“We developed a deep neural network that maps the phase and amplitude of WiFi signals to UV coordinates within 24 human regions. The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input.”
Which leads to the obvious question: how long has the military been able to do this?
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
TEMPEST is a U. S. National Security Agency specification and a NATO certification referring to spying on information systems through leaking emanations, including unintentional radio or electrical signals, sounds, and vibrations. TEMPEST covers both methods to spy upon others and how to shield equipment against such spying. The protection efforts are also known as emission security (EMSEC), which is a subset of communications security (COMSEC).
Good bot (does this work here?)
Not yet
wdym by “does this work here?”
There was an incredibly annoying and useless bot on Reddit that ranked other bots based on comments like that.
oh lol
Absolutely ludicrous to paint this development as anything but the wet dream of both a burglar and a police state.
Also VR nerds. Current tracking is either based on the headset, so you can’t move your arms unless the headset can see them, or your arms have to be seen by lighthouses, or you rely purely on gyroscope and accelerometers for tracking, which tend to drift. So either you have blind spots, have to deal with occlusion, or will slowly drift and have to recalibrate periodically. Wifi-based tracking seems like a neat idea tbh.
Edit: considering wifi is just photons that aren’t wiggling fast enough for us to see, I’d be surprised if the government doesn’t already have this technology behind closed doors.
Home automation nerds would also cream their pants if they could get their hands on this. Imagine you could use your existing wifi router to detect presence in your home. Say goodbye to shitty IR sensors that forget about your existence within 3 seconds, no more finicky radar modules that are either too sensitive or not nearly sensitive enough.
I literally just have my machine ping my phone every ten seconds. Surprisingly effective presence detection.
How would one go about setting this up? Because that sounds really cool for home automation.
There is this Home Assistant integration which I remember getting working. I haven’t used Home Assistant in a while though, so I can’t be a good resource if you need any help.
It’s a very crude way of detecting presence for a variety of reasons, and likely won’t be as useful as you imagine.
The biggest problem is how modern smartphones handle networking when they’re locked. They enter a power saving state where they don’t respond to all pings, or they respond late enough that the pinger decides the device is just not there. Of course there are ways around it, but those are things you need to do explicitly so it won’t work on all devices until you’ve taken the time to set it up.
And since it detects a mobile device’s existence in the local wireless network rather than the actual presence of a human being, it’s not very flexible at all. What if you want to detect the presence of a guest? Are you gonna make sure they’re on your network with their devices set up to properly respond to pings? What if you forgot to turn on your phone’s wifi after turning it off?
I mean it does work once you’ve set it up, but do expect it to have a very limited scope in what you can and cannot do with it.
Wasn’t this the plot point of The Dark Knight?
We only have to enter his name to be safe.And everyone thinks Batman was the good guy.
starts putting paint on face
The whole point of that scene was that he was overstepping the line.
But then cops wear Punisher logos and Republicans play Born in the USA at election rallies, so who knows how the masses interpreted it…
That’s just another example of why Batman was literally evil.
Yes, but he specifically used cell signals.
Came here to say this!
I am going to repeat myself forever it seems. We got it wrong when we decided that you only have privacy when someone can’t physically see what you are up to. Nothing else is treated this way. You are not allowed to drive as fast as your car can physically move. You are not allowed to go into anything locked as long as you are able to pick it. You are not allowed to steal whatever you want as long as no one tackles you for it. And yet somehow some way it became understood that merely because someone can get a photo of you they have the legal right to do so.
As if access to better technology means you should follow less moral rules vs the opposite. Someone with a junk camera of the 80s can do far less perving compared to the new cameras+drones out there.
it became understood that merely because someone can get a photo of you they have the legal right to do so.
What jurisdiction is this true? There are certainly times that there is an expectation of privacy and getting a photo of you would be illegal. Easy example: and owner of a store can’t photo you in the dressing room, the even tho they could put a camera in there. It’s the same thing here, there is an expectation of privacy in your home (or for many enclosed and private spaces), so this kind of “picture” would likely already be a violation.
Just about all of them where the government is spying on their residents. Unless you think it’s alright if the government does it?
The poster made the claim:
it became understood that merely because someone can get a photo of you they have the legal right to do so.
And now you’re talking about the government spying. Total non sequitur that has nothing to do with what I was discussing.
The posters claim goes a bit further than just “can get a photo of you”. The poster originally mentions (and it’s integral to the point) that privacy shouldn’t be predicated on the idea that so long as you are behind closed doors (ie not in view) you have the expectation of privacy. You deliberately narrowed the scope. But please understand that technically my car and the contents thereof are covered by a right to privacy. To search my car lawfully in the US you’d require a warrant. Doesn’t matter if my car is parked on the street. But you could lawfully take a photo of me in that car pretty much anywhere in “public” and that would also be considered lawful. So, what exactly is the demarcation? Where is the line drawn and doesn’t that seem rather arbitrary?
The context of the poster you responded to’s point is that the government decides and makes a line between what is private and what isn’t. And that’s further defined and enforced by laws. When you take into account the number of tools governments the world over have developed to spy on their citizens and just how many of those are then made available to or leaked to the public, and further that some of them being used in public are perfectly legal that poster has a point. We did not draw the line in the sand the right way.
To search my car lawfully in the US you’d require a warrant. Doesn’t matter if my car is parked on the street. But you could lawfully take a photo of me in that car pretty much anywhere in “public” and that would also be considered lawful.
The poster said nothing about the state. They were talking about privacy. They gave a long list of things that we aren’t allowed to do even if we are “able” to do them, and then made the false claim that we are allowed to take pictures “just because we can.” Maybe they have beliefs about the line being in the wrong place for other things, but this submission is about a type of picture, and the poster specifically mentioned taking pictures. So me talking about picture makes perfect sense, bringing in the state searching your car makes next to zero sense.
The context of the poster you responded to’s point is that the government decides and makes a line between what is private and what isn’t.
The poster said absolutely zero about the state. None. Zilch. Zip. When you accused me of narrowing the scope, you were actually projecting your expansion of the scope.
But make no mistake about it, if a cop walks by your car and sees a dead body in the back seat, they don’t need to get a warrant to search your car…because there is no expectation of privacy…which is, of course, actually what we are talking about.
Who determines privacy? Who enacts the laws? How is privacy enforced? What happens when you report someone for invasion of privacy? I don’t understand how this issue can have context without mention of the state.
And we are allowed to take pictures just because we can. If I take your picture in public? Just about nothing you can do about it unless it breaches some other law (like what you mentioned with filming in bathrooms). There are specific things I can’t do with that photo, for instance if that person happens to be famous they may have a right to publicity and their image etc. But they don’t have rights to copyright or the like. Could I post their photo in a random online forum claiming they have done something illegal? Nope? Can I blackmail them? Nope. But I can absolutely use their photo in a copyrighted way for art or even business.
I don’t understand how this issue can have context without mention of the state.
Sure, which is why I challenged them over jurisdiction on their false claim that you could take a picture wherever you want. You even seem to agree with me that that is not the case.
Could I post their photo in a random online forum claiming they have done something illegal? Nope?
Because this is libel. You are allowed to say whatever you want, “unless it breaches some other law.” Just like your limits on what pictures you can take are not “just because you can” but “unless it breaches some other law.”
It all comes down to an expectation of privacy. You have none in a public space as what you are doing everyone else can see.
And the implication of their initial point, in the context of the submission, is that this type of “photography” would be allowed because “you can” and I argue that this would already be protected under current law that there is an expectation of privacy behind in your home. Like in many (it not all?) I can’t take a picture of you in your home through a window even if I can see you from a public space, because of the expectation of privacy.
I mean you can look through my walls if you want, but don’t come crying to me if you don’t like what you see.
(I’m painting fantasy miniatures. They’re for a friend.)
Lead paint coming back into fashion.
paint myself in lead paint to become invisible. got it. /s
Years ago there was a journal on gait recognition through home WiFi.
Wait, I thought this was a crackpot conspiracy thing?
Nope, that’s what they want you to think. Just wait a few decades and we’ll find out tin foil hats will actually have some use
did you never read that MIT guy’s research on the tin foil hats?
Because I’m supposed to trust MIT as if it’s never gotten CIA funding ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
No one else getting batman : the dark knight vibes ?
Lets hope the government is transparent about its use of this technology.
Article is from a year ago. Government tends to be ahead of the curve. As an uninformed guess, they have been using it in high value situations for 4+ years.
(Dear FBI, the above is a guess based on public information. I don’t know shit.)
Israel has been using a similar system since at least 2022:
https://petapixel.com/2022/06/29/the-xaver-1000-sees-through-walls-and-is-made-for-the-israeli-army/
It’s pretty likely that they have shared this system with their closest allies, similar to how the Trophy missile defense system found its way onto German and American tanks.
By the way, those throwable cameras mentioned at the end of the article have been available to the IDF since 2005.
scientists bout to see me on the goddamned pot.
Doesn’t this mean the matrix film was right with their visualization (regardless of orientation)?
I now have no sense of privacy anymore
The reason this is good for privacy is because we don’t need a new smart device to send other (like video) data away for heavy processing in the cloud.
We might instead be able to just update wifi routers to create local functionality.
Then it will depend on the router and the user configuration what actually happens with that data.
The user can have full local control…. Except neighbours wifi could be spying and so could someone with a wifi device in a car. But if putting a faraday cage around peoples exterior walls (combined with an underground physical cable to an internal extender for phone and roaming while insid) becomes a thing then it looks it could be a great system theoretically.
Gotta wait to see how it might look in practice though.
