I am similar in that all of my interactions are with my real name and it is unique enough that just putting it into google will instantly identify me. There is one other 'jeff sponaugle' but I think he is far more annoyed with my presence than I would be with him.
On the plus side, someone will sometimes say while talking to me - oh your are that Subaru guy, or that youtube guy, or whatever and that is fun connection.
A fantastic read, and really interesting to see the use of Forth. I remember Forth having a bit of popularity in the 80s. This was such an amazing game, especially in that you felt like the world was huge with the encouragement to just explore.
The other game this reminds me of is a game for the TI99/4a called Tunnels of Doom. It was a cartridge game that also had a floppy or cassette data load. It had a dynamic dungeon creation so every time you played the game you got a new unique experience. That would be an equally challenging one to reverse engineer due to the oddity of the GROM/GPL architecture in the TI99/4a.
The study looks at a wide range of different tests spanning many different areas of expertise and output types. Some of the tests, like the web vis tasks used Sonnet not Opus (which was not out at the time). It is similar to testing a car to do many different things, but only one of the tests is the actual driving somehwhere and many of the others are based of the fabric used in the interior. This gives a very broad "96% failure" while missing the observation of the successes. Of course AI can't do everything, and nor can I.
One of the most interesting observations about AI is the timescale at which the favorite model and favorite task changes. Before November I found Sonnet to be interesting, but not moving that much of the needle. Once Opus came out it was clear the needle was not only moving, but moving fast.
This is a VERY controlled environment - and they used 20 passes of each person walking with direct knowledge of each person to train for identity. They did no tests with multiple people walking at the same time, or with any other external moving distortion effects (doors opening, etc) . This is very far from actual 'identification' of people in real public settings - and no doubt the cell phone everyone is carrying with them offers many orders of magnitude better opportunity. In a real crowded environment this would be nearly worthless.
The devices that reported BFI information were also stationary, and there were no extra devices transmitting information that would be conflicting.
Yes, but things could be refined. With more resources and research thrown at it, it could become more versatile, that's why the title of the post says "could". And chances are, there are private and government entities already doing this. Research like this has been coming out for at least a decade now.
Even Xfinity has motion detection in homes using this technique now:
This has already been an area of research, both publicly, and most likely in private/government defense research. In a targeted situation, i.e. surveillance of a household of 6, this would work easily enough...but I doubt there is enough information to provide reliable (high AUC) tagging of ID in a public scenario oh hundreds to thousands of individuals.
> Researchers in Italy have developed a way to create a biometric identifier for people based on the way the human body interferes with Wi-Fi signal propagation.. can re-identify a person in other locations most of the time when a Wi-Fi signal can be measured. Observers could therefore track a person as they pass through signals sent by different Wi-Fi networks – even if they’re not carrying a phone.. their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent.
That’s 95.5% accuracy with a 16 person dataset in a highly constrained environment.
Wi-Fi uses long wavelengths, you can cancel out the noise with one person but crowds are all distorting the same very weak signal here. 5Ghz = 6cm, visible light is 380 to about 750 nanometers.
Xfinity's is sensitive enough to configure for animals or humans under 40-70lbs, I forget the exact number.
From my minimal research, it could be pushed a lot further.
What I'm particularly interested in is the edge case scenario of duplexes and apartments, where neighbors are unwittingly subjected to surveillance. There is little more to their routers than firmware to impart these capabilities. No reason to think it won't become common, and there are a handful of other companies basically offering just this as a service.
Strange times.
Edit: I should have mentioned the obvious, that pesky thing no one wants to address... When AI is added to this tech, it will get grotesque. Gait recognition, behavioral patterning, etc. Not something to sneeze at.
Possibly what was used to watch Maduro, along with synthetic aperture radar etc.
if it's a public scenario, you don't need that, they're using wifi on people's persons to id them. The concern is more gait analysis, and by some accounts even lip reading is possible with mm-wave 5g.
like i mentioned in another comment, do you really need good resolution for gait analysis? You also have people carrying their phones inside the house all the time, so you know what bssid is associated with that coarse movement. and if you have access to their ap/router combo, you can tell what IP that device has and what domains it's been visiting.
Let's say you visit a friend in a different city, the same ISP controlling their router, can use your mac, but even if you turn off your wifi or leave your phone in your car, your volume profile and gait can betray you. how you sit, how you lean, how you turn. I'd wager, if 6-10 distinct "points" can be made out and associated with a person, that's all that's needed to uniquely identify that person after enough analysis of their motion, regardless of where they go in the world.
Imagine if they're not using one AP, but using your neighbors AP as well, two neighbor APs and your own can triangulate and refine much better.
> In China cameras use your gait to automatically ticket you for J-walking and automatically deduct funds from your bank account. I’ve read that before at least.
China is a huge place with a population larger than the entire western world combined, so I don't doubt something like that could be happening somewhere. Maybe it was a tech demo?
However in general that is not a thing. If you pick any of China's megacities and walk down a street it will take you all of 5 seconds to realize how absolutely not a thing that is. Jaywalking is rampant, so obviously there's efforts to crack down on it, but I've yet to see anyone be shy about it around cameras*.
* And cameras really are everywhere. Though I suspect a lot are closer to a decorative prop for deterrence than a surveillance tool.
"If I have nothing to hide I have nothing to fear" eh?
What a colossally bad thing to do for personal privacy. Yes let's give governments the ability to spot and pick up anyone they want for any reason under the guise of 'criminality'. ICE or the SS would have a field day.
I guess people better keep their mouth shut if they know what is good for them??
It applies to the sensor size as well. Such as you need a 3m sensor to get 100px per radian, under ideal circumstances, unless I'm mistaken. (I think I'm not)
> Even Xfinity has motion detection in homes using this technique now
WiFi presence detection is a completely different problem. If the WiFi environment is changing past a threshold, return a boolean yes or no. It can't actually tell if someone is present or if the environment is just changing, such as a car driving close enough to reflect signals back in a certain way.
Doing mass surveillance where you detect individual people in a random home environment isn't the same thing at all. All of these "could" claims are trying to drawn connections between very different problems.
You'll have to explain that a bit more. Isn't the threshold detection analyzing radio signal data? For identifying people, you don't need to reconstruct their face or fingerpring using that data. you just need to fingerprint them.
With gait analysis for example, it's only looking at a handful of data points, the way we walk is very unique. lip-reading, i can see how that's a stretch, but out movement patterns and gait are disturbances in radio waves. If you're using just one person's wifi, that sounds difficult, but if you're collecting signal from multiple adjacent wifi access points, it's more realistic to build a very coarse motion representation, perhaps with a resolution no finer than 1 cubic ft, but even with more coarse representations, gait can be observed.
Even gait aside, the volume profile of a person and their location in the house alone are important data points, couple that with the unique wifi identifier or IP, you can make a really good guess at who the person is, and what room they're in.
Only if wifi is radically increased in frequency, power, directionality or antenna size. And i mean way beyond practicallity. It would be easier to identify people by the sounds of thier footsteps, something easily done through anything with a microphone. With three microphones, you can track that movement to the inch.
the article is off-base with wifi. the real story is in 6G cellular.
there is a working group at 3gpp, an EU-funded research group (6th sense, Open6GHub), universities (NCSU, Bristol), and many companies working very hard right now on proposals to include "integrated/joint sensing and communication" (ISAC/JCAS) in the 6G spec.
ISAC means adding mmWave to 6G (ostensibly for speed, but also) to build a high-fidelity 3d realtime "digital twin" of the real world that can see through walls, owned and operated by your telecom provider.
> A very exciting innovation that 6G will bring to the table would be its ability to sense the environment. The ubiquitous network becomes a source of situational awareness, collating signals that are bouncing off objects and determining type and shape, relative location, velocity and perhaps even material properties. With adequate 6G solutions for privacy and trust, such a mode of sensing can help create a “mirror” or digital twin of the physical world in combination with other sensing modalities.
there's been a testbed deployment in a German hospital for "non-invasive" monitoring of vitals; which sounds to me like it can literally see a heartbeat.
truth is, this is the nature of wireless radios. we can't keep improving bandwidth and latency without also turning the radio into a camera. i'm disturbed by the inevitability.
> ISAC means adding mmWave to 6G (ostensibly for speed, but also) to build a high-fidelity 3d realtime "digital twin" of the real world that can see through walls, owned and operated by your telecom provider.
"See through walls"
There used to be a great video on youtube of a very high power 60GHz signal being blocked by a door. Sad I can never find it. E Band isn't much better.
IIRC the 60GHz radio is being left out of a lot of 5G deployments because the slight benefits don't outweigh the cost.
This is a pretty common thing for mmWave (or near mmWave) to be deployed with massive fanfare and then be slowly phased out of existence. I am decidedly not writing this on a WiGig docking station.
I dont see telcos wanting to constantly broadcast extra mmWave for little to no added benefit, especially not in all directions. Likewise, regulators are going to choke on that. And the class/band license schemes would have to be updated, to remove interference from devices already using those bands as they are about to have a constant background level of interference. E-Band PTP users, of which there are many, wont give up their high capacity links to weird 6G omni broadcasts without a fight.
I tell you what however, having a button you can press that would map the environment for alignment sounds like a maybe use case here. Better than a camera for detecting new obstructions when links go down.
They might also add more bands to the whole automatic MIMO backhaul trick they have been pursuing.
yeah there's some truth here. from what i understand, the radios that give the best "imaging" are also the least resilient for data -- you need basically line-of-sight. and 5G did have some optional ULF "add-ons" that basically never got used because the tradeoffs for speed to signal integrity were poor.
it won't start as a mass deployment -- just focused on stadiums, airports, government buildings, etc.; maybe some authoritarian states will attempt mass deployments, but the cost will be an obstacle. also, my read is that western telcos aren't interested in owning a surveillance tool because they know their governments won't let them keep it.
hopefully 6G won't be the end of physical privacy. but it will prototype the end of physical privacy -- and i think it will end up being just a matter of time from that point on, unfortunately.
I just dont see the benefit, unless you are installing a 6G device in every room of your house.
Which is probably the target case here. 4G had light adoption by smaller telcos, 5G has some self installable repeaters, but most of the plans for 5G to spread to self installed / class license hardware were all vapourware. 6G might have some backing pushing them into trying to find more ways to sell 6G devices, and having put up a bunch of 6G certified (but class license only) devices in your home, it would be cool if you could see some biometrics, and hook the system into home automation for surveillance and determining whether the lights go on.
But without that in home capability, and massive spread of deployed devices I just dont see the surveillance utility. Especially if your town has lots of awnings and trees.
Yes, you won't be able to do this on normal wifi traffic typically either, you need to send specific packets at a high enough rate (in between normal internet traffic) in order to sense with any accuracy, as I also remarked earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976849
Yea, that makes sense as you would need quite a bit of information across a reasonable temporal range if the identifying qualities are movement related. Very interesting.
There'll be an update where a first responder can send a special packet to an SSID that will enable these high rate packets without needing to join the wifi. It'll be secure where only the good guys will know about it so that it won't be able to be used nefariously. /s
They can do that by looking at the cars in my driveway/garage and or just watching the windows for any period of time. Plus my phone. If <insert 3 letter agency> agents are sitting outside of your house, they aren't going to drive away because you pull the plug on the router and suddenly deprive them of BFI packets.
WiFi AP's already do a lot of tracking and measurement just to improve signal fidelity and effective throughput. Why wouldn't those same techniques be useful for more general object tracking? Of course using a single AP to attempt to track movement in real-time is unlikely to have great results, but with several APs and enough compute triangulation should improve results.
> Why wouldn't those same techniques be useful for more general object tracking?
These demos use machine learning to train against a known environment.
Basically, pattern matching changes in the signals against a very controlled set of training data.
You can use WiFi signals to detect that something is changing in the environment, but without the machine learning with controlled input data you don't know what it actually means. This is how WiFi presence detection works, but it won't tell you if it's a person moving through the house or your cat walked in front of the router.
Yes it's in a controlled environment not in a real world noisy environment.
But this is more stealthy than a camera and could potentially work with non-line-of-sight or even through walls.
And based on that I could imagine with a combination of a camera and this method, you could train the model on data where both the camera and this method is seeing the individual and then continue to track them with the wifi sensing + the trained model even where the camera cannot see them anymore.
But yea real world is noisy, so it could be very challenging.
Yeah this is one of those "cool demo" research results that is completely impractical in the real world that is sold (probably by university PR departments) as an actual viable technique that might have real-world implications.
We've seen it before with things like taking photos around corners.
And no, it isn't like the Wright flyer and a bit crap now but in 40 years we have jet planes. This will never get significantly better.
Yeah I've seen this same type of study done over the years with the same dire warning. But like you pointed out it's just extremely labor intensive when it's simply easier to attack phones, security cameras or any other smart device that can be easily hacked. Or just install your own bugs.
Would not be surprised to see this get more traction right now due to the political climate.
If I was interested in mass surveillance I would combine the radio data (WLAN, BT, ...) with the camera feed. If you then see the same person with ML, you can correlate that with radio's. You can even do that with cell towers with anonymous SIM, especially if combined with public transport camera feed or ALPR/ANPR.
HEADLINE: Electromagnetic radiation can be used to see!!!!
Right, that's what your eyes do. Radio is much longer wavelength than visible light (~5-10cm). So at best it offers extremely crappy resolution unless - you're doing something clever with second order information.
Well nowadays you individually track by using mac addresses and other network information from the devices within range. Cisco has some creepy real time maps of your location with each person walking around and all their previous visits etc
Saw a system like this at a Podunk, nowhere, USA police station over a decade ago. It had high fidelity maps of peoples comings and goings based on Bluetooth and WiFi MAC IIRC. And some kind of API backend to look up identity based on those identifiers, not sure to who.
You could for example flag a location (house) and get a list of all of the comings and goings over the last x months, then look them up by identity. You could also flag when an individual was in proximity to another, or when someone turned on, off or switched phones.
I’m sure it amounted to illegal surveillance and would be inadmissible if any of it was done without a warrant, but it would be beautiful for parallel construction. (How is that even constitutional???)
It apparently relied on some kind of infrastructure deployment that consisted of “traffic cameras” and “satellites” ( I’m certain not of the spacecraft type) that I assume were just small receivers mounted on street lights, since the streetlights were almost completely replaced at the same time as the cameras were put in, by the same out of state contractor.
I was there to change out a bad SSD and do a RAM upgrade on one of the servers. I don’t imagine the technology has become less invasive.
If you have a phone or carry active Bluetooth devices, assume you are 100 percent tracked 100 percent of the time.
If you want to not be tracked I wouldn't even trust airplane mode. With just a SIM pinging towers already a lot can be done. With airplane mode I'm just being paranoid but I never tested radio emissions myself with it disabled so I'd just leave my phone at home if I was really worried about it.
Turning your phone off (airplane mode or power down, which sign out of networks) or lighting up a new one in the same location as an old one was turned off are treated as significant events in these systems and can be configured as an automatic flag for investigation.
If you care, slip it into a faraday bag instead of turning it off or going into airplane mode and you won’t be flagged nearly as likely. People rarely use airplane mode or turn off their phones in situations where it doesn’t provide a useful clue about activity.
There is a huge overlap between surveillance platforms and behavior analysis / data brokers.
Modern phones connect with a randomized MAC address. So yes, you can track a person around, but you will need another system (like the WiFi login page) to match MAC to identity.
I have a 3 node proxmox setup on MS-01s using a 25G Thunderbolt ring for Ceph, and indeed it took a lot of hoops to get it working correctly and reliably. I did manage to get it such that nodes can go up and down without needing to unplug anything, and the dynamic routing works if a node disappears. Performance is pretty good, with a more realistic 20ish gbit/sec.
I figured this was Jeff’s CTO Laboratory. I enjoy your channel. Are you kicking yourself for pulling the trigger on MS-01s now that MS-02 Ultras released?
"because I can, and it is fun." The best answer! I am most of the way done with upgrading most of my homelab to 100G from 10G, but there really isn't a practical reason for it. 100G has dropped in price so much as datacenters are all about 400/800G now.
I'm using ConnectX5s for most, and some ConnectX4s in the older servers. Both of those cards have really come down in price in the used/ebay market. I have been playing around with some different optics - I have a bunch of CWDM4s which are very inexpensive and use a single SingleMode pair.... but of course they run hot so if you have them in servers without good air flow you might have problems.
I'm using mostly fiber just because the servers are connected to Cisco 9305 with 72 100g ports.
Oh they are both loud and eat a ton of power. I think the 9305 is at least 800 watts at idle. That is the biggest downside of the retired datacenter gear... yo u really need a dedicated room with power, cooling, and sound isolation.
I wouldn't really call 100Gbit overkill, if you compare it to modern disk drives is about where we should be relative to shared storage/NAS/etc infrastructure people used to run. So yes, being able to share my /home directory across a few dozen machines at my house without a huge perf impact vs using a local drive seems a pretty reasonable use case. Sure its faster than my WAN access, but who cares?
Frankly, 10Gbit is fully 25 years old with, 10GbaseT being 20 years old this year.
Thats ridiculously ancient technology. There is/was a 25/40GbaseT spec too (now 10 years old), which basically no one implemented because like ECC ram (and tape drives, and seem to be trying to do it with harddrives and GPUs) the MBA's have taken over parts of the computer industry and decided that they can milk huge profit margins from technologies which are incrementally more difficult because smaller users just don't matter to their bottom lines. The only reason those MBAs are allowing us to have it now, is because a pretty decent percentage of us can now get 5Gbit+ internet access and our wifi routers can do 1Gbit+ wireless, and the weak link is being able to attach the two.
I did a bit of back of the napkin math/simulation about a possible variable rate Ethernet (ex like NBbaseT, where it has multiple speeds and selects faster one based on line conditions), and concluded that 80+Gbit using modern PHY/DSP's and high symbol rate, multiple bands, techology which is dirt cheap thanks to wifi/bt/etc on fairly short cable distances (ex 30-50M) on CAT8 is entirely possible. And this isn't even fantasy, short cat7 runs are an entire diffrent ballpark from a phone pair, and these days mg.fast/etc have shown 10Gbit+ over that junk.
Agreed - the big thing is 100g is much much cheaper now as so much 100g gear is coming out of datacenters. So many of those older ConnectX4s and 5s, plus lots of switches and optics. 100g really is the new 10g for homelabs.
It has not lost its value yet, but the future will shift that value. All of the past experience you have is an asset for you to move with that shift. The problem will not be you losing value, it will be you not following where the value goes.
It might be a bit more difficult to love where the shift goes, but that is no different than loving being a artist which often shares a bed with loving being poor. What will make you happier?
I think understanding stellar processes and then using that understanding to theorize about other observations is a skill. My point was that observing can be a fantastic way to build a skill.. not all skills, but certainly some skills. Learning itself is as much an observation as a practice.
"If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties."
"I think 2026 is the year of Business Analysts who were unable to code." This is interesting - I have seen far more BAs losing jobs as a result of the 'work' they did being replaced by tools (both AI and AI-generated). I logically see the connection from AI tools giving BAs far more direct ability to produce something, but I don't see it actually happening. It is possible it is too early in the AI curve for the quality of a BA built product to be sufficient. CC and Opus45 are relatively new.
It could also be BAs being lazy and not jumping ahead of the train that is coming towards them. It feels like in this race the engineer who is willing to learn business will still have an advantage over the business person who learns tech. At least for a little while.
On the plus side, someone will sometimes say while talking to me - oh your are that Subaru guy, or that youtube guy, or whatever and that is fun connection.
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