fi sensing, Task Group IEEE 802.11bf was formed to develop an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard that will enhance its ability to support Wi-Fi sensing and applications such as user presence detection, environment monitoring in smart buildings, and remote wellness monitoring. In this paper, we identify and describe the main definitions and features of the IEEE 802.11bf amendment as defined in its first draft. Our focus is on the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) sensing procedure, which supports bistatic and multistatic Wi-Fi sensing in license-exempt frequency bands below 7 GHz (specifically, 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz). We also present an overview of basic sensing principles, and provide a detailed discussion of features defined in the IEEE 802.11bf amendment that enhance client-based Wi-Fi sensing.
* https://www.nist.gov/publications/ieee-80211bf-enabling-wide...
* https://www.cognitivesystems.com/how-does-802-11bf-enhance-l...
(See also perhaps IEEE 802.11bi, Enhanced Data Privacy.)
This can be abused in so many ways, like watching how people's heart rates change then watching an add, or browsing a selection of goods in the shop, and making viscerally targeted advertising. Or burglars detecting whether people are at home.
Soon we won't just have to worry about unpatched wifi routers being parts of botnes, we'll have to worry about them tracking our locations and excitement levels and selling them off to whoever.
I mean, heart rate? Do we have a giant network that can tell where everybody is and whether they are having a strong emotional response to anything?
Mobile phone spyware can attack poorly patched or corporate controlled WiFi radio basebands, for 3D imaging of human user behavior.
> heart rate
Laptop demo (2022), https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/respiration... | https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/Client/...
Am so confused.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469920 (from the same org)
"Inside a $1 radar motion sensor" (2024), 100 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834349
"mmWave radar, you won't see it coming" (2022), 180 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30172647
"What Is mmWave Radar?: Everything You Need to Know About FMCW" (2022), 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35312351
But not all of them are good for doing stuff like this.
You need full raw I/Q and DAC access to sweep the frequency.
Chinese vendors sell uC+Radar-Module units on Aliexpress for around ~20-30€. They Infineon-based boards are super easy to spot by looking at the Antenna-on-Chip layout.
You can cut off their head (microcontroller) and directly attach your favorite uC onto the SPI bus to talk to them. Or use the existing one.. not overly complicated to reverse engineer the schematic.
Example: MicRadar RA60ATR2
https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM38437.2019.9014297 https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC.2018.8319181 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3286978.3287003 ..... many more.
I'd say this is far more interesting, does not use ML and credits the tech stacks that it leverages . https://people.csail.mit.edu/davidam/docs/WiMic_final.pdf
Some places, adding wires is expensive and given that wifi has improved over the years, it might not be worth the cost of adding wires.
This is the funniest thing I've read so far today. BOTN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121617
And that 99% or social media users have their phone on them at all times.
Sure, you can attribute a good chance of success to the movement of the phone equating a strike on the person, but it's still _just a phone_ that you're triangulating.
Or we're speaking about striking civilians posting on social media - where I'm not sure drone strikes are very cost effective or pertinent.
My understanding is that drone strikes aren't a thing done because you just got a hit on social media of a precise location, but more of a somewhat long investigation into the activity and identity of the target, their habits and movements (both to confirm their value and maximise sucess) - and then a calculated drone strike that both maximizes sucess and minimizes collateral.
Of course Israel does not do this and is more into the "paint a bullseye around the victim" kind of doctrine, but that's outside the scope of this discussion.
Wake me up when it can find me in the crowd.
And we've been laughing all this time at tinfoil hat types..